From city symphony to global city film : documentary display and the corporeal

In the introduction to his history of the relationship between the body and the city in Western civilisation, Richard Sennett includes an anecdote about attending a cinema in New York. Sennett uses the story of watching film as a way of commenting on the place of the body and senses within urban settings and is concerned to document \u27physical sensations in urban space\u27 as a way of addressing what he sees as the \u27tactile sterility which afflicts the urban environment.\u27[1] While Sennett\u27s work performs an important task by drawing attention to various historical conditions implicated in urban and metropolitan experience, it is possible to rework the categories he deploys - bodies, the city, and film - into a very different argument concerning representations of the city. Indeed the three categories coalesce in the so-called city film - works which include the \u27city symphony\u27 of the 1920s and subsequent documentary representations of urban spaces, among them the New York City films of the 1940s and 1950s, and films of non-Western cities produced in the decades from the 1960s to the present - within which the city is realised through a focus on people. <br /

History, memory, and the politics of programming : the video work of Richard Fung

Richard Fung, a Toronto-based video artist and cultural critic, was born in Trinidad in 1954, and attended school in Ireland before immigrating to Canada to study at the University of Toronto. Richard Fung has taught at the Ontario College of Art and Design, and has been a visiting professor in the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York in Buffalo. He is currently the coordinator of the Centre for Media and Culture in Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. <br /

Vietnam veteran as ventriloquist

Because of the shame and controversy surrounding the Vietnam war, a stifling of Vietnam veterans\u27 voices resulted. This paper looks at how this came about, as well as the different ways veterans were regarded in society, and the concomitant affects of this on their psychological welfare. The many films dealing with these events are also discussed

Reworking direct cinema: performative display in rockumentary

early 1960s, a staple of American direct cinema. In keeping with its associations with observational direct cinema, rockumentary emphasizes showing over telling: that is, rockumentary privileges the visual capacities of documentary over patterns of exposition. While the &lsquo;documentary display&rsquo; of rockumentary is comparable to certain features of the early &lsquo;cinema of attractions&rsquo; it exceeds such features in its focus on performance. Typically, an emphasis within documentary theory on unmediated and unreconstructed access to the real as the basis of documentary film has not admitted a place for notions of performance before the camera. Rockumentary, with its relentless foregrounding of the performing body and the performance of musicians, revises this understanding. This essay examines rockumentary within the context of observational direct cinema as a mode centred on a documentary performative display as it operates within selected works from the 1960s to the early twenty-first century. The film theorist Brian Winston has claimed that &lsquo;[d]irect cinema made the rock performance/tour movie into the most popular and commercially viable documentary form thus far.&rsquo; The inverse of this assessment is closer to the mark: the rockumentary turned direct cinema into a commercially viable and popular form, one which the rockumentary has at times returned to and innovatively superseded in its scopic attention to performative display

Anti-Americanism: recent sources

Anti-American sentiment has, it would seem, increased in the wake of the election of George Bush, jr. and the US&rsquo;s response to the events ofSeptember 11. Commentators within the US, and globally, have analysed the recent variants of a long-standing condition. Below is a review of recent coverage of the phenomenon. The entries for the print sources are divided into:(1) analyses of anti-Americanism written in the US,(2) accounts of international expressions of anti-Americanism.<br /

It\u27s not only rock and roll: rockumentary, direct cinema and performative display

The documentary form commonly referred to as rockumentary has become, since its inception in the early 1960s, a staple of American direct cinema. In keeping with its associations with observational direct cinema, rockumentary emphasizes showing over telling; that is, rockumentary privileges the visual capacities of documentary over patterns of exposition. While the &lsquo;documentary display&rsquo; of rockumentary is comparable to certain features of&nbsp; the early &lsquo;cinema of attractions&rsquo; it exceeds such features in its focus on&nbsp; performance. Typically, an emphasis within documentary theory on unmediated and unreconstructed access to the real as the basis of documentary film has not admitted a place for notions of performance before the camera. Rockumentary, with its relentless foregrounding of the performing body and the performance of musicians, revises this&nbsp; understanding. This essay examines rockumentary within the context of direct cinema as a mode centred on a documentary performative display as it operates within selected works from the 1960s to the present. The film theorist Brian Winston has claimed that &lsquo;[d]irect cinema made the rock performance/tour movie into the most popular and commercially viable documentary form thus far.&rsquo; The inverse of this assessment may be closer to the mark: the rockumentary turned direct cinema into a commercially and widely available form, one which the rockumentary has at times returned to and superseded in its scopic attention to performative display.<br /