Theorizing Documentary, First Edition AFI Film Readers Routledge Paperback © 1993 ISBN: 0-415-90382-3 Publication Status: In Print Readership: Film and cultural studies Theorizing Documentary is the first work to address a wide range of theoretical issues specific to the documentary form. Documentaries encompass a wide range of forms, educational TV, personality profiles, ethnography, cine-poems, polemic tracts, and autobiography. What unites these types of film is their common bond with the ``historical real,'' the domain of lived experience. Today, as fictional and nonfictional forms are becoming increasingly hybrid (TV docu-drama, historically based feature films such as Oliver Stone's JFK, ``infotainment,'' tabloid television), the question ``what is documentary?'' is particularly compelling. Documentary Film offers original essays by leading critics and theorists, addressing key questions such as: How fictional is nonfiction? What gets to count on film as history -- and why? To what extent are representational forms adequate substitutions for social historical phenomena? Can one culture (or subculture) ever be translated for another? How can the documentarist prevent the spectator from conflating real life and the film's fabricated reality? Contributors: Paul Arthur, Bill Horrigan, Ana Lopez, Bill Nichols, Michael Renov, Philip Rosen, Susan Scheibler, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Brian Winston Published in English , First Published in the EU September 1993 Size: 256 pages, Dimensions: 216x138mm 5.5x8.5 inches

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