Documentaries involve self-conscious reflections on modern life. Early newsreels and actualities displayed film’s capacity to document events and everyday life as they happened, leading viewers…
The British Documentary Film Movement refers to the film units pioneered by John Grierson. With the benefit of state sponsorship, Grierson and the filmmakers that…
The Film Section includes entries on a variety of modernist genres, periods, movements, directors, films, and critical modes aligned with modernist aims and intellectual attitudes.…
As an aesthetic principle, montage, defined as the assemblage of disparate elements into a composite whole often by way of juxtaposition, is most often associated…
In Latin American intellectual history, modernism is a term that can be usefully and accurately applied to at least two distinct intellectual movements: a clearly…
Jean Painlevé was a French scientist who was particularly well known for his documentary films about science and the natural world. He was the only…
New Zealand native Len Lye was an experimental innovator in painting, sculpture, documentary film, and animation. After studying indigenous art in Samoa, he emigrated to…
World Film News was a publication that advanced the visibility of the documentary film movement and hosted wide-ranging debates over film, politics, and aesthetics. The…
Widely considered one of the greatest documentaries ever made, Night and Fog [Nuit et brouillard] is a 1955 French short film about the Holocaust, combining…
Humphrey Jennings (1907–50) is best remembered as one of Britain's most dynamic documentary filmmakers, but he was also at the centre of the key cultural…
Joris Ivens (Georg Henri Anton Ivens), nicknamed “The Flying Dutchman” for his globe-trotting career, was a Dutch documentary maker. His political commitment and deft use…
Basil Wright was a prominent figure in the British documentary film movement. He attended the first screening of John Grierson’s Drifters (1929), which amplified his…
Dorothea Lange is best known as a documentary photographer for the United States Department of Agriculture’s Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration) during the…
Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless captures French New Wave’s rejection of traditional cinematic form, and its style has influenced alternative, political, and documentary filmmakers.
Walker Evans was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration during the American Depression. His documentary style, historically regarded…
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Havana, 1928–1996), known to his closest friends and colleagues as Titón, was a Cuban writer and director of over 20 features, documentaries,…
Chronique d’un Été [Chronicle of a Summer] is a documentary film studying young working people in Paris, made by visual anthropologist Jean Rouch, sociologist Edgar…
Alberto Cavalcanti was a Brazilian-born film director and producer who made significant contributions to documentary and post-war cinema. In 1926 he made his first film,…
Mrinal Sen is an Indian film director closely associated with the Indian New Wave (alternatively known as the Parallel Cinema). Born in Faridpur, now Bangladesh,…
Roberto Rossellini (Roberto Gastone Zeffiro Rossellini, Rome, May 8, 1906—June 3, 1977) was an Italian film director, screenwriter, and producer. His early work appeared at…
Monochrome painting, otherwise known in Korea as Tansaekwa, was an art movement that emerged after the Korean War, lasting from the late 1960s through to…
This entry surveys the history and aesthetics of the city symphony film (or city film). It traces its intellectual and aesthetic origins in the late…
The Korean New Wave generally refers to the art cinema produced in South Korea starting in the late 1980s as the country liberalised after several…
Since the late 1960s, Austrian-born VALIE EXPORT has been an influential and controversial figure in feminist art history. Her artistic practice includes a variety of…