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Notes On The Rockumentary Renaissance, Michael Brendan Baker

Faculty Publications and Scholarship

Rockumentaries are, generally speaking, documentary films about rock music and related idioms, and usually feature some combination of performance footage, interviews, and undirected material. The genre arrived when it did because of the profile of rock music within youth culture and the transformation of the music industry, and it was delivered to the screen with tools and technology newly available to filmmakers at the time. Rockumentary emerges in the 1960s as part of a larger shift in the character and content of Western youth culture and popular music and ascends to the status of the theatrical documentary par excellence through …