Brian Winston is Lincoln Chair of Communications at the University of Lincoln, UK. He has an Emmy for documentary script-writing, has taught documentary in both the US and the UK, and has been involved with many international documentary film festivals and the Visible Evidence conference series. He is the author of Media, Technology and Society: A History, from the Telegraph to the Internet, Fires Were Started, Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries, and Messages: Free Expression, Media and the West, from Gutenberg to Google.

This accessible, well-executed, jargon-free collection provides readers with a concise overview of documentary film.

• Acknowledgments.- Notes on Contributors.- Foreword: Why Documentaries Matter .- Introduction: The Filmed Documentary.- PART I: DOCUMENTARY VALUES 1. The Question of Evidence, the Power of Rhetoric and Documentary Film; Bill Nichols.- 2. 'I'll Believe It When I Trust the Source': Documentary Images and Visual Evidence; Carl Plantinga.- 3. 'The Performance Documentary': The Performing Film-Maker, the Acting Subject; Stella Bruzzi.- 4. On Truth, Objectivity and Partisanship: The Case of Michael Moore; Douglas Kellner.- 5. CGI and the End of Photography as Evidence; Taylor Downing.- 6. Drawn From Life: The Animated Documentary; Andy Glynne.- 7. Dramadoc? Docudrama? The Limits and Protocols of a Televisual Form; Derek Paget.- 8. Ambiguous Audiences; Annette Hill.- 9. Life As Narrativised; Brian Winston.- 10. The Dance of Documentary Ethics; Pratap Rughani.- 11. Deaths, Transfigurations and the Future; John Corner.- PART II: DOCUMENTARY PARADIGMS 12. Problems in Historiography: The Documentary Tradition Before Nanook of the North; Charles Musser.- 13. John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement; Ian Aitken.- 14. Challenges For Change: Canada's National Film Board; Thomas Waugh and Ezra Winton.- 15. Grierson's Legacies: Australia and New Zealand; Deane Williams.- 16. New Deal Documentary and the North Atlantic Welfare State; Zoe Druick and Jonathan Kahana.- 17. The Triumph of Observationalism: Direct Cinema in the USA; Dave Saunders.- 18. Russian and Soviet Documentary: From Vertov to Sokurov; Ian Christie.- 19. The Radical Tradition in Documentary Film-making, 1920s–50s; Bert Hogenkamp.- 20. Le Groupe des trente: The Poetic Tradition; Elena Von Kassel Siambani.- 21. Cinéma Vérité: Vertov Revisited; Genevieve Van Cauwenberge.- 22. Beyond Sobriety: Documentary Diversions; Craig Hight.- PART III: DOCUMENTARY HORIZONS 23. Eastwards; Abe Mark Nornes.- 24. Africa N.; Frank Ukadike.- 25. Images From the South: Contemporary Documentary in Argentina and Brazil; Ana Amado and Maria Dora Mourao.- 26. 'Roadblock' Films, 'Children's Resistance' Films and 'Blood Relations' Films: Israeli and Palestinian Documentary Post-Intifada; Il Raya Morag.- 27. Sacred, Mundane and Absurd Revelations of the Everyday – Poetic Vérité in the Eastern European Tradition; Susanna Helke.- PART IV: DOCUMENTARY VOICES 28. First-Person Political; Alisa Lebow.- 29. Feminist Documentaries: Finding, Seeing and Using Them; Julia Lesage.- 30. Pioneers of Black Documentary Film; Pearl Bowser.- 31. LGTBs' Documentary Identity; Christopher Pullen.- 32. Docusoaps: The Ordinary Voice as Popular Entertainment; Richard Kilborn.- 33. Reality TV: A Sign of the Times?; Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn.- PART V: DOCUMENTARY DISCIPLINES 34. Anthropology: The Evolution of Ethnographic Film; Paul Henley.- 35. Science, Society and Documentary; Tim Boon.- 36. History Documentaries for Television; Ann Gray.- 37. Music, Documentary, Music Documentary; Michael Chanan.- 38. Art, Documentary as Art; Michael Renov.- PART VI: DOCUMENTARY FUTURES 39. Documentary as Open Space; Helen de Michiel and Patricia R. Zimmermann.- 40. 'This Great Mapping of Ourselves': New Documentary Forms Online; John Dovey and Mandy Rose.- 41. New Platforms for 'Docmedia': 'Varient of a Manifesto'; Peter Wintonick.- Afterword: The Unchanging Question; Brian Winston.- Index.