[Commlist] new book: Documentary Across Platforms

*Documentary Across Platforms***

Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics

*Patricia R. Zimmermann & Foreword by Gina Marchetti***

*_https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/documentary-across-platforms_*

In /Documentary Across Platforms/, noted scholar of film and 
experimental media Patricia R. Zimmermann offers a glimpse into the 
ever-evolving constellation of practices known as "documentary" and the 
way in which they investigate, engage with, and interrogate the world. 
Collected here for the first time are her celebrated essays and 
speculations about documentary, experimental, and new media published 
outside of traditional scholarly venues. These essays envision 
documentary as a complex ecology composed of different technologies, 
sets of practices, and specific relationships to communities, 
engagement, politics, and social struggles.

Through the lens of reverse engineering—the concept that ideas just like 
objects can be disassembled to learn how they work and then rebuilt into 
something new and better—Zimmermann explores how numerous small-scale 
documentary works present strategies of intervention into existing power 
structures. Adaptive to their context, modular, and unfixed, the 
documentary practices she explores exploit both sophisticated high-end 
professional and consumer-grade amateur technologies, moving through 
different political terrains, different platforms, and different 
exhibition contexts. Together these essays demonstrate documentary’s 
role as a conceptual practice to think through how the world is 
organized and to imagine ways that it might be reorganized with actions, 
communities, and ideas.

**

*Patricia R. Zimmermann*is Professor of Screen Studies at Ithaca College 
and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. She is 
the author and editor of numerous titles including /Reel Families: A 
Social History of Amateur Film;/ (with Scott MacDonald) /The Flaherty: 
Decades in the Cause of Independent Film/; and (with Helen De Michiel) 
/Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice/.


*Indiana University Press**| October 2019 | 296pp | 9780253043474 | PB | 
£25.99**

*Price subject to change.

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