New Nonfiction Film: Art, Poetics and Documentary Theory is the first book to offer a lengthy examination of the relationship between fiction and documentary from the perspective of art and poetics. The premise of the book is to propose a new category of nonfiction film that is distinguished from - as opposed to being conflated with - the documentary film in its multiple historical guises; a premise explored in case-studies of films by distinguished artists and filmmakers (Abbas Kiarostami, Ben Rivers, Chantal Akerman, Ben Russell Pat Collins and Gideon Koppel). The book builds a case for this new category of film, calling it the 'new nonfiction film,' and argues, in the process, that this kind of film works to dismantle the old distinctions between fiction and documentary film and therefore the axioms of Film and Cinema Studies as a discipline of study.
Introduction
New Nonfiction Film
A Certain Ratio (of Negation)
Acts of Experimentation . . .
Nonfiction as a Speculative Mode of Inquiry: Subjectivity and the Films of Ben Rivers and Ben Russell
Not Documentary . . .
The Mechanistic "In Itself" / the Speculative Treatment of Subjectivity
1.A Film About a Film Within a Film Adapted from a Short Story . . .
A Marriage of Form and Content
"I Don't Care about the Other. I am the Other."
2. (Self as) Modèle Environments: Nonfiction Film
Into the Abyss
"What"- "Who"
3. The Utopian Promise: John Akomfrah's Poetics of the Archive
The Time of Nonfiction
A Poet (in and) of the Archive
Back to a Future
The Time for Promises
Conclusion
4. "In My Mind, My Dreams are Real": Abbas Kiarostami and the Roots of New Nonfiction Film
Before the Law
The Becoming Reality of Fiction
Kiarostami Meets Errol Morris/ Makhmalbaf Meets Sabzian
Now, it's Nothing but Flowers
Real Traumas/ Traumas of the Real: The Koker Trilogy
The Marriage of Fiction and Non-Fiction
5. After Kiarostami: Cinemas of (Speculative) Nonfiction
Cinema of Trauma
Trauma and Speculative Nonfiction
In Search of the In-Itself
A Documentary Fallacy
The Earth Won't Listen
6. Nonfiction, the Cognitive Turn, and Chantal Akerman's D'Est (1993)
Bordering on Fiction
The Displaced m(Other)
Metal Repairs
7. The Poetic Mode, Depiction and Nonfiction: Sense- Value and Gideon Koppel's Sleep Furiously(2007)
To Document . . . (or) . . . to Depict
To Speak or Not to Speak: The Double Entendre
The Art of the Document
Conclusion
Cinema Will Save Us
The Three S's
A Final Note
