Contemporary Documentary offers a rich survey of the rapidly expanding landscape of documentary film, television, video, and new media. The collection of original essays addresses the emerging forms, popular genres, and innovative approaches of the digital era. The anthology highlights geographically and thematically diverse examples of documentaries that have expanded the scope and impact of non-fiction cinema and captured the attention of global audiences over the past three decades. It also explores the experience of documentary today, with its changing dynamics of production, collaboration, distribution, and exhibition, and its renewed political and cultural relevance. The twelve chapters - featuring engaging case studies and written from a wide range of perspectives including film theory, social theory, ethics, new media, and experience design - invite students to think critically about documentary as a vibrant field, unrestricted in its imagination and quick in its response to new forms of filmmaking. Offering a methodical exploration of the expansive reach of documentary as a creative force in the media and society of the twenty-first century, Contemporary Documentary is an ideal collection for students of film, media, and communication who are studying documentary film.

Contemporary Documentary offers a rich survey of the rapidly expanding landscape of documentary film, television, video, and new media. The collection of original essays addresses the emerging forms, popular genres, and innovative approaches of the digital era. The anthology highlights geographically and thematically diverse examples of documentaries that have expanded the scope and impact of non-fiction cinema and captured the attention of global audiences over the past three decades. It also explores the experience of documentary today, with its changing dynamics of production, collaboration, distribution, and exhibition, and its renewed political and cultural relevance. The twelve chapters - featuring engaging case studies and written from a wide range of perspectives including film theory, social theory, ethics, new media, and experience design - invite students to think critically about documentary as a vibrant field, unrestricted in its imagination and quick in its response to new forms of filmmaking. Offering a methodical exploration of the expansive reach of documentary as a creative force in the media and society of the twenty-first century, Contemporary Documentary is an ideal collection for students of film, media, and communication who are studying documentary film.

"Marcus makes a compelling and well-documented case that the post-1970s culture wars have been fought in large part in terms of competing understandings of the Fifties and Sixties. This is a smart, illuminating study of the political uses of nostalgia." --Paul S. Boyer, editor-in-chief, The Oxford Companion to United States History "This is a terrific and important book. The author weaves together popular cultural influences and politics in a masterly way. In doing so he has advanced the narrow view of cultural studies into the public realm with a bang." --Lary May, author of The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way In the twenty-first century, why do we keep talking about the Fifties and Sixties? The stark contrast between these decades, their concurrence with the childhood and youth of the baby boomers, and the emergence of televison and rock and roll help to explain their symbolic power. In Happy Days and Wonder Years, Daniel Marcus reveals how interpretations of these decades have figured in the cultural politics of the United States since 1970. From Ronald Reagan's image as a Fifties Cold Warrior to Bill Clinton's fandom for Elvis Presley and John F. Kennedy, politicians have invoked the Fifties and Sixties to connect to their public. Marcus shows how films, television, music, and memoirs have responded to the political nostalgia of today, and why our entertainment remains immersed in reruns, revivals, and references to earlier times. This book offers a new understanding of how politics and culture have influenced our notions of the past, and how events from long ago continue to shape our understandings of the present day. Daniel Marcus is an assistant professor in the department of communication at Wayne State University. As a member of the Paper Tiger Television collective, he edited ROAR The Paper Tiger Guide to Media Activism.