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In recent decades, a type of historical documentary has emerged that focuses on tightly circumscribed subjects, personal archives, and first-person perspectives. Efrén Cuevas categorizes these films as "microhistorical documentaries" and examines how they push cinema's capacity as a producer of historical knowledge in new directions.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Film and History
1. Microhistory and Documentary Film
2. The Archive in the Microhistorical Documentary
3. Péter Forgács's Home Movie Chronicle of the Twentieth Century:
The Maelstrom,
Free Fall, and
Class Lot4. The Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II:
Something Strong Within,
A Family Gathering,
From a Silk Cocoon, and
History and Memory5. Rithy Panh's Autobiographical Narrative of the Cambodian Genocide:
The Missing Picture6. Identities and Conflicts in Israel and Palestine:
Israel: A Home Movie,
For My Children,
My Terrorist,
My Land Zion, and
A World Not Ours7. The Immigrant Experience in Jonas Mekas's
Lost, Lost, LostEpilogue: Looking to the Future
Filmography
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Efrén Cuevas
Summary
In recent decades, a type of historical documentary has emerged that focuses on tightly circumscribed subjects, personal archives, and first-person perspectives. Efrén Cuevas categorizes these films as “microhistorical documentaries” and examines how they push cinema’s capacity as a producer of historical knowledge in new directions.
Additional text
Cuevas makes a strong and convincing case for the emergence and significance of what he calls the microhistorical documentary. His astute theorization of this category grounds deep, contextualized studies of films by a variety of documentary filmmakers who evince a microhistorical attitude in cinema. This significant, admirably written book will be of interest to anyone concerned with documentary cinema and with representations of history on film.
