Documenting the Documentary - Wayne State University Press

Documenting the Documentary New And Expanded Edition

13500-Documenting the Documentary_Grant.indd 1

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Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu General Editor Barry Keith Grant Brock University Advisory Editors Robert J. Burgoyne University of St. Andrews

Frances Gateward California State University, Northridge

Caren J. Deming University of Arizona

Tom Gunning University of Chicago

Patricia B. Erens School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Thomas Leitch University of Delaware

Peter X. Feng University of Delaware

Walter Metz Southern Illinois University

Lucy Fischer University of Pittsburgh


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Documenting the Documentary Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video

New and Expanded Edition

With a Foreword by Bill Nichols

Edited by Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski

Wayne State University Press Detroit


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© 2014 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. 18 17 16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2013948532 ISBN: 978-0-8143-3971-8 (pbk: alk. paper)—ISBN: 978-0-8143-3972-5 (ebook)

Designed by Keata Brewer Typeset by E.T. Lowe Publishing Company Composed in Scala


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For Bob, Millie, Jessica, and Xena and for Zoya Sloniowski-Kiff and Ethan Pano-Sloniowski, Grandchildren extraordinaire


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contents

Foreword to New and Expanded Edition by Bill Nichols xi Preface to First Edition xvii Acknowledgments xix Introduction xxiii 1. The Filmmaker as Hunter: Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

william rothman 2. “Peace between Man and Machine”: Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

seth feldman 3. Paradise Regained: Sergei Eisenstein’s Que viva México! as Ethnography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

joanne her shfield 4. Synthetic Vision: The Dialectical Imperative of Luis Buñuel’s Las Hurdes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

vivian sobchack 5. The Art of National Projection: Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon. . . . . . 64

william guynn 6. The Mass Psychology of Fascist Cinema: Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

fr ank p. tomasulo


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viii

Contents

7. American Documentary Finds Its Voice: Persuasion and Expression in The Plow That Broke the Plains and The City . . . . 103

charlie keil 8. “Men Cannot Act before the Camera in the Presence of Death”: Joris Ivens’s The Spanish Earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122

thomas waugh 9. The Poetics of Propaganda: Humphrey Jennings and Listen to Britain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

jim leach 10. “It Was an Atrocious Film”: Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts. . . 159

jeannette sloniowski 11. The “Dialogic Imagination” of Jean Rouch: Covert Conversations in Les maîtres fous. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178

diane scheinman 12. Documenting the Ineffable: Terror and Memory in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196

sandy flitterman-lewis 13. Making the Past Present: Peter Watkins’s Culloden. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

john r. cook 14. “Don’t You Ever Just Watch?”: American Cinema Verité and Dont Look Back. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

jeanne hall 15. “Ethnography in the First Person”: Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253

barry keith gr ant 16. The Two Avant-Gardes: Solanas and Getino’s The Hour of the Furnaces. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271

robert stam 17. Seeing with Experimental Eyes: Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287

bart testa 18. “A Bastard Union of Several Forms”: Style and Narrative in An American Family. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305

jeffrey k. ruoff


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Contents

ix

19. The Documentary of Displaced Persona: Michael Rubbo’s Daisy: The Story of a Facelift. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322

joan nicks 20. Gender, Power, and a Cucumber: Satirizing Masculinity in This Is Spinal Tap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339

carl plantinga 21. Documentary Film and the Discourse of Hysterical/Historical Narrative: Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 356

lucy fischer 22. Subjectivity Lost and Found: Bill Viola’s I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 368

cather ine russell 23. Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and The Thin Blue Line. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385

linda williams 24. Documentaphobia and Mixed Modes: Michael Moore’s Roger & Me. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 404

matthew bernstein 25. Silence and Its Opposite: Expressions of Race in Tongues Untied. . . . 424

sheila petty 26. Containing Fire: Performance in Paris Is Burning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 438

caryl flinn 27. Contested Territory: Camille Billops and James Hatch’s Finding Christa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 456

julia lesage 28. Spike Lee’s 4 Little Girls: The Politics of the Documentary Interview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475

paula j. massood 29. The Gleaners and “Us”: The Radical Modesty of Agnès Varda’s Les glaneurs et la glaneuse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 494

virginia bonner 30. “You Must Never Listen to This”: Lessons on Sound, Cinema, and Mortality from Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 507

david t. johnson


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x

Contents

31. Cultural Learnings of Borat for Make Benefit Glorious Study of Documentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 522

leshu torchin Bibliography 543 Contributors 549 Index 557


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