About the Book
Essays "capturing media ecologies as varied as museum installations, film festival showings, photography, and multiple varieties of internet sharing." --Jump Cut
In Documentary Across Platforms, noted scholar of film and experimental media Patricia R. Zimmermann offers a glimpse into the ever-evolving constellation of practices known as "documentary" and the way in which they investigate, engage with, and interrogate the world.
Collected here for the first time are her celebrated essays and speculations about documentary, experimental, and new media published outside of traditional scholarly venues. These essays envision documentary as a complex ecology composed of different technologies, sets of practices, and specific relationships to communities, engagement, politics, and social struggles. Through the lens of reverse engineering--the concept that ideas, just like objects, can be disassembled to learn how they work and then rebuilt into something new and better--Zimmermann explores how numerous small-scale documentary works present strategies of intervention into existing power structures. Adaptive to their context, modular, and unfixed, the documentary practices she explores exploit both sophisticated high-end professional and consumer-grade amateur technologies, moving through different political terrains, different platforms, and different exhibition contexts.
Together these essays demonstrate documentary's role as a conceptual practice to think through how the world is organized and to imagine ways that it might be reorganized with actions, communities, and ideas.
About the Author :
Patricia R. Zimmermann is Professor of Screen Studies at Ithaca College and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. She is the author and editor of numerous titles including Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film; (with Scott MacDonald) The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Film; and (with Helen De Michiel) Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice.
Review :
This collection brings together history, literature, architecture, and the politics of memory. The essays Goscilo (literature, Univ. of Pittsburgh) and Norris (film, Miami Univ., Ohio) have gathered look at the image of St. Petersburg, past and present, with particular reference to the city as a "preserved" site, both in the sense of being cherished in memory and the more negative sense of being embalmed as a kind of open-air museum rather than a vibrant living city. Essays on Petersburg in literary texts, poetry, and the visual arts (by Goscilo, Julie Buckler, Zara Torlone, Vladimir Khazan) join historical articles by William Brumfield (who looks at architecture), Steve Duke (who discusses multi-ethnic Petersburg), Cynthia Simmons (memory of the siege in WW II), and Richard Stites (culture and memory, especially in the early 19th century). Norris analyzes recent portrayals of Petersburg in popular culture, including film. The book includes a number of excellent images (both photographs of the city and images of art works showing different aspects of Petersburg life). Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
T. R. Weeks, Choice
This collection brings together history, literature, architecture, and the politics of memory. . . . The book includes a number of excellent images (both photographs of the city and images of art works showing different aspects of Petersburg life). Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.February 2009
Choice
. . .will certainly introduce . . . students, to the more conventional delights of a city . . . which is better-known for inhabiting the tropes of 'museum city' and 'theater set'. . . . Vol. 68.3 July 2009
Catriona Kelly, New College, Oxford
. . . the essays underscore the fact that for many Russians, Piter is a nostalgia museum, a sacred place. Preserving Petersburg will appeal . . . to scholars who are interested in the arts and those who are . . . familiar with the city's history and monuments. Sept. 2009
Michael Hamm, Centre College
. . . the collection truly sparkles as the contributors each in turn take up this snuff box of a city . . . and breathe movement and life into the idealized Petersburg museum.Vol. 68.4 Winter 2009
Gregory Stroud, Bennington College
As the various chapters of this fine volume make clear, seeing past the myth to the reality of the city's past and present remains as much of a challenge in the age of Putin as it was under Peter the Great and Nicholas I.
Slavonic & East European Review
This book is an important addition to scholarship on Imperial Russia's prized capital city. . . . Though St. Petersburg has consistently defied theorisation throughout its history, Goscilo and Norris' innovative anthology provides Slavic scholars with a panoramic view of the city's literary, pictorial and social manifestations. Vol. 62, No. 8
Europe-Asia Studies
[A]n excellent collection of essays ... [T]he variety of subjects and methodologies gathered together here will certainly satisfy anyone interested in the study of the former imperial capital.
Journal of Modern History
This collection of essays about St. Petersburg is a fine contribution to memory studies, urban history, and public history. . . . Everyone looking for a stimulating encounter with St. Petersburg will find it here.
European History Quarterly
A truly innovative contribution to the scholarship on Petersburg . . . The volume should be read by all serious Slavic scholars.
Emily Johnson, University of Oklahoma
[A]n interesting and important contribution to existing scholarship on St. Petersburg's myth, cult, and text. . . . this volume is distinctive.
Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy
An interesting and important contribution to existing scholarship on St. Petersburg's myth, cult, and text. --Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Barnard College A truly innovative contribution to the scholarship on Petersburg . . . The volume should be read by all serious Slavic scholars.
Emily Johnson, University of Oklahoma
