Since the beginning of human history, stories have helped people make sense of their lives and their world. Today, an understanding of storytelling is invaluable as we seek to orient ourselves within a flood of raw information and an unprecedented variety of supposedly true accounts. In Stories Make the World, award-winning screenwriter Stephen Most offers a captivating, refreshingly heartfelt exploration of how documentary filmmakers and other storytellers come to understand their subjects and cast light on the world through their art. Drawing on the author’s decades of experience behind the scenes of television and film documentaries, this is an indispensable account of the principles and paradoxes that attend the quest to represent reality truthfully.
Documentary filmmaking is a powerful and vital element to our society, and those who are responsible for bringing real stories and issues to a creative medium often have an uncanny ability to make a deep connection to us with their art. Legendary directors and cinematographers such as the Maysles brothers, D.A. Pennabaker & Chris Hegedus, Errol Morris, or Ken Burns have vividly made their marks in recent decades and continue to inspire those who enter the field. Inexpensive video camera equipment and video editing software have helped fuel a new wave of truth-tellers, bringing the tools of the craft within reach of amateurs and students, as well as independent journalists and filmmakers on a budget. In The Art of the Documentary, the directors, editors, cinematographers, and producers behind today's most thought-provoking nonfiction films reveal the thought processes, methods, and collaborations that have guided their efforts- from project conception to developing, producing, shooting, editing, and releasing some of the finest documentary films of recent decades. This richly illustrated volume, which will appeal to professional and aspiring filmmakers, as well as documentary enthusiasts, features conversations with directors, cinematographers, editors, and producers, including Ken Burns (The Civil War, Jazz, Baseball), director/cinematographer D A Pennebaker (Dont Look Back, The War Room), director/cinematographer Albert Maysles (Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens), director Errol Morris (The Fog of War, The Thin Blue Line), director Chris Hegedus (Startup.com, Down from the Mountain), editor Larry Silk (Pumping Iron, Wild Man Blues), cinematographer Buddy Squires (The Civil War, Ram Dass, Fierce Grace), director/producer Lauren Lazin (Tupac: Resurrection, Journey of Dr. Dre), editor/director Paula Heredia (The Vagina Monologues, In Memoriam: New York City, 9/11/01), director/cinematographer Kirsten Johnson (Fahrenheit 9/11, Innocent Until Proven Guilty), editor Geof Bartz (Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth, He's Having a Baby), Sheila Nevins, President of HBO Documentaries and HBO Family, Alison Bourke, executive producer for IFC, Cara Mertes, executive producer at PBS for the POV series, Frazer Pennebaker, producer. And with contributions by: Carol Dysinger, film editor and professor, NYU Film School, and Haskell Wexler, cinematographer. A Note About the Second Edition: In this edition of the book, we have included the original full interviews of the producers that did not appear in the first edition. Those producers include Sheila Nevins, Lauren Lazin, Alison Palmer Bourke, Cara Mertes, and Frazer Pennebaker. The interviews of the directors, cinematographers and editors have been left in tact and are included as they appeared in the first edition. The filmographies of each interviewee have been updated to include recent works.
American Art to 1900 presents an astonishing variety of unknown, little-known, or undervalued documents to convey the story of American art through the many voices of its contemporary practitioners, consumers, and commentators. The volume highlights such critically important themes as women artists, African American representation and expression, regional and itinerant artists, Native Americans and the frontier, and more. With its hundreds of explanatory headnotes, this book reveals the documentary riches of American art and its many intersecting histories. -back cover.
Politics and media are constantly dealing with the shifting definitions of facts, truth, reality, and fiction. Yet this is something the field of documentary art has been addressing for much longer. The contributions in this volume are from and about artists who explore the boundaries between fact and fiction by playing with the notion of the ?documentary?. The book draws from a wide range of documentary art practices, such as working with archival materials or scrutinising one?s own subjective stance as an artist. It observes how artists deploy the fine line between fact and fiction as a means to imagine versions of the future, and how it can still have an impact in the world of today.
Part of the acclaimed 'Documents of Contemporary Art' series of anthologies . Documentary has undergone a marked revival in recent art, following a long period in which it was a denigrated and unfashionable practice. This has in part been led by the exhibition of photographic and video work on political issues at Documenta and numerous biennials and, since the turn of the century, issues of injustice, violence and trauma in increasing zones of conflict. Aesthetically, documentary is now one of the most prominent modes of art-making, in part assisted by the linked transformation and recuperation of photography and video by the gallery and museum world. Unsurprisingly, this development, along with the close attention paid to photojournalism and mainstream documentary-making in a time of crisis, has been accompanied by a rich strain of theoretical and historical writing on documentary. This anthology provides a definitive historical context for documentary, exploring its roots in modernism and its critique under postmodernism; it surveys current theoretical thinking about documentary; and it examines a wide range of work by artists within, around or against documentary through their own writings and interviews. Artists surveyed include: Kutlug Ataman, Ursula Biemann, Hasan Elahi, Harun Farocki, Omer Fast, Joan Fontcuberta, Regina José Galindo, David Goldblatt, Alfredo Jaar, Emily Jacir, Lisa F. Jackson, Philip Jones Griffiths, An-My Le, Renzo Martens, Boris Mikhailov, Daido Moriyama, Walid Raad, Michael Schmidt and Sean Snyder. Writers include: James Agee, Ariella Azoulay, Walter Benjamin, Adam Broomberg, Judith Butler, Oliver Chanarin, Georges Didi-Huberman, John Grierson, David Levi Strauss, Elizabeth McCausland, Carl Plantinga, Jacques Rancière, Martha Rosler, Jean-Paul Sartre, Allan Sekula, Susan Sontag, Hito Steyerl and Trinh T. Minh-ha.
A refreshing new practical approach to documentary filmmaking, Get Close: Lean Team Documentary Filmmaking equips new and veteran filmmakers with the knowhow to make artistically rewarding documentaries for less money, less hassle, and less time. Author and veteran filmmaker Rustin Thompson shows that by stripping away, sidestepping, or reassessing the entrenched industry hurdles-long waits for funding, the unwieldy crews, the unnecessary gear, the gauntlet of film festivals, pitch forums, and distribution networks-filmmakers can move quickly from idea to execution to finished film. Throughout the book, Thompson demystifies and de-clutters the way docs are produced today, illustrating the use of a few simple and accessible tools and techniques while still engaging with the aesthetic possibilities of the medium, its creative opportunities and its satisfying rewards of giving back to the world. Using the essential lessons in Get Close, filmmakers will learn to eliminate physical and financial barriers between themselves and their subject matter, ultimately leading them to tell more artful, illuminating stories and find the joy in documentary filmmaking.
A thought-provoking, gorgeously illustrated gift book that will spark your creativity and help you rediscover your passion with “simple, low-stakes activities [that] can open up the world.”—The New York Times Welcome to the era of white noise. Our lives are in constant tether to phones, to email, and to social media. In this age of distraction, the ability to experience and be present is often lost: to think and to see and to listen. Enter Rob Walker's The Art of Noticing—an inspiring volume that will help you see the world anew. Through a series of simple and playful exercises—131 of them—Walker maps ways for you to become a clearer thinker, a better listener, a more creative workplace colleague, and finally, to rediscover what really matters to you.
In this highly anticipated sequel to New York Times bestselling and Caldecott Honor–winning author Tony DiTerlizzi’s Kenny and the Dragon, Kenny must cope with many changes in his life—including the fear that he’s losing his best friend. What can come between two best friends? Time has passed since Kenny Rabbit’s last adventure with his best friend, the legendary dragon Grahame, and a lot has changed in the sleepy village of Roundbrook. For starters, Kenny has a whole litter of baby sisters. His friends are at different schools and Sir George is off adventuring. At least Kenny still has his very best friend, Grahame. That’s before Dante arrives. Dante is a legendary manticore and an old friend of Grahame’s. Old friends spend a lot of time catching up. And that catching up does not involve Kenny. But there’s a Witch to defeat, a pal to rescue, and a mysterious book to unlock. And those are quests for best friends, not old friends. Right?