Documentary disciplines: An introduction

Cinema Journal

Volumn 46, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 108-115

  Rich, B Ruby ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949803430     PISSN: 00097101     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/cj.2007.0004     Document Type: Review

References (6)

1. So many names to reference here! A hopeless task, no doubt, and a dangerous one. In addition to those already referenced via Visible Evidence(s), the founding fathers of our current thinking about, through, and around documentary include Eric Barnouw, Bill Nichols, Alan Rosenthal, Jay Ruby, Thomas Waugh, Brian Winston, and the late Sol Worth. After the paternity the deluge: Paula Rabinowitz, Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor, Stella Bruzzi, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Fatimah Tobing Rony, Patricia Zimmerman, and so many others. And all the documentarians who have passed on their wisdom and theoretical perspectives, whether today on the D-word website or, notably, in book form: David MacDougall, Edgar Morin, Jean Rouch, Trinh T. Minh-ha. Thanks to my documentarian friend Danielle Beverly (Learning to Swallow) for her many conversations with me on the subject
2. For an up-to-date view see the "New World of Documentary," the exhaustive special section with introduction by Julia Lesage in JumpCut 48 (Winter 2006)
3. Indeed, jumpCut has been a central player in documentary debates across three decades and shows no sign of stopping. In particular, note cofounder/editor Chuck Kleinhans's essay on audio documentary in the same issue
4. I have borrowed the term samizdat from the vocabulary of the former Soviet Union. In a Library of Congress glossary on its website the term is described: "Literally self-publication. Russian word for the printing and circulating of literary, political, and other written manuscripts without passing them through the official censor, thus making them unauthorized and illegal." I am aware that by employing a term from this era and location I am making a claim concerning media access, freedom, and strategy in the United States of 2006 that may be contested
5. On this subject see Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour, eds., Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film (Toronto and Cambridge, Mass.: Alphabet City and MIT Press, 2004), including my essay on this theme, "To Read or Not to Read: Subtitles, Literacy and Monolingualism."
6. Darwin's Nightmare is distributed on film and video by the International Film Circuit and is forthcoming on DVD from another company