w/ M. Roholl “From New Deal Propaganda to National Vernacular: Pare Lorentz and the Construction of an American Public Culture,” in Peter Zimmermann and Kay Hoffmann, eds., Triumph der Bilder (Konstanz: UVK Verlagsges., 2003): 155-173 (original) (raw)
Related papers
American Documentary Film: Projecting the Nation
2011
In American Documentary Film, Jeffrey Geiger examines the role of documentary film in mobilizing, promoting, and even suppressing central myths of U.S. national identity. His brilliant close readings illuminate the relationship between the rhetorical, technical and stylistic elements of specific films and a broader set of contexts and concerns. Rigorous yet accessible, this elegantly-written book will be of great value to the general reader and the specialist alike, and it will transform the way we consider the history, theory, and practice of documentary filmmaking. (Valerie Smith, Princeton University) This is nothing less than a tremendous achievement ... and the new benchmark in concise appreciation of American documentary film history. (Ian Scott, H-net, Humanities and Social Sciences online) ...the richness of Geiger's synthesis will make it an excellent text for courses in the subject and also a resource outside the classroom. The book will be a particularly important acquisition for libraries with limited holdings on documentary film. Highly recommended. All readers. (Ken Nolley, Choice) In detailing the myriad ways in which documentaries have reflected and refracted conceptions of nationhood in the USA ... American Documentary Film offers a valuable model for rethinking documentary and its potential contribution to debates on American identity and history. (Andrew Utterson, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television) Simply put, this is one of the definitive texts on the subject, not out of place among the likes of John Grierson, Erik Barnouw, and Bill Nichols. (Douglas MacCleod, Scope)
World Records Vol 5, 2021
A response to Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow's “Beyond Story: A Community-Based Manifesto,” this article provides a historical perspective on how the feminist assertion "the personal is political" shaped the valorization of "story" in radical documentary film practice in the 1970s and the subsequent development of neoliberal practices within the Non-Profit Industrial Complex that has served as the economic infrastructure for documentary film in the US for decades. This, I argue, is the context out of which documentary film begins to be dominated by the logic of the market that finds its chief expression in documentary films that focus on individuals and depict experience within "three-act" narrative structures. Conceptualizing documentary as a terrain of political and economic struggle -- the article supplements Juhasz and Lebow's aesthetic critique of "story" with an explicit call to connect the need to transform the infrastructures for film funding, production, and circulation with other calls and movements to dismantle and replace the structures of racial capitalism.
The Power of Visual Discourse: 21 st Century US-American Films 'Against the Grain'
Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2015
Looking at U.S.-produced films and documentaries since the turn of the mil-lennium, one notices a rapidly growing number of productions that diverge from official US politics or „mainstream‟ attitudes yet seem to be in tune with the views of statistically significant sections and/or ethnicities of the US population. The spectrum is remarkably broad, from Michael Moore‟s polemical „mockumentaries‟ to Clint Eastwood‟s, George Clooney‟s, or Gus Van Sant‟s critical „American‟ movies, to the films by and about ethnic „minorities‟ like Mexican Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Asian Indian Americans, et cetera. Also, most recently, films and documen-taries about the serious problems of U.S. veterans of the latest wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have begun to make an appearance in mainstream media. Altogether, over the last 15 years, movies and documentaries have increasingly put their fingers on critical social and political issues; ethnic minorities and women in particular have become much more visible and, most importantly, they now have their own filmmakers and scriptwriters rather than leaving the „power of discourse‟ to the old masters. This is partly thanks to new generations of ethnic and/or female American filmmakers, but partly also because of new digital technologies that have become available in recent years and now make the production of films as well as their distribution on DVD and via internet easier and considerably less expensive. With the creation of special audiences and virtual communities via YouTube and social networks like Facebook, Twitter, etc., the development of a growing number of “interpretative communities” that began in the 1970s has accelerated and reached a new global level.
2019
This thesis investigates the political conjuncture surrounding the U.S. New Communist Movement’s break with the New Left of the 1960s, tracing the coordinates of this ideological shift through the lens of committed documentary. I argue that a materialist analysis of committed documentary necessitates understanding the form according to an aesthetics of political use-value. By attending to the question of documentary’s political utility, I demonstrate how films were used as cultural tools for conducting hegemonic struggles over certain political issues. Focusing on the contested dialectical relation between class and race, I trace period debates over the political status of the black proletariat through readings of four documentaries: Columbia Revolt (1968), Black Panther (1968), Finally Got the News (1970), and Wildcat at Mead (1972). Through these analyses, I argue for the centrality of political organization to any useful theory and practice of cultural commitment as a form of revolutionary politics.
The Ramparts We Watch: el discurso del cine documental en el campo de las Relaciones Públicas
2014
The aim of this article is to analyze Louis de Rochemont’s The Ramparts We Watch as a public relations war effort from the past century. Arising from the informative and propagandistic strategy of late 1930s newsreels, the aforementioned documentary was made using very appropriate narrative techniques to award it the dimension of objectivity and truthfulness characteristic of public relations messages, without losing sight of its educational and persuasive function. From this standpoint, The Ramparts We Watch founded a genre and constituted one of the clearest precedents of public relations war films in America