297 project: Miranda July's "Assignments"

James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) opened a whole, huge space for considering and pursuing documentary writing that owes more to what we will term the documentary impulse than it does to the genre of the documentary. Whereas the genre of documentary has grown in the last 60 years or so out of newspaper, magazine, radio, and tv journalism, the documentary impulse seems present in a huge array of literary and other art that is not bound, as journalism is, to the supposedly objective representation of the “facts.” In some ways, the documentary impulse may be considered a method for documenting the huge array of experiences that are, for various reasons, problematic to journalism, and to journalism’s conception of a knowable, objective reality.

That Agee – a journalist – grappled with these ideas is clear from the first pages of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; and for this reason his and Walker Evans’ text seems a valuable foundation for our consideration of What May Be Documented and how Art and Artistic structures become necessary – (and may be the only/best means) for this sort of documentation. Our goals then, in this class, circumvent attempts to define what it and is not documentary art. Instead, we will look at a variety of texts for what they may teach us about representing oftentimes hidden phenomena in the world around us.

Relevant Media

"A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" Dave Eggers
"Here, Bullet" Brian Turner
"Novels In Three Lines" Félix Fénéon
"One Big Self" C.D. Wright
"The Americans" Robert Frank
"The God Of Small Things" Arundhati Roy
"The Last Novel" David Markson
"The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks" Charles Simic
Billy Bragg
Ken Burns
Magic Realism: Salman Rushdie, Mikhail Bulgakov, Miguel Ángel Asturias (and so many more)
Neutral Milk Hotel, and Jeff Mangum's obsession with Anne Frank
Photos by John Cohen
Richard Misrach
Scorsese's "The Last Waltz" / songs by The Band

Tuesday, 17 February 2009

Miranda July's "Assignments"

No comments:

Post a Comment

Relevant Media

Relevant Online Media

Documentary Studies Resources

Labels

Blog Archive