Because of the huge boom in documentary making there's been a similar growth in the number of courses in documentary studies. This book brings together some of the leading scholars and practitioners in this area to provide a textbook and research tool.

From a boom in theatrical features to footage posted on websites such as YouTube and Google Video, the early years of the 21st century have witnessed significant changes in the technological, commercial, political, and social dimensions of documentaries on film, television and the web. This book assesses ideas and constructions of documentary.

American Documentary Filmmaking in the Digital Age examines the recent challenges to the conventions of realist documentary through the lens of war documentary films by Ken Burns, Michael Moore, and Errol Morris. During the twentieth century, the invention of new technologies of audiovisual representation such as cinema, television, video, and digital media have transformed the modes of historical narration and with it forced historians to assess the impact of new visual technologies on the construction of history. This book investigates the manner in which this contemporary Western "crisis" in historical narrative is produced by a larger epistemological shift in visual culture. Ricciardelli uses the theme of war as depicted in these directors’ films to focus her study and look at the model(s) of national identity that Burns, Morris, and Moore shape through their depictions of US military actions. She examines how postcolonial critiques of historicism and the advent of digitization have affected the narrative structure of documentary film and the shaping of historical consciousness through cinematic representation.

What is 'Arab' about Arab subcultures? This is the first book to set out to delineate different ways of studying and theorising Arab subcultural groups and practices, including film, graffiti, music, live art performances, Arab techies and youth cultures. Contributors tackle a number of questions including: How is the study of Arab subcultures to be theorised? How are we to analyse such creative processes in a new worldliness characterised by trans-temporality and trans-subjectivity? Arab Subcultures effectively opens up a critical and interdisciplinary dialogue about Arab subcultures with different fields of enquiry, including anthropology, philosophy, art criticism and cultural studies, at the heart of which lies the key intellectual task of re-imagining the uneasy relation between aesthetics and politics in the age of revolutions.

Provides a road map of the scholarship on modern Hindi cinema in India, with an emphasis on understanding the interplay between cinema and colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. This book attends to issues of capitalism, nationalism, orientalism, and modernity through understandings of race, gender and sexuality, religion, and politics.

Explores the processes by which we narrate our own lives and the lives of others; our motives; and the role of media.