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Dresden Story And The Emergence Of The Talking Head In The Nfb Documentary, Michael Brendan Baker

Faculty Publications and Scholarship

Numerous surveys of the development of documentary cinema and analyses of its transitional moments exist especially those concerning technological evolution and shifts in representational strategy. And yet few histories clearly mark out a space for the emergence of the interview subject as one of the standard rhetorical devices in nonfiction film. These “talking heads” ranging in appearance from speaking subjects directly addressing the camera to the testimony of witnesses addressing an on-screen or off-screen interviewer are a dominant feature of contemporary documentary cinema and a basic component of film and television language. While there are various discussions concerning the ideological …