Documentary's Awkward Turn: Cringe Comedy and Media Spectatorship (Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies) - Softcover

Middleton, Jason

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1138645559 ISBN 13: 9781138645554

Publisher: Routledge, 2015

Synopsis

Despite the prominence of "awkwardness" as cultural buzzword and descriptor of a sub-genre of contemporary film and television comedy, it has yet to be adequately theorized in academic film and media studies. Documentary’s Awkward Turn contributes a new critical paradigm to the field by presenting an analysis of awkward moments in documentary film and other reality-based media formats. It examines difficult and disrupted encounters between social actors on the screen, between filmmaker and subject, and between film and spectator. These encounters are, of course, often inter-connected. Awkward moments occur when an established mode of representation or reception is unexpectedly challenged, stalled, or altered: when an interviewee suddenly confronts the interviewer, when a subject who had been comfortable on camera begins to feel trapped in the frame, when a film perceived as a documentary turns out to be a parodic mockumentary. This book makes visible the ways in which awkwardness connects and subtends a range of transformative textual strategies, political and ethical problematics, and modalities of spectatorship in documentary film and media from the 1970s to the present.

About this title

About the Author

Jason Middleton is Assistant Professor in the English Department and the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, and Director of the Program in Film and Media Studies, at the University of Rochester, USA. He is co-editor of the book Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones (2007).

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1138645559
• ISBN 13: 9781138645554
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200