Michael Moore

This article analyzes the influence of Archibald MacLeish's "strategy of truth" and the principles of the Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry in the production of Frank Capra's documentary series Why We Fight. One of the main contributions of this research is to show how this series is the most important example of the application of the strategy of truth and, at the same time, one of the main examples of public relations audiovisual product realized to be addressed to American Army as well to the American public opinion. It is argued that Capra's Why We Fight made a substantial and long-lasting contribution to public relations, particularly in terms of its discourse and the use of analepsis has PR narrative resource. Overall, the article positions Why We Fight as one of the greatest efforts ever made in the history of military public relations.

Zur Funktionalisierung pikaresker Elemente im Dokumentarfilm Dear Mr. Rush: Any idea where aB our helicopters are? It's Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted. Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I onee lost my car in aSears parking lot. Man, was that a drag. 2 "Der berühmteste Linke der Welt! Der unterhaltsamste Klassenkämpfer dieses Globus! Der Entertainer unter den Sozialkritikem! Der Mann, der mit Pointen auf George W. Bush schießt, als kommandiere er über Cruise Missiles. Michael Moore, Amerikas dickste Smart Weapon: Lachen für den Frieden, Witzeln gegen Rechts, Pointen für den Regime Change in Washington."3 So nur eines der zahlreichen Journalisten-Urteile über den im Mittelpunkt dieses Beitrages stehenden, mittlerweile zum Kultregisseur avancierten Amerikaner Michael Moore, den ein Redakteur der Zeitung Die Welt lapidar als "Schelm und Filmemacher"4 bezeichnet. Diese gelungene Charakterisierung schreibt Moore eben jene Rolle zu, die er unserer Meinung nach am besten verkörpert, die des Schelms nämlich, mithin desjenigen, der, in Gewinn und Erfolgversprechender Absicht, aus einer mehr oder weniger vertrauenerweckenden Außenseiterperspektive ein Gesellschaftspanorama im Stile der verkehrten Welt zeichnet. Dass und warum seine zahlreichen Bilder einer korrumpierten amerikanischen Gesellschaft zuweilen auf ihn selbst zurückgeworfen werden, kann in zahlreichen Artikeln wie auch im vorliegenden Beitrag nachgelesen werden: Während z. B. die Süddeutsche Zeitung betont, Moore biete "die beste Vorstellung, die ein Starkomiker den von gutem Kabarett nicht unbedingt verwöhnten Deutschen bieten kann"s, versieht der britische Guardian den amerikanischen Regisseur nach dem Erscheinen des jüngsten Werkes, Fahrenheit 9/11, mit dem zweifel-

This paper examines the conditions of possibility for realism in several fields of contemporary culture-literature, painting, film, and TV news. It is argued that contemporary texts mobilize novel resources for the representation of the real. Realism in these works no longer takes the form of a seemingly self-evident mirroring of the world. Instead, the work of representation unfolds along several axes-fact-finding, metadiscourse, contractual negotiation, and praxis. Accordingly, contemporary realist texts display a hybrid make-up, mingling elements of classical mimesis and postmodernism. The essay indicates how this complex set of representational strategies informs alternative film-making (David Cronenberg's eXistenZ, Lisa Cholodenko's High Art), live TV news coverage of the 2003 Iraq campaign, and Michael Moore's documentaries.

Cette thèse de recherche-création explore et cherche à baliser les distances que structurent nos milieux de rencontre sur écrans, à partir de l'observation des visages qui s'y projettent. Dans le face-à-face en présentiel, je ne vois pas mon propre visage, mais je vois celui de l'autre qui, en me regardant, désigne cette part aveugle de mon corps. Faire face au visage, c'est ouvrir une distance qui permet la rencontre. Comment cette distance se trouvet-elle restructurée lorsque nous nous faisons face par l'intermédiaire de caméras et d'écrans, aujourd'hui combinés sous la forme hybride de « camécrans » ? Quels milieux de rencontre notre face-à-face écranisé peut-il ouvrir ? Interface-à-face : le titre de la thèse vise à interroger la distance physique, spatiale, technique et sociale entre nos visages sur écran. L'enquête est menée sur un corpus de propositions artistiques récentes (1990-2020) mettant en scène différents modes de rencontres entre des visages par la médiation d'écrans. Elle se concentre plus particulièrement sur les évolutions de trois artistes et collectifs dont les travaux sont particulièrement riches en la matière, que j'ai suivis et accompagnés dans leur travail : Dominic Gagnon, Annie Abrahams et BeAnotherLab. Pour tester les hypothèses théoriques que je tire de l'analyse des oeuvres du corpus, je propose des dispositifs artistiques que j'ai réalisés au cours des dernières années ou en cours de réalisation, exposés sur un site dédié à la thèse. En partant de rencontres asynchrones (sur YouTube) dans les vlogs et les vidéos ASMR (face A), la thèse analyse ensuite des rencontres synchrones (par Zoom et au casque de réalité virtuelle) (face B), pour proposer un parcours entre différentes études de cas, dont la somme esquisse une cartographie de possibles milieux de rencontre sur écrans. À travers ces dispositifs artistiques, l'écran devient un laboratoire d'observations et d'expériences de nos rencontres à distance, telles qu'elles se multiplient depuis une vingtaine d'années (sur des interfaces visiophoniques notamment), au point de prendre désormais une place incontournable dans nos relations sociales.

It has become evident that film has the ability to invoke changes in a society. The social issue of the treatment of the mentally ill has always been the subject of films, although many films of past appear exploitative, sensationalist, crude, and ignorant of the realities of the issues being represented. In 1967, Frederick Wiseman’s film, The Titicut Follies, despite winning numerous awards, created such controversy that it became the only film to be banned in the United States for reasons other than obscenity and national security until 1991. The film revealed gross mistreatment of the mentally ill in a state psychiatric facility. This essay posits that the influential and groundbreaking work was a major step not only in filmmaking but in the way filmmaking can reveal and reflect truths, and invoke social change. In a sense, Wiseman changed the paradigm of filmmaking and the documenting of reality. BlickA Game Changer-3

Colonial and de-colonial performative movements in non fiction films. "Those who make nonfiction films are subjects to the actual appearances and unforeseen happenings of the world. Any shot I begin making will contain multiple events, objects and qualities that will either emerge over time or that already coexist in the shot simultaneously. (…) There is no point in making films if they are mere replicas of what one has witnessed" (Mac Dougall, 41

This thesis interrogates the relationship between non-fiction film and urban discourse. It outlines intellectual and visual strategies at play in a selection of non-fiction films that actively assign meaning to the mutual influence of urban form and social processes. In so doing, I identify two overlapping traditions, the evocative and the evidentiary, which classify the applications of filmmaking to the interpretation of cities. The research focuses on two American urban planning films that represent radically different ways of organizing their visual content in order to advocate a specific kind of urban reform: The City (1939) by Willard Van Dyke and Ralph Steiner and The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980) by William H Whyte. Each case requires a thorough contextualization and location with urban studies, planning and film histories. The thesis, therefore, is arranged as a chronological exploration of the antecedents and turning points that explain the difference between these two films' formal strategies and philosophical positions. My analysis begins by linking the kinetic and fragmentary qualities of modernity in art and theory to the earliest experiments in creating moving images on film. It goes on to explore in greater depth the development of a formal cinematic vocabulary for the evocation of urban space. The adaptation of evocative techniques to the political subject matter of regional planning introduces an extended historical and formal analysis of The City that demonstrates how it draws from the diverse elements discussed in the previous chapters and applies them to the planning agenda of Lewis Mumford and the Regional Planning Association of America. Evidentiary techniques developed as methods of resistance to the top-down planning philosophies espoused by films like The City; the oppositional practices that emerged during the 1960s gave rise to a mentality of learning a city through looking at it, proceeding from the particulars to the general. The pioneering film work of William H. Whyte-the most overt application of filmmaking to a specific urban planning agenda-advances this inductive position to an instrumental use of images to support empirically a series of normative goals for the form of urban public space. The thesis concludes with a call for a productive synthesis of the two modes, a proposition that include a work-process narrative of my own attempts to represent urban dynamics on video and some initial implications of filmmaking's interpretive potential for urban planners and designers. Such as synthesis, I argue, requires recuperating the ability of montage to evoke the abstract essences of urban experience while maintaining the investigative order of operations-learning through looking-of the evidentiary tradition.

In einem der Videos aus dem Jahre 2016, das die New York Times noch vor der Wahl des gegenwärtigen US-amerikanischen Präsidenten Trump publiziert hat, ist ein vielleicht vierzigjähriger Mann am Rande einer Wahlveranstaltung zu sehen. Mit heftigen Stoßbewegungen seiner Hüfte skandiert er mehrfach "Fuck political correctness! Fuck political correctness!…" Dabei wendet er sich im Halbkreis, so als suche er überhaupt erst einen Adressaten für seine verbalen und körperlichen Äußerungen. Im Video folgen dann mehrere Beispiele misogyner Beschimpfungen der demokratischen Präsidentschaftskandidatin Hillary Clinton, dem voran gingen Szenen, die zeigen, wie Zuhörer*innen frenetisch dem Versprechen Trumps applaudieren, eine Mauer zwischen Mexiko und den USA zu errichten, wenn er gewählt werde (Parker/Corasaniti/Berenstein 2016). Diese Aufnahmen sind Beispiele für eine intensive Sexualisierung des politischen Raumes und für eine dabei stattfindende enge Verquickung von sexuellen Fantasien mit solchen der Macht und Bemächtigung. Diese Fantasien der Bemächtigung sind deutlich durch Geschlechterbilder geprägt, die Bemächtigung ist zugleich eine Erniedrigung und symbolische Feminisierung des Anderen. Die eine Penetration simulierenden Hüftbewegungen des Mannes gelten einem politischen Begriff, einer sprachlichen, eher abstrakten diskursiven Wendung. Sie wird durch diese sexuellen Handlungen allerdings verkörpert. Wie ist eine solche Verknüpfung von sexueller Erregung und Sprache zu verstehen? Der Begriff Political Correctness ist seit etwa 1990 in den USA zu einem Kampfbegriff der Konservativen und der politischen Rechten geworden. Sein

As reader's will quickly notice, the picture of a Website devoted to questioning Moore's perspective is "out of focus." But it is precisely this "out of focus" notion of reality that this essay raises. How can be draw a distinction between fact and fiction in this postmodern age; between what is "clear" and in focus and what is not?

In this case we examine the documentary "The Other1". The filmmaker, Loukia Rikaki2, developed this documentary by observing the way people live in Patsidero, a region on the island of Crete, for two whole years. Through this documentary we seek to examine the way in which "The Other" is presented in the observational  documentary,  the  way  in  which  the  truth  is  captured  behind  appearance  which  help  the  naturalness, the self, and the objectivity of the "Other" emerge. Consequently, an attempt is made reach certain conclusion regarding the observational documentary.

Amid the active landscape of documentary film in the early 1940s, the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a short screenplay advocating for public housing in Philadelphia. Despite its distinguished production team and Oscar nomination, A Place to Live (Brandon Films, 1941) has not been contextualized by scholarly work. This essay considers Rukeyser's narrative innovations as A Place to Live follows one family's desire for publicly funded housing. Rukeyser uses montage to establish a dialectical contrast between the conventions of male enunciatory authority and the film's female subject, who rises to an identificatory position that requires audience response.

The introductory chapter steadfastly endeavors to clarify the epistemic motives, methodical means, linguistic logic, and metaphysical presuppositions that concern my attempt to develop for the documentarian a philosophical project that, while basing its raison d’être on the archeology of 123 years of historical documentarianship, recognizes the urgency of moving on and developing new, semiotic and philosophical grounds. I introduce the distinctive functions of the four key disciplines that motivate, afford, and help conduct the book’s line of interrogation: philosophy, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and documentary theory. Each discipline (or subfield) receives a special explanatory treatment that elucidates the discipline’s distinctive presence in and explanatory relevance to the book.

Michael Moore’s documentaries have been central to the development of the contemporary political documentary and have served as an instrument of political activism or, as some argue, even propaganda. Delving into the underlying mechanisms, in this article, I examine the ways in which documentary subjects are persuasively deployed in Moore’s documentaries. An analysis combining close reading, qualitative content analysis, and rhetorical analysis points to key rhetorical categories of documentary subjects. These subjects’ embodiment of six main rhetorical categories displays a correlation with Aristotle’s cornerstones of rhetoric: ethos, logos, and pathos. Further, the categories demonstrate how moral emotions are utilised in constructing the ethos of documentary subjects. In addition, the article addresses the significance of identification in Moore’s persuasive rhetoric. This research participates in deconstructing the mechanics of persuasive mediated communication and contributes t...

This paper presents a genre analysis of a selection of American partisan political documentaries released between 2004 and 2012, including Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and Dinesh D’Souza’s 2016: Obama’s America. Since the release of Moore’s film, the genre has achieved commercial success despite a relative polarization between the critical responses towards liberal films and conservative ones. This essay determines that both liberal and conservative documentaries assign heroic and trustworthy roles to individual reporters and selections of interviewees, while leaders of the opposing party are villainized exclusively through selected archival video clips. However, while liberal documentaries are more prone to demonstrate a range of emotional appeals, conservative documentaries are more likely to rely on fear-mongering and angry aesthetics to persuade viewers.

The paper aims at identifying similarities and differences between two different ways of using the word "true", on the one hand when it is used to refer to a specific characteristic of what we say or think about, here called "words' truth", on the other when it is used to refer to a characteristic of whatever (as when we say "he is a true friend"), here called "things' truth". The main thesis here defended is that such similarities and differences may be usefully described starting from the feature of truth called "transparency" which is often considered as exclusively pertaining to words' truth.

The chapter takes advertising as an umbrella term for persuasive communication. Looking at screen advertising as a specific type of communication-one that is made to persuade-the documentary, educational films, and avant-garde works of the 1930s and early 1940s come into view together under the label of advertising. Focussing on the work of John Grierson, Paul Rotha, and Hans Richter, the chapter shows how debates among intellectuals, pedagogues, and artists on both sides of the Atlantic revolved around concepts of propaganda and education to promote democracy. The chapter contributes to the field of useful cinema studies by mapping the transnational network of people, ideas, and materials involved in using moving images as tools for shaping the human mind.

One important and influential popular culture product is fiction film. Arguably, even though fiction film is often seen as a mere entertainment outlet, its undeniable status as a socio-cultural commentator allows fiction films to impart values as well as capture popular imagination and consciousness. Fiction films, needless to say, can move or provoke the audience with their depiction of and focus on real-life events such as personal angst, the World Wars, the cold war, political struggles, economic downturns and natural disaster. One prevailing trend with regards to fiction film is that after the event of September 11, 2001, the interest in the war film genre gains its momentum. Speculations about the post-September 11war that ensued, such as that in Iraq, have allowed variegated representations of war to be made on silver screen, either reaffirming or challenging the audience’s perception of war. Employing close textual analysis, the main aim of this paper is to reveal the prevale...

The chapter takes advertising as an umbrella term for persuasive communication. Looking at screen advertising as a specific type of communication-one that is made to persuade-the documentary, educational films, and avant-garde works of the 1930s and early 1940s come into view together under the label of advertising. Focussing on the work of John Grierson, Paul Rotha, and Hans Richter, the chapter shows how debates among intellectuals, pedagogues, and artists on both sides of the Atlantic revolved around concepts of propaganda and education to promote democracy. The chapter contributes to the field of useful cinema studies by mapping the transnational network of people, ideas, and materials involved in using moving images as tools for shaping the human mind.

Documentary films are aesthetical representations of actual material or the direct sound recorded with video and presented aesthetically with the help of editing. The language of fiction film is very close to that of documentaries, as these two are the audio-visuals. Prior to the film made by Robert Flaherty, The Nanook of the North people used to call documentary films by different names, like academic film, Exotica etc. Documentary film has been around for 100 years. From the silent era to the sound era, it covers a long way, and the means of communication to the audience have changed with the time. Silent documentaries or sound documentaries, God voice documentaries to synk sound only diegetic sound documentaries, auteur documentaries have taken place. This paper will examine the evolution of documentary film and the changes in its form and language of representation through an examination of the works of some notable documentary filmmakers from various eras.

Frank Ankersmit tells historians of their mission: “You can approximate objectivity only as long as you sincerely despair of approximating it.” It follows that it is incumbent upon anyone who represents the past to enter that struggle. Whether by keyboard or camera, historians who do not probe and question their suppositions may seek to represent the past, but they do not make history. A prime question for historiophoty is to ask what this struggle looks and sounds like projected off the page. This chapter considers the cinepoetics of historical objectivity through a model of moving images that rewinds the clock to the emergence of film on screens and traces a new path for cinema through to a digital reimagining of what Tom Gunning calls the “cinema of attractions.” It explores the documentary methods of narration and reenactment in Sam Green’s Live Documentary practice and analyzes the methods by which filmmakers become cine-historians through articulating the historians’ dilemma by audiovisual means in the creation of moving history of shared experience and public spectacle.

Art is a reflection of our time: isn't it also the antidote?-Eric Rohmer A FTER A CERTAIN MOMENT," states Serge Daney in "Actualité de Rohmer," "the filmmaker was recognized as one of the rare witnesses of his times. Even his critics who could not see themselves in his conservative ideology and antiquated thematic felt that ten years later films signed by Rohmer would become sociological 'documents' of a certain atmosphere of the times which would not always remain the same." 1 For Daney, the films' accurate representation of his characters' social idiolect explains Rohmer's success in finding his public once a year. His characters, a wave of ever-young individuals, constitute an archive of types from one particular social stratum: bourgeois, liberal professionals, artists and intellectuals who are united in being talkative. As they conjecture they reveal a set of values and ideas. A minor but curious absence, that of a filmmaker, in Rohmer's extensive roster of professionals suggests there may be something to my inquiry on the role of cinema, or more precisely of documentary images in Rohmer's work. The unprecedented use of newsreel footage in Rohmer's Triple Agent (2004) leads us to ask whether the inclusion of archival documents of the politically charged 1930s signals a departure for a director who markedly shuns selfreflexivity and who is thought to keep politics at bay. Although Rohmer's adaptations have incorporated a wide range of artificial materials, including visual and audio references ranging from paintings and plays to cardboard trees, film footage has been conspicuously absent. In Triple Agent, momentous political news and change blast intermittently throughout in stark contrast to this chamber-like espionage drama, the interplay between the archive and theater bringing to the fore ontological issues that have always preoccupied Rohmer, namely, the status of the real and of documentary in cinema. Documents and artifacts have a time-capsule role in Rohmer's second-degree realism. Cinema, as an instrument of witnessing, preservation, and archiving is inseparable from Rohmer's attraction to history. He reconstitutes "what would have been produced if cinema existed," 2 ostensibly compensating for the lack of photographic record of a given time as he does, for instance, when he filters the Paris of the French Revolution through eighteenth-century landscape painting in The Lady and the Duke.

The Last Vaudevillian is a road movie that features a man who makes and lectures about his own travel films. More specifically it is about a series of travel film "screening events'* that have their own set of technical and social characteristics. Viewers gain a selective view of traveling with John Holod from New York to Florida as he practices his trade. As such, viewers are offered a back-stage view of a communication genre that many people either simply take for granted as unproblematic or may even believe has passed away into film history. The film starts with a timely topic, one relevant to a national debate surrounding the future of Cuban-born six year old, Elian Gonzalez. We see forty-five year old independent filmmaker John Holod presenting his new travelogue made in Cuba entitled, Cuba at the Crossroads (introduced as "the first one ever" made of Cuba). Ruoff s film is nicely structured using a series of screenings as a backbone, branching off to explain bits and pieces of the total process. Holod demonstrates and comments on his presentation style, model of lecturing, style of dress, andthelike and even expresses a sense of mission: he wants his audiences to "be educated but have a good time as well." We get to see some of Holod's living and traveling conditions, his motor home lavishly equipped with computer, FAX, GPS, television, VCR and well stocked collections of CDs and abundant kitchen facilities-he much prefers his own cooking to restaurant food. We get only a limited sense of how he operates as a filmmaker during the summers (researching, writing, filming, production) and a better sense of his life as a traveling exhibitor in the winter, mostly in the southern U.S. We get a view of film as alive performance, a show 100 Volume 15 Number 1 Spring-Summer 1999

It is not surprising that film and media students often think of documentary film as a platform for expressing political opinions, dissent or frustrations with important, contemporary social issues. This overview of documentary film history provides a list of the essential films and filmmakers and notes that might help educators in choosing the most relevant and appropriate film texts for their classroom practice.

The genre of documentary films, though closely related with factuality is often a medium that represents an alternative way to articulate the voices which borders on margins. S. Sukhdev's Nine months to Freedom: The Story of Bangladesh (1971) and Pramod Pati's Explorer (1968) belong to a selected category of documentary films which presents a divergence in representing the subject as well as the cinematic technique. This paper focuses on a close analysis of the selected films and attempts to highlight the dissent at multiple levels such as representation of the subject and the use of cinematic technique in the representation of the subject. The films selected for the study belongs to two different genres. Nine Months to Freedom resembles a political documentary; Explorer is an experimental film with plethora of subjects. Through the help of Clifford Geertz's 'Thick Description' the paper attempts to study dissent and dialogue in the film through the help of cinem...

was for many years remembered primarily as a novelist whose talent flowered briefly in the late 1920s and early 1930s, before dissipating in alcohol, melancholy and the misery of exile. Over the last two or three decades, however, he has been rediscovered as a writer whose journalistic output comfortably outweighs his literary, both in terms of volume and, arguably, consistency and quality. Roth may be read as a political journalist, a chronicler of the tensions of life in postWar Vienna and in Berlin at the peak of Weimar modernism, a travel writer, and a practitioner of the crafted Feuilleton; he was all of these things. Recently, interest has grown in Roth's substantial writings on the medium which came into its own during the 1920s and which, one could say, has altered the way in which we perceive the world: film. Roth produced as many as 80 articles which deal in some way with film. Karl Prümm concludes from this that Roth must have been a passionate cinemagoer and eager film reviewer, in thrall to the power of the medium. 1 This is a somewhat exaggerated claim, perhaps motivated by the desire to counter the prevailing assumption of his luddite hostility to the medium. The fact that Roth, in the early 1920s, attended and reviewed many films is not necessarily a sign, as I think it would be today, of a passionate interest in the medium. 2 In the major daily newspapers for which Roth worked, including the Berliner Börsen-Courier and Frankfurter Zeitung, film reviews, unlike literary and theatrical reviews, were not a priority, and had not even been included on a regular basis until the early 1920s.There were few film reviewers known by name. 3 Film criticism was, like the medium itself, still in its infancy; critics such as Béla Balázs and Rudolf Arnheim were still arguing the case for film as an art in its own right, rather than the trashy proletarian distraction as which it had frequently been portrayed. The criteria by which a film should be evaluated were still in the process of being established. Roth's early articles and columns for the Viennese magazine Die Filmwelt, as Klaus Westermann has observed, are never strictly speaking reviews; from an early stage he seems to have had more interest in film as a cultural phenomenon than in its artistic potential. 4 In any case, the work for Filmwelt in 1919 almost certainly represented only an opportunistic 'foot in the door' for Roth, for it tails off rapidly following his regular employment at Der Neue Tag. That he subsequently wrote so frequently about new films, following his move to Berlin in 1920, may be viewed as an indication of his relatively junior status and appetite for work where and when he could find it. As his reputation grew and fees increased we find fewer articles dealing with specific films; thus the vast majority of his film 'reviews' were written in the period up to the end of 1924. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that Roth is frequently enthusiastic about films in this period, and seems initially not to have had an intrinsic problem with the medium itself. However, if we examine the terms in which specific films are praised in Roth's work, in the heyday of Weimar modernist cinema and the UFA studios, it becomes apparent that the theoretical basis for Roth's rejection of film in his 1934 polemic Der Antichrist is discernible at quite an early stage. It is noticeable, for example, that Roth seems to

This chapter outlines the vast rise in tourist numbers on the seas coincided with the arrival of simpler, hands-on means for capturing the journey's 'fascinating sights' and 'colorful peoples' in moving images, leaving behind an unprecedented visual record of the Pacific tourist experience. Image production and consumption are linked to the construction of modern selves: indeed amateur filmmaking, Patricia R. Zimmermann has convincingly shown, was closely tied in the first half of the twentieth century to the assertion of patriarchal, bourgeois and familial self-identities. In amateur films shot on Pacific voyages, color stock would have been chosen for strategic reasons, ideally to supply an impact surpassing what Maxim Gorky referred to as the 'mute, grey' life offered by black and white pictures. By the 1920s and into the early 1930s, this emerging imperial identity was largely structured around a westward-gazing Pacific expansionism, further populariz...

The heightened visibility of LGBTQ documentaries produced from the late-1980s onwards is often viewed within the critical contexts of new queer cinema (commonly abbreviated as NQC), a term launched by B. Ruby Rich in her Village Voice and Sight and Sound articles of 1992. Rich's bold intervention picked up on an urgency among 'a new kind of film and video practice, one which takes up the aesthetic strategies that directors have already learned and applies them to a greater need than art for its own sake' (Rich 1992). Following Rich's formulation, NQC has been configured as a movement that cuts across and often confounds genres and national affiliations, 'united by a common style' which Rich characterised as 'Homo Porno' (1992). 1 While recognising the importance of this defiance of categorisations in identifying trends across queer film and video, I want here to explore some contours of new queer documentary, 2 which played such an important role in the rise of NQC. This involves further reexamining ways that queer nonfiction film and video evolved out of distinctive relations to the history and traditions of the documentary form, its established practices, and commonly-held social functions.

Vi sono regole che non si limitano a disciplinare i comportamenti sociali: li rendono anche possibili. L’archetipo secondo cui le istituzioni sociali come il denaro, le università, i giochi da tavolo, i contratti o la proprietà siano costituite da regole sembra ormai essere largamente accettato dalla filosofia analitica delle scienze sociali. Eppure, nonostante i numerosi contributi, l’idea che uno specifico tipo di regole possa ‘costituire’ la realtà giuridica e sociale sembra, ancora oggi, insospettire molti operatori giuridici. In termini ‘khuniani’ si potrebbe sostenere che, almeno per quanto riguarda quella branca della filosofia giuridica che si occupa di ontologia, si sta vivendo una vera e propria fase di crisi dei precedenti paradigmi ontologico-giuridici. Da un lato, infatti, sono sempre più numerosi i contributi scientifici interdisciplinari volti ad approfondire l’importanza e la funzione delle ‘regole costitutive’ nello studio di importanti fenomeni sociali e giuridici. Dall’altro lato, invece, si assiste a un proliferare di studi volti a mini- mizzare, ridefinire, ridurre e, più in generale, deflettere il ruolo delle regole costitutive in campo giuridico. Questo lavoro mira, dunque, a fornire una breve panoramica del dibattito contemporaneo sul tema delle regole costitutive evidenziando, al contempo, le principali problematiche ontologiche e giuridiche emerse all’interno del dibattito stesso. L’obiettivo principale di quest’opera è, infatti, quello di dimostrare come l’introduzione del concetto di regola costitutiva nell’ambito della filosofia del diritto sia stata, e sia tutt’oggi, foriera di una crisi dei paradigmi ontologico-giuridici tanto inevitabile, quanto apparentemente ricorsiva.

In this article we consider the growing interest in recent years in the use of documentary strategies in the wold of contemporary art, film and performing arts and explore some of the central epistemological assumptions underpinning the persistent idea that the documentary should be equated with 'non-fiction'. Following Stella Bruzzi we argue that if documentary theory maintains objectivity as the primary measure of value, it will inevitably and continuously arrive at the conclusion that the documentary genre is fundamentally flawed. Instead, we propose to move beyond the 'realist epistemology' of documentary theory and focus on the 'documentary real', i.e. the specific performativity of the reality constructed in and by the documentary genre. In the last paragraphs, we introduce the various articles that address the ''documentary real'' in this special issue.

Albert and David Maysles break the rules of conventional documentary and give their ex-socialite friends, the Bouvier-Beale ladies, their much-deserved screen time on the 1975 film Grey Gardens. Creating reality while witnessing it, these two might have been the very first to turn home videos into a legitimate documentary genre.

Catalysts of action? Evocators of spontaneity? The term "Flies on the Wall" was a term that emerged in the sixties in the US mainly to designate the documentary style of choosing not to intervene in the subject, or development of the actions filmed; a style that was possible thanks to the technological innovation of cameras made to be more portable and with a synchronous sound recorder that was to be incorporated for great fieldwork. "Various inventions carried out in Canada, Europe, and the US in the years following World War II culminated around 1960 with various 16 mm cameras, the Arriflex and Auricon, and sound recorders such as the Nagra, which could be easily operated by a single person." (Nichols, 2013:199).

About a year ago in a Times Literary Supplement review, the English novelist Lawrence Norfolk praised the emerging generation of US writers for resisting the allure of the mediated culture and providing readers with 'news of a rare and real America' ('Closing time in the fun-house' 26). Norfolk is thinking of William T. Vollmann's red light districts (mostly cleaned up now and Hilton-ed over), Jonathan Franzen's inner city (newly gentrified), Richard Powers's intelligentsia (last seen working online), and David Foster Wallace's mid-priced cruise ships, halfway houses, and rural state fairs (now mostly funded by corporations). Norfolk would probably oppose this America to the more globally familiar prospect of 'total operationality, hyperreality, total control' and total interchangeability of sign and referent that Jean Baudrillard finds here, along with technology's 'mortal deconstruction of the body' ('Simulacra' 121, 11 1, cited in Simulacrum America 6). To the contributors in Simulacrum America, however, Baudrillard's America is no less real than the vanishing spaces of the naturalist tradition; and its media representations are by now so familiar that they hardly count as news. Now that Roland Barthes's 'empire of signs' has been digitized, continental theory sounds less provocative, more descriptive of things as they are. What is new, however, and what separates this collection from mainstream critical writing, is the editors' recognition that, with the technologization of everything, criticism itself no longer looks the same: 'When the distance between the real and the imaginary begins to disappear,' they write, 'there is no longer any space for an ideal or critical projection' (6). And so, beyond the global understanding of America offered from these mostly European critics, the collection poses a local problem for critical writing: Under circumstances of simulation, working in the nonspace of Baudrillard's hyperreal and the virtual reality of cybernetic media, what's left for criticism itself to do? When literature's most compelling historical fictions have 'long given up the binary concept of fact versus imagination' (8) and when mass media imagery has made 'the very concept of "representation" ... problematic' (I), it makes little sense to think of

The genre of documentary films, though closely related with factuality is often a medium that represents an alternative way to articulate the voices which borders on margins. S. Sukhdev's Nine months to Freedom: The Story of Bangladesh (1971) and Pramod Pati's Explorer (1968) belong to a selected category of documentary films which presents a divergence in representing the subject as well as the cinematic technique. This paper focuses on a close analysis of the selected films and attempts to highlight the dissent at multiple levels such as representation of the subject and the use of cinematic technique in the representation of the subject. The films selected for the study belongs to two different genres. Nine Months to Freedom resembles a political documentary; Explorer is an experimental film with plethora of subjects. Through the help of Clifford Geertz's 'Thick Description' the paper attempts to study dissent and dialogue in the film through the help of cinematic apparatus.

Fahrenheit 9/11 es una película documental estrenada en 2004 y dirigida por el cineasta estadounidense Michael Moore. Trata sobre las causas y consecuencias de los atentados del 11 de septiembre de 2001 en Estados Unidos, haciendo referencia a la posterior invasión de Irak liderada por ese país y Gran Bretaña.

The first short documentary "Alive" (Dzīvs, 1970) is an important signifier of Latvian director Ansis Epners' (1937-2003) oeuvre both in terms of his approach to documentary film practice, and growing interest in fiction filmmaking. The film "Alive" and later idea to develop a full-length fiction film based on its main character demonstrate Epners' unconventional expression of both kinds of filmmaking, which was received with a mixed response at the time. Epners used performative elements in the documentary, and included real-life character playing himself in the planned fiction film, challenging the assumptions and conventions of filmmaking practices in Latvia at that time. In this article I will analyse Epners' formal and stylistic choices in the film "Alive" and its reception in the early 1970s, and the script for the fiction film based on the main character of the film "Alive" Arnolds Cīrulis. The reception of "Alive" shows the contradictions between the dominant views on the documentary film form and Epners' work. The fiction film script, which was not turned into film, remains as an example of versatility of Epners' ideas on the potentials of fiction filmmaking.

This article explores the concept of popular culture and popular art. When Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 received the Golden Palm in Cannes in 2004, the French press and director Jean-Luc Godard joined in a critique of the jury’s choice. The press discussed the possibility of the festival loosing its status as the most prestigious festival of art cinema after giving the prize to an American political documentary. Godard criticized Michael Moore for being to direct and not communicating through more subtle aesthetics. Between the lines of both critiques one find a devaluation of popular art often seen in modern aesthetic theory and this article tries to refute this devaluation in a critical reading of Theodor W. Adorno’sview on the popular.

This thesis could not have been completed without the unconditional love and unwavering support of many. To those who I may not name, please know that you have also made an endearing imprint on my journey to the finish line. First of all, I am fortunate to have been guided by my Thesis Committee Chair, Professor Valerie Soe. Because of my interest in movies and documentaries, I learned about her documentaries, Love Boat: Taiwan, which she directed by chance and participated in the film post-production. Although it is the first time I joined the production of a documentary, and my skill and ability were not yet proficient, Professor Soe still patiently gave me a lot of care and encouragement. Through two years of humanistic film research and the unlimited opportunities and information provided by my instructor, the instructor also taught me the necessary skills in the industry. I am also grateful to my committee member Professor Isabelle Pelaud for her detailed guidance on my thesis. Both of my committee members provide valuable suggestions on the topic choose, the construction of each chapter, the supply of relevant materials, and the revisions in the later stages, which enabled me to complete this thesis successfully. Due to COVID-19 and the closed down of the U.S. Embassy, I was locked down in China, and my visa was expired to go back to the U.S.. I started to miss the time that I spent on campus and in Silicon Valley. I am grateful to San Francisco State University and Asian American department to create good learning conditions and a friendly atmosphere for me, allowing me to spend two years of pleasant and unforgettable learning time there. To the AAS cohort before me and the cohort(s) after me collectively, thank you for being such a powerful impact to the community. I am delighted to be able to join with such enthusiastic and radical Asian American scholars and activists. However, without my Asian American friends in Asian Unity back in vi Colorado, I probably would never be able to step into this field and achieve this much of the accomplishment. I am incredibly thankful for the memorable experiences you guys made in our student organization many years ago. I look forward to the day we might meet again. In the end, I want to thank my family. Without their love and support for me, there would be nowhere I am today. I hope this thesis is not the finish line of my U.S. journey. I will be back.

E lizabeth Benacka's engaging book Rhetoric, Humor, and the Public Sphere: From Socrates to Stephen Colbert examines how a satirical character's performance in the public sphere shines a light on the nature of political performance. This book offers readers a compelling overview of rhetorical humor, American political satire, and the performances of Stephen Colbert and his eponymous character. The fırst two chapters are less about Colbert and more about the nature and function of humor and satire within rhetoric. She identifıes the major Greek and Roman sources that discuss humor and rhetoric, with a particular focus on the active role of the audience. Chapter 2 places Colbert in the lineage of American humor, in which wise fools reveal the incongruities between our ideals and our reality. In chapters 3-5, Benacka presents a robust analysis of Colbert's satire in various contexts, including his speech at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner, his testimony before a congressional committee, and his creation of a Super PAC. The linking of the humorous and the rhetorical is at the heart of Benacka's argument. She unpacks the ways in which humor functions in the public sphere, fınding that it not only moves the emotions but also can serve educational and argumentative goals. Benacka effectively uses a breadth of rhetorical and critical theory to support her case, from Aristotle's enthymeme as a structure for understanding humor, to Kenneth Burke's comic frame, to Richard Rorty's analysis of irony. Through an analysis of this literature, she fınds that what unites the concepts of irony, parody, and satire is that they all require active engagement by the audience in constructing meaning. She claims that "the discursive combination of information and entertainment imbues satire with the potential to encourage citizens'