Ithaca College

Patricia Zimmermann, Professor of Screen Studies and Codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF), has been named to the five-person international editorial and programming team to edit The British Film Institute Documentary Media Book and to develop a companion curatorial project for Bloomsbury Press, an international commercial and academic press with offices in London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi and Sydney.

Zimmermann, the only academic representing the US on the editorial team, joins scholars Brian Winston (UK); Gail Vanstone (Canada), Hend Alawadhi (Kuwait), and Tomas Crowder (Argentina).

The BFI Documentary Media project argues that documentary is undergoing a major epistemic change. In both theory and practice, the field of documentary has confronted new models of the postcolonial, the posthuman, the new materialism, critical race studies, and Indigenous studies as well as new interfaces across a myriad of technologies ranging from apps, drones, games, mapping, podcasts, tracking, wearables, web-based work, and more.

Documentary is no longer a singular analog form but has expanded into multiple media forms and practices. The project explores the new domains of documentary practice beyond the festival feature-length film, the theatrical film, and the various documentary practices of the global art world to carve out an initial exploratory mapping of the vast international field of documentary. 

21st-century documentary must be seen as transnational and heterogeneous. The project postulates a dynamic media ecology that is both global and multi-modal, moving across different technologies and different modes of production from the artisanal to the industrial to the collective.

The British Film Institute Documentary Media Project will work to recalibrate documentary studies toward a more transnational and global dialogue that unsettles the dominance of American/Canadian/Eurocentric projects and theories built into the academic discipline, film festivals, museum, and broadcast programming.