He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster (Nietzsche) For docudrama lovers like me, a new Peter Kosminsky production is always eagerly anticipated and the unfolding of The State over four consecutive evenings on Channel 4 last week made for a particularly intense viewing experience.
CALL FOR PAPERS – InMedia, the French Journal of Media studies DOCUMENTARY AND ENTERTAINMENT The purpose of this special issue of InMedia is to further the understanding of the documentary by linking it to the notion of entertainment, which has so far been underexplored in the expanding field of documentary studies.
After the deaths of Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher in the last days of 2016, the release of a new documentary about their lives, Bright Lights (HBO, January 2017) feels serendipitous.
How do we write using the audiovisual? Many of us are facing this challenge, frustrated by the restrictions of prose-only analyses. One answer is the audiovisual essay, in its poetic and analytic variants. These have recently taken off in the UK, especially in film studies, as a result of the significant loosening of copyright law, which now explicitly allows quotation of audiovisual works for the purposes of critical comment and review.
Ken Loach is surely the patron saint of British film and television studies – venerated for his early work with Tony Garnett and others for making British television drama a national event (fig 1); admired for the prizes (and finance) he has won in Europe; and respected for the way he continues to make films in his own way and following his own conscience into his eighties.
Released in its entirety on Netflix on December 18 th , 2015, the 10-episode long crime documentary, Making a Murderer – directed by Columbia University film graduates Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos – quickly became the ‘must see’ global TV hit of Christmas and the New Year.
The burning question was who goes and who gets left behind. — Former U.S. Army Captain Stuart Herrington in the American Experience’s ‘Last Days of Vietnam’ Award-winning producer-director, Rory Kennedy’s latest documentary, ‘Last Days of Vietnam,’ dramatically recreates the chaotic endgame and resulting moral quandary that accompanied America’s involvement in the Second Indochina War.
