Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary offers a theoretical mapping of contemporary non-standard documentary practices enabled by the proliferation of new digital imaging, lightweight and non-operator digital cameras, multiscreen and interactive interfaces, and web 2.0 platforms. These emergent practices encompass digital data visualizations, digital films that experiment with the deliberate manipulation of photographic records, documentaries based on drone cameras, GoPros, and virtual reality (VR) interfaces, documentary installations in the gallery, interactive documentary (i-doc), citizens' vernacular online videos that document scenes of the protests such as the Arab Spring, the Hong Kong Protests, and the Black Lives Matter Movements, and new activist films, videos, and archiving projects that respond to those political upheavals. Building on the interdisciplinary framework of documentary studies, digital media studies, and contemporary art criticism, Jihoon Kim investigates the ways in which these practices both challenge and update the aesthetic, epistemological, political, and ethical assumptions of traditional film-based documentary. Providing a diverse range of case studies that classify and examine these practices, the book argues that the new media technologies and the experiential platforms outside the movie theater, such as the gallery, the world wide web, and social media services, expand five horizons of documentary cinema: image, vision, dispositif, archive, and activism. This reconfiguration of these five horizons demonstrates that documentary cinema in the age of new media and platforms, which Kim labels as the 'twenty-first-century documentary, ' dynamically changes its boundaries while also exploring new experiences of reality and history in times of the contemporary crises across the globe, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Documentary feature films have historically existed on the margins of mainstream media. In the U.S., enterprising documentarians have spent most of the past 60 years struggling to find a larger, broader audience for their films. Often negatively associated with longform television journalism and tedious educational programming, documentaries have rarely escaped their perceived status as "cultural vegetables" - good for you, but relatively unappealing. Recently, this marginal status has shifted quite dramatically. Nearly unthinkable a decade ago, documentary films have become reliable earners at the U.S. box office. In 2018 alone, Won't You Be My Neighbor? made almost $23 million, They Shall Not Grow Old and Free Solo each earned almost $18 million, RBG netted $14 million, and Three Identical Strangers earned $12 million. In addition to their theatrical presence, documentary films are ubiquitous on cable channels and streaming video services, which have made documentary programming a key component of their offerings to subscribers. In 2019, Netflix paid the highest price for a documentary out of the Sundance Film Festival: $10 million for Knock Down the House about four working-class women, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, running for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. Longtime documentary champion and former head of HBO Documentary Sheila Nevins said that Netflix was playing with "Monopoly money" by acquiring the documentary at such a high price, but she also granted that this was a trend across the board. Industry journalists took note. This surge in popularity had made documentaries nearly ubiquitous. In 2019, think-pieces from CBS News, NPR, Los Angeles Times, and The Ringer all simultaneously proclaimed a new Golden Age of Documentary. With broad public interest and robust investment in their production, documentary films are definitively more popular and prestigious than ever before"--

Contemporary Documentary offers a rich survey of the rapidly expanding landscape of documentary film, television, video, and new media. The collection of original essays addresses the emerging forms, popular genres, and innovative approaches of the digital era. The anthology highlights geographically and thematically diverse examples of documentaries that have expanded the scope and impact of non-fiction cinema and captured the attention of global audiences over the past three decades. It also explores the experience of documentary today, with its changing dynamics of production, collaboration, distribution, and exhibition, and its renewed political and cultural relevance. The twelve chapters - featuring engaging case studies and written from a wide range of perspectives including film theory, social theory, ethics, new media, and experience design - invite students to think critically about documentary as a vibrant field, unrestricted in its imagination and quick in its response to new forms of filmmaking. Offering a methodical exploration of the expansive reach of documentary as a creative force in the media and society of the twenty-first century, Contemporary Documentary is an ideal collection for students of film, media, and communication who are studying documentary film.

Fiftieth anniversary reissue of the founding media studies book that helped establish media art as a cultural category. First published in 1970, Gene Youngblood’s influential Expanded Cinema was the first serious treatment of video, computers, and holography as cinematic technologies. Long considered the bible for media artists, Youngblood’s insider account of 1960s counterculture and the birth of cybernetics remains a mainstay reference in today’s hypermediated digital world. This fiftieth anniversary edition includes a new Introduction by the author that offers conceptual tools for understanding the sociocultural and sociopolitical realities of our present world. A unique eyewitness account of burgeoning experimental film and the birth of video art in the late 1960s, this far- ranging study traces the evolution of cinematic language to the end of fiction, drama, and realism. Vast in scope, its prescient formulations include “the paleocybernetic age,” “intermedia,” the “artist as design scientist,” the “artist as ecologist,” “synaesthetics and kinesthetics,” and “the technosphere: man/machine symbiosis.” Outstanding works are analyzed in detail. Methods of production are meticulously described, including interviews with artists and technologists of the period, such as Nam June Paik, Jordan Belson, Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, Stan VanDerBeek, Les Levine, and Frank Gillette. An inspiring Introduction by the celebrated polymath and designer R. Buckminster Fuller—a perfectly cut gem of countercultural thinking in itself—places Youngblood’s radical observations in comprehensive perspective. Providing an unparalleled historical documentation, Expanded Cinema clarifies a chapter of countercultural history that is still not fully represented in the arthistorical record half a century later. The book will also inspire the current generation of artists working in ever-newer expansions of the cinematic environment and will prove invaluable to all who are concerned with the technologies that are reshaping the nature of human communication.

This collection of essays by Australian based practitioner–theorists brings together new research on interactive documentary making. The chapters explore how documentary theory and practice is influenced by digitisation, mobile phones, and new internet platforms. The contributors highlight the questions raised for documentary makers and scholars as new production methods, narrative forms, and participation practices emerge. The book presents an introduction to documentary techniques shaped by new digital technologies, and will appeal to documentary scholars, students, and film-makers alike.

This book explores the industrial and personal challenges faced by filmmakers in bringing the current worldwide craze for documentary films and series to screens small and large. Utilizing a number of case studies drawn from in-depth interviews with acclaimed documentary directors, producers, and screenwriters from around the world, Phoebe Hart offers a thematic analysis to reveal the risks and opportunities for practitioners. Hart examines these themes in the context of current scholarship to provide insight into the modes and methods of making factual screen content as she engages with the documentary form and the marking of it, acquisition of mastery and inspiration, and specific rituals and habits of practice. From the unique vantage point of being a “pracademic” – that is, being both a successful documentary filmmaker and a recognized screen researcher and teacher - Hart ultimately argues for greater support of filmmakers and pursuit of a deeper understanding of creative processes.

The fourth edition of Bill Nichols's best-selling text, Introduction to Documentary, has been vastly altered in its entirety to bring this indispensable textbook up to date and reconceptualize aspects of its treatment of documentaries past and present. Here Nichols, with Jaimie Baron, has edited each chapter for clarity and ease of use and expanded the book with updates and new ideas. Featuring abundant examples and images, Introduction to Documentary, Fourth Edition is designed to facilitate a rich understanding of how cinema can be used to document the historical world as it is seen by a wide variety of filmmakers. Subjectivity, expressivity, persuasiveness, and credibility are crucial factors that move documentary film away from objective documentation and toward the thought-provoking realm of arguments, perceptions, and perspectives that draw from a filmmaker's unique sensibility to help us see the world as we have not seen it before. Exploring ethics, history, different modes of documentary, key social issues addressed, and both the origins and evolution of this form, this updated volume also offers guidance on how to write about documentaries and how to begin the process of making one. Introduction to Documentary, Fourth Edition will be of use not only to film students but also those in adjacent fields where visual representations of reality play an important role: journalism, sociology, anthropology, feminist and ethnic studies, among others.