Omschrijving
The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama is a collection of in-depth, substantive interviews with filmmakers devoted to documenting places and events that most of us never get to see-often, places and events that have considerable influence on our lives.
The Sublimity of Document may be the most aesthetically satisfying book of published interviews I've ever read. MacDonald has included a wealth of black-and-white images to accompany each interview and several separate sections of glossy, full-color frames from many of the films under discussion.
MacDonald focuses his extraordinary interviewing skills on work that stares more than stipulates. Sublime documents, those films that make us gasp at the wonder of the world more than the genius of the artist, are a forgotten treasure, until now. Reading this book can only enlarge our love for what the camera sees when it looks afresh at the world we think we already know.
With this, his seventh collection of interviews with avant-garde and documentary filmmakers, Scott MacDonald proves himself an axiom of cinema. His achievement is astonishing.
Scott MacDonald is author of the oral history series, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers and of Avant-Doc: Intersections of documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema (Oxford, 2015). He has taught film history since 1970, most recently, at Bard College, Harvard University, and at Hamilton College.