Book description
This is a celebration of the art of the documentary from its
origins to the present day. With the critical and box-office success
in the nineties of Microcosmos, When We Were Kings, Hoop Dreams and
Hearts of Darkness, documentary films are now attracting more popular
interest than at almost any time in their history. To contexualize and
encourage this renewal of interest in cinema's most under-appreciated
genre, Macdonald and Cousins have compiled a wide-ranging collection
of writings about and by documentary film-makers and their work.
Underlying the entire collection is the passionate beleif that
documentary can be as diverse and imaginatively rich as non-fiction
writing - by turns polemical, personal, journalistic, emotive and poetic.
Kevin Macdonald is the Oscar-winning director of One Day in
September, Into the Void, The Last King of Scotland, State of Play and
Eagle of the Ninth. He has written a biography of his grandfather,
Emeric Pressburger, and is the co-editor with Mark Cousins of Imagining
Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary. Mark Cousins is a broadcaster,
historian and film critic, the author of The Story of Film and
Widescreen: Watching. Real. People. Elsewhere. He writes regularly for
the film magazine Prospect and is an honorary lecturer in film, media
and journalism at the University of Stirling.
