Indiana University Press Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics

In Documentary Across Platforms, noted scholar of film and experimental media Patricia R. Zimmermann offers a glimpse into the continually 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 comprised 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. Review Patricia Zimmermannn's Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics casts a wide net, capturing media ecologies as varied as museum installations, film festival showings, photography, and multiple varieties of internet sharing. . . . Her book is bound to create new paths for exploration and to open up a new awareness of the richness and complexity of the global media landscape.--Inez Hedges "Jump Cut" Zimmermann's anthology envisions documentary as a set of practices that investigate, engage with, and interrogate the world. This collection of essays, a culmination of her scholarship over the past twenty years, is a testament to her groundbreaking work and contribution to the field of documentary studies.--The 2019-2020 Park School Faculty Writing Award Review Patricia Zimmermann has been at the forefront of the development of contemporary documentary studies. From the time of her first intervention (on the previously unremarked significance of amateur film) she has continued to make contributions noted for their scope and originality. Zimmermann has the enviable ability to always be at the cutting edge but never to be faddist. Author: Brian Winston, author of Source: The Documentary Film Book From the Author 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. About the Author 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.