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Sheridan College

Series

Cinema

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Notes On The Rockumentary Renaissance, Michael Brendan Baker Jul 2014

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 …


Dresden Story And The Emergence Of The Talking Head In The Nfb Documentary, Michael Brendan Baker Oct 2008

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 …