Three Documentary Filmmakers: Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, Jean Rouch

William Rothman

Mar 2009 · State University of New York Press

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Film study has tended to treat documentary as a marginal form, but as the essays in Three Documentary Filmmakers demonstrate, the films of Jean Rouch, Ross McElwee, and Errol Morris call for, and reward, the sort of criticism expected of serious works in any medium. However, critical methods that illuminate what makes Citizen Kane a great film are not adequate for expressing what it is about Rouch's The Funeral at Bongo: The Old Annaï, McElwee's Time Indefinite, and Morris's The Fog of War that makes them—each in its own way—great films as well. Although these filmmakers differ strikingly from one another, their films are deeply philosophical and personal, and explore the paradoxical relationships between fantasy and reality, self and world, fiction and documentary, dreams and film, filming and living. It is a challenge to find terms of criticism capable of illuminating such works, and the essays in this book rise to that challenge.

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William Rothman is Professor of Motion Pictures and Director of the Graduate Program in Film Studies at the University of Miami. He is the author of several books, including Documentary Film Classics and Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, and also the editor of several volumes, including Cavell on Film, also published by SUNY Press, and Jean Rouch: A Celebration of Life and Film.