ENG 3116 Spring 2025 - Wilson

In recent years, the documentary has regained stature among film genres, especially amid a global reckoning with the inequities that have allowed abuses of power and hierarchies to disenfranchise for centuries those who are deemed “other” because of national, ethnic, and racial caste, gender identity, sexuality, socioeconomic status, and other cultural markers. This semester, we will contemplate the following question: How has this genre gone from the bedrock of cinema in the late nineteenth century to a niche genre with the rise of Hollywood studio-driven, commercial entertainment of escapism in the succeeding one to a more democratized agent for truth telling, technological innovation, and social change in the past three decades? At the beginning of cinema in the 1890s, all films were documentaries, and the contemporaneous conventions of “real”-ness became the foundational aesthetics of commercial cinema. This course, a companion for ENG 3110 (Film Genres) and others, charts the evolution of the form’s convention as it continues to redefine the construction of “real”-ness, explore the nature of truth in a post-fact society, and interrogate the politics of representation and the sociological impact of the moving image. Given the historical representations of nationality, race, gender expression, sexualities, socioeconomic status, and other protected areas of identity, some of the required viewing includes images that may be disturbing while offering us occasion to study and learn from the artform’s evolution in documenting them. (This course may satisfy Liberal Studies Humanities and Cultural Practices requirements, the EWM requirement, and an LMC elective.)