Subject Guide: Documentary

Uses new critical approaches to demonstrate deep affinities in these vastly different filmmakers' philosophies on film, fantasy, and reality.

A filmmaker takes readers behind the lens in a series of candid interviews with creators of some of the most influential documentaries of our time. Filmmakers, film students, documentary makers for film and television, and lovers of pop culture will hear, in the filmmakers' own words, the challenges and triumphs faced in making documentaries. Firsthand knowledge is shared on such topics as how the documentary process differs from making fictional films, storytelling technique, ethical boundaries, funding, film festivals, and much more.

Documentary filmmaking is a powerful and vital element to our society, and those who are responsible for bringing real stories and issues to a creative medium often have an uncanny ability to make a deep connection to us with their art. Legendary directors and cinematographers such as the Maysles brothers, D.A. Pennabaker & Chris Hegedus, Errol Morris, or Ken Burns have vividly made their marks in recent decades and continue to inspire those who enter the field. Inexpensive video camera equipment and video editing software have helped fuel a new wave of truth-tellers, bringing the tools of the craft within reach of amateurs and students, as well as independent journalists and filmmakers on a budget.

Emphasizing the new documentary cinema, this book features filmmakers who belong to the generation born in the 1970s. Many of the interviewees were trained at the National Film School of Denmark's now legendary Department of Documentary and Television. The term "new" also captures tendencies that cut across the work of the filmmakers. For example, for the generation in question, internationalization and the development of a new digital media culture are inevitable aspects of everyday life, and, indeed, of the professional environments in which they operate. A comprehensive overview of documentary directors currently working in Denmark, this is the only book of its kind about this growing area of Danish cinema.

A series of in-their-own-words interviews with 15 directors whose work has, in some way, extended the boundary of the documentary. They constitute a tiny proportion of those working in the field, but they represent the state of the documentary across the world -- from the limited resources of China's only independent director with no access to his nation's television, to the big budget series that attract tens of millions of American viewers.

This Much Is True is a landmark volume about the art of directing documentaries, with contributions from some of the most eminent documentary filmmakers working today, including Nick Broomfield, Andrew Jarecki, Kim Longinotto, Kevin Macdonald, James Marsh and Albert Maysles. Each chapter focuses on a particular element of the filmmaking process, and takes the form of an in-depth and highly personal conversation, presented in unvarnished documentary form. Taken as a whole, the book represents a uniquely candid and well-informed account of what it takes and what it means to make documentaries.

MacDonald explores the cinematic territory between the traditional categories of "documentary" and "avant-garde" film, through candid, in-depth conversations with filmmakers whose work has challenged these categories. Arranged in an imaginative chronology and written to be accessible to anyfilm-interested reader, the interviews in Avant-Doc chart half a century of thinking by inventive filmmakers such as Robert Gardner, Ed Pincus, Alfred Guzzetti, Ross McElwee, Leonard Retel Helmrich, Michael Glawogger, Susana de Sousa Dias, Jonathan Caouette, Pawel Wojtasik, and Todd Haynes.