This work is a textual analysis of selected documentary films whose common theme is the inevitable discrepancy between the realities of the Vietnam and the 2003 Iraq War from the perspectives of the veterans and soldiers, and the assumed reality that is constructed in the media. It is at this point that the inextricable link between documentary cinema and reality proved fundamental to the developing discourse of the entire study ahead. Since the manner in which the world is both transformed and depicted strongly depends upon the tools available to the director, the technological innovations and the emergence of portable cameras, by granting the documentary filmmaker flexibility, irreversibly solidified this link between non-fictional act of narrating and its approach and proximity to reality. Four works that are picked among a large body of documentary films are Winter Soldier (1972) directed by Winter Collective; Gunner Palace (2004) directed by Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker; Full Battle Rattle (2008) directed by Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss and finally Standard Operating Procedure (2008) directed by Errol Morris. Even though the films are historically ordered, this study's concern is to be systematic thematically than chronologically. In the course of these analyses, discussions of notions like reality and truth, the relations of the makers of the films, the camera and editing process to the subjects of the films, will naturally emerge, as will issues related to the political and social roles of documentary cinema.

In this thesis I have done a discourse analysis of the documentary movie A Jihad for Love. A Jihad for Love came out 2007 and is directed by Parvez Sharma. The documentary movie is about homosexual Muslims and their jihad, struggle, for love and to be accepted in a world where they are barely recognized as a group. My aim of the thesis was to see how the movie portrays the persons who are in the film and their relationship to Islam and who gets access to the religion. I have also analyzed if Islam can be used to strengthen the sexual identity or if it works in the opposite way. I have used the theoretical instrument of intersectionality and religious proximity with a gender perspective with focus on sexuality and religion to analyze my material. My conclusions of the thesis are that the men in the movie are often more portrayed as active subjects that can use the religion as a tool to strengthen the sexuality. The women are more portrayed as inactive objects that cannot use the religion to strengthen their sexual identity because of different power axes, like gender and sexuality, which collide and with each other. Another conclusion is that men have a higher grade of religious proximity which makes them closer to God, whereas the women traditionally don’t have the same closeness to God and cannot therefore have the same power in the religious hierarchy.

”The myth of Palme- a textual analysis of the documentary Palme and its description of the social memory of Olof Palme as a norm or anomaly” by Emma Svanström aims to analyze how the directors of the documentary Palme choose to present Olof Palme to the future generations. Also the goal is to find out if their version presents Palme as a person who followed the norms or was divergent. To this purpose the thesis use textual analysis combined with a quantitative method in search of which persons the directors give the right to form the myth of Palme and which keywords they use to do describe him. To view the film as a social memory in the transformation to a myth the thesis use Jan Assmans theory of social memory and to find out if the documentary describes Palme as following the norms or divergent it uses Mary Douglas theory of anomaly. The results show that it is mainly the narrator and Olof Palme that gets to form the myth of him but also his family, friends, fellow employees and other persons that met him or was affected by his actions. Palme is discribed as special, intelligent, interested in social politics and able to act as he saw fit even if it was against the norms. He is above all described as a complex person with many and sometimes contradicting sides. Some of these actions and characteristics’ are viewed as following the norms while others are shown as anomalies.

In this new media paradigm, the production, viewing, funding and distribution of documentary films are changing too. Through four case studies and four articles, this thesis explores different aspects of how these changes impact on documentary content as well as the industries that produce, transmit and distribute documentary film, and asks how we are to understand documentary in a multiplatform context.

This thesis is asking whether the television series Community (2009-) can be defined as a Sitcom, combined with a look at how other genres that generally are considered to be non-comic are incorporated in the series and how those are identifiable as well as whether or not they compromise Community’s possible label as a Sitcom. In seeking to define this show’s place in its own genre I found that whilst Community does not follow the archetypal technical conventions of Sitcom, it still does follow some of its setups, tropes and ideas. It does not suffice as a classical Sitcom, but it does lean on some of the genres conventions and has not yet passed over the line where it would be part of a completely different genre. Instead I state that the series fits the term New Comedy, as devised by Antonio Savorelli, not a genre but a term representing the heightened use of metatextuality on four levels in Comedy. Thus Community suffices as a part of an evolved version of the Sitcom genre.

While it has explained how power and knowledge directly imply one another, constructivist theories of international relations have shown how knowledge and language are extensively used for legitimizing war, conflict and intervention. It has further been shown how not only news media, but increasingly popular culture is powerful in creating meaning and establishing knowledge about war and conflict. At the same time, media scholars have shown that the development in television production is going towards a blur between information and entertainment, fact and fiction. This blur has been shown to often and effectively de-politicize ideological content. This study is a critical discourse analysis of the TV series Krig för fred (War for peace), broadcast on the Swedish public service television during the spring of 2011. The study has through answering questions in terms of genre and ideology, found that the material is an example of a blur between documentary and reality TV and that the material is exclusively from a Swedish point-of-view, yet presented through a discourse of claiming the real. One of the consequences of the mixed genre seemed to have been that as more space was given to individual characters and exoticising images of the Afghan landscape and people, less space was given to criticism, which made this representation of the war entertaining rather than informative to watch. While the only information given about Afghanistan in the TV series is that it is among the poorest countries in the world, more clues have been given as to how the Swedish military view themselves and have been represented in relation to ‘others’ in the world.

The aim of this investigation is to study the various cinematic and rhetorical strategies that Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán uses to construct a complex image of the postdictatorial Chilean society. By analyzing three of his documentaries from the late 1990s and early 2000s (Chile, Obstinate Memory; The Pinochet Case and Island of Robinson Crusoe), I argue that Guzmán's cinematic images expose the challenges of constructing a collective memory of the 1973 coup in Chile and its aftermath. In an attempt to interrogate the social, political and economic dynamics of the Chilean transition to democracy that began in the year 1990, Guzmán's documentaries also explore the consequences of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1989) in the present. The historical conjuncture of postdictatorial Chile is connected to at least three geopolitical phenomenons: the Post-Cold War international arena formed after the dissolution of existent socialist regimes, the advent of neoliberalism as a transnational economic paradigm, and the struggle for global human rights. The documentaries of Patricio Guzmán are poetic responses to each of these geopolitical phenomenons that affect the constitution of the Chilean present. / Dissertation

<p>Impure Cinema: Political Pedagogies in Film and Theory asks what are the ways that the politics of film theory have been conceptualized since the era now known as "70s film theory." In particular, it analyzes the writings on cinema, politics and art by contemporary French philosophers Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière in relation to the influential approaches of Louis Althusser and Gilles Deleuze and to theories of documentary cinema. I argue that unlike the political modernism of 70s film theory and the post-theory turn of 90s film studies, Badiou and Rancière offer an approach to film theory that neither assumes that all films are political, nor that politics underdetermine theory, but rather suggests that we analyze both theories and films in terms of how they construct connections between cinema and politics. Following Deleuze, I call these connections "pedagogical" not because they transmit knowledge but because they always involve a new kind of connection or relation that seeks to transform habitual ways of seeing, saying or doing. For Badiou and Rancière this is based on a conception of cinema as "impure." Cinema, they argue, is never free of elements from other arts or daily life, but it is this impurity that is the grounds for linking its artistic and political possibilities. I look at various film forms that highlight cinema's impurity, in particular the "actuality" and how it has been reappropriated in various forms of documentary and essayistic practices as a way of giving cinematic form to questions of political equality.</p> / Dissertation

<p>For a brief moment in feminist time, from 1968 to 1974, women's documentaries were influential in the emerging field of feminist film studies and for feminist activism. By the late sixties feminists had identified visual representation within popular culture, film, and the media as one of the central battlegrounds for women's activism. For feminist filmmakers, documentary, with its alleged superlative grip on truth and transparency, seemed to provide an ideal counterpoint to the perceived mis-representation of "real" women in dominant, narrative cinema. Within seventies feminist film theory, however, scholars elaborated a gender-specific take on the ideological critique of realism that disavowed women's documentary films as naïve, unsophisticated, and complicit with the ideologies of patriarchy and capitalism.</p> <p> In this project, I recast realism as an unruly and contradictory set of codes and conventions that generate oppositional and revolutionary political documentaries. In contrast to the dominant anti-realist reception of feminist documentaries in seventies feminist film theory then, I argue that these documentaries contain unacknowledged nuance and neglected visions of the political aspirations (however flawed) of second wave feminism. Key figures in feminist political theory, such as Nancy Fraser and Hannah Arendt, shed light on the political and subjective configurations brought forth in several feminist documentaries, including I Am Somebody (1969), Janie's Janie (1971), The Woman's Film (1971), and Joyce at 34 (1972), and Self-Health (1974), which depend rather on second wave aspirations of collectivity and agency, and the power of self-authorship and experience.</p> / Dissertation

The objective of this study is to examine historically the policies of theDirectorate of Documentary Programs (DDP) of the Turkish Radio Television Corporation (TRT). Since there is very little research about particular sphere of the public service broadcasting in Turkey it is aimed to contribute to this area of study. In the course of the study, historical conditions, structural factors, broadcasting policies, the conditions of public broadcasting of a country, and the role of individuals and the research methods applied in media studies were taken into consideration. Furthermore, governmental, military, lawful, economic, cultural policies, and policies emerging from the institutional mechanisms, and practices of individuals are illustrated regarding the different time periods. In this study, documentary research, observation, interview, and internet research were used as data gathering methods. Literature analysis, historical analysis and interpretative analysis were employed as methods of analysis. It is mentioned that the role of individuals in the analysis of media studies is not paid much attention, additionally, especially in Turkey, research conducted about media generally ignores the methods of ethnography, field research and interpretative analysis. In analyzing the policies of DDP, it is asserted that except for the structural effects, individuals/actors have also roles in shaping these policies. Furthermore, to examine the media, particularly television policies, it is maintained that there is a need to carry out analysis at the individual level by the help of conducting field research, applying methods of ethnography, and interpretative analysis in Turkey. Finally, it is claimed that to a large extend DDP have been under the effects of public broadcasting notion of Turkey, and there is a need for improving the institutional policies for the DDP to serve the public interest.