New Nonfiction Film: Art, Poetics, and Documentary Theory
Ebook
Overview
New Nonfiction Film: Art, Poetics and Documentary Theory is the first book to offer a lengthy examination of the relationship between fiction and documentary from the perspective of art and poetics. The premise of the book is to propose a new category of nonfiction film that is distinguished from – as opposed to being conflated with – the documentary film in its multiple historical guises; a premise explored in case-studies of films by distinguished artists and filmmakers (Abbas Kiarostami, Ben Rivers, Chantal Akerman, Ben Russell Pat Collins and Gideon Koppel). The book builds a case for this new category of film, calling it the ‘new nonfiction film,’ and argues, in the process, that this kind of film works to dismantle the old distinctions between fiction and documentary film and therefore the axioms of Film and Cinema Studies as a discipline of study.
Challenges the division between fiction and nonfiction as the pivotal categories within film criticism, bringing the two strands of film studies discourse, feature-length and documentary film, into a much needed dialogue.
Develops a much-needed context for new documentary within the realm of the creative arts
Extends the understanding of the poetic mode formulated by theorist Bill Nichols
Adds a new category of choice to film studies, by establishing a typology of films that challenge, at their core, the classification of documentary and nonfiction film
Introduction
New Nonfiction Film
A Certain Ratio (of Negation)
Acts of Experimentation . . .
Nonfiction as a Speculative Mode of Inquiry: Subjectivity and the Films of Ben Rivers and Ben Russell
Not Documentary . . .
The Mechanistic “In Itself” / the Speculative Treatment of Subjectivity
1.A Film About a Film Within a Film Adapted from a Short Story . . .
A Marriage of Form and Content
“I Don’t Care about the Other. I am the Other.”
2. (Self as) Modèle Environments: Nonfiction Film
Into the Abyss
“What”- “Who”
3. The Utopian Promise: John Akomfrah’s Poetics of the Archive
The Time of Nonfiction
A Poet (in and) of the Archive
Back to a Future
The Time for Promises
Conclusion
4. “In My Mind, My Dreams are Real”: Abbas Kiarostami and the Roots of New Nonfiction Film
Before the Law
The Becoming Reality of Fiction
Kiarostami Meets Errol Morris/ Makhmalbaf Meets Sabzian
Now, it’s Nothing but Flowers
Real Traumas/ Traumas of the Real: The Koker Trilogy
The Marriage of Fiction and Non-Fiction
5. After Kiarostami: Cinemas of (Speculative) Nonfiction
Cinema of Trauma
Trauma and Speculative Nonfiction
In Search of the In-Itself
A Documentary Fallacy
The Earth Won’t Listen
6. Nonfiction, the Cognitive Turn, and Chantal Akerman’s D’Est (1993)
Bordering on Fiction
The Displaced m(Other)
Metal Repairs
7. The Poetic Mode, Depiction and Nonfiction: Sense- Value and Gideon Koppel’s Sleep Furiously(2007)
To Document . . . (or) . . . to Depict
To Speak or Not to Speak: The Double Entendre
The Art of the Document
Conclusion
Cinema Will Save Us
The Three S’s
A Final Note
An important book ... Refreshingly international in its references and framework. The book is at its best when it is engaged in close textual analysis informed by Bresson’s modèle ... Rich in theoretical scope.
A much-needed stepping-stone in the unblurring of lines between documentary, nonfiction, and nonfiction film.
[Waldron] is a perceptive analyst, engaging closely with the discursive organisation of his chosen texts and the experience of viewing them, while showing a lively interest in bringing wide-ranging ideas to bear.
It is rare these days that a book delivers a new critical concept and category that completely transforms our understanding of cinema, but that’s precisely what Dara Waldron does in New Nonfiction Film. Refusing the deadlock between the real and the fictive that has long circumscribed thinking about documentary, Waldron explores contemporary cinematic practices that seek truth by way of fiction. Through a series of revelatory readings of films by John Akomfrah, Chantal Akerman, Abbas Kiarostami, Pat Collins, and Ben Rivers, among others, Waldron’s New Nonfiction Film identifies a poetics of the moving image that defines the boldest examples of contemporary filmmaking
Waldron’s book offers a much needed contribution to the study of documentary as art. He explores the poetics of documentary by focusing on its outliers-art forms and experimentations-that have much to offer the ways we think about the changing nature of nonfiction film. New Nonfiction Film: Art, Poetics and Documentary Theory provides an important and lucid reference point in the expanding terrain of documentary studies and is the product of a deep engagement with a range of filmmakers and their work.
New Nonfiction Film explores the work of Chantal Akerman, John Akomfrah, and Abbas Kiarostami, among other boundary-pushing artists and directors. Combining close analysis with philosophical speculation, Dara Waldron shows how a growing number of films are orbiting the categories of both fiction and documentary, yet resisting the gravitational pull of each, in search of new trajectories. Questions of ethics, aesthetics, knowledge, and subjectivity all come to bear in this valuable contribution to documentary studies.
- Title: New Nonfiction Film: Art, Poetics, and Documentary Theory
- Author: Dara Waldron
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2018
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 224
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781501322525, 9781501362163, 150136216X, 1501322524
- Resource ID: LLS:9781501322525
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T15:01:28Z
Dara Waldron is a Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies at the Limerick Institute of Technology, Republic of Ireland, with a particular focus on Lens-Based media (differing forms of moving image practices). He is the author of Cinema and Evil: Moral Complexities and the “Dangerous” Film (2013).