Documentary's Awkward Turn
Documentary's Awkward Turn

Author: Jason Middleton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-12-04

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1317952197

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Despite the prominence of "awkwardness" as cultural buzzword and descriptor of a sub-genre of contemporary film and television comedy, it has yet to be adequately theorized in academic film and media studies. Documentary’s Awkward Turn contributes a new critical paradigm to the field by presenting an analysis of awkward moments in documentary film and other reality-based media formats. It examines difficult and disrupted encounters between social actors on the screen, between filmmaker and subject, and between film and spectator. These encounters are, of course, often inter-connected. Awkward moments occur when an established mode of representation or reception is unexpectedly challenged, stalled, or altered: when an interviewee suddenly confronts the interviewer, when a subject who had been comfortable on camera begins to feel trapped in the frame, when a film perceived as a documentary turns out to be a parodic mockumentary. This book makes visible the ways in which awkwardness connects and subtends a range of transformative textual strategies, political and ethical problematics, and modalities of spectatorship in documentary film and media from the 1970s to the present.

Documentary's Awkward Turn
Documentary's Awkward Turn

Author: Jason Middleton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-12-04

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1317952200

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Despite the prominence of "awkwardness" as cultural buzzword and descriptor of a sub-genre of contemporary film and television comedy, it has yet to be adequately theorized in academic film and media studies. Documentary’s Awkward Turn contributes a new critical paradigm to the field by presenting an analysis of awkward moments in documentary film and other reality-based media formats. It examines difficult and disrupted encounters between social actors on the screen, between filmmaker and subject, and between film and spectator. These encounters are, of course, often inter-connected. Awkward moments occur when an established mode of representation or reception is unexpectedly challenged, stalled, or altered: when an interviewee suddenly confronts the interviewer, when a subject who had been comfortable on camera begins to feel trapped in the frame, when a film perceived as a documentary turns out to be a parodic mockumentary. This book makes visible the ways in which awkwardness connects and subtends a range of transformative textual strategies, political and ethical problematics, and modalities of spectatorship in documentary film and media from the 1970s to the present.

Reclaiming Popular Documentary
Reclaiming Popular Documentary

Author: Christie Milliken

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2021-07-06

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 025305690X

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The documentary has achieved rising popularity over the past two decades thanks to streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. Despite this, documentary studies still tends to favor works that appeal primarily to specialists and scholars. Reclaiming Popular Documentary reverses this long-standing tendency by showing that documentaries can be—and are—made for mainstream or commercial audiences. Editors Christie Milliken and Steve Anderson, who consider popular documentary to be a subfield of documentary studies, embrace an expanded definition of popular to acknowledge the many evolving forms of documentary, such as branded entertainment, fictional hybrids, and works with audience participation. Together, these essays address emerging documentary forms—including web-docs, virtual reality, immersive journalism, viral media, interactive docs, and video-on-demand—and offer the critical tools viewers need to analyze contemporary documentaries and consider how they are persuaded by and represented in documentary media. By combining perspectives of scholars and makers, Reclaiming Popular Documentary brings new understandings and international perspectives to familiar texts using critical models that will engage media scholars and fans alike.

The Poetics and Politics of Invective Humor
The Poetics and Politics of Invective Humor

Author: Katja Schulze

Publisher: transcript Verlag

Published: 2022-11-30

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 3839462606

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Vituperation, disparagement, and debasement seem to have become part of the mainstream discourse in contemporary US-American media culture. Zooming in on a distinct televisual comedy genre, Katja Schulze explores the formal principles, media-specific realizations, and the cultural work of disparagement in contemporary female-led situation comedies. Subsequently, larger patterns of (gender-based) invective strategies and conventions that define the dynamism of this comedic genre come into view. Her study outlines case studies of popular sitcoms, like Parks and Recreation, Mike & Molly, and the revival of hit-sitcom Roseanne, thereby unearthing how the shows are able to stage humor as mass-mediated deprecation - a signifying practice with its own poetics and politics.

The Cinema of Discomfort
The Cinema of Discomfort

Author: Geoff King

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2021-10-07

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1501359282

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How do we understand types of cinema that offer experiences of discomfort, awkwardness or disquieting uncertainty? This book examines a number of examples of such work at the heart of contemporary art and indie film. While the commercial mainstream tends to offer comforting viewing experiences – or moments of discomfort that exist largely to be overcome – The Cinema of Discomfort analyses films in which discomfort is offered in a sustained manner. Cinema of this kind confronts us with material such as distinctly uncomfortable sexual encounters. It invites us into uncertain relationships with awkward and sometimes unlikable characters. It presents us with challenging behaviour or what are presented as uncomfortable realities. It often refuses information on which to base judgments. More discomfortingly, cinema of this kind tends to provoke uncertainty at the level of what emotional responses we are encouraged to have towards difficult, sometimes controversial, characters or events. The Cinema of Discomfort examines a number of case-studies, including Palindromes by Todd Solondz (US) and Dogtooth from Yorgos Lanthimos (Greece), along with other examples from Austria, Sweden, the UK, the US and Germany. Offering close textual analysis of the manner in which discomfort is generated, it also asks how we should understand the appeal of such work to certain viewers and how the existence of films of this kind can be explained, as products of both their socio-cultural context and the more particular institutional realms of art and indie film.

"So funny, it hurts". Cringe Comedy and Performances of Discomfort

Author: Alena Saucke

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2015-09-28

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13: 3668055157

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Master's Thesis from the year 2015 in the subject Cultural Studies - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,0, Free University of Berlin (John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies), course: Kulturwissenschaft, language: English, abstract: This thesis examines the relatively recent and increasingly popular phenomenon of cringe comedy. The characteristic feature of cringe comedy is the exposure of the viewer to prolonged states of social discomfort in the form of vicarious embarrassment, framed in a faux-realist aesthetic. Appearing increasingly since the turn of the millennium, cringe comedies employ the prolonged suspension of discomfort, deviating from the traditional sitcom. Since academic research on the topic has been limited, this thesis incorporates theoretical perspectives on comedy, embarrassment and shame, television and cultural history, insights from the fields of humor research, affect theory, the sociology of emotions and psychology as well as cultural and media studies. Drawing upon these sources, the author attempts to situate cringe comedy within the late capitalist comedic landscape, and analyze it as an aesthetic bound to the post-Fordist traits of hyperflexibility, hyperperformance and the increasingly blurred lines between work and play. The common experiential thread shared by cringe comedy shows is the endurance – on the part of the viewer – of a kind of voluntary shame stasis, provoked by repeated social faux pas, mixed with desperation and failure, and rarely ending in a comforting comedic resolution. These moments provide an interesting diversion from the usual hyperflexible performances of the late capitalist stage. In allowing for prolonged and awkward gaps, refusing to quickly fill them with socially scripted comfort, and delaying or altogether avoiding a return to a smooth equilibrium, cringe comedy grants us time to question the current methods of managing affective imbalance. In the words of Elspeth Probyn, the benefit of shame (as performed and triggered in these comedies) could be the introduction of “acute sensitivity“ (2) towards ourselves and others. While numerous cringe comedy shows will be referenced,the main analysis centers on the 2005/2014 HBO series The Comeback.

Vocal Projections
Vocal Projections

Author: Maria Pramaggiore

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2018-10-18

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1501331264

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Vocal Projections: Voices in Documentary examines a previously neglected topic in the field of documentary studies: the political, aesthetic, and affective functions that voices assume. On topics ranging from the celebrity voice over to ventriloquism, from rockumentary screams to feminist vocal politics, these essays demonstrate myriad ways in which voices make documentary meaning beyond their expository, evidentiary and authenticating functions. The international range of contributors offers an innovative approach to the issues relating to voices in documentary. While taking account of the existing paradigm in documentary studies pioneered by Bill Nichols, in which voice is equated with political rhetoric and subjective representation, the contributors move into new territory, addressing current and emerging research in voice, sound, music and posthumanist studies.

The Chinese Atlantic
The Chinese Atlantic

Author: Sean Metzger

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2020-05-05

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 0253047544

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In The Chinese Atlantic, Sean Metzger charts processes of global circulation across and beyond the Atlantic, exploring how seascapes generate new understandings of Chinese migration, financial networks and artistic production. Moving across film, painting, performance, and installation art, Metzger traces flows of money, culture, and aesthetics to reveal the ways in which routes of commerce stretching back to the Dutch Golden Age have molded and continue to influence the social reproduction of Chineseness. With a particular focus on the Caribbean, Metzger investigates the expressive culture of Chinese migrants and the communities that received these waves of people. He interrogates central issues in the study of similar case studies from South Africa and England to demonstrate how Chinese Atlantic seascapes frame globalization as we experience it today. Frequently focusing on art that interacts directly with the sites in which it is located, Metzger explores how Chinese migrant laborers and entrepreneurs did the same to shape—both physically and culturally—the new spaces in which they found themselves. In this manner, Metzger encourages us to see how artistic imagination and practice interact with migration to produce a new way of framing the global.

POV Horror
POV Horror

Author: Duncan Hubber

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2023-12-01

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 147669155X

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Drawing together strands of film theory and psychology, this book offers a fresh assessment of the found footage horror subgenre. It reconceptualizes landmark films--including The Blair Witch Project (1999), Cloverfield (2008), Paranormal Activity (2009), and Man Bites Dog (1992)--as depictions of the lived experience and social legacy of psychological trauma. The author demonstrates how the frantic cinematography and ambiguous formulation of the monster evokes the shocked and disoriented cognition of the traumatized mind. Moreover, the frightening effect of trauma on society is shown to be a recurring theme across the subgenre. Close textual analysis is given to a wide range of films over several decades, including titles that have yet to receive any academic attention. Divided into four distinct sections, the book examines how found footage horror films represent the effects of historical and contemporary traumatic events on Western societies, the vicarious spread of traumatic experiences via mass media, the sublimation of domestic abuse into haunted houses, and the viewer's identification with the monster as an embodiment of perpetrator trauma.

Dead Funny
Dead Funny

Author: David Gillota

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2023-07-14

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1978834187

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Horror films strive to make audiences scream, but they also garner plenty of laughs. In fact, there is a long tradition of horror directors who are fluent in humor, from James Whale to John Landis to Jordan Peele. So how might horror and humor overlap more than we would expect? Dead Funny locates humor as a key element in the American horror film, one that is not merely used for extraneous “comic relief” moments but often serves to underscore major themes, intensify suspense, and disorient viewers. Each chapter focuses on a different comic style or device, from the use of funny monsters and scary clowns in movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street to the physical humor and slapstick in movies ranging from The Evil Dead to Final Destination. Along the way, humor scholar David Gillota explores how horror films employ parody, satire, and camp to comment on gender, sexuality, and racial politics. Covering everything from the grotesque body in Freaks to the comedy of awkwardness in Midsommar, this book shows how integral humor has been to the development of the American horror film over the past century.