Documentary Film Video

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Documentary moving images are often assumed to tell truths about the world we inhabit, but what those truths might be and how we might ascertain them leads us to important questions: do documentaries represent the world as “it really is”? Whose version of the world do documentary images and sounds claim to represent? How do non-fiction moving images use technologies—of the camera, the projector, the video monitor, the personal computer, the smart phone—to record and represent events? Cannot those same technologies be used to shape images for the purposes of the film-maker or videographer? In this regard, might not every ostensibly ‘non-fiction’ image be capable of an instrumental use—be it aesthetic, political, social—and how in this sense does the documentary become the most strategic—and most powerful—form of mediation? This course examines the documentary image in its historical, theoretical, political and aesthetic dimensions in order to address these questions. It begins by examining many of the canonical texts of the documentary and the historical effects of these films and then moves to consider the recent emergence of new media forms that respond to the claims of the documentary, media such as mockumentaries and reality television programming.