Documentaries such as Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman's Born into Brothels, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, Jeffrey Blitz's Spellbound, along with March of the Penguins and An Inconvenient Truth have achieved critical as well as popular success. Although nonfiction film may have captured imaginations, many viewers enter and leave theaters with a nanve concept of "truth" and "reality"-for them, documentaries are information sources. But is truth or reality readily available, easily acquired, or ...

In order to "construct" a national narrative, unsettling moments of Turkish history have been disavowed by the official discourse in Turkey. As a consequence, uneasy and therefore repressed knowledge of the past, which has not been appropriated as a part of the official discourse on national history, is finding its existence in cinematic representations. Along with the mainstream films in which the official discourses on history resonate, the growing interest in representing the past in cinema in ...

This article argues that Su Friedrich's 1984 film The Ties That Bind employs what were at the time atypical forms and techniques to push the limits of the traditional historical documentary. Its aesthetic experimentation helps to redefine the idea of historical representation in film and does so mainly by treating evidence as both partial (in both senses of the word) and contingent offering a radical challenge to normative history and destabilizing the notion of history as authority. Unlike ...

The growing presence of subjects narrating their lived experiences in documentaries implies their involvement in the making of their own histories. This thesis explores this subjective dimension by examining the formal methods employed by filmmakers in documentaries in which personal stories are performed and/or narrated by subjects. -- Abstract'tan.