Velvet Light Trap articles from September 2007

Velvet Light Trap archives from September 2007

Introduction.(THE EDITORS)
September 22, 2007... The relationship between the recorded image and reality has always been of great interest to media scholars, although its place in scholarly discourse is perhaps no more pronounced than in documentary studies. Questions such as documentary's...

Q & A: poetics of the documentary film interview.
September 22, 2007... The study of documentary film needs a closer scrutiny of essential formal devices. This essay analyzes one of those practices with the goal of proposing a poetics of the film interview. David Bordwell explains: "A historical poetics of cinema...

Contemporary documentary film and "Archive Fever": history, the fragment, the joke.
September 22, 2007... But if Derrida's Mal d'archive [Archive Fever] provokes that more serious thing, which is a joke, it is because the shade of the history writing that haunts its pages is--really--no laughing matter. In this light, then, if there is laughter, it...

Documentary stories for change: viewing and producing immigrant narratives as social documents.(analysis of the television documentary The New Americans )
September 22, 2007... This analysis focuses on the politics of representation involved in the production of a community campaign around the public television documentary The New Americans (2004). The New Americans is a seven-hour miniseries that aired on PBS 29-31...

"Gangs Gone Wild": low-budget gang documentaries and the aesthetics of exploitation.
September 22, 2007... From the front page of the 30 October 2005 edition of the Los Angeles Times a shirtless Salvadoran man glares menacingly. Displaying multiple tattoos, he appears to challenge readers with the directness of his gaze and the hostility of his...

Familial pursuits, editorial acts: documentaries after the age of home video.
September 22, 2007... I think it's going to be very interesting... to see what happens with this digital generation of parents who have recorded their kids' every footstep.... People can just go back to the data bank and see exactly how little Jinmy spooned his...

Comedy verite? The observational documentary meets the televisual sitcom.
September 22, 2007... About halfway through the first season of the FOX television show Arrested Development the program's narrative abruptly confronted its televisual style. As the Bluth family enters a courtroom, the presiding judge announces that no cameras are...

Darfur Diaries: an interview with Jen Marlowe and Adam Shapiro.(INTERVIEW)(Interview)
September 22, 2007... Since 2005 dozens of documentaries focusing on the genocide of the African population in the Darfur region of Sudan have been produced and distributed through a myriad of media outlets. Varying wildly in terms of content, production value, and...

The role of documentary in the contemporary American political scene.(DOSSIER)(Essay)
September 22, 2007... In order to supplement the full-length articles presented in this issue, we approached a number of luminaries in the field of documentary scholarship and asked them to provide short responses on the place of documentary in the current American...

Mexican Movies in the United States: A History of the Films, Theaters, and Audiences, 1920-1960 by Rogelio Agrasanchez, Jr.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Rogelio Agrasanchez, Jr. Mexican Movies in the United States: A History of the Films, Theaters, and Audiences, 1920-1960. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006. $45.00. Between the late 1930s and the early 1950s the Mexican film...

The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture by Henry Jenkins.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Henry Jenkins. The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture. New York: New York UP, 2007. $22.00. Popular culture is uniquely compelling in that it represents a reflective exaggeration of the dissonance between...