American Documentary Research Articles

Documentary as Memory Archive and Feminist Practice

This essay reflects on the significance of documentary filmmaking in the context of Latin American documentaries, in general, and Chilean films, in particular. It also reflects on how Latinas’ diasporic memories of place affect identity and how we think of the past through language and images. Feminist film activism is a way to build an archive of women’s lives and voices revealing how gender shapes them. The short documentary La chispa en la pradera (Spark in the Meadow, 2023) displays feminist activism and feminist memories that cut across different generations of women fighting for equality and justice in contemporary Chile.

Love in the Time of Computation

In a brief note on ‘Photography’ published in 1978, American documentary photographer Walker Evans offered principles for his practice. Close analysis suggests that the heart of his concerns lay in the photographers’ love for their subjects based in an unexpressed but significant ecological orientation. This analysis leads towards a critical reconsideration of the concept of ‘mass image’, a term developed to describe the production and management of a collective database of imagery uploaded to social media platforms. The article criticises the idea that this mass image is single and unified. Developing ideas of love and fantasy, the article argues that, in an era when the unconscious is structured not like language but like code, massed image databases lack a single present time, with consequences for photographic aesthetics.

Representation of China’s National Image from the Perspective of Conceptual Metaphor: A Case Study of the American Documentary China: Time of Xi

Representation of China’s National Image from the Perspective of Conceptual Metaphor: A Case Study of the American Documentary China: Time of Xi

Effectiveness Of Contemporary American Documentary as The Media to Promote Female Empowerment

Effectiveness Of Contemporary American Documentary as The Media to Promote Female Empowerment

Not Your Model Minority

This roundtable offers a conversational case study of how a film retrospective on Asian American documentary filmmaker, producer, and activist Renee Tajima-Peña turned into a series of community care and coalition-building events, co-curated by precariously employed faculty at San José State University, California. The curators behind Not Your Model Minority: The Art and Activism of Renee Tajima-Peña had envisioned the retrospective as a way of showcasing Tajima-Pena’s hidden legacy, particularly the way in which her archival work in documentary practice connects the struggles of Asian Americans with African Americans and Latinx communities, essentially curating solidarity among aggrieved communities. Moved by the turn of events brought by the COVID-19 pandemic and the spike in anti-Asian violence unleashed by it, the curators remade the film retrospective into a deeply needed time-space for feminist-oriented communal sharing and caring, fostering acts of intersectional intimacy and promiscuous care.

Between the desert and the sky: Raúl Zurita's "Purgatorio" (Purgatory) as an antecedent of documentary poetry in Latin America

The Chilean poet Raúl Zurita writes from the pain of living during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). At that time, Zurita was kidnapped and, in his memory, there remains a wound that cannot heal. Although the term documentary poetry does not exist in Latin America, this article addresses the possibility that the poet is a precursor of Latin American documentary poetry. For this, it is based on the importance of the context in which Zurita lived and how he found a way to transform pain through poetry. In this article we will see how in Purgatorio —translated to English as purgatory— (1979), Zurita applies tools typical of documentary poetic creation such as intervened images, polyphony and wordplay. In the United States, documentary poetry has as its referents poets such as Ed Sanders, Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams, among others. They also wrote about historical events using documentary poetry tools. Therefore, we consider the importance of a poet like Zurita to demonstrate how violent and historical events in Latin America remain through poetry.

Reflection of Hierarchical Culture through the Directive Speech Acts in "The Social Dilemma'' Documentary

This paper examines the hierarchical cultural values reflected through the directive speech acts contained in “The Social Dilemma,” an American documentary discussing the negative sides of social media that affect its users unwittingly. The data of the research are gotten from the utterances of the casts including fictional and interview sessions presenting researchers, technologists, and activists with concern for humanity. Based on a descriptive qualitative method, it is found that the cultural values of the hierarchy are presented through the directive speech acts as in types of orders, forbidding, suggesting, and requesting. Based on the findings, it is indicated that all data delivered by its speakers in direct strategy utilizing two main values known as authority and wealth. Eventually, these two values lead to two circumstances related to the role and position in the community and also the strong goal of gaining profit from the tech industry, which encompasses the advertising goal (to make money on social media through advertisements), the growth goal (to get users as many as possible), and the engagement goal (to keep people scrolling and staying). As a consequence, based on the reflection of these hierarchical values, reform in social media is highly demanded to be in line with humanism.
 Keywords: Hierarchical Cultural Value, Directive Speech Acts, The Social Dilemma Documentary

:Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge

:<i>Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge</i>

ИДЕОЛОГИЯ И КОСМОС В ДОКУМЕНТАЛЬНЫХ ФИЛЬМАХ СССР И США ПЕРИОДА ХОЛОДНОЙ ВОЙНЫ

The article highlights issues related to the peculiarities of developing the theme of space in Soviet and American documentary (popular science) films of the 1950s-1960s. The article is devoted to the issues related to the peculiarities of the development of the space theme in documentary (popular science) films of the Cold War period. Analyzing materials (movies and TV films, scripts) of Russian and foreign archives, the author identifies key strategies that allowed the USSR and the USA to broadcast in documentaries about space and the universe, near-Earth and interplanetary flights such key ideas for those years, as colonization, technocratism, etc. Special attention is paid to the function of a commentator and visual solutions, which made it possible to implement the tasks of propaganda on documentary film and television material. Space themes in cinema and television of the USSR and the USA during the Cold War were supposed to clearly demonstrate the advantage of each of the rival superpowers. In popular science films about space, the technological rivalry between the two superpowers took the form of an ideological confrontation.

Getting Real

FQ contributing editor Brian Hu interviews Grace Lee about her distinctive brand of first-person nonfiction filmmaking, suggesting that her insider-outsider perspective has made her a unique yet exemplary voice in Asian American cinema. At the same time, Lee’s career challenges an auteurist framework to instead emphasize the institutional practices that shape film production and reception. What makes Grace Lee a pivotal author in Asian American documentary isn’t just her significant body of films, but also her vision in seeing documentary production as a form of institution building

Néstor Curbelo: The Latin American Andrew Jenson

Néstor Curbelo: The Latin American Andrew Jenson

Toward a Nonfiction Cinema of Audience Accountability

FQ columnist Manuel Betancourt muses on the difference between responsibility and accountability in the context of nonfiction cinema’s impulse towards and history of speaking up and back to power. In keeping with his preference for poetic nonfiction over traditional documentary, he considers recent Latin American documentaries that fight against narrative rules in order ask more of their audience. He suggests that filmmakers such as Jonathan Perel, whose Corporate Accountability (2021) he discusses at length, extend this notion of accountability not only to their subjects but to their audience through untraditional approaches that force viewers to sit with their discomfort and actively engage with the images before them.

Don’t Look Down

Don’t Look Down

The Centenary on Screen: Transnational Productions of the Easter Rising

The Centenary on Screen:Transnational Productions of the Easter Rising Stephen Joyce (bio) In the run-up to 2016 there was a curious parallel between debates among historians about how to represent the Easter Rising and debates in film studies on ways to control representations of Ireland in a transnational medium. Historiographic debates demonstrated a strong appetite for narratives that eschewed nationalistic celebrations and looked beyond the Irish state to embrace fresh perspectives. The government's Advisory Group on Centenary Commemorations declared in its initial statement that the commemorative program should "not only address the key events in Ireland but also enhance the understanding of the wider United Kingdom, European, and world context in which they took place" (Advisory Group on Centenary Commemorations). This statement aligns with recent trends in Irish historical studies, with Enda Delaney and Fearghal McGarry asking in the introduction to a special issue on the Irish Revolution in a global context, "To what extent is it necessary to understand revolutionary change within a global as well as nation-state framework?" (6). Yet the field of Irish-media studies has long struggled with the converse problem, namely, that the dominant representations of Ireland on screen have traditionally come from global media giants based in the United States and the United Kingdom, with the Irish nation-state struggling to make any impact given the lack of resources available to compete with Hollywood. As Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons, and John Hill observed in their seminal Cinema and Ireland (1987), "Ireland's peripheral (and ex-colonial) status has not simply hampered the possibilities for a native film industry but, in its absence, has also made possible a set of cinematic representations which have tended to sustain a sense of cultural inferiority" (xi). Thus, rather than the historiographic challenge of trying to integrate global perspectives into national histories, Irish media have typically struggled [End Page 87] to inject national perspectives into a global medium. The commemorations of 1916 on screen thus represent an intriguing intersection of historiographic and media discourses regarding how and by whom narratives about Ireland should be constructed on screen. This article will examine these issues in relation to the three major new productions on the Easter Rising aired by Ireland's national broadcaster Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) in the months before the centenary: the five-part drama series Rebellion from 3 to 31 January 2016, the three-part American documentary 1916: The Irish Rebellion from 10 to 24 February 2016, and finally the British-Irish co-production The Enemy Files on 21 March 2016. How should we interpret the significant participation of foreign media in defining a crucial moment in Ireland's national identity? Is this an example of Ireland's traditional inability to determine its own image on screen, or a demonstration of a new, more transnational approach to understanding Irish history? Before examining these questions and their underlying assumptions, I will first introduce the three productions in more detail. The first to be announced, on 31 March 2015, was the three-part documentary 1916: The Irish Rebellion, an initiative of the Keough-Naughton Institute of Irish Studies at Notre Dame. The first episode establishes the local context in Ireland as well as the Rising's connections with the United States and the Irish diaspora. The second looks at the events of Easter Week, while the final episode studies the Rising's impact both in Ireland and internationally. The documentary had a sizable budget of $3 million and a voiceover by Hollywood star Liam Neeson, and received screenings and broadcasts in over sixty countries worldwide. In many ways the documentary sought to present the definitive account of the Rising; reviewing it for the Irish Times, Bernice Harrison wrote, "Filmmaker Bríona Nic Dhiarmada appears to be declaring that while the TV schedules are cluttered with commemorative programming, all you need to know about the Rising is here." Although it was praised for its narrative sweep and excellent use of documentary footage, many Irish viewers felt that the documentary had little new to say. As Pat Stacey commented in a review for the Irish Independent, "For Irish viewers … our familiarity with the material meant this...

One More Time: Reenactment in Contemporary Latin American Documentary Cinema

Originally elaborated within the discipline of performance studies, reenactment has recently been adopted by filmmakers as a documentary and aesthetic strategy for tracing genealogies of conflict. Suspending documentary’s commitment to the indexical image, reenactments introduce a performative element by re-staging past events for the camera. By abandoning the document in favour of embodied memory, reenactments engage the relation between performance and history. This article addresses a series of theoretical and historiographic questions posed by the increasing popularity of reenactment: just what are reenactments? When and why do filmmakers draw on performance rather than archival documents or indexical images, what might account for the resurgence of reenactment in recent years, and how has it affected the tensions between documentary subjectivity and collectivity that have marked Latin American documentary in the twenty-first century?

Latin American Documentary Narratives. The Intersections of Storytelling and Journalism in Contemporary Literature by Liliana Chávez Díaz, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021, 312 pp. ISBN: 9781501366031. £ 64.80.

Latin American Documentary Narratives. The Intersections of Storytelling and Journalism in Contemporary Literature by Liliana Chávez Díaz, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021, 312 pp. ISBN: 9781501366031. £ 64.80.

«Я ніколи ще не бачив такої сили в людях»: інтерв’ю з фотографом Жеромом Сессіні

Jérôme Sessini is a French photographer, and member of Magnum Photos, in his works covers some of the most significant historical events of the last 30 years. The interview was recorded in January 2023 by Valeriia Shulha, a student of the Art History Department of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. In the first part of the interview, Jérôme talks about the beginning of his career as an amateur photographer and American documentary photographers as his big inspiration. He started photography at the age of 23 and now he’s a leading photojournalist, having joined Magnum in 2012 and becoming a full member in 2016. Jérôme's lens covers political upheaval, social uprisings, and human struggle. He’d started working as a photojournalist in 1998 when he covered the conflict in Kosovo on behalf of the Gamma photo agency. Since then, he has been immersed in some of the most important events of recent years, including the war in Iraq (from 2003 to 2008), Aristide’s fall in Haiti (2004), the conquest of Mogadishu by the Islamic militias, and the war in Lebanon (2006). His works have one common feature - avoiding dry documentation, they’re picturing stories of ordinary people, to show the world’s social tragedies on a micro-scale. In the second part of interview the photographer explains why Ukraine is the most important project for him and shares his experience of documenting the events of modern Ukrainian history. In 2014, Sessini began covering events in Ukraine since the Revolution of Dignity. After the Maidan’s events, the photographer traveled throughout Ukraine for several years and gathered in his book "Inner Disorder" all the stories of Ukrainian’s lives ruined by the war. The photo book was published in 2021. Jérôme's work Final Fight for Maidan won the World Press Photo Awards in 2015. Sessini shares the story behind the creation of this image. A few days after the beginning of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Sessini arrived in Ukraine, working on a series of photos for magazines such as "The New Yorker". Jérôme Sessini explains that the main aim for him is to create a coherent narrative in his works. The photographer always has been trying to communicate with the people he photographs. According to Jérôme, the only way to convey something to his audience is to feel and experience what you’re photographing.

Central Park and its Provision

In Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary, Jonathan Kahana paraphrases Hannah Arendt as follows: ‘Public things do not just appear, in some quasi-natural event, but are the result and legacy of human fabrication, of work’. Through a detailed interpretation of Frederick Wiseman’s Central Park (1990), this essay asks what it means for a film to register and document this fabrication, and how the fact of provision can be made present and meaningful in such a film. It brings together three distinct but related critical ideas – the commons, infrastructure and the everyday – to examine the formal and aesthetics means by which Central Park depicts urban phenomena not as an immanent condition, but rather as something which has deliberately and actively been made available to a public.

Introduction

Introduction

ATLIKĖJŲ POŽIŪRIS Į REPĄ LIETUVIŠKOJE IR AMERIKIETIŠKOJE DOKUMENTIKOJE

The popular musical genre of rap in Lithuania, ascribed to the subculture of hip-hop, is appearing in the area of social and commercial advertisements more frequently. Rap is also gradually becoming a willingly used platform for telling various stories. This musical genre is used during different lessons and trainings as a means that encourages creativity and motivation of learning. Being based in the USA and quite strongly rooted in Lithuania, rap itself makes one think about how this phenomenon transformed in Lithuanian cultural sphere or how it is perceived nowadays by Lithuanian artists. Using documentaries, this article seeks to analyze the thoughts about rap and its significance in Lithuanian and American documentaries proposed by the hip-hop artists, in addition to discuss and explain their similarities and differences from the artist’s perspective.