Bringing together an expansive range of writing by scholars, critics, historians, and filmmakers, The Documentary Film Reader presents an international perspective on the most significant developments and debates from several decades of critical writing about documentary. Each of the book's seven sections covers a distinct period in the history of documentary, collecting both contemporary and retrospective views of filmmaking in the era. And each section is prefaced by an introductory essay that explains its design and provides critical context. Painstakingly selected from the archives of more than a hundred years of cinema practice and theory, the essays, reviews, interviews, manifestos, and ephemera gathered in this volume suit the needs and interests of the beginning student, the advanced scholar, the casual reader, and the working documentarian.

This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the global landscape of documentary film festivals. Contributors from across the globe offer in-depth analysis of both internationally renowned and more alternative festivals, including Hot Docs (Canada), Nyon (Switcherland), Yamagata (Japan), DocChina, Full Frame (US), Belgrade (former Yugoslavia), Vikalp (India), and DocsBarcelona (Catalonia, Spain), among others. With a special focus on historical and political developments, this first volume draws a map of documentary festivals operating today, and then looks at their origins and evolution. This volume is organized in three sections: the first addresses methodological problems film historians and social scientists face when researching documentary film festivals, the second looks at the historical development of this circuit within the wider frame of history of world and national cinemas, and the third reflects on how politics find their way through festival programs and actions. Curatorial, organizational, industrial and political changes occurred in the festival realm addressed in this book help better understand how these affected documentary production, distribution, curation, exhibition and reception up to this day.

This book maps a hundred years of documentary film practices in India. It demonstrates that in order to study the development of a film practice, it is necessary to go beyond the classic analysis of films and filmmakers and focus on the discourses created around and about the practice in question. The book navigates different historical moments of the growth of documentary filmmaking in India from the colonial period to the present day. In the process, it touches upon questions concerning practices and discourses about colonial films, postcolonial institutions, independent films, filmmakers and filmmaking, the influence of feminism and the articulation of concepts of performance and performativity in various films practices. It also reflects on the centrality of technological change in different historical moments and that of film festivals and film screenings across time and space. Grounded in anthropological fieldwork and archival research and adopting Foucault’s concept of ‘effective history’, this work searches for points of origin that creates ruptures and deviations taking distance from conventional ways of writing film histories. Rather than presenting a univocal set of arguments and conclusions about changes or new developments of film techniques, the originality of the book is in offering an open structure (or an open archive) to enable the reader to engage with mechanisms of creation, engagement and participation in film and art practices at large. In adopting this form, the book conceptualises ‘Anthropology’ as also an art practice, interested, through its theoretico-methodological approach, in creating an open archive of engagement rather than a representation of a distant ‘other’. Similarly, documentary filmmaking in India is seen as primarily a process of creation based on engagement and participation rather than a practice interested in representing an objective reality. Proposing an innovative way of perceiving the growth of the documentary film genre in the subcontinent, this book will be of interest to film historians and specialists in Indian cinema(s) as well as academics in the field of anthropology of art, media and visual practices and Asian media studies.

DIVExamines the formation of the nation-state in postcolonial India, how it worked to create an identity for itself, to what extent it succeeded, and what may be the prospects for unity in a widely diverse country./div

In these two volumes of original essays, scholars from around the world address the history of British colonial cinema stretching from the emergence of cinema at the height of imperialism, to moments of decolonization andthe ending of formal imperialism in the post-Second World War.