The Sublimity of Document

Cinema as Diorama

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by Scott MacDonald

Type: Interviews
Subject: Genre > Experimental
Keywords: theory, experimental, interviews, documentary
Publishing date: 2019
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 560 pages
6 ½ x 9 ¾ inches (16.5 x 25 cm)

ISBN

978-0-19-005213-3

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Book Presentation:
The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama is a collection of in-depth, substantive interviews with moving-image artists working "avant-doc, that is, making films that explore the territory between documentary and experimental cinema.

The book uses the early history of the museum habitat diorama of animal life, specifically the Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History, as a way of rethinking both early and modern cinema document--and especially those recent filmmakers and films that are devoted to providing viewers with panoramic documentations of places and events that otherwise they might never have opportunities to experience in person.

This international collection of 27 interviews follows on MacDonald's earlier Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema (Oxford, 2015). The interviews, organized panoramically within the collection, are dense with information and insight, and readable by specialists and non-specialists alike. In most instances, these are the most in-depth and expansive-sometimes the first-interviews with these filmmakers.

Together, these interviews offer an engaging panorama of the recent history and geography of cinema devoted to documenting the world around us, as well as an in-depth look at the challenges and accomplishments of filmmakers willing to go anywhere on the planet (or on the internet ) to document what they believe we need to see.

MacDonald's general introduction provides an overall context for the collection, which includes interviews with Ron Fricke, Gustav Deutsch, Laura Poitras, Fred Wiseman, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Bill Morrison, Brett Story, Abbas Kiarostami, Lois Pati o, Dominic Gagnon, Erin Espelie, Yance Ford, Janet Biggs, Carlos Adriano, Craig Johnson, Ben Russell, Betzy Bromberg, James Benning, Maxim Pozdorovkin, along with several veterans of Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab (and with the executive directors of the distributor, Documentary Educational Resources, which has served the field of independent documentary for nearly fifty years)--each interview is introduced with MacDonald's overview of the interviewee's life and work.

The book includes filmographies and selected bibliographies for all the filmmakers.

About the Author:
Scott MacDonald is author of the oral history series, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers and of Avant-Doc: Intersections of documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema (Oxford, 2015). He has taught film history since 1970, most recently, at Bard College, Harvard University, and at Hamilton College.

Press Reviews:
"The Sublimity of Document may be the most aesthetically satisfying book of published interviews I've ever read. MacDonald has included a wealth of black-and-white images to accompany each interview and several separate sections of glossy, full-color frames from many of the films under discussion." - Documentary-Online

"MacDonald focuses his extraordinary interviewing skills on work that stares more than stipulates. Sublime documents, those films that make us gasp at the wonder of the world more than the genius of the artist, are a forgotten treasure, until now. Reading this book can only enlarge our love for what the camera sees when it looks afresh at the world we think we already know." - Bill Nichols, author of Introduction to Documentary, 3rd edition

"With this, his seventh collection of interviews with avant-garde and documentary filmmakers, Scott MacDonald proves himself an axiom of cinema. His achievement is astonishing." - David James, University of Southern California

See the publisher website: Oxford University Press

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