Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics Patricia R. Zimmermann 9780253043474

In Documentary Across Platforms, noted scholar of film and experimental media Patricia R. Zimmermann offers a glimpse into the ever-evolving constellation of practices known as "documentary" and the way in which they investigate, engage with, and interrogate the world. Collected here for the first time are her celebrated essays and speculations about documentary, experimental, and new media published outside of traditional scholarly venues. These essays envision documentary as a complex ecology composed of different technologies, sets of practices, and specific relationships to communities, engagement, politics, and social struggles. Through the lens of reverse engineering-the concept that ideas just like objects can be disassembled to learn how they work and then rebuilt into something new and better-Zimmermann explores how numerous small-scale documentary works present strategies of intervention into existing power structures. Adaptive to their context, modular, and unfixed, the documentary practices she explores exploit both sophisticated high-end professional and consumer-grade amateur technologies, moving through different political terrains, different platforms, and different exhibition contexts. Together these essays demonstrate documentary's role as a conceptual practice to think through how the world is organized and to imagine ways that it might be reorganized with actions, communities, and ideas.

About the Author

Patricia R. Zimmermann is Professor of Screen Studies at Ithaca College and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. She is the author and editor of numerous titles including Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film; (with Scott MacDonald) The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Film; and (with Helen De Michiel) Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice.

Reviews

Zimmermann's anthology envisions documentary as a set of practices that investigate, engage with, and interrogate the world. This collection of essays, a culmination of her scholarship over the past twenty years, is a testament to her groundbreaking work and contribution to the field of documentary studies.

-- The 2019-2020 Park School Faculty Writing Award

Patricia Zimmermannn's Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics casts a wide net, capturing media ecologies as varied as museum installations, film festival showings, photography, and multiple varieties of internet sharing. . . . Her book is bound to create new paths for exploration and to open up a new awareness of the richness and complexity of the global media landscape.

-- Inez Hedges * Jump Cut *

Exploring a wonderfully diverse range of documentary projects that includes installation pieces, archives, still photography, community-based collaborative media, experimental shorts and video art, the essays analyze how work is done, by whom, for whom, to what end, and why these questions matter.

-- Richard Shpuntoff * Documentary *

Patricia Zimmermann's book Documentary Across Platforms provides a knowledgeable insight into the ever-evolving practices beyond conventional non-fiction cinema. It is an important contribution to contemporary documentary studies and also a must-read for all filmmakers and audiences who consider the genre a conceptual practice to think about themselves and the world - how it is and how it might be.

-- Melita Zajc * Modern Times Review *

Zimmermann's invitations to reassess and engage in her own work have taken several forms over the past twenty-five years. They include essays for journals or exhibition catalogs, books, magazine articles, public presentations, handouts for public screenings, and postulates to arouse further conversation. They incorporate personal accounts, deep dives into the archival record, theoretical musings, and the occasional call to arms. Now one can read a thematically arranged selection of this remarkable career in a new collection.

-- Melissa Dollman * The Moving Image *

Patricia R. Zimmerman's Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics is a rich and diverse compendium of texts spanning decades and covering a myriad of topics related to the expanded nature of documentary platforms. . . . Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering, Media, Place and Politics is a vital textual resource for confronting the many changes that have taken place in writing about documentary and practicing documentary that has evolved into such new areas of scholarship in recent years. To remain abreast of these advances is important. It means keeping in touch with an ever-evolving world, something that Zimmerman is well able to do. Here's hoping she can keep doing it well into the future.

-- Dara Waldron * Alphaville *

Patricia R. Zimmerman's Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics is a rich and diverse compendium of texts spanning decades and covering a myriad of topics related to the expanded nature of documentary platforms. Zimmerman, best known for her pioneering scholarship in the area of home movies (considered as a subset of the documentary film), demonstrates a real intellectual zest when moving across the terrain of documentary film practices and their extension into certain areas of contemporary art.

-- Dara Waldron * alphaville / Journal of Film and Media *



Book Information
ISBN 9780253043474
Author Patricia R. Zimmermann
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Weight(grams) 449g