U.S. Politics Through Doc Film

Catalog description

This course explores a variety of political issues through the medium of documentary film. The semester is divided into four topical sections – Working Class Lives, Crime and Punishment, the Politics of Identity, and War & Peace. The course also will examine broader questions of the documentary medium, with a particular focus on the question of whether documentary filmmaking might constitute a social science, the nature of knowledge produced by nonfiction films, the role of narrative in understanding political phenomena, and the political anthropological act of participatory observation and ethnographic filmmaking.