Résumé : "American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary is a critical history of American filmmakers crucial to the development of ethnographic film and personal documentary. The Boston and Cambridge area is notable for nurturing these approaches to documentary film via institutions such as the MIT Film Section and the Film Study Center, the Carpenter Center and the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard. Scott MacDonald uses pragmatism’s focus on empirical experience as a basis for measuring the groundbreaking achievements of such influential filmmakers as John Marshall, Robert Gardner, Timothy Asch, Ed Pincus, Miriam Weinstein, Alfred Guzzetti, Ross McElwee, Robb Moss, Nina Davenport, Steve Ascher and Jeanne Jordan, Michel Negroponte, John Gianvito, Alexander Olch, Amie Siegel, Ilisa Barbash, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. By exploring the cinematic, personal, and professional relationships between these accomplished filmmakers, MacDonald shows how a pioneering, engaged, and uniquely cosmopolitan approach to documentary developed over the past half century."

Résumé : Les documentaires américains des années 80 et 90 circulent au sein d'un paysage qui s'étend des sphères activistes jusqu'à la télévision et aux cinémas commerciaux. A travers les films, articles de presse, textes universitaires et commentaires des spectateurs, l'auteur explique comment le genre s'est remodelé selon l'évolution de la société américaine.

Résumé : "Documentary Resistance: Social Change and Participatory Media offers a new approach to understanding the networked capacity of documentary media to create public commons areas, crafting connections between unlikely interlockers. In this process communities invest in the exchange of documentary moving image discourse around politics and social change. This book advances a new argument suggesting the social change capacity of documentary is found in the genre's ability to establish forms of collective identification and political agency capable of producing and sustaining activist media cultures. Organized activist media publics often take on the necessary heavy lifting of political struggle, work that cannot be accomplished with the media screen alone. This book advances the creation of a conceptual, theoretical, and historical space in which documentary and social change can be examined. This interdisciplinary project draws upon research in cinema, media, and communication studies as well as cultural theory to explore how political ideas move into participatory action. This book will take a distinctive approach, attempting to understand how struggles for social justice are located, reflected, and represented on the documentary screen, but also in pre- and post-production processes. To address this living history, this project includes over sixty completed unpublished field interviews with documentary filmmakers, critics, funders, activists, and distributors. This will create a dynamic and practice-inclusive space in which documentary can be investigated"