Imagining Reality

Front Cover
Faber & Faber, Jun 16, 2011 - Photography - 714 pages

In Imaging Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary, Oscar-winning documentary-maker Kevin Macdonald ( One Day in September, Touching the Void) and leading broadcaster/historian Mark Cousins ( The Story of Film) offer an expanded, revised edition of their 'definitive, inspirational' ( Independent) compendium on the roots and history of the documentary film.
Imagining Reality takes the reader on a tour of the evolution of documentary film as an increasingly vibrant, polemical, experimental and entertaining form. It gathers a wide-ranging collection of writings by and about such groundbreaking documentary-makers as Vertov, Flaherty, Marcel Ophuls, Chris Marker, Kieslowski, Claude Lanzmann, and Nick Broomfield.
The story is carried up to date by attention to the success documentaries have had among mainstream movie audiences in recent years, including Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, The Buena Vista Social Club, Spellbound, Capturing The Friedmans, Être Et Avoir, and The Fog Of War.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Title Page
The first documentary Workers leaving the Lumière factory 1895
Auguste Lumière and his wife feeding their baby 1895
Going to Extremes
Herbert Pontings photograph of Captain Scotts ship The Endeavour 1911
Nanook of the North 1922
Kino Eyes and Agit Trains
A poster for Dziga Vertovs KinoGlaz Cinema Eye 1924
A face from The Eternal Jew 1940
Humphrey Jennings directs his actors in Fires Were Started 1943
Aspects of Asia
A barrage balloon raised aloft in The First Days 1939
The Emperors Naked Army Marches On 1986
The Essayists
Sans Soleil 1980
The Grain of Truth

We go to the cinema film Three Songs about Lenin 1934
The Eleventh Year 1928
Exterior of agittrain
Interior of agittrain
Mikhail Kaufman filming The Man with a Movie Camera 1928
Documentary and the AvantGarde
Witchcraft through the Ages in which the director Benjamin Christensen himself plays the devil 1922
The Symphony of a Great City 1927
Fantasy sequence from A Propos de Nice 1930
Land without Bread 1932
The British Movement
A surreal image from Victor Turins Turksib 1929 a film which greatly influenced John Grierson
Song of Ceylon 1934
a whimsical image from Pett and Pott 1934
Night Mail 1936
Housing Problems 1935
Battling for Minds
Olympia 1937
Olympia 1937
Moments after an air attack The Spanish Earth 1937
The Four Hundred Million 1939
The Chair 1962
Joseph E Levine and Sophia Loren in Showman 1962
PART 2
Chronique dun Été 1960
Gimme Shelter 1970
The Cinema of Social Concern
Los Quatro Puentes 1968
In the Year of the Pig 1969
Roger and Me 1989
Hoop Dreams 1994
Diversity
Simon Srebnik returns to Chelmno the site of a Nazi extermination
Documentary meets fiction in The Thin Blue Line 1989
Nick Broomfield
Crumb 1995
Breakthrough
The Burning Question
A Response to Pauline Kael
About the Editors
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of the Documentary
Kevin Macdonald,Mark Cousins
No preview available - 1998
Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary
Mark Cousins,Kevin Macdonald
No preview available - 2006

Common terms and phrases

American artistic asked audience Basil Wright battle Berlin British documentary Broomfield BUÑUEL camera cameraman Cavalcanti Ceylon cinéma vérité crew cultural cutting Direct Cinema director documentary film dramatic Dziga Vertov editing fact feel film unit film’s Flaherty footage French German ghetto GPO film unit Grierson happened Harry Watt Hoop Dreams human Humphrey Jennings Huston idea images Indian interview Iwasaki Japan Japanese documentaries Jews Joris Ivens Koumiko Lanzmann Las Hurdes light living look Marcel Ophüls Marker material Maysles montage movement movie Nanook narration Nazi never newsreels Nichi-ei Nick Broomfield non-fiction Ophüls person photograph picture play political problems produced propaganda rain reality record Riefenstahl Sans Soleil scenes screen seems sequence Shoah shooting shot social sound track Source story studio style talking group television tell there’s things thought Tokyo truth Vertov viewer voice wanted

About the author (2011)

Kevin Macdonald is the Oscar-winning director of One Day in September, Into the Void, The Last King of Scotland, State of Play and E agle of the Ninth. His biography of his grandfather, Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter, is also published by Faber .
Mark Cousins is a broadcaster, historian and film critic, the author of The Story of Film and Widescreen: Watching. Real. People. Elsewhere. He writes regularly for the film magazine Prospect and is an honorary lecturer in film, media and journalism at the University of Stirling.

Bibliographic information

TitleImagining Reality
AuthorsKevin Macdonald, Mark Cousins
PublisherFaber & Faber, 2011
ISBN0571261450, 9780571261451
Length714 pages
Subjects › 

History / Essays
Photography / Photoessays & Documentaries
  
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