New and Open: Spatial Violence and the Documentary Image

Published today as a Gold Open Access ebook: Patrick Brian Smith's book Spatial Violence and the Documentary Image.

cover of Spatial Violence and the Documentary Image

Patrick Brian Smith's new study looks at the turn towards the spatial in how documentary film is addressing the powerful and turbulent forces affecting our world today. We drift increasingly away from the ideal of land divided up cleanly by borders, and from any clear understanding of our own rights. Globalization and neo-capitalism, together with increasingly privatised and extra-judicial arrangements for "security", have created miniature states of their own. A detention centre for asylum seekers in rural Oxfordshire, with bland Holiday Inn-like carpets and tables but bars on the windows, is not so far from a Piranesi prison, and the fifty-one-acre studio built in the small Mexican coastal village of Popotla in order to film "Titanic" is a new kind of colony. But filmmakers do keep on looking into things people would rather they didn't, and Patrick's book is about the spatial turn in modern social documentary.

Spatial Violence and the Documentary Image is volume 15 in our film series, Moving Image.

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