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Crafting Truth
Price: $26.95
Subtitle: Documentary
Form and Meaning
Authors:
Louise Spence and
Vinicius Navarro
Subject: Film
Paper ISBN:
978-0-8135-4903-3
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4902-6
Pages:
272 pages, 51
photographs
Publication Date: January 2011
Praise:
"A novel and illuminating
introduction to key concepts in documentary. The distinctive cast to
the book makes it an extremely welcome contribution to the field."—Bill Nichols, author of Engaging Cinema: An Introduction to Film
Studies
"Crafting Truth addresses all the main issues involved in
studying the documentary, cleverly illustrated by recent examples while
not forgetting necessary consideration of the canon–a very valuable
account."—Brian Winston, University
of Lincoln, UK
"Crafting Truth delivers an
intelligent and inspiring introduction to documentary studies through
an original framework that powerfully attends to the complex politics,
aesthetics, ideas, and forms at the heart of the genre."—Alexandra Juhasz,
co-editor
of F is for Phony and
documentary videomaker
Description:
Documentaries such as Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman’s Born
into Brothels, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit
9/11, Jeffrey Blitz’s Spellbound,
along with March of the Penguins and
An
Inconvenient Truth have achieved critical as well as popular
success. Although nonfiction film may have captured imaginations, many
viewers enter and leave theaters with a naïve concept of “truth”
and “reality”—for them, documentaries are information sources. But is
truth or reality readily available, easily acquired, or undisputed? Or
do documentaries convey illusions of truth and reality? What aesthetic
means are used to build these illusions?
A documentary’s sounds and images are always the product of selection
and choice, and often underscore points the filmmaker wishes to make. Crafting Truth illuminates the ways
these films tell their stories; how they use the camera, editing,
sound, and performance; what rhetorical devices they employ; and what
the theoretical, practical, and ethical implications of these choices
are. Complex documentary concepts are presented through easily
accessible language, images, and a discussion of a wide range of films
and videos to encourage new ways of thinking about and seeing
nonfiction film.
About the Authors:
LOUISE SPENCE is a professor of cinema studies at Kadir Has
University in Istanbul and the coauthor of the award-winning Writing Himself into History: Oscar
Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences (Rutgers
University Press).
VINICIUS NAVARRO is an assistant professor of film studies at the
Georgia Institute of Technology.
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Price: $26.95
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