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This book is a study of documentary series such as Michael Apted's world-famous Seven Up films that set out to trace the life-journeys of individuals from their earliest schooldays till they are fully grown adults. In addition to Seven Up, the book provides extended accounts of the two other best known longitudinal series to have been produced in the last three or four decades. It includes Winifred and Barbara Junge's The Children of Golzow and Swedish director Rainer Hartleb's The Children of Jordbro. The book first examines some of the principal generic features of long docs and considers the highly significant role that particular institutions have had on their production, promotion and dissemination. It then explores a study of how the individual works originated, with a special emphasis on the nurturing role of particular institutions. The book also explores the affinities that long docs have with soap opera texts, which have similar aspirations to neverendingness. Both long docs and soaps rely on an episodic mode of delivery and both seek to persuade their audience that they are attempting to chronicle real-time developments. Finally, the book explores the variety of ways in which long doc filmmakers contrive to bring their work to a satisfactory conclusion.
documentary series How Buildings Learn ( Brand, 1994 ). The problem with architecture, Brand suggested, was it is so often driven by the grand visions of an expert designer, who focus on producing finished blueprints and plans that are not open to adaptation or truly responsive to the needs of inhabitants. A similar line of argument also emerged in the work of John Turner (1972) , who advocated the importance of placing dwellers in control, rejecting the top-down tendency
provides a firm footing from which to interpret not just his films or the wider Hollywood machinery, but to think more carefully about the American polity and its constant, historical and reiterating focus on the mantra of war. Thus Stone’s later films are examined as part of the response to 9/​11 and how America has confronted twenty-​first-​century war, including World Trade Center (2006) and W. (2008) as well as the Untold History (2012) documentary series. As a first step towards that exploration, this chapter begins by revisiting Platoon (1986). As anchor, motivator
This chapter opens with a recent story concerning the mummy Takabuti. In 2020, researchers discovered that Takabuti’s DNA was closer to that of Europeans than of modern Egyptians, a finding that harks back to earlier studies of the so-called ‘White mummy’.
Travelling back to the late nineteenth century, the chapter introduces Flinders Petrie. Petrie was a highly successful archaeologist in his day, whose legacy is now being questioned because of his pseudo-scientific racial theories. Examining skulls from the earliest period of Egyptian civilisation, Petrie posited the existence of a ‘new race’, distinct from the local populations, that was responsible for the achievements of Egyptian culture.
Another form of the quest for the ‘White mummy’ can be found in the present day. The documentary series Ancient Aliens, which attracts as many as 2 million viewers per episode, advances the theory that ancient civilisations were in fact created by aliens. While this is an even more outlandish theory than Petrie’s, it shares the racist assumption that Africans could not be responsible for creating a great civilisation.
The chapter ends with a trip to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, which has an extensive collection of human remains, including thirty-three Egyptian mummies. It reflects on recent efforts to address the presence of African heritage in European museums.
This book is about people willing to do the sorts of things that most others couldn't, shouldn't or wouldn't. While there are all sorts of reasons why people consume substances, the author notes that there are those who treat drug-taking like an Olympic sport, exploring their capacity to really push their bodies, and frankly, wanting to be the best at it. Extreme athletes, death-defiers and those who perform incredible stunts of endurance have been celebrated throughout history. The most successful athletes can compartmentalise, storing away worry and pain in a part of their brain so it does not interfere with their performance. The brain releases testosterone, for a boost of strength and confidence. In bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism (BDSM) play, the endogenous opioid system responds to the pain, releasing opioid peptides. It seems some of us are more wired than others to activate those ancient biological systems, be it through being caned in a dungeon during a lunchbreak or climbing a sheer rock wall at the weekend. Back in 1990, sociologist Stephen Lyng coined the term 'edgework', now frequently used in BDSM circles, as 'voluntary pursuit of activities that involve a high potential for death, physical injury, or spiritual harm'.
There is no soundtrack is a specific yet expansive study of sound tactics deployed in experimental media art today. It analyses how audio and visual elements interact and produce meaning, drawing from works by contemporary media artists ranging from Chantal Akerman, to Nam June Paik, to Tanya Tagaq. It then links these analyses to discussions on silence, voice, noise, listening, the soundscape, and other key ideas in sound studies. In making these connections, the book argues that experimental media art – avant-garde film, video art, performance, installation, and hybrid forms – produces radical and new audio-visual relationships that challenge and destabilize the visually-dominated fields of art history, contemporary art criticism, cinema and media studies, and cultural studies as well as the larger area of the human sciences. This book directly addresses what sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne calls ‘visual hegemony’. It joins a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship that is collectively sonifying the study of culture while defying the lack of diversity within the field by focusing on practitioners from transnational and diverse backgrounds. Therefore, the media artists discussed in this book are of interest to scholars and students who are exploring aurality in related disciplines including gender and feminist studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, urban studies, environmental analysis, and architecture. As such, There Is No Soundtrack makes meaningful connections between previously disconnected bodies of scholarship to build new, more complex and reverberating frameworks for the study of art, media, and sound.
Newspapers, magazines and pamphlets have always been central, almost sacred, forms of communication within Irish republican political culture. While social media is becoming the primary ideological battleground in many democracies, Irish republicanism steadfastly expresses itself in the traditional forms of activist journalism.
Shinners, Dissos and Dissenters is a long-term analysis of the development of Irish republican activist media since 1998 and the tumultuous years following the end of the Troubles. It is the first in-depth analysis of the newspapers, magazines and online spaces in which the differing strands of Irish republicanism developed and were articulated during a period where schism and dissent defined a return to violence.
Based on an analysis of Irish republican media outlets as well as interviews with the key activists that produced them, this book provides a compelling long-term snapshot of a political ideology in transition. It reveals how Irish Republicanism was moulded by the twin forces of the Northern Ireland Peace Process and the violent internal ideological schism that threatened a return to the ‘bad old days’ of the Troubles.
This book is vital for those studying Irish politics and those interestedin activism as it provides new insights into the role that modern activist media forms have played in the ideological development of a 200-year-old political tradition.
expecting, but a virtual bible of advice. March 20 Gary to Alan. Alan! Alan! Alan! I really dearly like you Alan, and I would love to see you succeed as a documentary filmmaker at the highest level. And particularly 243 244 The documentary diaries economically. You are among my favorite documentary producers. But, as much as you know how to make films, you are not quite getting it. Go to page 20 of your new book, 1st paragraph. Therein lies the secret to economic success with documentaries. SERIES! Series, Alan. Anything less than a series is not likely to achieve a
explaining why he didn’t want the program. The primary reason was that opera lovers who view PBS are well served by the broadcast of live opera. There wouldn’t be room on the schedule or demand from that audience for a documentary series about opera because that audience would prefer live opera. I tried to pitch it to the Smithsonian Channel at the suggestion of an American producer friend. I sent the one-sheet and three e-mails to the head of the Smithsonian and never got a whiff of a reply. Another colleague suggested I submit it to Ovation, a US channel whose declared
manner, with small crews embedded in the host societies for several months. See Ichioka ( 1995 ). 2 The Family is viewable online in an abbreviated form at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZArtrC5rpVs . The British series was itself inspired by the US television documentary series, An American Family , about