SAY WHAT HAPPENED: A Story of Documentaries

In a lively book, these are the musings of a man who has thought deeply about his medium of documentaries. Why are they made? Who is in the tribe of documentary filmmakers? Do their films really change the world? Mark Cousins wrote 'When you film a documentary, life comes barrelling at you like a wild bear.' Some 20 years ago Nick Fraser created BBC Storyville, producing films that won Oscars, BAFTAs and Peabody Awards. He found filmmakers from all across the world covering important subjects in documentaries. His book describes the frenzied, intense world of documentary filmmaking, tracing its history back to the early pioneers such as Dziga Vertov and his ground-breaking 'Man with A Movie Camera.' The book deals with the British documentary tradition founded by John Grierson, and discusses the work of American masters such as the Maysles brothers, Frederick Wiseman and D. A. Pennebaker, as well as Europeans such as Marcel Ophuls, Claude Lanzmann, Chris Marker and Verner Herzog. He interviews acclaimed documentary filmmakers and discusses the work of Ken Burns, Errol Morris and Joshua Oppenheimer as well as listing his top 100 documentaries and where readers can watch them. In a world beset with 'fake news', he argues documentaries are better at getting at the verities about life and death, and that the new journalism will come from films made using new technology. Beautifully written and elegantly structured, it is a personal, funny and moving account which has helped the author recover from his 2017 stroke. 400 page large softback, illus.