Investigating Visible Evidence: New Challenges for Documentary #: Kill the Documentary

A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars

Investigating Visible Evidence: New Challenges for Documentary #: Kill the Documentary
Jill Godmilow
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Paperback
h235 x 156mm - 224pg
22 Mar 2022 US
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9780231202770
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Can the documentary be useful? Can a film change how its viewers think about the world and their potential role in it? In Kill the Documentary, the award-winning director Jill Godmilow issues an urgent call for a new kind of nonfiction filmmaking. She critiques documentary films from Nanook of the North to the recent Ken Burns/Lynn Novick series The Vietnam War. Tethered to what Godmilow calls the "pedigree of the real" and the "pornography of the real," they fail to activate their viewers' engagement with historical or present-day problems. Whether depicting the hardships of poverty or the horrors of war, conventional documentaries produce an "us-watching-them" mode that ultimately reinforces self-satisfaction and self-absorption. In place of the conventional documentary, Godmilow advocates for a "postrealist" cinema. Instead of offering the faux empathy and sentimental spectacle of mainstream documentaries, postrealist nonfiction films are acts of resistance. They are experimental, interventionist, performative, and transformative. Godmilow demonstrates how a film can produce meaningful, useful experience by forcefully challenging ways of knowing and how viewers come to understand the world. She considers her own career as a filmmaker as well as the formal and political strategies of artists such as Luis Bunuel, Georges Franju, Harun Farocki, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Rithy Panh, and other directors. Both manifesto and guidebook, Kill the Documentary proposes provocative new ways of making and watching films.

Kill the Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars

This provocative and engaging book by acclaimed filmmaker Jill Godmilow raises important questions for anyone concerned about the future of political documentary. She maps out an original approach to "postrealist" documentary that champions moral engagement, social activism, aesthetic daring, historical grounding, and intersectional participation for bold twenty-first-century filmmaking. -- Deirdre Boyle, author of Ferryman of Memories: The Films of Rithy Panh In her captivating and original Kill the Documentary, filmmaker and critic Jill Godmilow offers a plea-in the form of a letter, which is a manifesto, and forty propositions, and a tool kit-for making postrealist nonfiction, for making film useful and fruitful. In her scathing critique of "great" documentaries, and her offering up of her own counter-canon, she insists that filmmakers and viewers can begin again by refusing the pedigree, pornography, and cultural imperialism of the real, and by supporting postrealist strategies: interventionist and interactive, performative and formal. Honestly, I don' t agree with all she says, or every one of the 144 films she honors, and that' s her urgent book' s point and purpose: I can and should make my own. -- Alexandra Juhasz, Brooklyn College, CUNY Kill the Documentary is a provocative manifesto for rethinking the documentary. Godmilow provides a shield against the tear-soaked sentimentality and nostalgia of the Ken Burns style of packaging history. A new tool in the film teacher' s kit, this book is useful beyond discussions of documentary. The passion of her prose is infectious-a welcome relief for student reading assignments. -- DeeDee Halleck, professor emerita, University of California, San Diego Jill Godmilow marshals a pantheon of hard-hitting, tough-minded films that refuse to be herded into the realist corral. Godmilow' s letter, or manifesto, like most manifestos, draws a line in the sand. Which side are you on becomes the question. Stay put and miss the point, or step on through to the other side and restore for yourself some of the nuance and subtlety that is foreign to the spirit of a manifesto. -- Bill Nichols, from the Foreword
Jill Godmilow is professor emerita in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. Her acclaimed films include the Academy Award-nominated Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman (1974); Waiting for the Moon (1987), which won best feature film at the Sundance Film Festival; and What Farocki Taught, which was featured at the 2000 Whitney Biennial. In 2015, she was knighted by President Komorowski of Poland and awarded the Knight' s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland for her film Far From Poland. Bill Nichols is professor emeritus in the School of Cinema, San Francisco State University. He is the author of numerous books, including Introduction to Documentary.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780231202770
Published: 22 Mar 2022
Published In: United States
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Format: Paperback
Height: 235mm
Width: 156mm
Pages: 224

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