Do vídeo-ativismo à Vía Digital: uma nova década do documentário argentino

Owing to China’s austere censorship regulations on film media, directors of films and documentaries engaging with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender themes have struggled to bring their work to domestic attention. Working outside of the state-funded Chinese film industry has become necessary for these directors to commit their narratives to film, but without approval of China’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, these artists have had little chance of achieving widespread domestic distribution of their work. However, advancements in new media technology and Web 2.0, ranging from digital video formats to Internet-based distribution via social media networks and video-hosting platforms, provide opportunities for Chinese audiences to access films and documentaries dealing with LGBT themes. This empirical study assesses how production, promotion and consumption of queer documentary films are influenced by the development of social media within Chinese cyberspace. Through close readings of microblogs from SinaWeibo, this study combines analysis of contemporary research with digital social rights activism to illustrate contemporary discourse regarding film-based LGBT representation in China. Finally, the study comments on the role that documentary filmmaking plays in China’s gay rights movement, and discusses the rewards (and challenges) associated with increased levels of visibility within society.

Steen L. Christiansen writes his book Drone Age Cinema (2017), “Contemporary cinema is entering the drone age…What will cinema be in the drone age?”. A very economical alternative way of capturing aerial shots for (low budget) documentaries, prosumer drones became available in Turkey and globally in 2015 and were quickly integrated into documentary film production. Before the emergence of prosumer drones, aerial shots were a luxury unaffordable for all but a few high-budget documentary film productions. Drones created a threshold in Turkish documentaries: gaze (exploration of geography-nature-life-people) from above, a Renaissance of the aerial shot. In this presentation / paper I will discuss the response to this new way of seeing in Turkish documentary cinema, and the ways in which drone shots have changed the cultural and technological environment of Turkish documentary cinema.

This article examines the role female documentary filmmakers have played as “change agents” who have provided significant advocacy for social, cultural, political and legal change. They have created global opportunities for women’s voices and experiences to be witnessed and heard. Documentary production is a site of media empowerment for women because the form promotes knowledge that supports gender equality and equity in both local and global contexts. Documentary productions are both a site of struggle and of women’s media activism.

ABSTRACTThis article outlines trends in Finnish documentary film industry during the so-called golden era of 1990s and early 2000s based on key variables in documentary film financing and production. This period coincides with global documentary financiers increasing market orientation (‘factual turn’, which has largely broken the ties of documentary film production with filmic modes of craftsmanship and public service [Hogarth 2006. Realer than Real: Global Directions in Documentary. Austin: University of Texas Press, 5]. Public service cinema culture was still largely intact in Finland in the early 2000s and is the main reason for the ‘golden era’. The ‘golden era’ would not have been possible without strong domestic public subsidy organizations, The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture (Audiovisuaalisen kulttuurin edistämiskeskus, or AVEK) and the Finnish Film Foundation (Suomen elokuvasäätiö, or SES). Another crucial factor is that the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) has not given in to the global ‘factual turn’. Finnish documentary filmmakers strongly identify with Aaltonen’s [2006. Todellisuuden vangit vapauden valtakunnassa: Dokumenttielokuva ja sen tekoprosessi [The Prisoners of Reality in the Realm of Freedom: Documentary Film and Its Production Process]. Keuruu: Like, 248] observation that the metanarrative of documentary film is the narrative of itself becoming an art.

Over the last two decades, documentary filmmakers have increasingly turned their attention to environmental issues, whether the climate crisis, pollution, threats to the biosphere and its species or the effects of resource extraction. Women consistently play key roles in environmental documentary filmmaking, whether behind or in front of the camera. This essay explores the nexus of documentary filmmaking, women and environment. It examines the Australian documentary sector, tracking changing pathways of opportunity for women working in documentary production, particularly in relation to the causal connections between the rise of philanthropic funding and environmental documentary. The discussion investigates two recent examples, Wild Things (2020) and The Leadership (2020), exploring how they might reward an analysis that connects environmentalism and women. Tracking the convergence of a number of factors, including the gendered composition of the documentary sector, the rise of “impact documentary” with its changed conceptualisation of audiences, and the gendered profile of environmentalism, this article argues that contemporary documentary filmmaking is a significant site for understanding the environment as a feminist concern.

Deepfakes are a technological innovation that might be understood to violate the documentary film’s relationship with the real. Yet documentary makers have been among the first screen producers to adopt this technology, using it to swap the faces or voices of people they present to their audiences, further disrupting the already complex relationship between the filmmaker and their subject. This paper investigates the growing practice of documentary deepfakes, using two case studies of documentary films from the period 2019–2022 that have used varied forms of deepfakery, examining the intentions of the filmmakers, the technical processes and the ways in which creative choice is both expanded and limited by the technology. An interview-based research methodology provides original insights into filmmakers’ rationales when creating deepfakes. The paper reveals the contradictions inherent in deepfake practice, as described by one documentary filmmaker: ‘I'm looking at deepfake as a way of telling the truth’ (Benjamin Field, producer). A central theme is the ethics of documentary practice using manipulative AI. This paper contributes new insights to theoretical discourse around the digital manipulation of the moving image, discussing the growing disruption caused by deepfakes to documentary film culture and audiences.

The increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in documentary filmmaking is reshaping the creative and production processes. AI offers innovative possibilities for content generation and enhances efficiency, but it also raises critical questions about authenticity and manipulation. The purpose of this study is to explore how AI technologies are integrated into documentary filmmaking and to assess their impact on the industry. This paper employs a case analysis and literature review to examine the various applications of AI in documentary production, focusing on content analysis, automated editing, and virtual content creation. The study also addresses the ethical concerns related to the use of AI in the genre. The findings show that AI technologies significantly improve creativity and production efficiency by automating routine tasks. However, the use of AI also poses risks related to the potential manipulation of content and the authenticity of the documentary genre. The paper concludes that filmmakers must carefully navigate the ethical challenges posed by AI, ensuring that the technology enhances the narrative without compromising the truthfulness and integrity of documentary storytelling.

This book aims to showcase and analyse a wide range of French social and auteur documentaries from the past two decades that focus on ‘precarious subjects’: people who are in one way or another confronted by the damage inflicted on ‘resources, bodies, and time’ by late-stage capitalism (pp. 107, 13). It is, of course, a book about film, and it is also a book about the effects of globalization on workplaces and workers in metropolitan France. A central contention of the argument is that the work that documentary filmmakers have been doing to chronicle the human consequences of the changing workplace is a praxis of solidarity, of community-building, of ethical resistance. As the book reveals, the filmmakers discussed — consistently engaged on the side of the workers — have not necessarily been working in the same mode as earlier practitioners of militant cinema. Instead, they use an innovative collection of new documentary forms to bear witness, express care, and resist the ‘dissolution, dislocation and disjunction’ that lead to precarious forms of existence (p. 15). This book does not aim to present a general overview of documentary production in France over the past two decades; instead, it offers the lens of precarity as ‘one suggested entry point among many more available’ into a vast and expansive archive (p. 22). It is organized into chapters that share a central thematic concern (vanishing factories; migrant labour in the shipyards and the cleaning industry; filmmakers’ homecomings to post-industrial towns; workplace suffering; and journeys around rural France) as well as some commonalities in documentary approach and praxis. A wide variety of filmmakers, both well-known and emerging, are showcased here. This is one of the book’s important strengths: in addition to providing new takes on a few of the more familiar works, it also offers an initiation to many films that readers will be eager to discover after reading Audrey Evrard’s fulsome descriptions and carefully articulated analyses. Clearly demonstrating a wide-ranging knowledge of French documentary and its history, Evrard effortlessly draws out useful echoes with, and distinctions from, earlier periods and documentary practices, including worker films from the 1930s and militant films from the 1960s through the 1980s. Whether or not readers are persuaded by all of the book’s critical claims, they will likely be compelled by the central thread: these films’ consistent attention to the voices and experiences of individuals from all walks of life, to the pain and shared humanity of their subjects. Of great interest, as well, is the attention to ethics, and particularly the ethics of care in documentaries (also the focus of Ethics of Care in Documentary Filmmaking since 1968, a recent issue of French Screen Studies ed. by Grace An and Catherine Witt (2022)). If occasionally the throughline temporarily seems to digress via its simultaneous engagement with multiple theoretical strands, most of the book reads tightly and fluidly, with a clear focus on its central concerns. Overall, Evrard’s book is a welcome addition to a growing body of English-language scholarship devoted to recent French documentary production.

This study explores the challenges faced by Communication Studies undergraduates at Trincomalee Campus, Eastern University, in documentary filmmaking. As part of their curriculum, students are required to produce a documentary in the "Beginning Video Production" course, which integrates both theoretical knowledge and practical filmmaking skills. The research aims to identify the technical, ethical, and creative difficulties that students encounter, assess the applicability of classroom theory to real-world production, and provide recommendations for improving the learning process. Through a survey methodology, 75 questionnaires were distributed across three student batches, gathering insights into the major challenges in documentary production, including difficulties with camera techniques, editing, narrative structure, and ethical considerations. The findings indicate that students struggle with applying theoretical knowledge to practical aspects of filmmaking, particularly in the areas of technical execution and time management. Moreover, the study highlights resource limitations, such as inadequate equipment and technical issues, as significant obstacles. Despite these challenges, students expressed the importance of improving practical skills, advanced editing techniques, and ethical awareness. The study suggests that curriculum enhancements, better resource allocation, and a greater focus on hands-on learning could help overcome these challenges and better prepare students for future documentary filmmaking endeavors.

This book reconsiders the history and study of women’s documentary filmmaking in the United States from 1920 to 1940, and during the long 1970s--when significant transformations in cinematic technologies coincided with major transformations in sociopolitical discourses surrounding gender and race. Rather than comprehensive, the approach is transhistorical, setting women’s cultural expression during these two periods into conversation, and thereby provoking a reconsideration of a number of key debates about subjectivity, feminism, realism, and documentary that have had lasting epistemological and material consequences for film and feminist studies. The book excavates a lost ethnographic history of women’s documentary production and investigates the political and aesthetic legacy of this early history in later, more deliberately feminist and yet equally misremembered periods, especially the 1970s. In particular, Subject to Reality asks how ethnographic thinking and seeing shaped the historical arc and aesthetic, ethical, and political commitments of women’s realist documentaries throughout the twentieth century. The shared interests of women in anthropology, academic film studies, and political feminism have long shaped the production and reception of documentary in the United States. Subject to Reality explores the consequences of this cross-pollination as it has shaped women’s documentaries, and especially the realist films that have been glossed over as “boring” “organizing tools” or merely “talking head films.”

The object of this research is to expand the practice of archiveology, a term coined by Joel Katz in 1991 and theorised more recently by Catherine Russell to describe the process of reusing found archival footage in expository documentary to “produce new modes of thinking about the past” (2018, 47). This research will experiment with poetry as a source of archive, adding to the more commonly deployed materials such as film, still photographs, or letters used in documentary production. The intention of the work is to illuminate the literary career of the Australian poet Ronald McCuaig (1908–1993), who was also my grandfather. Ronald McCuaig was described by Australian author Geoffrey Dutton as “Australia’s first modern poet” (1986, 49), and was widely respected for his literary contribution, which spanned from the 1930s to the 1990s. In recent years, however, his work and career had begun to fade from view. As an established documentary filmmaker, I have completed a significant practice-based study, experimenting with production methods for multiplatform outcomes. The rich archive collection that emerged throughout the study led me to question how it is possible to do justice to literature through my usual documentary practice. I have initiated a hermeneutical experiment, re-versioning McCuaig’s literary work—predominantly poetry—through the methodologies of archiveology and videopoetry. Over the past ten years, audience screening options and spaces have changed dramatically, providing opportunities to develop work that provides for a multifaceted viewing experience, adding online spaces to traditional cinema or television viewing. These options provide an opportunity to experiment with archiveological practices for new viewing artefacts such as videopoems. I aim to demonstrate the impact of Ronald McCuaig’s original work and its potential to provide powerful social commentary, still of relevance in 2020, using Walter Benjamin’s ‘dialectical image’ as a conceptual framework. The outcome of poetry from the 1930s, reimagined into videopoetry with companion documentary sequences, results in a synthesis and an unusual and expanded outcome for a documentary filmmaker: a gallery exhibition. Rather than a single screening event, the exhibition includes multiple screening spaces, a material culture collection, furniture installations, an exhibition publication, digitised original anthologies, and an online space. The combination of these outputs and proposed future endeavours provides audiences with a more visceral connection to the poet, his life and work.

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the post-dictatorship Argentine documentary film-making activity from the standpoint of documentary film-maker Carlos Echeverría's line of work. In particular, we try to closely follow Echeverría's documentary production—his experience in Germany, as well as the distinctive production and distribution modalities of his art—in light of the circumstances posed by the documentary professionalization process insinuated during the mid-1980s in Argentina, which gradually gained visibility during the mid-1990s.In general terms, the analysis will try to focus on the reconfiguration of the documentary production field after the military dictatorship and, mainly, in the way the film Juan, como si nada hubiera sucedido (Carlos Echeverría, 1987) establishes important narrative and stylistic turning points, thus condensing certain displacements that will begin to take place as from that moment and which will gain significance and magnitude towards the mid-1990s in Argentina.

The rapid development of Virtual Reality (VR) technology has brought significant changes to the field of cultural media. Among them, VR documentaries, as an emerging form of communication, provide viewers with a brand-new sensory experience through their powerful immersive capabilities. This article will analyze the immersive communication features of VR documentaries, using the classic VR documentary Planet Earth II as an example, and explore its impact on viewers based on existing literature and data. By using VR headsets and 360-degree video capture technology, documentary filmmakers are able to immerse viewers in wildlife habitats and interact with the natural environment. This immersive experience enhances the audiences emotional empathy and engagement, giving them a deeper understanding and appreciation of the beauty and fragility of the natural world. In addition, as VR technology continues to evolve, it can be expected that future documentary productions will add elements of interactivity and personalization. Viewers may be able to choose what interests them, follow their favorite characters to explore, and interact with objects in the documentary. This personalized experience will make viewers more engaged and further drive innovation in documentary production.

This essay offers convergent critical rhetoric as an approach to critical television studies. Constructed through a combination of rhetoric, ethnography, and documentary filmmaking, the approach encourages critics to utilize the logic of production to illuminate participatory practices in media. We use the “Rally to Restore Sanity,” hosted by Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, as an exemplar. Through a combination of an academic essay and a short film, we examine the voice of participants at the rally, who questioned the polarized climate of the modern television industry. Using our approach, we found that attendee participation in the spectacle enacted a critique of “The Media” and the politics of profit-motivated news production. We close the essay with a discussion of limitations and future directions of the approach.

Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest. Matthew C. Ehrlich. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011. 240 pp. $50 hbk.In the short span of time between the end of World War II and the 1951 premiere of television's See It Now, there is the story of radio documentary's heyday, complete with protagonists, conflicts, and a narrative arc. Ehrlich, a professor of journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has trained a magnifying glass on a sliver of the twentieth century that is an apt microcosm of the political, economic, and cultural environment of U.S. broadcasting and in the United States at large. He focuses on the historical context of audio documentary; the work of producer Norman Corwin and his peace-advocating World Flight; the specific documentary efforts of CBS, ABC, and NBC; the political climate and its effect on documentary production; and the lasting effects of the era on subsequent cultures of journalism and broadcasting. In describing events at the three commercial radio networks during this time period, Ehrlich sheds light on a wide range of issues, including government regulation and network economics, changing media technology, the cold war, journalistic ethics, and the era's complex cultural mind-set regarding patriotism, liberalism, and democracy.Despite radio's visual limits, it is a colorful piece of history (to wit, an alternative title could be The Blue Book and Red Channels) and, like the postwar period itself, this story is rife with muddy paradoxes. documentary, for instance, Living 1948, was referred to as a drama document, encapsulating the juxtaposition of fact with artifice therein describing much of the period's audio documentary style. With an engaging, jargon-free writing style, Ehrlich describes the rapid evolution of audio documentary from nonfiction dramatizations conceived of by to journalistic, actualities-style reporting exemplified (and then amplified on TV) by the likes of Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly. He presents a well-organized structure with a logical flow, if at times weighed down a bit by ample narrative detail. Likely to appeal to those who are already somewhat familiar with broadcasting history, this account may fill in some gaps in understanding the intricacies and nuances of the era, especially those relating to both patriotism and public service.Postwar radio programming was vulnerable to the suspicious gaze of anticommunists, and cold war monitoring practices affected many of those in the broadcasting industry. Red Channels, the 1950 entertainment industry blacklist, damaged the careers of documentary producers such as Robert Louis Shayon, and Morton Wishengrad, to name only a few of the desirables/undesirables who tended to embody the tenets of liberalism and produce programs covering progressive topics like peace and social justice. of the paradoxes that Ehrlich does a service in addressing is that of liberalism. Reform-minded though the documentary makers might have been in the bigger scheme, their implicit audience was ultimately elite, white, and male. Anticommunism presented itself via different faces, and herein lies another paradox: Ehrlich refers to one as the One World Liberal in the mold of [antifascist documentary writer Arnold] Perl and Corwin, and the other, like Morton Wishengrad, unalterably opposed to Communism and deeply suspicious of the Soviet Union. Such nuanced difference was but one characteristic of the era's cultural complexity and one with heightened implications in documentary production.The public service aspect of documentary ventured into another kind of monitoring. …