Kill the Documentary A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
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.
<i>Kill the Documentary</i> is a brilliant, angry book. An honest book. A brave book. Guggenheim Fellow and award-winning filmmaker Jill Godmilow has written a stirring call to arms.
- Cynthia Close, Documentary Magazine
Creatively curious pages
- Ezra Winton, Cineaste
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,
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 <i>Ferryman of Memories: The Films of Rithy Panh</i>,
In her captivating and original <i>Kill the Documentary</i>, 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 <i>postrealist nonfiction</i>, 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 <i>postrealist strategies</i>: 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,
<i>Kill the Documentary</i> 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,
This book will be a gold mine for any instructors putting together an “Introduction to Documentary Filmmaking” syllabus or for cinematic autodidacts hungry to experiment with alternative modes of nonfictional filmmaking.
- Jaimie Baron, Film Quarterly
Herein lies the specificity and refreshing nonconformity of [this] book: it pushes the reader not only to see through the ideological premises of conventional formats, but also to delve into the multiple configurations that generate subversive experiences . . . [Godmilow's] persistent faith in the importance of developing critical awareness and in the agency of art to intervene into reality despite the omnipresent ‘capitalist realism’ in the global neoliberal society radiates a compelling force.
- Stefanie Baumann, Radical Philosophy
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 Buñuel, 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.
Acknowledgments
I Call This Book a Letter
Introduction—a Letter to Filmmakers
1. Abandon the Conventional Documentary—Reject Realism as the Only Authentic Nonfiction Form
2. Take Action—Make Useful Postrealist Films
3. Forty Postrealist Strategies to Learn from and Borrow
4. The Toolkit
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
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.