Uses new critical approaches to demonstrate deep affinities in these vastly different filmmakers’ philosophies on film, fantasy, and reality.
Film study has tended to treat documentary as a marginal form, but as the essays in Three Documentary Filmmakers demonstrate, the films of Jean Rouch, Ross Mc Elwee, and Errol Morris call for, and reward, the sort of criticism expected of serious works in any medium. However, critical methods that illuminate what makes Citizen Kane a great film are not adequate for expressing what it is about Rouch’s The Funeral at Bongo: The Old Annaï, Mc Elwee’s Time Indefinite, and Morris’s The Fog of War that makes them-each in its own way-great films as well. Although these filmmakers differ strikingly from one another, their films are deeply philosophical and personal, and explore the paradoxical relationships between fantasy and reality, self and world, fiction and documentary, dreams and film, filming and living. It is a challenge to find terms of criticism capable of illuminating such works, and the essays in this book rise to that challenge.
Table of Content
Introduction
William Rothman
Part 1. Errol Morris: The Fog of Film
1. Errol Morris’s Irony
Gilberto Perez
2. Errol Morris’s Forms of Control
Ira Jaffe
3. The Philosophy of Errol Morris: Ten Lessons
Carl Plantinga
Part 2. Ross Mc Elwee: I Film Therefore I Am
4. Coincidence in Ross Mc Elwee’s Documentaries
Diane Stevenson
5. Reflections on Bright Leaves
Marian Keane
6. Drifting in Time: Ross Mc Elwee’s Time Indefinite
Jim Lane
7. Surprise and Pain, Writing and Film
Charles Warren
8. Sometimes Daddies Don’t Talk about Things like That
William Rothman
Part 3. Jean Rouch: The Filmmaker as Provocateur
9. Jean Rouch and the Power of the Between
Paul Stoller
10. The Pause of the World
Daniel Morgan
11. Jean Rouch’s Les maîtres fous: Documentary of Seduction, Seduction of Documentary
Alan Cholodenko
12. Petit à Petit and The Lion Hunters
Michael Laramee
13. Jean Rouch as Film Artist: Tourou and Bitti, The Old Anaï, Ambara Dama
William Rothman
Works Cited
List of Contributors
Index
About the author
William Rothman is Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Miami. His many books include Tuitions and Intuitions: Essays at the Intersection of Film Criticism and Philosophy and Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, Second Edition, both also published by SUNY Press.
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