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2025 Spring

DOCUMENTARY FILM SEMINAR - FMS367 Spring 2025


Course
Mary Angiolillo
For information about registration please contact our admissions.

This course surveys the history and contemporary vitality of non-fiction films, teaching students to appreciate the social significance and aesthetic possibilities of the form that is considered the taproot of cinema. The curriculum is divided into three sections: in the first, we identify the distinctive development and attributes of documentary; the second explores the range of subjects these films can address, using the largest human rights festival in Europe as a practical laboratory for writing about their topics, and the third outlines documentary’s current characteristics, as a historical chronicle, free associative essay, tester of truth, and ongoing inspiration for fiction films.
Course Contents
THE DISTINCTIONS OF DOCUMENTARY
(Origins and Definitions, Creative Choices: Technologies and Approaches,Social Effects,
Modes and Experiments)
COVERING THE SUBJECTS OF DOCUMENTARY
(Writing about Documentary, Documentary and the Group, Documentary and Individual Performance, Documentary and the Body,Documentary and Memory)
DOCUMENTARY’S MODERN MUTATIONS
(Documentary as a Historical Chronicle, Documentary as a Playful Essay, Documentary Plays with Truth ,Documentary Inspires Fiction)

Here is the course outline:

1. Documentary Film Course Introduction

Feb 3

Introductory Lesson. Conditions surrounding the emergence of documentary film. Early Lumiere and Edison films. Lumiere exercise assigned. Czech Dream screened.

2. Technological Beginnings / The Ethnological Illusion

Feb 10

More on Edison kinetoscope films and Lumiere films; The emergence of documentary storytelling by screening Flaherty's landmark film Nano of the North.

3. Film Truth, City Symphonies

Feb 17

We will discuss Vertov’s theories of film truth, and look at a subgenre of documentary popular in the 1920s - the City Symphony film. Clips screened from Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera and other city symphony films, including Rain by J. Ivens, 1929. Reflexive and poetic modes of documentary discussed. Questions related to "Fascination with Reality" exercise clarified.

4. Lumiere exercise (Fascination with Reality) + British Film Movement

Feb 24

We will screen the short "Lumiere and Company" /Fascination with Reality exercises (to be uploaded before class)

5. British Documentary Film Movement and Propaganda

Mar 3

Lesson on British Documentary Film Movement and Propaganda, screening of Night Mail and clips from propaganda films

6. Direct cinema and cinema vérité

Mar 10

Observation mode of documentary discussed, cinema verité vs direct cinema are compared; Clips are screened from famous documentaries within these movements, such as Primary and Chronicles of a Summer; Salesman is discussed.

7. One World Film Festival

Mar 17, TBA

Participation at screening of documentary film outside AAU /One World Film Festival (to be confirmed, program announced on March 1)

8. The Thin Blue Line / Investigative Documentary

Mar 31

Re-enactments and investigative documentary. Screening of Mighty Times and The Thin Blue Line

9. Documentary Storytelling - Development of Treatment

Apr 7

Discussion of components in a documentary treatment. Portrait samples. Daughter of Danang.

10. Documentary Activism

Apr 14

Documentaries made as provocation to action. The films of Michael Moore.

11. Possible Guest Filmmaker

Apr 28

TBA

12. Time-Lapse Documentaries

May 5

Time-lapse as a subgenre and technique. The work of Helen Trestiková

13. Treatments pitched

May 12

Pitching of imagined documentary projects

14. Final Exam (Taken online)

May 19

Objective exam on principles related to major periods in documentary history, documentary modes and landmark film.