Engaging with Reality

Description

As our world becomes more globalized, documentary film and television tell more cosmopolitan stories of the world’s social, political and cultural situation. Ib Bondebjerg examines how global challenges are reflected and represented in documentaries from the United States, the United Kingdom and Scandinavia after 2001. The documentaries deal with the war on terror, the globalization of politics, migration, the multicultural challenge and climate change.



Engaging with Reality is framed by theories of globalization and delves into the development of a new global media culture. It also deals with theories of documentary genres and their social and cultural functions. It discusses cosmopolitanism and the role and forms of documentary in a new digital and global media culture. It will be essential reading for those looking to better understand documentary and the new transnational approach to modern media culture.

Introduction: Documentary, contemporary society and media culture 

PART I: Globalization, documentary film and television

Chapter 1: Globalization in a mediated world

Chapter 2: Sociology and aesthetics of documentary genres

Chapter 3: Engaging with and investigating reality: the social and political documentary

PART II: War, terror and democracy: the post-9/11 documentary

Chapter 4: Into the dark side: the politics of war

Chapter 5: On the battleground: reporting and representing war

Chapter 6: Behind the headlines: documentaries, war, terror and everyday life

PART III: A new global order: political, social and cultural challenges

Chapter 7: Politics and spin in a mediated world

Chapter 8: A multicultural world: migration, culture and everyday life

Chapter 9: Risk society: the environmental challenge

Conclusion: Cosmopolitan narratives: documentary in the new digital media culture

Sujets

• Performing Arts
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Película fotográfica
• Reference
• Globalization
• Media studies
• Documentary film
• Cultural Studies
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 28 mars 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783202409
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2014 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2014 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Upper left cover photo:
Still from Blood in the Mobile (2010). Photo: Mark Craemer.
Courtesy director: Frank Piasecki Poulsen.
Upper right cover photo:
Framegrab from My Iranian Paradise (2008). Directors: Katia Forbert Petersen and Anette Mari Olsen. Courtesy: Katia Forbert Petersen.
Lower left cover photo:
Still from Stealing Africa (2012). Director: Christoffer Guldbrandsen. Courtesy cinematographer: Lars Skree.
Lower right cover photo:
Still from Burma VJ (2008). Director: Anders Østergaard. Cinematographer: Simon Plum. Courtesy head of production company Magic Hour Film: Lise Lense Møller.
Cover designer: Stephanie Sarlos
Copy-editor: Richard Walsh
Book manager: Tim Mitchell
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-189-1
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-240-9
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-241-6
Printed and bound by Hobbs the Printers Ltd, UK
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Documentary, contemporary society and media culture
PART I: Globalization, documentary film and television
Chapter 1:Globalization in a mediated world
Chapter 2:Sociology and aesthetics of documentary genres
Chapter 3:Engaging with and investigating reality: the social and political documentary
PART II: War, terror and democracy: the post-9/11 documentary
Chapter 4:Into the dark side: the politics of war
Chapter 5:On the battleground: reporting and representing war
Chapter 6:Behind the headlines: documentaries, war, terror and everyday life
PART III: A new global order: political, social and cultural challenges
Chapter 7:Politics and spin in a mediated world
Chapter 8:A multicultural world: migration, culture and everyday life
Chapter 9:Risk society: the environmental challenge
Conclusion: Cosmopolitan narratives: documentary in the new digital media culture
References
Index of names and titles
Acknowledgements
The direct inspiration to write this book came in 2006 after having been to the cinema for the opening night of Danish director Christoffer Guldbrandsen’s documentary film The Secret War . It is a documentary dealing with the Danish participation in the American led coalition against terror, in this case the war in Afghanistan. It is a very critical, investigative film, asking questions about the political background for the war and the way the military acts, especially in relation to prisoners and the Geneva Convention. It was not the film in itself that started the project, but the very heated discussions it raised in the Danish public, both on a more national level and in relation to more global issues and involvement. My interest in this incident was further fuelled by the heated debate on what a documentary film is, what a documentary film can and cannot be, in short what the role of documentary is in society.
The project started as an interest in documentary films dealing with war, in particular the kinds of wars Western countries have been involved in in Iraq and Afghanistan since the tragic 9/11 terror attack in New York. To frame the Danish case it became necessary to look into documentaries from other countries, and I decided to compare films from the USA and the UK on war and the War on Terror. However, while doing research on this topic in those countries it became more and more obvious that the broader issue of globalization and the way documentaries respond to, and engage in, global challenges would frame the case of war and terror more clearly.
Hence the book developed into a project on how documentaries engage in global challenges and what globalization means in our present situation. Besides the War on Terror, the issues that seemed the most obvious were the way the global dimensions of politics were described, the challenge of migration and multicultural developments and the environmental challenge. So it became a book about documentary and globalization seen through four different themes and cases and based on examples from three different countries. It is not a book about the global documentary scene as such, but a case study of how global themes are dealt with in selected countries and selected documentaries representing different genres. An important aspect of the book is furthermore to look into the ways in which documentary forms can influence our ways of thinking and feeling about the world, how documentaries as narratives of reality can shape and change social imaginaries of global problems and distant others.
Many of the chapters in this book were presented in very early form at MA level courses for students in my Department for Media, Cognition and Communication at the University of Copenhagen, and for colleagues at our regular research group meetings at this department. I would like collectively to thank my students and colleagues for valuable debates, comments and criticism. Special thanks to my philosophy colleague, Nils Holtug, for critical reading and comments on the philosophical and theoretical parts of the chapter on the multicultural challenge. Many of the chapters have also been presented at international seminars and conferences, for instance Visible Evidence Conferences, The Hong Kong International Documentary Conference, The ECREA conference in Barcelona, the DigiCult conference in Paris and a number of International Conferences in Copenhagen, conferences that have all helped to sharpen the arguments.
Parts of this book have been published in earlier versions, but are all revised and expanded in this book. Part II of the book is partly based on two articles: ‘War on Terror – War on Democracy?’ in Northern Lights (2009b) 7: 29–50; ‘Behind the Headlines: Documentaries, the War on Terror and Everyday Life’ in Studies in Documentary Film (2009c) 3(3): 219–31. An earlier version of Chapter 7 appeared as an article ‘Politics Backstage: Television Documentaries, Politics and Politicians’ in Tidskriftet Politik 9(2): 45–54.
Ib Bondebjerg, Copenhagen, 21 May 2013.
Introduction
Documentaries, contemporary society and media culture
In his book The Cosmopolitan Vision (2006), Ulrich Beck differentiates between ‘globalization’, which he argues is too often seen only as the neoliberal growth of the economy, the market, and the free flow of goods and capital; and ‘cosmopolitanism,’ which he connects to a growing global public awareness of crisis, to a cosmopolitan empathy and a globalization of emotions (Beck 2006: 5ff). Globalization then, is not just taking place behind closed corporate doors or among global political elites, it is present in different forms and shapes in our media and thus our everyday life. The spectacular and horrifying images of the attack on The World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 are symbolic in the sense that those images were immediately circulated in a broad and diverse global public sphere through visual and other media. They were reported and reacted on in probably many different ways, but the incident and the mediation of it signals a new global media age that began in the 1960s but has now been developed further with a new digital speed.
The world as we know it today is still very much a world characterized by huge global divides. Even though the Internet represents a high point in the development of global connectivity, the whole world is far from being connected to the same degree to this emerging global media sphere. Globalization looks very different when seen from New York and from a remote, poor African village. But the media play an increasingly crucial role in letting audiences face and become aware of global problems, and as Beck has pointed out, media can play a role in creating a globalization of emotions, empathy and understanding of global issues and challenges. Creating a ‘simultaneity of events and knowledge’ globally will increase the cosmopolitan dimension of globalization (Beck 2006: 42). Documentary forms of film and television have a special role to play in this creation of both a cosmopolitan knowledge of global challenges and realities, and a stronger emotional understanding of our global others. Documentary film and television claim a special relation to our factual reality, and by circulating stories about aspects of our global reality and to a growing global audience they create new mental frameworks for understanding this reality. Even though the films and television programmes that are focused on in this book are made by directors from a few Western countries, they take us backstage not only in world politics, but also the lives of people in many parts of the world. They tell stories and reveal consequences of global politics and global challenges that have universal dimensions and affect us all.
This book is about documentary films and television in the US, UK and Denmark after 2001 dealing with some of the most central global themes and challenges of politics, conflicts of war and terrorism, the multicultural development in a world of migration and great social and economic divides, and the ecological challenge of climate change. Documentaries come in many forms and genres, but they all deal with contemporary realities, with ways of living, and social and cultural issues that can have strong critical and emotional effects. Media in general and documentary forms in particular thus have a special role in dealing with these global challenges, in making them visible and understandable to us. Often b