The Intellect Handbook of Documentary

The Handbook of Documentary is an important go-to resource for practitioners, scholars and students in this burgeoning field. It tackles key topics and debates – from the role of documentary in post-truth culture to the rise of streaming giants (and the implications for national documentary cultures) and the shifting (increasingly hybrid) practices of documentary activism and the professionalization of impact. Featuring work by key figures in international documentary scholarship and talented emerging scholars, the Handbook is a landmark publication for documentary studies in the twenty-first century. The Handbook is broad in its scope, incorporating historical, theoretical, empirical, and practical scholarship. It is organized around ten key themes/debates: What and where is documentary (studies)?; Documentary in an Age of epistemic uncertainty; Documentary histories; Documentary and the Archive; Audio/Visualities; Documentary Relationalities; Beyond the Anthropocene?; Digital/documentary practices; Documentary and (new) politics?; A golden age? Documentary distribution and funding. Importantly, the Handbook challenges the dominance of Western voices in documentary scholarship, incorporating the voices and practices of practitioners from the Global South.

Table of Contents:
  Handbook of Documentary – Kate Nash and Deane Williams Section 1: Where and what is documentary (studies) in an age of epistemic crisis? Saying More about Documentary? Notes on Formation, Continuity and Change in the Field of Study – John Corner Next Steps: Post-Narrativity, Post-Truth (Post-Trump?) and Post-Digital is Poetry – Alexandra Juhasz The Documentary Disposition – Michael Renov Section 2: Documentary in the Anthropocene  ‘We Are Dead and We Are Going to Die’: The Apocalypse Documentary – Alisa Lebow Cinema of Qi: A Daoist Approach to Ecological, Sensory and Affective Cinema Through Vital Energy – Kiki Tianqi Yu The Possible Worlds of VR Documentary – Mandy Rose Documentary Realism in the Anthropocene – Selmin Kara Section 3: Audio/Visualities: Polyphony, Complexity and Representation Reflection, Staging and Documentary Film: The Monadic Camera-Subject – Fernão Pessoa Ramos Documentary Says ‘We’: Lyrical Polyphony as Practice – Simona Schneider Flee and the Failure of Empathy – Annabelle Honess Roe Section 4: Re-viewing the Ethics and Politics of Representation  Shirley Clarke’s The Connection and the Event of (Fake) Documentary – Jaimie Baron Towards a History of the International Association of Documentary Filmmakers: The Congress of Algiers 1968 – Mariano Mestman Recycling Indigenous Images: Archiveology and the National Film Board of Canada – Catherine Russell Wang Bing’s Documentary Po/ethics of the Maoist Chaos and the Paradigm of Western Testimony: Unwitnessing, Victims, Collaborators, Followers, Cadres and Dissidents – Raya Morag South Somewhere Else: Decolonising the Documentary, Cross-Cultural Collaborative Filmmaking in the Global South – Deane Williams and Antonio Traverso Section 5: Documentary and Politics The Case of Nuclear Documentary – Helen Hughes Radical Civic Media: Equipe Media, Western Sahara and Global Documentary Ecologies – Ryan Watson Documentary Storytelling for Social Change in the Participatory Media Age: Understanding Nonfiction’s Social Impact and Future Challenges – Caty Borum Entertainment with a Purpose: Netflix and Documentary Today – Annie Goldson Documentary-on-Demand: Researching Audience Engagements with (Political) Documentary on Netflix –  Kate Nash and Craig Hight From Testimony to the Cinema of Action in the Video nas Aldeias Project – Gilberto Alexandre Sobrinho Section 6: Production, Distribution, Audiences: The Changing Documentary ‘Industry’ Utility for the Utilitarian: Documentary’s Uses for Other Kinds of Non-Fiction Film – Grace Russell Documentary Funding in the Age of the Streamers – Inge Sørensen and Nick Higgins Audience Engagement: Streaming Factuality in the Nordic Region – Annette Hill Section 7: Digital Documentary Practices Compilationism and Digital Media: From Documentaries to Audio-Visual Essays – Chiara Grizzaffi Augmented Reality Documentary – Dale Hudson, Claudia Costa Pederson and Patty Zimmerman Tilting at Windmills: The Technicizing of Empathy – Brian Winston with an introduction by Kate Nash

About the Author :
Kate Nash is Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She has published widely in the areas of documentary ethics, interactive documentary and on the relationship between documentary and politics. Her books include New Documentary Ecologies (2014 with Craig Hight and Catherine Summerhayes) and Interactive Documentary: Theory and Debate (2020). She is Co-Editor (with Craig Hight) of Studies in Documentary Film. Deane Williams is Associate Professor of Film and Screen Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. From 2007-2017 he was editor of the journal Studies in Documentary Film, and his books include Australian Post-War Documentary Film: An Arc of Mirrors (2008), Michael Winterbottom (with Brian McFarlane, 2009), the three-volume Australian Film Theory and Criticism (co-edited with Noel King and Constantine Verevis, 2013–2017), The Cinema of Sean Penn: In and Out of Place (2016) and (with Julia Vassilieva) editor of Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality and Technology (2021).

Review :
'The Intellect Handbook of Documentary is a welcome, comprehensive and substantial guide to the subject, incorporating chapters by leading authors on the subject, and covering many areas of historical and topical interest. The editors have a long and distinguished association with the field, and the Handbook will add to that.'