Drawn from Life

Issues and Themes in Animated Documentary Cinema

Jonathan Murray, Nea Ehrlich

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Year: 2018
• Edition: 0
• eBook ISBN:
  9780748694129
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Documentary cinema has always drawn from real life, but an increasing number of contemporary filmmakers are going further still, drawing onscreen images of reality through a range of animated filmmaking techniques. Drawn from Life is the first book to explore the field of animated documentaries from a diverse range of scholarly and practice-based perspectives, exploring and proposing answers to a range of questions that preoccupy twenty-first-century film artists and audiences alike: Why use animation to document? How do such images reflect and influence our understanding and experience of reality, whether public or private, psychological or political? From early cinema to present-day scientific research, military uses, digital art and gaming, this book casts new light on the capacity of the moving image to act as a record of the world around us, challenging the orthodox definitions of documentary cinema.

Table of contents

• Drawn from Life
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• The Contributors
• Editors’ Introduction
• Part 1 Past and Present
• 1 From Contextualisation to Categorisation of Animated Documentaries
• 2 Before Sound, there was Soul: The Role of Animation in Silent Nonfiction Cinema
• 3 Indeterminate and Intermediate or Animated Nonfiction: Why Now?
• Part 2 Defining Terms and Contexts
• 4 Animated Documentary, Recollection, ‘Re-enactment’ and Temporality
• 5 The Documentary Attraction: Animation, Simulation and the Rhetoric of Expertise
• 6 Never Mind the Bollackers: Here’s the Repositories, Sites and Archives in Nonfiction Animation
• Part 3 Films and Filmmakers
• 7 Drawings to Remember
• 8 Adorno, Lewis Klahr and the Shuddering Image
• 9 The Reasons for Animating Reality: Animated Documentary and Re-enactment in the Work of Jonas Odel
• 10 Memory Drawn into the Present: Waltz with Bashir and Animated Documentary
• Part 4 Practice-based Perspectives
• 11 Making The Trouble with Love and Sex
• 12 ‘Does this look right?’ Working Inside the Collaborative Frame
• 13 Creative Challenges in the Production of Documentary Animation
• Index