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In this seminar we will analyze how documentary film has been engaging critically with U.S. national identity and American history since the 1930s. Apart from exploring the conventions and evolution of documentary film we will discuss how the narration of the U.S.A. in this genre has developed from the government-sponsored The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and Robert J. Flaherty’s anthropologically-inclined Louisiana Story (1948) to a myriad of critical stances toward national policies in films like Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963), Harlan County, USA (1976), Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), Why We Fight (2005), An Inconvenient Truth (2006), and Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience (2007). Another segment of our class will be devoted to the versions of American history that are created in films like The Atomic Café (1982), Berkeley in the Sixties (1990), The Civil War (1990), and Walkout (2006).
Our main secondary source will be Jeffrey Geiger’s American Documentary Film: Projecting the Nation (2009). Course readings will be compiled in a reader, which will be available after the first class meeting.
Please note: We will view the films together in class. This is why individual seminar sessions may be up to four hours long, although this course counts only as a 2 SWS seminar.
First class meeting: April 17, 2013.
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