Meanwhile, the flow of conspicuously engaged documentaries continues unchecked.
Life in the muddy forest camp, just up the river from brightly lighted and heavily guarded oil facilities, is something most Westerners won't have seen before, even amid the current outpouring of socially engaged documentaries.
"Topical, politically engaged documentaries, particularly those made by American filmmakers, share in this tendency, offering implicit reassurance even as they deliver bad news about the state of the world".
That's the quality that makes it a Kartemquin film, the latest in a long line of politically engaged documentaries ("Hoop Dreams" is the most famous) produced by the Chicago-based Kartemquin company, founded in 1966 by a group of University of Chicago students.
So, too, could Ben Shahn shift back and forth between socially engaged documentary photography and cartoon-style Social Realist painting; and Richard Pousette-Dart between luminous photographs of fuzzy flowers and luminous, fuzzily textured abstract paintings.
Research objectives are (1) to engage documentary practice with emerging media technologies in an open data space; (2) to prototype tools to facilitate cyclical authoring among a contributors' community.
"This Film Is Not Yet Rated," a feisty, intellectually engaging new documentary by Kirby Dick ("Sick," "Derrida," "Twist of Faith") does not so much answer these questions as explore just why they are so difficult to answer.
Kent Jones's engaging new documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut teems with such moments: the 30-year-old tyro French director asking his hero to explain how he made his films, and the 63-year-old responding in detail, often revealing the lubricious impulses behind such masterpieces as Psycho, The Birds and Marnie.
Does he really think that we are living in the end times for photography, or at least the kind of socially engaged, committed documentary photography that he epitomised?
