Despite the prominence of "awkwardness" as cultural buzzword and descriptor of a sub-genre of contemporary film and television comedy, it has yet to be adequately theorized in academic film and media studies. Documentary’s Awkward Turn contributes a new critical paradigm to the field by presenting an analysis of awkward moments in documentary film and other reality-based media formats. It examines difficult and disrupted encounters between social actors on the screen, between filmmaker and subject, and between film and spectator. These encounters are, of course, often inter-connected. Awkward moments occur when an established mode of representation or reception is unexpectedly challenged, stalled, or altered: when an interviewee suddenly confronts the interviewer, when a subject who had been comfortable on camera begins to feel trapped in the frame, when a film perceived as a documentary turns out to be a parodic mockumentary. This book makes visible the ways in which awkwardness connects and subtends a range of transformative textual strategies, political and ethical problematics, and modalities of spectatorship in documentary film and media from the 1970s to the present.

In 1968, Argentinean Filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino first articulated the theory of a "Third Cinema" - a revolutionary genre of cinema that would counter oppression on a global scale. Intended to be a "guerilla cinema" geared at contesting the overwhelming dominance of Western cinema, Solana and Getino distinguished "Third Cinema" from other forms of cinema, classifying these other types as First Cinema (commercial cinema epitomized by Hollywood) and Second Cinema. "Third Cinema" was supposed to be a liberationary tool - particularly for the bulk of the world that was subject to European imperialism, such as Latin America, Africa and Asia. Spanning a wide geographical spread of cinemas ranging from Latin America, North and Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and Asia, this book addresses the following questions: how can we rethink the concept of "Third Cinema" for today? How do new national cinemas - and their accompanying media industries - reflect the concerns of societies that are struggling with the implications of accelerated modernization - and how are these concerns configured in new genres of aesthetics? Is there still a "Third Cinema" component in contemporary cinemas, and if so, how can it be understood?

The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History examines the problems of representation inherent in the appropriation of archival film and video footage for historical purposes. Baron analyses the way in which the meanings of archival documents are modified when they are placed in new texts and contexts, constructing the viewer’s experience of and relationship to the past they portray. Rethinking the notion of the archival document in terms of its reception and the spectatorial experiences it generates, she explores the ‘archive effect’ as it is produced across the genres of documentary, mockumentary, experimental, and fiction films. This engaging work discusses how, for better or for worse, the archive effect is mobilized to create new histories, alternative histories, and misreadings of history. The book covers a multitude of contemporary cultural artefacts including fiction films like Zelig, Forrest Gump and JFK, mockumentaries such as The Blair Witch Project and Forgotten Silver, documentaries like Standard Operating Procedure and Grizzly Man, and videogames like Call of Duty: World at War. In addition, she examines the works of many experimental filmmakers including those of Péter Forgács, Adele Horne, Bill Morrison, Cheryl Dunye, and Natalie Bookchin.

El falso documental ha pasado de ser una producción anecdótica a convertirse en una categoría cinematográfica reconocida por el gran público. Aunque su popularidadactual es incuestionable, no se trata de una forma nueva, sino que podemos rastrearla desde el inicio del cinematógrafo. Este libro recopila algunos de los títulos más emblemáticos, buscando a través de su estudio las características y la estructura que lo definen como modelo documental.En sus páginas se mantiene que todo fake puede ser estudiado no solo por los códigos tradicionalmente adscritos a los relatos de realidad que parasita, sino también por el contexto de su producción, su recepción y por la actitud mantenida por el texto. Alguno de los aspectos que mejor definen el falso documental es su falta de vocaciónde engaño y su insistencia en retratar los medios de comunicación de una manera subversiva.

In Too Bold for the Box Office, Cynthia J. Miller has assembled essays by scholars and filmmakers who examine the unique cinematic form of mockumentary. Individually, each of these essays looks at a given instance of mockumentary parody and subversion, examining the ways in which each calls into question our assumptions, pleasures, beliefs, and even our senses. Writing about national film, television, and new media traditions as diverse as their backgrounds, this volume's contributors explore and theorize the workings of mockumentaries, as well as the strategies and motivations of the writers and filmmakers who brought them into being.