Screening Reality, Jon Wilkman
Screening Reality, Jon Wilkman
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Screening Reality
How Documentary Filmmakers Reimagined America

Author: Jon Wilkman

Narrator: Bob Souer

Unabridged: 15 hr 33 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/18/2020


Synopsis

Amidst claims of a new "post-truth" era, documentary filmmaking has experienced a golden age. Today, more documentaries are made and widely viewed than ever before, illuminating our increasingly fraught relationship with what's true in politics and culture. For most of our history, Americans have depended on motion pictures to bring the realities of the world into view. And yet the richly complex, ever-evolving relationship between nonfiction movies and American history is virtually unexplored.

Screening Reality is a widescreen view of how American "truth" has been discovered, defined, projected, televised, and streamed during more than one hundred years of dramatic change, through World Wars I and II, the dawn of mass media, the social and political turmoil of the sixties and seventies, and the communications revolution that led to a twenty-first century of empowered yet divided Americans.

In the telling, professional filmmaker Jon Wilkman draws on his own experience, as well as the stories of inventors, adventurers, journalists, entrepreneurs, artists, and activists who framed and filtered the world to inform, persuade, awe, and entertain. Screening Reality is an essential and fascinating book for anyone looking to better understand the American experience and today's truth-challenged times.

About Jon Wilkman

Jon Wilkman is an author and award-winning filmmaker whose work has appeared on ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, HBO, and A&E. His seven-part Turner Classic Movies series, Moguls and Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood, was nominated for three Emmys. His book Floodpath was an Amazon Nonfiction Book of the Year. A founding member and three-term president of the International Documentary Association, Wilkman lives in Los Angeles.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Biblio on January 13, 2020

Whew, this is a fat book, filled with the fascinating history of documentary film. From the very first short silent films to newsreels and travelogues, to instructional films for soldiers to filmstrips for students, to Ken Burns' Civil War series, it's all here. It covers TV as well, with Edward Mur......more

Goodreads review by Maynard on April 07, 2021

Basically a history of lefty documentaries in the US. Fine, if that's what you want, but not what I was after. A small fraction of the book (by far the most interesting section, but spread throughout the book) is devoted to the changing technologies that allowed for the creation of new types of docum......more

Goodreads review by Lance on April 19, 2021

Wilkman provides a fascinating look at the role of film in re-presenting reality. The book doesn't focus on the news but rather the realm of documentaries captured video of important events (e.g. Kennedy assassination), reality television as a genre, and ephemeral content since the birth of film. Wh......more