The documentary audit : listening and the limits of accountability /
"Documentaries are often seen and celebrated as "giving voice" to the "voiceless." However, documentaries don't just engage and speak to us about the world we share. Their most common oral and aural conventions model listening habits and practices that shape and influen...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Columbia University Press,
[2025]
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| Edition: | First edition. |
| Series: | Investigating visible evidence.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | "Documentaries are often seen and celebrated as "giving voice" to the "voiceless." However, documentaries don't just engage and speak to us about the world we share. Their most common oral and aural conventions model listening habits and practices that shape and influence how viewers think about marginalized populations and in turn society and structural inequalities. Attending to the many registers of the term "audit" - an auditory counterpart of the gaze; a form of moral and administrative oversight; a ritual of verification; an informal mode of pedagogy - Pooja Ranjan develops a framework for understanding and critiquing three common listening habits that emerged historically in documentary filmmaking: neutral listening, entitled listening, and juridical listening. Ranjan examines older documentaries in conversation with the work of contemporary postcolonial, queer/crip, anti-Zionist, and anti-racist documentary practitioners. More specifically, she considers early sound films advertising the British Crown's telecommunications services and call center documentaries; collaborations among documentarians, people with disabilities, and disability activists in Japan and the USA before and after the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act; and forensic efforts to document and expose anti-Palestinian and anti-Black state violence in the Occupied West Bank and Chicago's Southside. In discussing these films, Ranjan reveals the ways in which the liberal values of objectivity, access, and justice have come to frame documentaries. Throughout, she also examines oppositional modes of listening that exemplify how documentary foregrounds resistant methodologies and epistemologies, disability media and access aesthetics, and abolitionist approaches to media."-- |
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| Physical Description: | xv, 262 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 23 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780231217972 0231217978 9780231217989 0231217986 |