This edited collection of contributions from media scholars, film practitioners and film historians connects the vibrant fields of documentary and disability studies. Documentary film has not only played an historical role in the social construction of disability but continues to be a strong force for expression, inclusion and activism. Offering essays on the interpretation and conception of a wide variety of documentary formats, Documentary and Disability reveals a rich set of resources on subjects as diverse as Thomas Quasthoff's opera performances, Tourette syndrome in the developing world, queer approaches to sexual functionality, Channel 4 disability sports broadcasting, the political meaning of cochlear implant activation, and Christoph's Schlingensief's celebrated Freakstars 3000.
This article analyses a series of 'Desiring China: Sexuality and Female Subjectivity' screening and discussion of Chinese independent documentary films at the University of Hong Kong in 2016. It explores a feminist positionality in Chinese independent documentary film to deal with privacy, gender, violence, and trauma: 1) filmmaker's position on the ethics of care and (intimate) solidarity with protagonists, 2) protagonist's position of confession and appeal in reclaiming autonomy from gender based violence and discrimination; 3) filmmaker's and protagonist's different positions on reducing documentary's negative impact on protagonist's personal life through controlling distribution, 4) evolving positions of protagonist and filmmaker on self-transformation and the re- open for screening, 5) activist position of representation as in politics and filmmaking's position of representation as in arts, and 6) tensions between theory and practice requires scholars, filmmakers, and activists to situate and contextualise ethics for discussion and practice.This article argues for the need to adopt a feminist ethics of care when producing, exhibiting, and critiquing documentaries about women and social margins in contemporary China. It promotes equal power relationship among documentary participants and innovation of cinematic language, to deal with ethical dilemmas and potential limitations of filmmaking and exhibiting Chinese independent documentary films.
Sy Taffel is a senior lecturer in media studies and co-director of the Political Ecology Research Centre at Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand. He has published work on political ecologies of digital media, media and materiality, hacktivism, automation, and pervasive/locative media. He is the author of Digital Media Ecologies (Bloomsbury 2019) and a co-editor of Ecological Entanglements in the Anthropocene (Lexington, 2017 with Nicholas Holm).
From July 13th to the 30th 2012, I traveled to Cape Verde through the URI faculty-led study abroad program, visiting the islands of Santiago and São Vicente. There, I focused specifically on the history and politics of Cape Verde, as well as the scientific, cultural, economic, environmental, historical, and social importance of the oceans. The main course was AAF 390 Directed Study: Documentary film production of fishing industry and environmental sustainability. With the footage acquired from the trip, I have created a documentary film that portrays the situations within the fishing communities. Properly managing natural resources is crucial for Cape Verdeans. They must get the most use out of what little resources they have without being dependent on anyone else. The biggest resource for the archipelago of Cape Verde is the Atlantic Ocean. Because of its location, a major source of food as well employment that the islands have is fish. The fishermen of Cape Verde work diligently every day to provide food for their family, their community, as well as the rest of the country. The ocean and the fishing industry are precious aspects of the country that need protection and recognition. There are various issues throughout the nation that are hurting the fisheries. The best way to prevent the decay of the industry is through proper investment from the government and through agreements with other countries. Expansion of the industry depends on this financial investment into the maintenance of the local ships and processing plants. Negotiations with foreign markets and other fisheries will help build a better and more sustainable fishing economy. One of the subjects of the film focuses on meeting the fishermen organization of the Artisanal Fisheries as well as ones in the community of São Tome. This is an important aspect to the film because it captures the efforts of the fishermen as they discuss their work ethic, problems, and solutions they look forward to achieving. We also spent multiple days filming the fish market and touristic fisheries in São Vicente. There, we gathered numerous interviews with the men and women selling fish as well as fishermen coming in on their boats. There is a major focus on this section of the documentary, because it depicts the working environment of the daily procedures for a variety of people in the industry. I plan on continuing to create documentaries on subjects that promote positive social change. My documentary on the fisheries in Cape Verde sheds light on the overlooked struggles and hard work that the country is dealing with.
International audience ; "Glasgow's Turnaround" is the first part of a two part research documentary. It studies the history of Glasgow's planning strategies following on from the city's industrial heyday of shipbuilding in the 1930s, its industrial decline, population shrinkage (some of which was actively encouraged by city and government policies), to today's current regeneration strategies and their outcomes.
International audience ; "Glasgow's Turnaround" is the first part of a two part research documentary. It studies the history of Glasgow's planning strategies following on from the city's industrial heyday of shipbuilding in the 1930s, its industrial decline, population shrinkage (some of which was actively encouraged by city and government policies), to today's current regeneration strategies and their outcomes.
International audience ; "Glasgow's Turnaround" is the first part of a two part research documentary. It studies the history of Glasgow's planning strategies following on from the city's industrial heyday of shipbuilding in the 1930s, its industrial decline, population shrinkage (some of which was actively encouraged by city and government policies), to today's current regeneration strategies and their outcomes.
International audience ; "Glasgow's Turnaround" is the first part of a two part research documentary. It studies the history of Glasgow's planning strategies following on from the city's industrial heyday of shipbuilding in the 1930s, its industrial decline, population shrinkage (some of which was actively encouraged by city and government policies), to today's current regeneration strategies and their outcomes.
International audience ; "Glasgow's Turnaround" is the first part of a two part research documentary. It studies the history of Glasgow's planning strategies following on from the city's industrial heyday of shipbuilding in the 1930s, its industrial decline, population shrinkage (some of which was actively encouraged by city and government policies), to today's current regeneration strategies and their outcomes.
This proposal outlines the scope, purpose, and desired content of the Crisis for Americans film series sponsored by Pepperdine College. The audience for this proposal is not made clear, although it was prepared by Vice President William Teague and "Mr. Gough" on February 27, 1961.
24.hours.in Tampere (www.24-hours.in) is an interactive documentary project exploring new opportunities for participation, collaboration and the potential democratisation of documentary production. Utilising user-generated video captured on mobile phones and available devices, the project is participatory whereby the audience contribute documentary videos. With reference to Dziga Vertov's seminal 1929 documentary film 'Man with a Movie Camera', the aim is for the videos to document the cities, the people that live there and their daily lives. Moving beyond the user-generated content model, the project will build up a database of location specific documentary material and aim to create a new system for collaborative documentary production and user-curated content. The initial 24.hours.in Tampere prototype was produced at the Tampere Art Factory International Week, hosted by TAMK School of Arts & Media, Tampere University of Applied Sciences, Tampere, Finland in April 2011. Richard Vickers ran an interactive documentary workshop, working with students from TAMK, to produce a collaborative, participatory, experimental documentary project centred on 24-hours in Tampere. The aim was to document the city of Tampere, the people that live here and their daily lives in a 24-hour period, the participants were encouraged to embrace Vertov's pioneering avant-garde approach to filmmaking, utilising camera phones and mobile devices to capture "life caught unawares". The paper presented at the MindTrek Academic conference discusses the development of the prototype project and the opportunities that ubiquitous and pervasive mobile camera phones and smart devices offer for the democratisation of documentary production.
Phetmixay Means Fighter is a short documentary film that seeks to explore Lao American refugee resiliency narratives through the life of my father, Phoutone Phetmixay. As the central character, Phoutone's poetic remembrances of his commitment to the Lao Royal army, displacement from Laos, and resettlement in the United States all serve to consider the complex history of Lao Americans in the geopolitical context of U.S. invention and the socialist Lao government. The film is invested in creating a space to validate a part of my own family's history by way of mourning, healing, and building community amongst other Lao American refugee families.
Over the past two decades, opportunities for 'creative documentary' on television may have diminished, but other distribution options for innovative and engaged films have opened up. A resurgence of cinematic documentary is attracting substantial numbers of viewers who, bored or disillusioned by television's shift to reality programming, are prepared to pay for theatre tickets, while online subscription services such as Netflix and Amazon now stream and fund high-quality documentary. Increasing numbers of filmmakers are self-distributing their works online. A significant percentage of these films, freed from the constraints of broadcast television, take up political challenges because, as Michael Chanan says, documentary has 'politics in its genes' (2008, p. 16). In fact, as mainstream news and current affairs becomes increasingly tabloid, it could be argued that documentary is assuming the role of investigative journalism or, to use Laura Poitras' description, documentary functions as 'Journalism Plus'. This article, at times drawing on my own film practice, attempts to explore these shifts and developments, locating documentary at a time of institutional transformation.Image: He Toki Huna: SAS Quick Reaction Force in Kabul post a suicide bombing in February 2010. Photo by Lionel de Coninck
The documentary mode has not had the recognition it deserves in the western historiography of Japanese cinema. The 'discovery' of that cinema at film festivals in Europe and the United States in the 1950s, and the growth of academic and popular writing that followed, prioritized aesthetic and cultural difference and obscured Japan's contribution to the documentary mode. Canonical authors such as Donald Richie, who was instrumental in introducing Japanese cinema to the West, even claimed that Japan did not have a true documentary tradition due to the apparent preference of the Japanese audience for stylisation over realism, a preference that originated from its theatrical tradition (Richie 1990, p. 60). And yet, over 130,000 documentary films were made between 1945 and 2010 (Murayama 2010, pp. 240–46), and postwar Japanese documentary films regularly won prizes at specialist film festivals.1 Beyond documentary film production itself, a closer look at the history of Japanese feature film production also calls Richie's assertion into question. "Semi-documentary" and "documentary touch" were clichés of postwar feature film criticism, in response to a renewed emphasis on actuality and ordinary life in at least one strand of Japanese studio and independent production. This special issue, Developments in Japanese Documentary Mode, seeks to challenge the predominance of fiction film in the literature on Japanese cinema, and in particular the assumption of a stylised Japanese aesthetic. It reveals a broad sense in Japan of the film medium as connected to material and phenomenological authenticity, even as that rhetorical effect was sometimes put in service to political and economic ideologies.
The need for political participation felt in the aftermath of the Cuban revolution, and the widespread mobilization of photography to political ends during this period intersected with postmodern theory in a global arena. While US-based critiques of the documentary genre have been duly analyzed in the relevant literature, related conversations taking place in Latin America have only been marginally explored. This article posits that so-called postmodern discourses in fact created the basis for a horizontal, transnational and multi-centered, rather than vertical (North‒South) dynamic between these photographic communities. Through their commitment to politics, and to avant-garde aesthetics, documentary photographers performed gestures of cultural and visual appropriation, fitting their itinerant context. This article analyzes the work of Claudia Gordillo, taking as a case study Nicaragua during the 1980s.
