What I've Been Reading

I wanted to make a blog post to make a note of the books I've borrowed from the library and have been reading for a few weeks. These have inspired me during the process of beginning and refining my video excerpt; they've helped me both conceptually and in post-production due to how relevant they are to the filmmaking styles I've been exploring throughout the course.

The first is a book called Ex-Cinema by Akira Mizuta Lippit. Although this has been a difficult read, it is extremely conceptual and explores philosophical theories of experimental filmmaking and video in depth. I have a few chapters left to read, and I'm particularly interested in reading a chapter called 'Revisionary Cinema', that explores dreams in film and video.

The next is Touch: Sensuous Therory and Multisensory Media by Laura U. Marks. This is a book that explores haptic visuality in total depth, going from analog to digital filmmaking, even exploring haptic visuality in nature documentaries and erotic films. Her chapter on nostalgia and film was useful, as she speaks of younger generations tendency to become enamoured with obsolete filmmaking technologies, which is something I resonate with when it comes to digital camcorders. I'm going to look for more literature on this topic before and during production of my final film.

The Subject of Documentary by Michael Renov was a very resourceful book, that provided many chapters on the genres and styles of filmmaking I've been utilising and inspired by during this course. Especially: 'The Subject in History: The New Autobiography in Film and Video'; 'Technology and Ethnographic Dialogue'; 'New Subjectivities: Documentary and Self-Representation in the Post-verite Age', and 'Domestic Ethnography and the Construction of the "Other" Self'. The last chapter was insightful in how it informed me on the name of the kind of documentary I am working on - domestic ethnogaphy - during which filmmakers normally involve family members or other people from their community to explore their own identity, as well as a larger, collective identity.

Lastly, The Documentary Book by Brian Winston explores a vast array of different documentary types, even subgenres of these documentaries, as well as the history, present, and future of documentary filmmaking. This book uses many documentaries as case studies which I have added to my watchlist in order to source inspiration from.