Tag Archives: documentary

Reading 03

by

After some readings about interactive documentary and historical examples of the relationship of cinema and documentary to technology now we turn to basics. While reasonably long this is simple to read, and many of you will have read this already. It is from Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. New York, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, 2013. Print. (PDF here.)

I’ve put them all into the one document but they are an introduction to narrative, then an introduction to experimental film, and the last bit is about documentary, nonnarrative, and two nonnarrative documentary forms. We want to make more visible to ourselves what a narrative actually is, and then to think about what experimental practices can teach us to better see the role of multilinearity in general, and for our Korsakow films specifically.

Reading 02

by

The first reading was recent work that discusses what might be different about interactive documentary. We started here as we are working in the area of interactive documentary this semester, though we are more interested in multilinear networked making more specifically and broadly than interactive documentary per se. Interactive doco is what we will make, we will think about it quite a bit, but we’re making these doco’s as much because they let us quickly engage with other things than with just documentary…

So, the second reading. Let’s be explicit here, the subject lets us test ideas, and to explore new things. As was said in formally and informally, that includes the teaching staff. Here we bring in our current research and think, with you, about it. So, the second reading looks very interesting and is something I’ve mentioned in my own work regularly. It is the relation of Astruc’s concept of caméra-stylo and new technologies of making. Astruc wrote a long time ago, but the ideas seem to provide us with ways to think about what is happening now, while also reminding us that while a lot has changed dramatically, some deeper things have not.

Set Reading

Sørenssen, Bjørn. “Digital Video and Alexandre Astruc’s Caméra-Stylo: The New Avant-Garde in Documentary Realized?” Studies in Documentary Film 2.1 (2008): 47–59. EBSCOhost. Web. 19 Sept. 2013. (Get it while it’s hot.)

Supplementary Reading

Sobchack, Vivian. “Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of QuickTime.” Mille 34.Fall (1999).. (This one’s still warm from the oven too.)

This second reading is interesting because it explores in a positive way what and why video on a computer is, isn’t, could be, and so on. Nice way to approach video online precisely not as wannabe TV or cinema.

Reading 01

by

The first reading, which is a sort of scene setting moment, is Aston, Judith, and Sandra Gaudenzi. “Interactive Documentary: Setting the Field.” Studies in Documentary Film 6.2 (2012): 125–139. (You can find a copy of this in the shoe box.)

A supplementary reading is Hight, Craig. “The Field of Digital Documentary: A Challenge to Documentary Theorists.” Studies in Documentary Film 2.1 (2008): 3–7. (You can find a copy of this in the shoe box.)

Aston and Gaudenzi are two practice based researchers in the area of interactive documentary and two of the key people behind the very active and significant i-docs project. Hight is a near neighbour (New Zealand) who, with Kate Nash (formerly Tasmania, now with the i-docs crowd in Leeds), has been publishing work around interactive documentary locally.

Things to think about: what do the authors claim to be new, or different, about interactive documentary? What sorts or types of interactive documentary do they suggest currently exist? How are these different sorts described or defined? Do these differences appear to matter to makers? Audiences? Both? How?