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This article considers the status of preexisting footage used within contemporary documentary when that footage originates from another discrete nonfiction work. It proposes a category for these earlier titles (Intermediate archival context) and offers terms to examine the translation of preexisting material from one documentary context to another (recognition, formal fidelity, and intentional proximity). Through an analysis of the use of AIDS activist media footage within two modern-day documentaries on the activist group ACT UP, the article argues that the influence of Intermediate archival context can be understood not only in the appropriation of Individual Images but in the citation and interpretation of formal strategies seen within historical nonfiction practice., THE STATUS. USAGE, AND EFFECTS OF ARCHIVAL AND FOUND FOOTAGE WITHIN EXPERIMENTAL and documentary media have been of long-standing scholarly interest, and that interest has seemingly grown as archival material [...]

The OWI was the key agency for the distribution and dissemination of US film and propaganda during World War II. But it was the Overseas Branch of the OWI that dominated activity and the Motion Picture Unit (MPU) of the OB that helped shape documentary production through the portrayal of American values and society. The OWI's winding up at war's end has long been seen as part of a natural reversion to peacetime government policy. Yet, as this article argues, events within the MPU/OWI in the last year of the war throw up evidence that suggests the agency was being deliberately sidelined – even undermined – in preparation for a more rigorous and ideological post-war propaganda apparatus. This revised propaganda philosophy was set in train by a select number of individuals, principally historian Edward Lilly, newspaperman C.D. Jackson, and the army's Brig Gen Robert McClure. Their scrutiny of the MPU/OWI – accessed via private correspondence and archival papers – is revealed for the first time in this article and is explained away as a self-conscious move away from civilian and towards military propaganda authority and control in the emergent Cold War era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With its celebrity devotees, sci-fi undertones and eccentric leaders, Scientology has always attracted scrutiny--so much so that in 2015, the mysterious religion was the subject of two separate documentaries. REBEKAH [...]

Visual methods are becoming increasingly popular in social sciences, but are still little explored when it comes to water related studies. Drawing on literature on visual methods and documentary filmmaking, this paper reflects on the role and potential of videography to capture and visualize inequalities in urban water supply and access. The paper is based on research undertaken over a period of 4 years, in which a mix of talk based and videographic methods was used to capture the production of uneven conditions of access to water in Lilongwe, Malawi, and Maputo, Mozambique. It reflects on the important and unique ethical questions raised by video‐based methods, including the data collection process, the type of knowledge that is produced, how it is mobilized, who has access to it and the relation between representation of social reality and the power of storytelling. This article is categorized under: Human Water > Methods Engineering Water > Planning Water Human Water > Rights to Water [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Type 2 diabetes is almost three times more prevalent in the indigenous people of New Zealand (Māori) than non-Māori. Despite the high rate of diabetes there is a low level of diabetes knowledge and awareness in the Māori community. Several studies of Māori health identify a need for new health communication approaches to diabetes prevention in order to reduce the gap between Māori and non-Māori disease rates. We applied a Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) framework and behavioral theory to create a culturally appropriate documentary for Māori at risk for type 2 diabetes. We discuss how we utilized Bandura's social cognitive theory to provide a culturally sensitive theoretical basis for behavior change messaging. We outline why social cognitive theory was a culturally appropriate foundation and describe the role of the community in shaping the documentary messaging. A culture-centered approach utilizing participatory methodologies and culturally sensitive behavioral change theory might serve as a model for creating health communication resources in collaboration with other indigenous communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's insights on scholarship and activism through documentary films related to international relations (IR). Topics discussed include usefulness of documentary about Lakota Sioux worldviews and experiences to Native American communities, feminist methodology, and selection between activist an activist or academic-filmmaker.

The research deals with the relationship between documentary and reality in the sixties. It focuses on the process by which the film symbolizes its social environment and thus captures the collective being of its moment. The study maintains that the ontological hermeneutics, as a strategy of interpretation of the Cuban space, is the distinctive mark that typifies the documentalistic produced by the ICAIC in the period. The research assumes an interdisciplinary direction and implements analytical tools from Philosophy, Linguistics and Sociology, towards the working horizon of the history of Cuban art and, in particular, to the examination of Cuban audiovisual. The aim is to demonstrate that the work-reality relationship in the ICAIC documentary in the 1960s was mediated by two different approaches: a consensus perspective and a conflict perspective. The confrontation to reality by the documentary film of the stage used both approaches to fulfill its communicative and guiding function, but also to become introspection and review of the progress of the social process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While documentary films have reflected the increased diversity and visibility of Latin American immigrants in Spanish cinema by exploring the experience of both South American and Caribbean women in Spain, there has been a tendency in Spanish fiction films to focus on the lives of Caribbean characters from Cuba and the Dominican Republic. This article argues that with the release of Amador in 2010, Fernando León de Aranoa ruptures this propensity to render invisible the existence, experiences, and knowledges of other Latin American immigrants in fiction film by creating Marcela, the Peruvian protagonist. By focusing its narrative on Marcela, Amador considers the potential that the immigrant's point of view—in Marcela's case one that is informed by the Quechua-Andean concept of tinkuy—has to facilitate socioeconomic mobility and agency of female immigrants and to positively impact the Spanish discourse around the contentious topic of immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the psychological aspects of two documentaries about violence: The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, GB/DK/NO 2012) and Das radikal Böse (The Radical Evil, Stefan Ruzowitzky, DE/AT 2013), specifically the concepts of trauma and conformity. Both perspectives are revealing and provide insight and structure. But question marks hang over both concepts because they hide important elements of the violence described in the documentaries. In the case of The Act of Killing the difference between perpetrators and victims should not be neglected; in the case of Das radikal Böse conformity should be recognised as not simply a moral failing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conversation about impact is an old one, as we know, thanks to the careful analysis of Brian Winston, particularly about the rhetorical games that John Grierson could play with [...]

Narrative is essential for public engagement with global poverty. Stand Up Planet, a documentary about global development, was produced to evaluate the effects of a little-utilized nonfiction comedy narrative. Using a pretest-posttest experimental design, this study examines shifts in U.S. audience engagement with global poverty after watching Stand Up Planet, compared with a somber documentary, The End Game. Both documentaries increased awareness of global poverty, support for government aid, knowledge, and intended actions. However, Stand Up Planet produced significantly larger gains in awareness, knowledge, and actions; these effects were mediated by the narrative's relatability, positive emotions, and entertainment value. The End Game's effects were mediated by narrative transportation and negative emotions. Implications for narrative in social change campaigns are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I introduce a lens of mobility for the study of documentary film practices and gender in zones of conflict. By drawing on my qualitative research regarding the practice of the independent filmmaker Iffat Fatima, I will argue that a lens of mobility helps to grasp highly mobile media practices both conceptually and methodologically. Through a lens of mobility, my focus lies on the potential of documentary film to open the imaginative boundaries of conflict zones and to politically and emotionally mobilize the testimony offered from everyday life in a highly militarized zone. This specifically requires the tracing of moments of political mobilization beyond cognitive questions of conflicting narratives and representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of progressive filmmaking in the interwar period is often associated with John Grierson, the British documentary movement and the influence it traced abroad. This paper argues, however, that more particular attention needs to attend the specific context for progressive filmmaking in the United States. To make this argument, this paper foregrounds two strands of progressive filmmaking that were pursued alongside, and often in tension with each other at the Rockefeller Boards between 1934 and 1945. The Rockefeller Boards pursued both a version of social-realist documentary in the Griersonian tradition as well as a project focused on 'human relations' films. As this paper suggests, the human relations project contrasted with Grierson's social documentary by linking film to a particular kind of psychological interior; a self not oriented to the social world but to the internal spaces of psychological and personality development. This implies a complex process of cultural diffusion in which Grierson's model was filtered through, and ultimately displaced by, a set of concerns and preoccupations unique to the American context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the use of arts for creating social awareness regarding medical care. Particular focus is given to the contribution of storytelling documentaries in association with Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) presenting the narrations for the healthcare institutes. Role of organization allowing participants to express stories through art is also discussed.

The article discusses how the documentary films from and about Romania picture the Romanian society in the aftermath of the 1989 revolution. It highlights several types of approach and cinematic discourse used by authors specialized in documentary film-making. The analysis reveals the process of professionalization within this field in Romania and the progressive maturation of artistic expression, in parallel with the shift from a type of documentary focused on "telling" (the voice-over technique) to documentary focused on observation (a documentary which "shows"). Short reviews for several relevant films are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marc Bauder’s finance film,Master of the Universe(2013) won the European Documentary Film Prize in December 2014. Bauder’s film focuses on a series on interviews with a former leading investment banker, Rainer Voss, high up in one of Frankfurt’s deserted bank skyscrapers. Voss’s statements, set against the skyline of Frankfurt’s ‘Mainhattan’ financial sector, allow Bauder to constitute an aesthetic that, I argue, successfully addresses a key problem in moving image studies, namely how to find an appropriate film form to register the workings of contemporary finance. Bauder’s film offers an unusual depiction of the self-constitution and self-understanding of a banker-turned-whistleblower, focusing on Voss’s speech acts of explication and justification. Drawing on Judith Butler’s analysis of performative agency and of the separation of economics and politics through iterative perlocutionary acts, I argue that Bauder’s investigation into the performativity that establishes the autonomy of the financial sector and grants it extensive social power offers a significant aesthetic engagement with financial performativity and contributes to debates about documentary and performativity and about routes to a reconnection of economics and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mindanao is the Philippine's second largest island in the south. Identifying Mindanao-based documentaries that have development themes remain unknown or unacknowledged. Using Phenomenology as theoretical framework and method, as a result, the researcher found out that similar to other documentary films in other parts of the country and the world, the themes showed by Mindanao-based documentaries reflect on agriculture, health, women and children, environment and population. However unlike its other foreign and local counterparts, a number of Mindanao-based documentaries anchor the mentioned development themes under the context of peace and conflict situation, human rights, indigenous peoples and their ancestral domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the definition of documentary as an art form and as an act of social engagement and political intervention. Topics discussed include Chinese documentary being as old as Chinese cinema, the first film made in China titled "The Battle of Dingjunshan" that was based on a Beijing opera performance, and the documentary "North Expedition Diary" informing about use of documentary by politicians and military for agitation in Wartime China.

This article explores how the increasing visibility of new collectives in contemporary China has shaped independent documentaries. Countering a prevalent approach to documentary studies that emphasizes the individual and the subjective, this article suggests that how to represent collectivity has preoccupied Chinese documentary filmmakers from the inception of this art form. Yet early independent documentary filmmakers of the 1990s did not have a clear agenda on the representation of collectivity. The crowd in their films appears as an indistinguishable entity, akin to a passive or inactive social agent. More recent documentaries present significantly more complicated interactions between the camera and the crowd and deliberately tap into the problem of representation of contemporary crowds not just from a formal perspective, but from a political perspective as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]