Middletown: The Making of a Documentary Film Series (Visual Anthropology)
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Middletown: The Making of a Documentary Film Series will be long cited as a critical contribution to our understanding of the social effects of filmmaking, a field about which we know very little at the moment."
-Dr. Brian Winston of Pennsylvania State University, University Park
"The book stands out as a case study and for the clarity with which it presents its vision of competing models for documentary film based on research. There are few other case studies dealing with such a high profile series of films of interest to both scholars of American and other cultures."
-Christopher Musello of University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
Book Description
Inspired by the immensely influential 1937 sociological study Middletown: A Case Study in Cultural Conflicts by Rovert and Helen Lynd, Peter Davis's six documentary films about Muncie, Indiana, set out to examine the lives of Munsonians in the early 1980s. The disputes and conflicts accompanying the filming revealed more about AMerican values and customs than the films themselves. While attempting to transform the data from the Middletown studies into a meaningful and interesting visual form, the filmmakers were constantly distracted by the pressures, decisions and perils of government- and corporate-funded documentary filmmaking. Dwight W. Hoover, a Muncie historian and collaborator in the iddletown film project, describes why the folms were make and how they changed the lives of everyone involved.
Middletown: The Making of a Documentary Film Series (Visual Anthropology),DWIGHT HOOVER,Routledge,3718605430,Cinema/Film: Book,Documentary films,Documentary mass media,Educational And Documentary Films,Middletown Film Project,Muncie (Ind.),Production and direction,United States
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