History and Politics of Documentary Cinema

Catalog description

This course explores the ethics and aesthetics of documentary cinema, arguably the very first genre of film. Starting with its early and classical uses as ethnography and observational portrayals of everyday life, we will track this genre's trajectory from an instructional and experimental form to a distinct, yet often ambiguous mode of production among today's familiar theater releases. We will examine different techniques of documentary storytelling and portraiture, considering also filmic instances that make a point of blurring the lines between documentary and fiction. Moving through the semester, we will discuss documentary films' formal innovation, political tensions, and capacity to show rather than tell the stories they strive to bring across. Guided by the insights generated with the help of our primary film examples and critical readings, we will also explore our own, personal relationship to documentary cinema both as viewers and, on occasion, as documentarians ourselves. This course includes class lectures, screenings, small group discussion, and opportunities to compose an individual and collaborative document(ary). Films considered throughout the semester range from Nanook of the North (1922) and The Living Desert (1953) to Grizzly Man (2005) and Summer of Soul (2021). In our weekly sessions, we will balance discussions of documentary grammar as a vehicle for artistic practice with explorations of the ways this genre reflects broader currents of cinematic and cultural history.