HAA 1820 Documentary Film

(offered every other year)

This course examines the historical development of documentary film, and fundamental issues and ideas related to that development. The course begins with the earliest years of the cinema in the late nineteenth century, and includes films from the 1920s (e.g. Nanook of the North, Man With A Movie Camera) government supported film from the United States, Great Britain, and Germany in the 1930s (e.g. The River, Night Mail, Triumph of the Will), World War II documentaries (e.g. The Battle of San Pietro), films from the 1960s and 1970s by Frederick Wiseman and others, as well as more recent films. The three-part premise of the course is that: 1.) documentary films are never “objective”; 2). beyond matters of “topic,” the underlying structure and strategies of any documentary film reveal the culture in which the film was made and the stand of the film-maker within that culture; 3). the most significant documentaries are precisely those that effectively engage the “subjective” interaction between film form and film content.