Documentary Across Platforms

Zimmermann's anthology envisions documentary as a set of practices that investigate, engage with, and interrogate the world. This collection of essays, a culmination of her scholarship over the past twenty years, is a testament to her groundbreaking work and contribution to the field of documentary studies. -- The 2019-2020 Park School Faculty Writing Award Patricia Zimmermannn's Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics casts a wide net, capturing media ecologies as varied as museum installations, film festival showings, photography, and multiple varieties of internet sharing. . . . Her book is bound to create new paths for exploration and to open up a new awareness of the richness and complexity of the global media landscape. -- Inez Hedges * Jump Cut * Exploring a wonderfully diverse range of documentary projects that includes installation pieces, archives, still photography, community-based collaborative media, experimental shorts and video art, the essays analyze how work is done, by whom, for whom, to what end, and why these questions matter. -- Richard Shpuntoff * Documentary * Patricia Zimmermann's book Documentary Across Platforms provides a knowledgeable insight into the ever-evolving practices beyond conventional non-fiction cinema. It is an important contribution to contemporary documentary studies and also a must-read for all filmmakers and audiences who consider the genre a conceptual practice to think about themselves and the world how it is and how it might be. -- Melita Zajc * Modern Times Review * Zimmermann's invitations to reassess and engage in her own work have taken several forms over the past twenty-five years. They include essays for journals or exhibition catalogs, books, magazine articles, public presentations, handouts for public screenings, and postulates to arouse further conversation. They incorporate personal accounts, deep dives into the archival record, theoretical musings, and the occasional call to arms. Now one can read a thematically arranged selection of this remarkable career in a new collection. -- Melissa Dollman * The Moving Image * Patricia R. Zimmerman's Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics is a rich and diverse compendium of texts spanning decades and covering a myriad of topics related to the expanded nature of documentary platforms. . . . Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering, Media, Place and Politics is a vital textual resource for confronting the many changes that have taken place in writing about documentary and practicing documentary that has evolved into such new areas of scholarship in recent years. To remain abreast of these advances is important. It means keeping in touch with an ever-evolving world, something that Zimmerman is well able to do. Here's hoping she can keep doing it well into the future. -- Dara Waldron * Alphaville * Patricia R. Zimmerman's Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics is a rich and diverse compendium of texts spanning decades and covering a myriad of topics related to the expanded nature of documentary platforms. Zimmerman, best known for her pioneering scholarship in the area of home movies (considered as a subset of the documentary film), demonstrates a real intellectual zest when moving across the terrain of documentary film practices and their extension into certain areas of contemporary art. -- Dara Waldron * alphaville / Journal of Film and Media *

Patricia R. Zimmermann is Professor of Screen Studies at Ithaca College and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. She is the author and editor of numerous titles including Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film; (with Scott MacDonald) The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Film; and (with Helen De Michiel) Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice.

Foreword / Gina Marchetti Introduction: Documentary Across Platforms Part I: Platforms 1. Reverse Engineering: Taking Things Apart for the New Global Media Ecology 2. Ardent Spaces, Formidable Environments 3. Precious Places, Scribe Video Center, Philadelphia 4. The Hand That Holds Up All This Falling: The Works of Daniel Reeves 5. Cartographies of Impossible and Possible Worlds: The Photography of Michael Kienitz 6. Black Soil: Chernozem and Tusit in Ukraine Part II: Reversals 7. Matrices of War 8. Blasting War 9. Digital Deployments 10. Public Domains: Engaging Iraq through Experimental Digitalities 11. Cambodian Digital Imaginary Archive: Genocide, Lara Croft, and Crafts Part III: Histories 12. The Home Movie Archive Live 13. Throbs and Pulsations: Les LeVeque and the Digitizing of Desire 14. Just Say No: Negativland's No Business 15. Remixed and Revisited Black Cinema: Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates Live Project 16. Live!: Reconnecting the Histories of Live Multimedia Performance 17. Toward a Theory of Participatory New Media Documentary Part IV: Speculative Engineering 18. Home Movie Axioms 19. Speculations on Environmental Sensualities and Eco-Documentaries 20. Speculations on Reverse Engineering: Algorithms for Recombinant Documentaries Across Platforms Acknowledgements Notes Index