Most documentaries deal with men, but what do they actually say about masculinity? In this groundbreaking volume Sara Martín analyses more than forty 21st-century documentaries to explore how they represent American men and masculinity. From Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s The Mask You Live In to Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, this volume explores sixteen different faces of American masculinity: the good man, the activist, the politician, the whistleblower, the criminal, the sexual abuser, the wrongly accused, the dependent man, the soldier, the capitalist, the adventurer, the sportsman, the architect, the photographer, the musician, and the writer. The collective portrait drawn by the documentaries discloses a firm critical stance against the contradictions inherent in patriarchy, which makes American men promises of empowerment it cannot fulfill. The filmmakers’ view of American masculinity emphasizes the vulnerability of disempowered men before the abuses of the patriarchal system run by hegemonic men and a loss of bearings about how to be a man after the impact of feminism, accompanied nonetheless by a celebration of resilient masculinity and of the good American man. Firmly positioning documentaries as an immensely flexible, relevant tool to understand 21st-century American men and masculinity, their past, present, and future, this book will interest students and scholars of film studies, documentary film, American cultural studies, gender, and masculinity.

Considers representations of masculine identity and sexuality in popular film across the work of several American directors and genres.

Traces the history of black men in America using a tough-guy image to obscure their anger and disappointment over their roles in society back to their origins in Africa and the slave era.

Part III. Novel and Transnational Masculinities -- 9. Glocalized Masculinities of the Barrio Alto -- 10. Materializing the Penis -- 11. Challenging Novel Masculinities -- Conclusion: Of Tropes and Men -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index

In virtually every aspect of culture-health, marriage, family, morals, politics, sex, race, economics-American men of the past two decades have faced changing social conditions and confronted radical questions about themselves. In Millennial Masculinity: Men in Contemporary American Cinema, editor Timothy Shary collects fourteen contributions that consider male representation in films made at the turn of the century to explore precisely how those questions have been dealt with in cinema. Contributors move beyond the recent wave of "masculinity in crisis" arguments to provide sophisticated and often surprising insight into accessible films. Chapters are arranged in four sections: "Performing Masculinity" includes a discussion of Adam Sandler and movies such as Milk; "Patriarchal Problems" looks at issues of fathers from directors such as Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, and David Fincher; "Exceptional Sexualities" examines male love and sex through movies like Brokeback Mountain and Wedding Crashers; and "Facing Race" explores masculinity through race in film. Sean Penn, Jackie Chan, Brad Pitt, Will Smith, and Philip Seymour Hoffman are some of the actors included in these analyses, while themes considered include police thrillers, psychotic killers, gay tensions, fashion sense, and the burgeoning "bromance" genre. Taken together, the essays in Millennial Masculinity shed light on the high stakes of masculine roles in contemporary American cinema. Film and television scholars as well as readers interested in gender and sexuality in film will appreciate this timely collection.

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of how contemporary American prison narratives reflect and produce ideologies of masculinity in the United States, and in so doing, compellingly engages popular culture in order to demonstrate the profound ways in which implicit understandings of prison life shape all Americans, and their reactions to people both incarcerated and not.

Originally released in 1998, Documenting the Documentary responded to a scholarly landscape in which documentary film was largely understudied and undervalued aesthetically, and analyzed instead through issues of ethics, politics, and film technology. Editors Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski addressed this gap by presenting a useful survey of the artistic and persuasive aspects of documentary film from a range of critical viewpoints. This new edition of Documenting the Documentary adds five new essays on more recent films in addition to the text of the first edition. Thirty-one film and media scholars, many of them among the most important voices in the area of documentary film, cover the significant developments in the history of documentary filmmaking from Nanook of the North (1922), the first commercially released documentary feature, to contemporary independent film and video productions like Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005) and the controversial Borat (2006). The works discussed also include representative examples of many important national and stylistic movements and various production contexts, from mainstream to avant-garde. In all, this volume offers a series of rich and revealing analyses of those "regimes of truth" that still fascinate filmgoers as much today as they did at the very beginnings of film history. As documentary film and visual media become increasingly important ways for audiences to process news and information, Documenting the Documentary continues to be a vital resource to understanding the genre. Students and teachers of film studies and fans of documentary film will appreciate this expanded classic volume.