A Companion to Documentary Film History

Documentary Borders and Geographies
 
Theme Editor, Alice Lovejoy
 
Contributors:
 
1. Martin Johnson, "A Distant Local View: The Small Town Film and U.S. Cultural Diplomacy and Occupation, 1942-1952"
 
2. Paul Fileri, "The Work of Displacement in Colonial Documentary: History, Movement, and Collectivity Between the Postwar Metropole and Colonial French West Africa"
 
3. Naoki Yamamoto, "Negation of the Negation: Tracking Documentary Film Theory in Japan"
 
4. Raisa Sidenova, "The Topographical Aesthetic in Late Stalinist Documentary Film"
 
Authors and Authoring Agencies
 
Theme Editor, James Cahill
 
Contributors:
 
1. Zoe Druick, "Documentality: The Postwar Mental Health Film and the Database Logic of the Government Film Agency"
 
2. Josh Neves, "Unmanned Capture: Automatic Cameras and Lifeless Subjects in Contemporary Documentary"
 
3. Brian Jacobson, "Corporate Authorship: French Industrial Culture and the Culture of French Industry"
 
4. Alla Gadassik, , "A Skillful Isis: Esfir Shub and the Documentarian as Caretaker"
 
5. Philip Rosen, "Now and Then: On the Documentary Regime, Vertov, and History"
 
Films and Film Movements
 
Theme Editor, Joshua Malitsky
 
Contributors:
 
1. Jane Gaines, "Documentary Dreams of Activism and the 'Arab Spring'"
 
2. Luca Caminati, "A Culture of Reality: Neorealism, Narrative Non-Fiction, and Roberto Rossellini (1930s/1960s)" and translation of Alberto Cavalcanti, "Propaganda Documentaries"
 
3. Thomas Waugh, "The Romantic Becomes Dialectic?: Joris Ivens, Cold Warrior and Socialist Realist, 1946-1956"
 
Media Archaeologies
 
Theme Editor, Malte Hagener
 
Contributors:
 
1. Steven Jacobs, "A Concise History and Theory of Documentaries on the Visual Arts"
 
2. Weihang Bao, "Documentary in the Age of Mass Mobility: Minzu wansui and the Epic Gesture of

Joshua Malitsky is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and Director of the Center for Documentary Research and Practice at Indiana University. He works on a range of topics related to documentary and other nonfiction media genres and has published a number of articles on documentary history and theory including topics such as the relationship between documentary and nation-building, documentary and science, documentary studies and linguistic anthropology, and the sports documentary. He is the author of Post-Revolution Non-Fiction Film: Building the Soviet and Cuban Nations.

A Companion to Documentary Film History asks us to reflect on the ways we write histories of and through documentary. Consisting of 20 original essays by the field's leading scholars, the volume is critically reflexive and highly informative. Attending to both established approaches and theoretically-informed methodological shifts, this fabulous book is sure to become a touchstone for the field. --Charles Musser, Yale University
 
The book's rather dry title could well read, "Generative Perspectives on Documentary Film History." That is, anyone interested in non-fiction media, especially scholars in related areas, will find exciting new ways to think about the media they use, write about, and perhaps make. One of the book's major delights is its precise summary of so much scholarship about documentary, and in a broader sense about facticity itself. An epistemological treat. --Julia Lesage, University of Oregon
 

Joshua Malitsky's A Companion to Documentary Film History is a remarkable achievement. Together with his four section editors, Malitsky has compiled a book which covers all key aspects of documentary history, from early cinema to the Arab spring and from Europe to the Americas, Africa and Asia. The result is an introduction which is comprehensive in scope and penetrating in depth. At the same time, it is an anthology of the best work currently available on the subject - a real pleasure to read. -- Vinzenz Hediger, professor of cinema studies, Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main
 
"An utterly dynamic approach to the most necessary, engaged, and impactful form of cinema we have. These essays cast documentary history as aesthetically charged, politically crucial, and culturally vivid, showing us that so-called non-fiction films have persistently reshaped everyday, institutional, and exceptional spaces. They have animated local and global networks, crosspollinated with art movements and new technologies, charging film makers and film