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55 books match the query 'Documentary films' and 4 start with i

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Immediations

Pooja Rangan

Duke University Press, 2017

Endangered life is often used to justify humanitarian media intervention, but what if suffering humanity is both the fuel and outcome of such media representations? Pooja Rangan argues that this vicious circle is the result of immediation, a prevailing documentary ethos that seeks to render human suffering urgent and immediate at all costs. Rangan interrogates this ethos in films seeking to “give a voice to the voiceless,” an established method of validating the humanity of marginalized subjects, including children, refugees, autistics, and animals. She focuses on multiple examples of documentary subjects being invited to demonstrate their humanity: photography workshops for the children of sex workers in Calcutta; live eyewitness reporting by Hurricane Katrina survivors; attempts to facilitate speech in nonverbal autistics; and painting lessons for elephants. These subjects are obliged to represent themselves using immediations—tropes that reinforce their status as the “other” and reproduce definitions of the human that exclude non-normative modes of thinking, being, and doing. To counter these effects, Rangan calls for an approach to media that aims not to humanize but to realize the full, radical potential of giving the camera to the other.

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Indigenous Aesthetics

Native Art, Media, and Identity

By Steven Leuthold

University of Texas Press, 1998

What happens when a Native or indigenous person turns a video camera on his or her own culture? Are the resulting images different from what a Westernized filmmaker would create, and, if so, in what ways? How does the use of a non-Native art-making medium, specifically video or film, affect the aesthetics of the Native culture?

These are some of the questions that underlie this rich study of Native American aesthetics, art, media, and identity. Steven Leuthold opens with a theoretically informed discussion of the core concepts of aesthetics and indigenous culture and then turns to detailed examination of the work of American Indian documentary filmmakers, including George Burdeau and Victor Masayesva, Jr. He shows how Native filmmaking incorporates traditional concepts such as the connection to place, to the sacred, and to the cycles of nature. While these concepts now find expression through Westernized media, they also maintain continuity with earlier aesthetic productions. In this way, Native filmmaking serves to create and preserve a sense of identity for indigenous people.

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Innocent Lens

Race and Visibility on the Swedish Screen

Benjamin Mier-Cruz

University of Wisconsin Press, 2027

Sweden, like other Nordic countries, prides itself on being “colorblind” or immune to the kinds of racism found in, for example, the United States. In the 1960s and 1970s, white Swedish documentarians, in the fashion of early anthropologists, recorded racial tensions amid the US civil rights movement. More recently, in the twenty-first century, short films produced by Swedes of color have tackled racism and bigotry within Sweden.

Benjamin Mier-Cruz offers a comparative study of these two periods of Swedish documentary filmmaking. “Racially innocent” white documentarians of the mid-twentieth century developed an “aesthetics of altruism” predicated on Sweden’s assumed racial equalitarianism—a notion that their documentaries in turn helped create and maintain. In contemporary films, on the other hand, Swedes of color use the same filmic format to challenge not only their predecessors’ reductionist, pseudo-anthropological presentations but also Sweden’s purportedly colorblind ideology. Mier-Cruz’s close readings of films from both eras demonstrate the possibilities and limitations of the documentary form and the ways in which it is motivated by politics and activism.

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