The documentary film and television programmes analyzed in this book are cosmopolitan narratives in the sense that they deal with global challenges and try to develop narratives based on a reality that address us cognitively and emotionally as global citizens. With the rise of a new, digital media culture also documentary film and television have to a larger degree become part of a mediatized reality that stretches beyond the nation state and address a more global public.
Documentary is a creative form dealing with reality. In the many different forms of documentary this reality is presented to us in ways that speak to our social, cultural and psychological imagination and may influence our knowledge and attitudes towards the world and its forms of life and the challenges we face. In a more and more globalized world, documentaries can bring the global reality closer to us.
Engaging With Reality deals with the sociology and aesthetics of documentary forms in a global and digital media culture. The book analyses key documentaries from America, England and Denmark after 2001 dealing with global challenges and themes connected to war and terror, to global politics, to the question of migration and the multicultural challenge and to the climate challenge.
Engaging With Reality contributes to a new and broader understanding of our changing, contemporary media culture and offers a comparative, transnational analysis of the forms and functions of documentary in a new global and digital media culture.
Intellect Books, 288 p.ISBN978-1-78320-189-1. E-book: 978-1-78320-241-6