Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Average Customer Rating:

A fine introduction.

Customer Rating:

I don't think I've written a review on Amazon.com in almost ten years, but when I saw that this fine book had one review -- for one star -- I wanted to offer something of a corrective. As its title states, this is an introduction to the critical study of documentary films, and it is a good one at that. While it introduces a lot of elementary concepts and questions that are fundamental to the genre -- What makes a film a documentary? What ethical issues are unique to the genre? etc -- it does so in a voice that is engaging, scholarly and literate. Put another way, this book manages to be an introduction to a subject without resorting to a dumbed-down, "Documentaries for Dummies" approach. A worthwhile read for students of the genre and aspiring documentarians.

Bad Introduction

Customer Rating:

How to take seriously a comparatively recent book that first claims that all films are documentaries and than goes on to explain how there are various kinds of documentaries (some of which are obviously not documentaries at all)? Naturally, the terminology in film studies is not very well systematized, but there is no need to forget the work done in this field so far - this contemporary book, in a sense, seems to have been written immediately after classical (but somewhat dated) writings of John Grierson and Andre Bazin! A great deal of Grierson's and Bazin's writing is still interesting, much of it still holds water, but this is a diluted and clumsily combined version of their respective approaches. "Reality" is a dangerous concept if we don't explain or define it, so is "realism" and of course, in this book particularly, so is the "documentary". After the start that confuses the issues, some lucid observations and potentially explanatory examples lead nowhere and promote confusion. It's a pity.