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In his recent exhaustive study of incognito social investigation literature--perhaps the first full critical history of the subject--Luke Seaber (2017: 1) explores the nineteenth-century tradition of 'disguising oneself as a [...]

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 [...]

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]

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 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]

This field note explores the ways in which the documentary MIND ZONE: Therapists Behind the Front Lines (2014), directed by Dr. Jan Haaken, moves viewers into innovative and critical stances towards the U.S. military mental health program. Using a discourse analysis of the film and transcripts of interviews conducted by Haaken, I trace the deployment of the term 'the mission' to show how the film teases apart problematic military discursive practices. Jacques Lacan's theory of the four discourses is used to analyze how MIND ZONE's content challenges audiences to produce their own critically informed opinions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gifted filmmakers such as Joshua Oppenheimer, director of The act of killing, are attempting to use the power of documentary to provoke social and political change in post-conflict settings. What roles do interventionist filmmakers play in processes of national reconciliation and transitional justice? Can The act of killing really be a catalyst for change in Indonesia? This article contends that the genocide documentary is a form of antagonistic intervention that warrants systematic and critical re-evaluation. It holds that claims regarding the remedial impact of documentaries such as The act of killing are difficult to substantiate, the main problem being attribution, cause and effect. Intervention in the mind of the director seems to follow the logic of a synchronous circuit, where trauma based on revealed truth leads to transitional justice. Each component in the circuit has a corresponding political argument. This article will examine three interrelated arguments linking genocide documentary and political intervention: (1) re-traumatization, (2) power-laden truths and (3) the narrowing of impunity gaps. This article contributes to debates about genocide and intervention by presenting evidence from Indonesia, including rare interviews with the protagonists in Oppenheimer's award-winning film, surveys of Indonesian audiences and data gathered from a global online petition as well as Chinese microblogs in order to better understand how audiences respond to genocide documentaries and why it is so difficult to generate political action outside the theatre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented which examines documentary films on food production, the meat industry, and animals in the agriculture and fishing industries. It mentions films including "Food, Inc.," "The Moo Man" and "King Corn," suggests that the films promote ethical consumerism and help food consumers identify their values related to consumption, and discusses images of slaughter in the documentaries that evoke emotions in viewers such as disgust.

Documentary has been so closely associated with the mediums of film and television that the emergence of new forms of documentary, made for computerized mediums such as the Internet, mobile phones and tablets appear fundamentally transformative. The potential for audiences to interact with documentary in various ways is at the heart of what makes these new modes of documentary distinctive; audiences are potentially able to engage in a range of practices from navigating virtual environments, to choosing video content from a database, taking part in ‘chat’ sessions and creating content. Engaging theoretically with these emerging audience practices raises questions about authorship and the social impact of documentary. In this paper, interactivity and participation are considered from a social perspective. It is suggested that there is a need to distinguish between user actions that impact on the documentary text and the ability of users to engage with others through documentary. The concept of documentary voice is interrogated to reveal two distinct dimensions: voice-as-authorship and voice-as-social participation. Drawing on documentary and digital media scholarship, this paper explores the social functions of documentary interactivity and participation with reference to a range of web-documentary examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that contemporary independent documentary filmmaking in China has been used as a tool by Chinese citizens to intervene in the public sphere and to provoke social change. I therefore propose to look at the phenomenon of Chinese video activism under the umbrella of alternative media. In particular, I take into consideration the “rhizomatic” media approach, which focuses on the interaction of alternative media with authority, the market and civil society. The case studies I present consist of several documentary projects completed between 2004 and 2010 that opened up spaces of dialogue between filmmakers and local authority, mass media and civil society. The paper claims that documentary films have an impact on audiences, whose members are consequently motivated to engage in discussion and action. I argue that activist video-making in China is reshaping the identity of urban citizens: through filmmaking, urban citizens claim their right to access information and demonstrate their will to participate and intervene in social issues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the International Criminal Court's (ICC's) use of documentary films such as "The Prosecutor" and "Kony 2012" as a way of promoting the ICC as of July 2014, focusing on the tension between actual victim experiences and the portrayals of those experiences in ICC practices. According to the article, the documentary film "Carte Blanche" highlights the stories of several rape victims from the Central African Republic. The social aspects of documentaries are also examined.

In August 2010, Franco-Tunisian director Nadia El Fani was shooting a documentary on Ramadan in Zine El Abedine Ben Ali's Tunisia. In it she showed the hypocrisy of people, hiding to have lunch in the middle of the day, the month of fasting having become a duty perceived as law. The film-maker was pleading for a secular state. The Tunisian revolution then erupted in December 2010, leading to Ben Ali's departure on 14 January 2011. El Fani, camera in hand, filmed the debates raging in Tunisia, in particular the one asking to modify Article 1 of the Constitution according to which Islam is the religion of the State. Upon the release of her resulting film, Neither Allah nor Master in 2011, the director was accused of attacking the sanctity of religion.

This article demonstrates how certain stories, voices and values around agro-food networks can be made powerful by documentary film. Our central argument is that documentaries mobilize ethics by presenting a partial and affective account of their subject matter, which makes their audience feel differently about the social relations that underpin the production of food and acts as a focal point for media scrutiny and political interventions. We focus attention on three documentaries about Caribbean sugar to explore multiple and disparate ethical claims made about the farmers, workers and communities that embody Caribbean sugar industries. Through a comparison of the three documentaries, we chart how the production and distribution of these films have entailed quite different ethical narratives, encounters and interventions. A key finding is that the context in which films are received is just as important as the content they deliver. The paper concludes with a guarded endorsement for using documentary film to transform the unequal life conditions experienced in the global food system, stressing the need for empirically-grounded critique of the context of documentaries and suggesting the important role that geographers might play as interlocutors in their reception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]