Documentary Film Cultures - Böcker

Documentary, in a small, bilingual nation such as Wales, experiences many of the same challenges that it faces across the world. As the costs of professional documentary production lessen, and the potentialities of internet distribution loosen the grip of its traditional tele-cinematic gatekeepers, documentary production communities face both the potential of new distribution avenues and severe professional precarity.In Wales, the dynamics of this transformation unfolds according to a specific historical, political and cultural situation. With funding, regulatory frameworks, audience taste, viewing figures, and contractual territories all mostly emanating or controlled from across the border in England, at times it is difficult to identify texts that can and can’t be claimed as «Welsh». But then again, contingency and struggle have always been fundamental aspects of Welsh cultural identity.What emerges is not so much the documentary culture of a small nation, but a documentary culture that is still struggling to come to terms with itself, giving Welsh documentary a character defined by a specific set of features: the political and cultural interplay of two languages, a continuation of older British public service broadcasting traditions, the acceptance of the marginal, the close interconnectedness of key players and the often paralysing effect of underfunding.

How did Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population go from being the objectified subjects of documentary films to the directors and producers in the digital age? What prompted these changes and how and when did this decolonisation of documentary film production occur? Taking a long historical perspective, this book is based on a study of a selection of Australian documentary films produced by and about Aboriginal peoples since the early twentieth century. The films signpost significant shifts in Anglo-Australian attitudes about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and trace the growth of the Indigenous filmmaking industry in Australia.Used as a form of resistance to the imposition of colonialism, filmmaking gave Aboriginal people greater control over their depiction on documentary film and the medium has become an avenue to contest widely held assumptions about a peaceful colonial settlement. This study considers how developments in camera and film stock technologies along with filmic techniques influenced the depiction of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. The films are also examined within their historical context, employing them to gauge how social attitudes, access to funding and political pressures influenced their production values. The book aims to expose the course of race relations in Australia through the decolonisation of documentary film by Aboriginal filmmakers, tracing their struggle to achieve social justice and self-representation.