Joshua Glick - Böcker

The Oxford Handbook of American Documentary offers new approaches to the study of documentary produced within, or connected to, the United States. Leading scholars of nonfiction and emerging voices in the field examine documentary as a dynamic cultural form that draws on wide-ranging technologies, coheres around different representational modes, and is used for a variety of artistic, political, and entertainment purposes. A pressing concern of many of this volume's authors - like many of the filmmakers they write about - is documentary's ability to not just reach viewers, but to actively engage them in building a more equitable and just world. This volume's twenty-six essays place the act of documentary making within a broader historical context, including macro-level analysis of how policy initiatives or economic shifts impact filmmakers as well as granular attention to how participants of a social movement use film to galvanize support for a cause. Additionally, The Oxford Handbook of American Documentary addresses the ways in which the stylistic tropes and rhetorical conventions of documentary are used to manipulate for political power or profit.

Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958-1977 explores how documentarians working between the election of John F. Kennedy and the Bicentennial created conflicting visions of the recent and more distant American past. Drawing on a wide range of primary documents, Joshua Glick analyzes the films of Hollywood documentarians such as David Wolper and Mel Stuart, along with lesser-known independents and activists such as Kent Mackenzie, Lynne Littman, and Jesus Salvador Trevino. While the former group reinvigorated a Cold War cultural liberalism, the latter group advocated for social justice in a city plagued by severe class stratification and racial segregation. Glick examines how mainstream and alternative filmmakers turned to the archives, civic institutions, and production facilities of Los Angeles in order to both change popular understandings of the city and shape the social consciousness of the nation.