This collection aims to give insight to the reader as to how poetic approaches to documentary filmmaking have helped to develop the documentary form into a rich and diverse way of representing the real world in film. As such, it is the aesthetics of documentary filmmaking that becomes the primary focus of discussion within this collection. The majority of the chapters are written by documentary filmmakers who give insight into how poetics have influenced their own approach to documentary filmmaking, while other chapters are written by film scholars who analyse the work of others, in order to uncover how poetics are manifested in existing documentary films. This book will be of interest to those who produce documentary films, as well as those who have an interest in the work of other documentary filmmakers.

This collection aims to give insight to the reader as to how poetic approaches to documentary filmmaking have helped to develop the documentary form into a rich and diverse way of representing the real world in film. As such, it is the aesthetics of documentary filmmaking that becomes the primary focus of discussion within this collection. The majority of the chapters are written by documentary filmmakers who give insight into how poetics have influenced their own approach to documentary filmmaking, while other chapters are written by film scholars who analyse the work of others, in order to uncover how poetics are manifested in existing documentary films. This book will be of interest to those who produce documentary films, as well as those who have an interest in the work of other documentary filmmakers.

Set to generate future discussions in the field for years to come, The Poetics of Poetry Film is an encyclopaedic work on the ever-evolving genre of poetry film. Tremlett provides an introduction to the emergence and history of poetry film in a global context, defining and debating terms both philosophically and materially. Including over 40 contributors and showcasing the work of an international array of practitioners, this is an industry bible for anyone interested in poetry, digital media, filmmaking, art and creative writing, as well as poetry filmmakers. Poetry films are a genre of short film, usually combining the three main elements of the poem as: verbal message; the moving film image and diegetic sounds; and additional non-diegetic sounds or music, which create a soundscape. In this book, Tremlett examines the formal characteristics of the poetic in poetry film, film poetry and videopoetry, particularly in relation to lyric voice and time. The volume includes interviews, analysis and a rigorous and thorough investigation of the poetry film, from its origins to the present.

The Poetics of Radical Hope: The Abderrhamane Sissako Experience communicates pieces of evidence that Sissako is the most talented and the most sophisticated filmmaker of his generation. This imaginative excellence emanates from new aspirations to fashion an original African cinematic aesthetic for a politic of radical hope and creative adaptation. Sissako’s contribution extends to all aspects of the indigenous motion pictures industry to help rebuild the continent’s cultural infrastructures and create intellectual and cultural spaces to mobilize narrative strategies to contribute in the making of potent African collectives. Far from being abstract, Sissako's logic of contribution resists facile reading and demands a direct and profound engagement with the text. Sissako is one of the best filmmakers working today because his cinema constitutes a generative contribution to the contemporary production of African intelligibility. This logic of contribution helps to better articulate the historical logics and practices of a continent in constant throes of situational emergencies. The cinemas confront African colonial legacies to contemporary globalization discourses that grip the contemporary global condition, notably: political instability, poverty, illiteracy, digital divide, global warming and food shortages, diseases and the so-called "clash of civilization."

This book explores the space of queer documentary through the modernist optic of Marcel Proust’s ‘lieu factice’ (artificial place), a perspective that problematizes the location of place in a post-postmodern world with a dispersed sense of the real. The practice of queer documentary in France and Italy, from the beginning of the new millennium onwards, is seen to re-write the coherence of ‘place’ through a range of emerging queer realities. Proposing the post-queer as a way of contending with the spatial dynamics of these contexts, analysis of key texts positions place as mourned, conceded and intersectional. The performance of place as agency is considered through the notional film, the radical archive of documentary, the enactment of politics, queer indeterminacy and a phenomenology of the object, the frame and queer mobility. The central themes of family, gender, dis/location, in/visibility and re/presentation question blind investment in the integrity of being emplaced.

In the post-World War II era, authors of the beat generation produced some of the most enduring literature of the day. More than six decades since, work of the Beat Poets conjures images of unconventionality, defiance, and a changing consciousness that permeated the 1950s and 60s. In recent years, the key texts of Beat authors such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac have been appropriated for a new generation in feature-length films, graphic novels, and other media. In Adapting the Beat Poets: Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouc on Screen, Michael J.Prince examines how works by these authors have been translated to film. Looking primarily at three key works—Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Ginsberg’s Howl, and Kerouac’s On the Road—Prince considers how Beat literature has been significantly altered by the unintended intrusion of irony or other inflections. Prince also explores how these screen adaptations offer evidence of a growing cultural thirst for authenticity, even as mediated in postmodern works. Additional works discussed in this volume include The Subterraneans, Towers Open Fire, The Junky's Christmas,and Big Sur. By examining the screen versions of the Beat triumvirate’s creations, this volume questions the ways in which their original works serve as artistic anchors and whether these films honor the authentic intent of the authors. Adapting the Beat Poets is a valuable resource for anyone studying the beat generation, including scholars of literature, film, and American history.

One of the great exponents of the direct cinema style, Quebecois poet, essayist, and film-maker Pierre Perrault (1927-1999) began his documentary career in radio before joining the more traditional Ren’e Bonni’ere filming life in the lower St. Lawrence. In the 1960s he joined the National Film Board of Canada to shoot films in the new direct style, taking a small two-man crew into communities to reveal their beliefs and allegiances as they coped with social change. His legendary trilogy on the Ile-aux-Coudres opened with his most famous work, Pour la suite du monde (1963). Ostensibly a look at the local people’s effort to revive a traditional beluga hunt, it is actually the beginning of a lifelong inquiry into the relationship between community and national identity. This relationship emerges most clearly in the highly poetic Un pays sans bon sens! (1970), which brought Perrault into conflict with the NFB. The film was sidelined for many years. After a trip outside Quebec to Moncton to document francophone student unrest, Perrault made a second trilogy, this one in northwestern Quebec, showing the collapse of traditional farming communities relocated to the Abitibi during the Great Depression. Further explorations took Perrault to the northern interiors of Quebec, the hunting woods of Maniwaki, and to the tall ships retracing Jacques Cartier’s voyages of discovery. The triology culminated in the desolate arctic landscapes of the mysterious muskox, and two of his most haunting creations. The first major publication on Perrault in English, Pierre Perrault and the Poetic Documentary discusses not only the world that Perrault’s cinema revealed but a revolution in film-making from a great poet. Co-written and edited by David Clandfield, Principal of New College in the University of Toronto, Pierre Perrault and the Poetic Documentary also features contributions from scholar Jerry White, as well as translations of some of Perrault’s writings on film. Published by the Toronto International Film Festival. Distributed in Canada by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Distributed outside Canada by Indiana University Press.