239147 The Nation on the Editing Table - Constructing Imagined Communities in Documentary Film from Latin America (S) (WiSe 2011/2012)

The last two decades have seen the proliferation of documentary filmmaking in the Americas with the return of documentaries even to the commercial circuits of film distribution. At the same time, there has been a constant aesthetic innovation and experimentation. Both aspects suggest us to look back at the history of documentary filmmaking and try to understand how, from the very beginnings of documentary filmmaking in the 1920s, these films have played a crucial role in what H. Bhabha has called the narration of nation (Bhabha, 1990). With its extremely wide variety of formats and genres, documentary discourse has had a crucial impact on how people conceive the imagined communities they belong to and identify with. It has also been formative in the ways in which people relate lived time to national history, and in which they cognitively map or visualize territorial belonging. Ultimately, documentary filmmaking lays the groundworks for provides patterns for the ways in which the public sphere, as well as the rules of political or medial engagement, are construed.

Based on a corpus of canonical documentary films from North and South America, this seminar will provide an insight into film theory, film analysis and an overview of the history of documentary filmmaking.

Teilnahmevoraussetzungen, notwendige Vorkenntnisse

You will need to know enough Spanisch to work with films from Latin America