Documentary Format Research Articles

In Commemoration of Dr. Mostafa Pourtaghva Shahrestani, a Pioneer in Infectious Disease Research.

It is important to honor the contributions of scientific leaders who have dedicated their lives to advancing knowledge and serving their country. One way is to document their experiences and personalities in a documentary format, which can serve as a historical record and an inspiration for future generations. Dr. Mostafa Pourtaghva Shahrestani, a renowned physician and specialist in infectious diseases and tropical medicine, has made significant contributions to public health in Iran. He has played a crucial role in controlling infectious diseases such as smallpox, tuberculosis, rabies, plague, and cholera. Throughout his career, he has held various executive positions, including the head of Pasteur Hospital and the director of the Pasteur Institute of Iran. Dr. Pourtaghva's life is a testament to his unwavering dedication to public health services, as evidenced by his continuous effort, love, and interest in honest work. His inspiring story can serve as a model for those who seek to follow in his footsteps.

How VLOG Promotion Content Influences Consumer Attitudes

As Internet technology continues to advance and as various social media platforms proliferate, consumers have gained the ability to distribute video content across a multitude of online channels. A vlog (video blog) is an online video documentary format used by vloggers (video bloggers) to record their daily lives and share their experiences with various products. In recent years, Vloggers who publish vlogs on social media have gained increasing popularity. The use of vlogs to convey product information has received widespread attention, leading an increasing number of companies to consider them part of their marketing mix and actively incorporate them into their marketing strategies. However, it is still unclear which factors influence consumer attitudes while watching vlogs. Therefore, it has become a focus of attention in both academia and the business world to clarify how vlog promotion content influences consumer attitudes and to use vlog promotion to improve consumer attitudes, thereby increasing consumers’ purchase intentions and achieving brand promotion objectives. The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the factors that influence consumer attitudes towards vlog promotion content. This article is based on the ABC attitude model theory, and data collected through an online questionnaire survey of Chinese consumers were analysed to statistically verify the relationship between consumers’ purchase intentions and factors related to vlog content. The predictor variables included trust in vlog, vlogger popularity, vlogger personal appeal, understanding of vlogger advertised products, vlog content, and frequency of interaction between vlogger and fans. Path analysis revealed that two intermediate variables related to vlogger (cognition and emotion) had a positive impact, and a model was constructed to further examine their influence on consumer behaviour (dependent variable). The research findings of this study reveal that three key factors significantly influence consumer attitudes towards vlog promotion. These factors encompass the understanding of vlogger’s advertised products, vlog’s content, and the frequency of interaction between vlogger and fans. For future vlog promotions, it is recommended to augment the vlogger’s product knowledge and approachability. To create captivating vlog content, emphasis should be placed on enhancing its entertainment value, establishing personal connections with viewers, and encouraging shareability. Moreover, the vlogger should actively engage with dedicated fans, prioritize valuable fan comments, and foster harmonious relationships. Furthermore, the findings of this study demonstrate the effectiveness of vlog promotion for various brands and services, providing valuable insights into the content of promotional activities for different brands and services. This highlights the strategic significance of vlog promotion and its relevance in guiding promotional strategies.

In Queer Memory: Mediating Queer Chinese History in Digital Video Documentaries

This article examines the digital and cinematic mediation of queer memory in four independent Chinese documentaries: Queer China, “Comrade” China (dir. Cui Zi’en 2008), Our Story (dir. Yang Yang, 2011), We Are Here (dir. Shi Tou and Jing Zhao, 2016) and Shanghai Queer (dir. Chen Xiangqi, 2019). All these films have been made by queer identified filmmakers and have used the digital video documentary format as an activist strategy; all have strived to record China’s queer history in the post-Mao era. However, because of the filmmakers’ gender and sexual subjectivities, together with the historical and social contexts in which these films were made, the four documentaries remember China’s queer history in different ways. Together, these documentaries contest a heteronormative and a homonormative narrative of Chinese history by constructing alternative memories; they also insert queer people’s voices and experiences into that history. All these mediations testify to the heterogeneity of queer people’s experience, as well as the overdetermination of queer memory as a result of a contingent assemblage of factors such as time, place, technology and filmmaker’s gender and sexual subjectivities.

Genetic hauntings: Mediating pre-patienthood and haunted health on TV

Through the development of a “health hauntological” approach, this article investigates how pre-patient illness narratives are mediated and negotiated in and around the DR documentary series Gentesten ændrede mit liv (2020) [The gene test changed my life]. We argue that this documentary format attests to how the expansion of genetic testing technologies alters experiences, genres, and narratives of illness that increasingly move to a pre-diagnostic and pre-symptomatic domain. The analysis shows how the use of genetic testing technologies creates hauntological situations in which pre-patients – through the mapping of family pathologies of the past and possible future diagnoses – encounter the complex temporalities and entanglements inherent to genetic bonds. Furthermore, we claim that these haunting encounters with mortality, vulnerability, and potential loss can be acted on – or listened to – in various responsive ways. Mediating pre-patient illness narratives thus entails an ethical balancing between care for participants and the desire for tellable, transformational narratives.

The Big Short's Incoherence, Documentary Aesthetics, and Use of Direct Address

<i>The Big Short</i>'s Incoherence, Documentary Aesthetics, and Use of Direct Address

Giving immigrants a voice: exploring migration and identity in the video series Germania

In 2016, the German production company funk began a new weekly series of short documentary videos, Germania, designed to explore German identity and the reality of those living with a migration background. Although one in five people in Germany today have a migratory background, the focus of the series, according to promotional materials, was not the immigration debate (which has consumed much of public policy since 2015) but rather the fact that Germany has long been a land of immigration and is today firmly a multicultural society. Each video, ranging between 5 and 15 minutes, portrays a well-known young artist who talks in first-person about identity, their roots, and the geographies that have shaped and impacted them as well as their perspectives on Germany. The series eschews the traditional documentary format in favor of digital media and a YouTube/TikTok aesthetic. This article explores a select number of these videos and analyzes the concept of identity that they convey as well as the format chosen as a kind of synthesis of traditional documentary and digital media.

Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off

Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off

한국 다큐멘터리 영화의 새로운 경향

In the midst of new discussions on documentary recently, the question of a suitable format to better embody the characteristics of documentary material that has changed since 2010 is showing an aesthetic attempt, breaking away from the conventional documentary format based on experimentation. These attempts reflect experimental attempts of visual or auditory images. The great interest in documentary aesthetics and the movement of the documentary director‘s new production method are gradually shifting from discussions on documentaries that emphasized meaning and content to discuss aesthetic experiences and production to artistic expressions. Since 2010, it has been a new starting point and turning point for changes in discussions on documentaries. As a result, the newly emerging group of creators began to create documentaries with various materials in new forms. It paid attention to documentary films that have been produced in a new format since 2010. This is because documentaries produced after 2010 are gradually reflecting on documentaries that emphasized the meaning and content of social change, continuing to discuss production to express aesthetics and art.

A Study of the Influence of Shamanism on the Thai Film Rang Zong

The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of shamanism on the Thai film Rang Zong: The Medium, exploring the themes of possessiveness, hedonistic eroticism, death, and ghost consciousness through the film’s references, in particular, to the Lascaux cave murals, which were also produced by a shamanistic mindset. Rang Zong, directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun and produced by Na, Hongjin of Korea, conveys the vividness of reality through a fake documentary format. In the Lascaux cave murals, a primitive shaman performs rituals to pray for condolences, consolation, and peace after death for the dying bison that shows humanity’s connection to nature. In Rang Zong, by contrast, the shaman demonstrates how there is a lack of communication and sympathy in modern life. In shamanism, there exists no notion of good and evil, and so the ghosts in the film are not an expression of evil, but only want to communicate the injustices they have suffered. However, due to a lack of communication skills, the shaman in this film perceives the ghosts solely as an evil to be removed, rather than listening to their voices. Such a narrow perception leads to a disconnection between the sky and the earth, and a tragic situation is produced through the revenge of the misunderstood ghosts.

Pin Up! The Interactive Documentary

Pin Up! The Movie: An Interactive Documentary uses oral history to explore an international subculture. In it, women and men adopt vintage style and advocate for social and political change. Specifically, they use the subculture to advocate for anti-racist practices, call for body positivity, and lobby for full equity and acceptance of LGBTQI subcultural members. These advocates do this with acknowledgement of historical racism and sexism, which is sometimes echoed in the contemporary subculture. This i-doc intentionally uses non-professional storytelling tactics (vertical video, online video recordings, strait to camera interviews) to transform notions of a proper “aesthetic” within the documentary genre. It also invites subcultural members to take over its social media feeds. This paper argues that actively approaching the i-doc as a shared authority demonstrates how emerging formats, gamification of storytelling, and non-narrative structures can result in a sense of subcultural authenticity: a way to use the documentary format to provide agency to both members of the subculture featured in the project, as well as to audience members.

Santos. Un docuexpres

Documentary filmmaking in documentary format becomes even more expressive, if possible, with the haste of making it in express format. To this end, the Alcances festival in Cádiz itself has a modality that includes and welcomes it. To demonstrate the power of the striking image, we use the work "Santos" (2022) directed by Víctor Martínez. In little more than four and a half minutes, the voice of the protagonist echoes in a desacralised space that, being a hairdressing salon, is wrapped in saints and legacies of a very personal baroque. However, the creative work is nourished by the transcription of the locution that helps us to visualise this very personal universe that seduces and persuades.

Triumph of the Will: A memorial in film

Despite Hitler’s efforts to transform Berlin into Germania, the capital of the new world he envisioned and which he believed would bear comparison with Ancient Egypt, Babylon, and Rome, there is little in the way of monumental architecture to bear witness to that ambition. Though there is only limited public evidence of Hitler’s architectural hubris present either in stone or steel, the same cannot be said of film. Leni Riefenstahl’s masterpiece Triumph of the Will (1935) (German: Triumph des Willens) is the most famous propaganda film of all time and a staple of university film schools and secondary schools across the world. At the time of its creation, celluloid motion picture film was a relatively new technology and the documentary format a nascent art form. Nevertheless, it was lauded almost immediately as a visually stunning imagining of the new regime and its leader. Though the film maker was subsequently reviled for her Nazi associations, as an art work her film has retained an almost miasmic aura that justifies continued re-assessment of its standing as a monument to the Nazi regime and the horrors perpetrated in its name.

Cinema e Comunicação Política – A Ante-Sala do Golpe Militar de 1964

Short films in a documentary format of political propaganda authored by IPES - Institute of Research and Social Studies, which acted in the Brazilian political scene, intervening in the State and society until the occurrence of the Military Coup of 1964.The Institute, through a gigantic campaign, which included films, had as objective to mold the public opinion through democratic ideals turned to the liberal principles with focusing on “impeding the solidarity among working class, containing the unionization and mobilization of the farmers, supporting the right ideological cleavage in the ecclesiastic structure , disaggregating the Student Movement and blocking the national reformist forces in the Congress and, at the same time, mobilizing the middle classes as manipulated mass of the organic elite” . (DREIFUSS, 1981.p.281).In this campaign, they appropriated the power that the cinema was capable of exerting in that period as well as the characteristics of the environment, as the allure over the spectator and the capacity to operate in the subjectivity due to certain social and ideological formations, the use of the emotional and manipulative appeal, as the example of the soviet and German films of political propaganda. Our proposal is to discuss the filmic speech and the thematic presented, based on the following guidelines: political speech, presentation of patriotic symbols, bond of union (nation, people), the heroism and victory, besides the matter of order casted under religious aspect addressed on the IPES films.

Public Violence: Viral Images Give the Alert

With the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) crisis the debate about police violence emerges as a major example of a counter-narrative, mainly relying on the online circulation of viral images. This article analyses the conditions for the emergence in public debate of a minority narrative thanks to digital media. Apart from activist communication, faced with powerful denial mechanisms, an autonomous alert process has been established based on the credibility of the documentary format, the argumentative dynamic of the online conversation, and the mobilization of an aesthetic of pity.

‘web 2.0’ 플랫폼 기반 중국어 교육 및 학습용 동영상 미디어 콘텐츠 현황 분석 및 그 발전 방향 탐색 — ‘YouTube’를 중심으로 —

This paper discussed the current status analysis and future development direction of video media contents for Chinese education and learning provided on YouTube, the web2.0 platform. In the near future, video-based educational and learning contents are expected to become more popular than text-based educational and learning contents. The development from paper textbooks to digital media textbooks has become a trend that can no longer go against the times. The YouTube video content, which serves as such a textbook, is expected to be produced and provided in more advanced forms in the future. The following are the main discussions discussed in this paper for this reason.<BR> First, YouTube is a “Web 2.0” platform that enables interactive communication between producers and users with the keywords “opening,” sharing and participation.<BR> Second, YouTube is an optimized platform for the use of video content, and its utilization as an information search engine is also high.<BR>Also, the video content currently available on YouTube plays the role of an online teacher called ‘Mr. You.’<BR> Third, most of the Chinese-related video media on YouTube are entertainment-style content that causes interest and fun, and only a small number of educational and learning video content.<BR> Fourth, among the Chinese education and learning video media provided on YouTube, contents such as “Chinese pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and conversation” can be largely divided into lecture-style videos and entertainment videos, most of which are lecture-style videos.<BR> Fifth, video content on YouTube is highly likely to develop into interactive media content that is interactive between producers and consumers. Sixth, video media content related to Chinese language, including Chinese language education and learning purposes on YouTube, is likely to be created in the form of interactive ‘interactive web documentaries’, and it seems certain that such video content will become mainstream in the near future.<BR> The above content discussed in this paper is the result of analyzing and exploring the representative platform of ‘Web 2.0’ with YouTube. It is highly likely that video media content from other ‘Web 2.0’ platforms will evolve into this direction. One unfortunate thing about this debate was that we only presented the direction that Chinese educational and learning video content would develop into an interactive web documentary format in the future, but failed to discuss how to produce such content and what content to contain. Based on this discussion, we will continue to discuss how to produce and use video media contents in the form of interactive web documentaries for Chinese education and learning.

"Cantautoras" El documental y la fotografía como herramientas artísticas y de visibilización.

Se plantea en esta propuesta una pieza audiovisual que retrata a cinco cantautoras del panorama musical actual de Granada. Visibilizar el trabajo, talento, vivencias y dar voz a estas jóvenes mujeres cantautoras que, a pesar de la estigmatización, los prejuicios y de tener muchas más dificultades que los hombres, se mueven y luchan por un futuro en la música, es el principal objetivo de este proyecto. Asimismo, se contrastan y retratan diferentes procesos creativos de cada cantautora, Se trata de una investigación artística basada en la práctica y en la experiencia personal, pues yo misma soy cantautora. La idea de este proyecto surge por necesidad propia; cómo cantautora busco el encuentro, las realidades y las vivencias de otras mujeres que cómo yo, sienten el impulso y el anhelo de expresar parte de lo que pensamos y nos inquieta, a través de nuestras canciones. Surge el deseo de profundizar y visibilizar la figura de estas mujeres músicas, indagando sobre los distintos procesos creativos ¿De dónde surge la necesidad de componer? ¿Qué queremos mostrar? La música es una de las herramientas fundamentales que las personas tenemos para expresar lo que sentimos, nuestros estados de ánimo, nuestras vivencias o, sin más pretensión, el poder experimentar el placer de la propia música en sus variantes. Se necesitan personas, en este caso mujeres, que canten a la libertad y a la igualdad de oportunidades. Personas que con sus canciones y músicas saquen a la luz inquietudes, que nos hagan pensar, que remuevan conciencias y corazones. Para nosotras como mujeres jóvenes en la escena musical, supone un tremendo esfuerzo dignificar, visibilizar y profesionalizar , es decir, poder vivir de la música como oficio o profesión, no solo hablamos de la música, esto trasciende desafortunadamente también a otras manifestaciones artísticas. El formato documental audiovisual es una herramienta idónea para retratar estas realidades, la conjunción de la imagen, la emoción y lo musical.

Acoso escolar, violación y suicidio en twitter: segunda temporada de «por trece razones».

Tanto si son ficción como si incorporan un formato documental, las series para adolescentes (teens series) pueden convertirse en una referencia para los adolescentes. La serie 13 Reasons Why (Por trece razones), en su segunda temporada, generó interés entre los adolescentes, las familias y el sector educativo. El objetivo general de esta investigación es analizar cuantitativamente los comentarios sobre el acoso escolar, las violaciones y los suicidios en Twitter vinculados con la segunda temporada de 13 Reasons Why. Metodología: se concretó en un análisis de contenido de los tuits que contenían las etiquetas (hashtag) #13ReasonsWhy y/o #PorTreceRazones. Resultados y discusión: temas complejos como la violación, el suicidio, la relación padre-hijo, el acoso y el ciberacoso se plantearon en torno al suicidio de Hannah Baker. Conclusiones: Una de las conclusiones del estudio establece que 13 Reasons Why promovió el debate sobre el acoso escolar, la violación y el suicidio siendo Twitter un canal donde se exponen temas tan complejos para los adolescentes.

Darkness visible; blindness and borders/memories and movies

The author considers a trio of films of recent vintage in which the primary narrator is sight impaired and consider the role memory and recollection play in the telling of their accounts. Each film – Notes on Blindness, Blue, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – are biographical and depicted in documentary or hybrid/stylised documentary format. Common threads and themes unite the seemingly disparate characters and these focus on water and waiting. How a ‘sightless’ scene is recreated for film is at the heart of this article.

“Nurse! I Want My Mummy!”. Empathy as Methodology in the Documentary Film "A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital" (1952)

This article analyzes A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital, a documentary film made by James Robertson in 1952. The film records the 8-day hospitalization of 2.5-year-old Laura as she goes through the phases of protest, despair, and detachment (Robertson and Bowlby 1952, Bowlby 1960) from her mother, who is only allowed to visit her briefly once a day. A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital forms part of Robertson’s decades-long campaign to promote changes in hospital regulations concerning parental presence in pediatric wards. During that time, it was commonly believed that such visits were unnecessary and disruptive, alleviating excessive maternal anxiety rather than serving the needs of the child. Robertson, who strongly opposed this belief, decided to use a visual medium rather than advance academic arguments, convinced that “visual communication pierces defenses as the spoken word cannot do.” This article argues that A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital, even though it follows a conventional documentary format, employs a set of formal devices which are geared to appeal to the viewers’ empathic abilities, arising from their common experience of early childhood.

A Little Child Shall Lead Them: A Documentary Account of the Struggle for School Desegregation in Prince Edward County, Virginia ed. by Brian J. Daugherity and Brian Grogan

Reviewed by: A Little Child Shall Lead Them: A Documentary Account of the Struggle for School Desegregation in Prince Edward County, Virginia ed. by Brian J. Daugherity and Brian Grogan Kevin B. Johnson A Little Child Shall Lead Them: A Documentary Account of the Struggle for School Desegregation in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Edited by Brian J. Daugherity and Brian Grogan. Carter G. Woodson Institute Series. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. xxiv, 263. Paper, $29.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-4272-8; cloth, $59.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-4271-1.) Before federal immigration policy jeopardized child welfare with mass detentions and family separations, the school crisis in Farmville, Virginia, during the 1950s was an origin for present-day austerity politics. Brian J. Daugherity and Brian Grogan have compiled a timely document collection that captures the inception of modern conservatism in rural America, set during the civil rights struggle’s modern phase and white supremacist resistance. African American student activists like Barbara Johns spearheaded fights for quality education in a rigidly segregated rural community. Inspired by teacher Inez Davenport, Johns initiated a 1951 student-led boycott of Robert R. Moton High School; hundreds of black pupils fled “‘tar paper shacks’” and demanded a modern school (p. 34). Included here are a litany of documents emphasizing the local, state, and national developments of central Virginia’s long, complex march toward unitary schooling. The editors have divided the collection into seven chapters along with a prologue—containing the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) opinions and the 1924 Virginia Racial Integrity Act—and an epilogue providing writings on racial reconciliation from the 1990s. The intervening chapters include major sources covering women and the black freedom struggle, resistance to the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, and the inception of dog whistle politics. In 1959 Prince Edward County, Virginia, opted for an “‘extreme step’” by closing all of its public schools, thereby depriving some 2,700 African American children of any form of education for five years (p. 112). Sources for integration in Virginia allow readers to examine the absurdity of segregation; in particular, Edwin B. Henderson’s article from 1957 explains how segregationist policies served white Virginians’ economic interests. “Once segregation is outmoded,” he writes, “educated and intelligent Negroes will become competitors in a free society” for professional employment (p. 104). He likewise notes segregationists’ fears of miscegenation while they ignored the racial intermixing prevalent in the state’s population. [End Page 527] The sources in chapter 4 highlight the national response to such extreme forms of racial conservatism, and the editors introduce the documents with contextual information regarding segregationists’ tactics—vacillating between massive resistance and delay. Once the county board ceased funding public schools, the decision created chaos and upheaval for black and white children. “The entire social fabric of the county was disrupted,” Daugherity and Grogan note (p. 114). White students attended white private academies in basements and movie theaters, while many black children “left the county to live with relatives” (p. 114). The editors’ sources and contextual introductions illuminate an aspect of the civil rights era in which “‘patriotic constitutionalists’” concealed white supremacy in coded policies that ripped children from their rural Virginia community (p. 62). Daugherity and Grogan exemplify this major theme by juxtaposing sources by civil rights attorneys Spottswood W. Robinson III and Oliver W. Hill and segregationists James J. Kilpatrick and Harry F. Byrd Sr., among others. The chronological documentary format makes the work a nice complement to Jill Ogline Titus’s monograph, Brown’s Battleground: Students, Segregationists, and the Struggle for Justice in Prince Edward County, Virginia (Chapel Hill, 2011). Kevin B. Johnson Arkansas State University, Beebe Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association