Documentary Display
Re-Viewing Nonfiction Film and Video
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Book Presentation:
Not all documentary films and videos are sober depictions of the real world. Documentary representations can present expressive, entertaining and spectacular images. This book examines such innovative approaches as they occur within the process of "documentary display"a practice which emphasizes the visual attractions of documentary representation. Works of documentary display explore modes of exhibitionistic "showing" in which sensation is frequently the vehicle of cognition and knowledge. Such a display is analyzed within the popular and prominent forms of found-footage film, "rockumentary", the city film, nonfiction surf film and video and certain views of natural science topics. This accessible and informed study, with its focus on entertaining, popular, spectacular and sensational forms of representation, makes an important contribution to theoretical analyses of documentary film and video.
About the Author:
Keith Beattie is a member of the Faculty of Arts of Deakin University, Melbourne.
Press Reviews:
Documentary has too often been regarded as the sober reverse-side of fiction in cinema: grey, instructional, wedded to ponderous, old-fashioned notions of realism. Keith Beattie's exciting Documentary Display throws the question of documentary openboth in its production and its receptionand, at the same time, re-opens our eyes to its very diverse, frequently spectacular history... This book re-defines a cinematic genre, and in the process challenges us to embrace the sensual, poetic and thoroughly entertaining aspects of non-fiction film. Adrian Martin, Senior Research Fellow, Monash University, Melbourne
> From the same author:
D. A. Pennebaker (2024)
Interviews
Dir. Keith Beattie and Trent Griffiths
Subject: Director > D.A. Pennebaker
Albert and David Maysles (2010)
Interviews
Dir. Keith Beattie
Subject: Director > Albert Maysles, David Maysles
The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand (2007)
Dir. Geoff Mayer and Keith Beattie
> On a related topic:
Films of Fact (2008)
A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television
by Timothy Boon
Subject: Genre > Documentary
Science Is Fiction (1999)
The Films of Jean Painlevé
Dir. Andy Masaki Bellows and Marina McDougall
Subject: Director > Jean Painlevé
André Bazin on Documentary (2026)
Cinema's Urge to Explore
Dir. André Bazin
Subject: Genre > Documentary
The Interactive Documentary Form (2025)
Aesthetics, Practice and Research
Subject: Genre > Documentary
The Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration on Film and Television, Volume 1 (2025)
Ernest Shackleton
by John Atkins
Subject: Genre > Documentary
The Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration on Film and Television, Volume 2 (2025)
Scott and Amundsen
by John Atkins
Subject: Genre > Documentary
The Representation of Perpetrators in Global Documentary Film (2025)
Dir. Fernando Canet
Subject: Genre > Documentary
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