Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video

Documenting the Documentary features essays by 27 film scholars from a wide range of critical and theoretical perspectives. Each essay focuses on one or two important documentaries, engaging in questions surrounding ethics, ideology, politics, power, race, gender, and representation-but always in terms of how they arise out of or are involved in the reading of specific documentaries as particular textual constructions.

By closely reading documentaries as rich visual works, this anthology fills a void in the critical writing on documentaries, which tends to privilege production over aesthetic pleasure.

As we increasingly perceive and comprehend the world through visual media, understanding the textual strategies by which individual documentaries are organized has become critically important. Documenting the Documentary offers clear, serious, and insightful analyses of documentary films, and is a welcome balance between theory and criticism, abstract conceptualization and concrete analysis.

Barry Keith Grant is professor of film studies in the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film at Brock University in Ontario, Canada. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, he is the author or editor of numerous books, including Voyages of Discovery: The Cinema of Frederick Wiseman, 100 Documentary Films (with Jim Hillier) and Shadows of Doubt: Negotiations of Masculinity in American Genre Films (Wayne State University Press, 2011). Jeannette Sloniowski is associate professor in the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film and the graduate program in popular culture at Brock University. Her publications include Canadian Communications: Issues in Contemporary Media and Culture,Detecting Canada: Essays on Canadian Detective Fiction, Candid Eyes: Essays on Canadian Documentaries, and Slippery Pastimes: A Canadian Popular Reader.