ENG 3116 Spring 2024 - Borruso

In this course, students study cinema’s ability to use documentary form to question the nature of truth, the politics of representation, the construction of the real, and the sociology of the image. Looking at documentaries, mockumentaries, and realist films, we will consider how they formulate their arguments and aesthetics as well as how they utilize cinematic elements such as montage, editing, blocking, lighting, and others. We will also examine how these films relate to pivotal film theory texts, thinking about how they illustrate the concepts of writers like Bazin and Eisenstein. With a definition that is difficult to pin down and conventions that are ever-evolving, the documentary, as this course will show, is a uniquely flexible form and one that is equally capable of providing argument, entertainment, education, and visual poetry.