{"product_id":"kill-the-documentary","title":"Kill the Documentary","description":"Can the documentary be useful? Can a film change how its viewers think about the world and their potential role in it? In \u003ci\u003eKill the Documentary\u003c\/i\u003e, the award-winning director Jill Godmilow issues an urgent call for a new kind of nonfiction filmmaking. She critiques documentary films from \u003ci\u003eNanook of the North\u003c\/i\u003e to the recent Ken Burns\/Lynn Novick series \u003ci\u003eThe Vietnam War\u003c\/i\u003e. Tethered to what Godmilow calls the “pedigree of the real” and the “pornography of the real,” they fail to activate their viewers’ engagement with historical or present-day problems. Whether depicting the hardships of poverty or the horrors of war, conventional documentaries produce an “us-watching-them” mode that ultimately reinforces self-satisfaction and self-absorption.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn place of the conventional documentary, Godmilow advocates for a “postrealist” cinema. Instead of offering the faux empathy and sentimental spectacle of mainstream documentaries, postrealist nonfiction films are acts of resistance. They are experimental, interventionist, performative, and transformative. Godmilow demonstrates how a film can produce meaningful, useful experience by forcefully challenging ways of knowing and how viewers come to understand the world. She considers her own career as a filmmaker as well as the formal and political strategies of artists such as Luis Buñuel, Georges Franju, Harun Farocki, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Rithy Panh, and other directors. Both manifesto and guidebook, \u003ci\u003eKill the Documentary\u003c\/i\u003e proposes provocative new ways of making and watching films.","brand":"Columbia University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54219809194328,"sku":"9780231202763","price":112.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780231202763.jpg?v=1770446711","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/kill-the-documentary","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}