Documentary Cinema

While we usually associate cinema with narrative films, non-fiction film practices have played a major role in the development of the medium since its emergence. Such a disregard is due to the fact that, for a long time, documentary films have been marginalized within the distribution circuits of the film industry. To add injury to insult, when documentaries found a home in the programming of broadcast television in the 1960s and 1970s, documentary practices underwent a formal and conceptual pauperization, which still resonates in the depreciative expression “TV documentary.” Whereas with the advent of digital technologies, non-fiction cinema and documentaries regained center stage within the contemporary media landscape, their reputation has hardly been rehabilitated.

This course aims at illuminating the potentiality of documentary cinema and at problematizing commonsensical assumptions linked to this film practice. We begin by analyzing definitions of the documentary and the limits they impose on our understanding of this film practice. Throughout the course, we push the boundaries of received definitions, with the purpose of expanding and refining our awareness of the potentialities inherent to non-fiction moving image works. This course does not aim at providing a historical survey of notable documentaries and film movements. The purpose of the course is, instead, that of exploring some of the most productive directions in contemporary documentary and non-fiction cinema, by focusing on a series of techniques and approaches that defy the emphasis on factuality and immediacy, which characterizes the conventional understanding of the documentary.