Documentary Film and Social Change: A Rhetorical Investigation of Dissent

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Graduate Program: Communication

Custom Dissertation Writing Service: Multi-method Approach: Interviews, Analysis of Texts, Analysis of Historical Artifacts, and Analysis of Data Distribution Patterns

For well over a century, non-fiction film has figured significantly in the public sphere as a powerful means of persuasion. My dissertation may explore the intersection of social change and cultural texts by investigating the history of contemporary activist documentary film. Using all the required means of coercion and persuasion at their disposal, social movements have jointly developed a diverse set of tactics and strategies to prompt social change. Among these documentary films deserve scholarly attention.

Documentary films that reflect the interests of social movements are significant but to what ends and in what rhetorical situations are these strategies most effective for social change? This study will not call into question the importance of cultural texts like documentary film, but rather may explore how constitutive cultural strategies constrain or aid the instrumental goals of contemporary social movements. In this dissertation I can argue that mediated, politically aesthetically and driven dressed activist documentary film and video not only has the potential to be an act of political oratory but under the right conditions can transform into a public communication between private people that has the potential for social change. This project will discover the commitments of early activist media, theories of social change, and the second wave of activist media and at last, the function of contemporary activist documentary. There is much left to be studied about the affiliation of activist cultural texts and social change. The manner in which activist documentary film is conceptualized in theoretical literature or in film reviews, primarily qualifies the term "activist" with the intentions of the film maker and his or her ideological commitments outside of 3 filmmaking. There is, thus, another tendency to label documentary film as "activist" based on content. If the film mediates as moral or political controversy, the inclination is to label it "activist." Thus, such labels are fruitless if the film does not truly intervene in a larger public space to create active political agents that will extend and perform the political work initiated by documentary film. It is not enough for documentary film to "be" activist; it must help in creating the space for activism and invested in cultural change and producing material.