Boldly signifying the cultural issues of the 1960s and 1970s in groundbreaking pieces such as Grey Gardens, Gimme Shelter, and Showman, filmmakers and brothers David and Albert Maysles used an approach to documentary film that involved spontaneous observation of naturally occurring events. With no rehearsed footage and no preconceived plots, their revolutionary work eschewed the authoritative voice-over narrator, didactic scripts, and the traditional problem-and-solution format used by the majority of their predecessors in the genre and duly influenced subsequent directors in both fiction and nonfiction film. Their collaboration from 1962 until David’s death in 1987 wrought thirteen major works in which the brothers critiqued the concept of celebrity with unglamorous footage of iconic figures, explored how commercialism hinders communication, and questioned the possibility of seeing anything clearly in a world abounding with both real and constructed images. Jonathan B. Vogels outlines how the Maysles brothers blended a unique amalgam of direct cinema characteristics, a modern humanist aesthetic, and a collaborative working process that included other directors and editors. Looking at the films as both shapers and reflections of American culture, he points out that the works offer insights into a wide range of contemporary topics including materialism, celebrity, modern art, and the American family. In addition to describing the changes in technology that made direct cinema possible, Vogels provides careful, scene-by-scene analyses that allow for a consideration of the Maysles brothers’ films as films, a tactic not frequently employed in nonfiction film studies.

The volume is ideal for graduate and undergraduate courses on the long sixties, political cinema, 1968, and new waves in art history, cultural studies, and film and media studies.

Albert Maysles has created some of the most influential documentaries of the postwar period. Such films as Salesman,Gimme Shelter, and Grey Gardens continue to generate intense debate about the ethics and aesthetics of the documentary form. In this in-depth study, Joe McElhaney offers a novel understanding of the historical relevance of Maysles. By closely focusing on Maysles's expressive use of his camera, particularly in relation to the filming of the human figure, this book situates Maysles's films within not only documentary film history but film history in general, arguing for their broad-ranging importance to both narrative film and documentary cinema. Complete with an engaging interview with Maysles and a detailed comparison of the variant releases of his documentary on the Beatles (What's Happening: The Beatles in the U.S.A. and The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit), this work is a pivotal study of a significant filmmaker.

Cinema and Secularism is the first collection to make the relationship between cinema and secularism thematic, utilizing a number of different methodological approaches to examine their identification and differentiation across film theory, film aesthetics, film history, and throughout global cinema. The emergence of moving images and the history of cinema historically coincide with the emergence of secularism as a concept and discourse. More than historically coinciding, however, cinema and secularism would seem to have-and many contemporary theorists and critics seem to assume-a more intrinsic, almost ontological connection to each other. While early film theorists and critics explicitly addressed questions about secularism, religion, and cinema, once the study of film was professionalized and secularized in the Western academy in both film studies and religious studies, explicit and critical attention to the relationship between cinema and secularism rapidly declined. Indeed, if one canvases film scholarship today, one will find barely any works dedicated to thinking critically about the relationship between cinema and secularism. Extending the recent “secular turn” in the humanities and social sciences, Cinema and Secularism provokes critical reflection on its titular concepts. Making contributions to theory, philosophy, criticism, and history, the chapters in this pioneering volume collectively interrogate the assumption that cinema is secular, how secularism is conceived and related to cinema differently in different film cultures, and whether the world is disenchanted or enchanted in cinema. Coming from intellectually diverse backgrounds in film studies, religious studies, and philosophy, the interdisciplinary contributors to this book cover films and traditions of thought from America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia. In these ways, Cinema and Secularism opens new areas of inquiry in the study of film and contributes to the ongoing interrogation of secularism more broadly.

A deflationary, anti-theoretical film-philosophy through the cinema of Abbas KiarostamiMathew Abbott presents a powerful new film-philosophy through the cinema of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Mathew Abbott argues that Kiarostamis films carry out cinematic thinking: they do not just illustrate pre-existing philosophical ideas, but do real philosophical work.Crossing the divide between analytic and continental philosophy, he draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Alice Crary, NoAl Carroll, Giorgio Agamben, and Martin Heidegger, bringing out the thinking at work in Kiarostamis most recent films: Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, ABC Africa, Ten, Five, Shirin, Certified Copy and Like Someone in Love.

This book covers the 1960's as part of the definitive history of American cinema from its emergence in the 1800s to the present day.

Narrating American Gender and Ethnic Identities investigates two major issues within contemporary American Studies: cultural representations of various minorities (ethnic, religious, sexual) and of women in intersectional contexts of race, class, and sexuality. The first part of the volume, “Gender and Sexuality in Film and Literature”, analyzes different film genres and literary accounts in reference to those aspects of gender and sexuality that are related to identity. Various cultural texts are discussed from perspectives deriving from feminist, gender, and LGBT studies, intersectionality theories, as well as film studies. The second part, “American Experiences of Ethnic Diversity”, dwells upon ethnic and racial problems of American multicultural society and complex interrelationships between the dominant and the marginalized (the center and the periphery). It also focuses on the issue of one’s “(un)fitting” into the dominant culture, mainstream politics, and canon. The book is mostly addressed to scholars and students of American Studies but will also be noteworthy to anybody interested in the United States, literature, and the media. Selected chapters of this volume can be used as a point of departure for discussions – both scholarly and student – on contemporary challenges to the idea of multiculturalism, the complex role of various intersections (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender, age, sexuality, religion, class, dis/ability, etc.) in shaping minority subjectivities, as well as feminist responses to and reading of dominant women’s literary and filmic representations.

Documentary productions encompass remarkable representations of surprising realities. How do documentaries achieve their ends? What types of documentaries are there? What factors are implicated in their production? Such questions animate this engaging study. Documentary Screens is a comprehensive and critical study of the formal features and histories of central categories of documentary film and television. Among the categories examined are autobiographical, indigenous and ethnographic documentary, compilation films, direct cinema and cinema verite and television documentary journalism. The book also considers recent so-called popular factual entertainment and the future of documentary film, television and new media. This provocative and accessible analysis situates wide-ranging examples from each category within the larger material forces which impact on documentary form and content. The important connection between form, content and context explored in the book constitutes a new and lively 'documentary studies' approach to documentary representation.

This book is an extensive collection of original interviews with 50 noted filmmakers. Conducted over a seven-year period expressly for this project, the interviews cover various aspects of film production, biographical information, and the interviewees' favorite or most influential films. Filmmakers interviewed include highly respected auteurs (Richard Linklater, Wim Wenders), B-movie greats (Roger Corman, Lloyd Kaufman), and well-renowned documentary directors (D.A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles). Each entry includes a brief biography and filmography, while dozens of personal photographs, promotional materials, and film stills appear throughout the work.

Martin Scorsese's Documentary Histories: Migrations, Movies, Music is the first comprehensive study of Martin Scorsese's prolific work as a documentary filmmaker. Highlighting the historiographic aims of the director's various non-fiction film, video, and television productions, Mike Meneghetti re-examines Scorsese's documentaries as resourceful audiovisual histories of migrations, movies, and popular music. Italianamerican's critical immersion in the post-Sixties ethnic revival inaugurates Scorsese's decades-long documentary project in 1974, and the era's developing vernacular of reclamation would shape each of his subsequent non-fiction efforts. Martin Scorsese's Documentary Histories surveys the succeeding films' decisive adherence to this language of retrieval. With extended analyses of Italianamerican, American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince, The Last Waltz, Shine a Light, Feel Like Going Home, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, Il mio viaggio in Italia, and A Letter to Elia among others, Meneghetti resituates Scorsese's filmmaking within the wider contexts of documentary history and American culture.