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.

Documentary Media: History, Theory, Practice facilitates the study of documentary media, its changing forms, and diverse social functions. Fox provides balanced and accessible coverage of the historical, critical, and the practical aspects of documentary media without mandating specialized skills sets in students or access to costly technology. For practitioners and students alike, Documentary Media lays out fundamental concepts and production processes needed to contribute to the contemporary production of non-fiction media in the digital age. Each chapter engages students by challenging traditional assumptions about documentary form and function, posing critical and creative questions, and offering historical and contemporary examples. Additionally, each chapter closes with an "Into Practice" section that assists readers in applying the chapter's concepts. Fox aims to help the student establish a complete treatment, aesthetic plan, and pre-production strategy for their own documentary project.

This book studies the key genres in contemporary Japanese cinema through analysis of their key representative films. It considers both those films whose generic lineage is clearly definable (samurai, yakuza, horror) as well as the singularity of several recent trends in the country's filmmaking (such as magic realist filmmaking).

After World War II, U.S. documentarians engaged in a rigorous rethinking of established documentary practices and histories. Responding to the tumultuous transformations of the postwar era--the atomic age, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the emergence of the environmental movement, immigration and refugee crises, student activism, the globalization of labor, and the financial collapse of 2008--documentary makers increasingly reconceived reality as the site of social conflict and saw their work as instrumental to struggles for justice. Examining a wide range of forms and media, including sound recording, narrative journalism, drawing, photography, film, and video, this book is a daring interdisciplinary study of documentary culture and practice from 1945 to the present. Essays by leading scholars across disciplines collectively explore the activist impulse of documentarians who not only record reality but also challenge their audiences to take part in reality's remaking. In addition to the editors, the volume's contributors include Michael Mark Cohen, Grace Elizabeth Hale, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Jonathan Kahana, Leigh Raiford, Rebecca M. Schreiber, Noah Tsika, Laura Wexler, and Daniel Worden.

This book presents a chronology of thirty definitions attributed to the word, term, phrase, and concept of “documentary” between the years 1895 and 1959. The book dedicates one chapter to each of the thirty definitions, scrutinizing their idiosyncratic language games from close range while focusing on their historical roots and concealed philosophical sources of inspiration. Dan Geva's principal argument is twofold: first, that each definition is an original ethical premise of documentary; and second, that only the structured assemblage of the entire set of definitions successfully depicts the true ethical nature of documentary insofar as we agree to consider its philosophical history as a reflective object of thought in a perpetual state of being-self-defined: an ethics sui generis.