Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering

This volume examines documentary films that compel us to bear witness, move us to anger or tears, and possibly mobilize us to action. The essays gathered here analyze questions regarding the usefulness and legitimacy of documentary testimony: What is the value of the historical archive the televised public hearings or activist online videos constitute? Is it made part of the official record, or dismissed as renegade or ephemeral? To what extent can documentary bring about social change? How do the documentary testimonies compensate for or account for the frailty of memory?

Author: Bhaskar Sarkar
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 11/11/2009
Pages: 286
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.80h x 6.00w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9780415996648

About the Author

Bhaskar Sarkar is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition.

Janet Walker is Professor and former chair of the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her many authored and edited books include Couching Resistance: Women, Film, and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry, Feminism and Documentary, Westerns: Films through History, and Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust.