When the flm-maker Morgan Spurlock told an American festival audience 'we live in a world where independent documentary film has truly become the last bastion of free speech' he won a round of applause from the packed house. Michael Chanan's wide-ranging and illuminating study of international documentary film-making re-reads its complex history and present flourishing from the perspective of this fundamentally democratic aim.
 
Chanan traces the history of the documentary from the first Lumiere films to Grierson and his contemporaries, through to Free Cinema, Cinema verite and Direct Cinema, up to the current resurgence of documentary with high profile films such as those of Michael Moore. Chanan's thematic approach takes in topics such as the documentary before documentary, how documentary film language works, the veracity of the image, the construction of the soundtrack, the migration of documentary to television, political documentary, censorship, first-person film-making, and the relation of the archives to history and memory. Drawing on examples of documentary cinema in Japan, Iran and Latin America as well as Europe and the USA, Chanan argues that documentary provides a crucial public space in which ideas are debated, opinion is formed and those in authority are held to account.

Shortlisted for the 2008 Kraszna-Krausz Award for the Best Moving Image Book. For more information about this prize, see the website: http://www.kraszna-krausz.org.uk/

Preface and Acknowledgments    
Part I – Mapping the Field    
1 The New Documentary Wave    
2 The Documentary Field    
3 Rules of Evidence    
Part II – Historical Moments    
4 Documentary before Documentary    
5 Discovery of Space    
6 The Documented Point of View    
7 Soundscapes    
8 Public Address    
9 Essays and Endeavours    
10 Truth Games    
Part III – Contemporary Themes    
11 Different Histories    
12 Living History    
13 The Space of the Subject    
14 After Vérité    
15 History and Memory    
Index    

MICHAEL CHANAN is a documentary film-maker and Professor of Film and Video at Roehampton University.  His films include Detroit - Ruin of a City (with George Steinmetz, 2005).  His books include Cuban Cinema (2003) and Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music (1995).