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Exploring the World of Documentary Film

This quiz explores key concepts, historical milestones, and influential figures in the realm of documentary film, providing an engaging way to test your knowledge on the subject.

#Documentary Film #Film History #Cinema #Film Studies #Educational Quiz

1 Paramount Pictures tried to repeat the success of Flaherty's Nanook and Moana with two romanticized documentaries, Grass (1925) and Chang (1927), both directed by ________ and Ernest Schoedsack.

2 in association with the ________, 1989.

3 Joris Ivens Award: most prestigious ________ (IDFA) award (named after Joris Ivens)

4 Cambridge, UK: ________, 2001.

5 One of the most notorious propaganda films is ________'s film Triumph of the Will (1935).

6 (In contrast, ________ concentrated primarily on getting their process adopted by Hollywood studios for fictional feature films.)

7 Although "documentary film" originally referred to movies shot on film stock, it has subsequently expanded to include video and digital productions that can be either ________ or made for a television series.

8 In the 1960s and 1970s, documentary film was often conceived as a political weapon against neocolonialism and capitalism in general, especially in ________, but also in a changing Quebec society.

9 ________ is the complex process of creating documentary projects.

10 Early color motion picture processes such as ________ and Prizmacolor used travelogues to promote the new color process.

💡 Interesting Facts

  • the ABC documentary television program Our World was often assigned to students as homework, with ABC distributing 39,000 study guides a month.
  • the Oscar Award-nominated film The Final Inch, a documentary about efforts to eradicate the poliovirus, is the first film project from Google's philanthropic division Google.org.
  • the documentary film 9to5 – Days in Porn by Jens Hoffmann documents a year in the lives of members of the U.S. porn industry.
  • the documentary film Aliens of the Deep by Academy Award winner James Cameron and Steven Quale was made using footage of at least 40 deep sea dives in both the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean.
  • the documentary film Barricades was shelved for three years by Israeli television because of the controversy that would result from airing it.
  • the 2007 documentary film Quantum Hoops tells the story of the Caltech mens' basketball team, who had a 259-game losing streak after not winning a conference game since 1985.
  • the 2007 documentary film Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience was based on a collection of writings by U.S. soldiers who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq.
  • the 2007 film 10 MPH documents a 100-day, 4,064-mile journey across the United States on a Segway scooter.
  • the 1995 documentary film Anne Frank Remembered contains the only known film footage of the young diarist.
  • the 2001 documentary film Scottsboro: An American Tragedy retold the story of the Scottsboro Boys, one of the most controversial courtroom pursuits of racism in U.S. history.
  • the 2003 documentary Prisoner of Paradise is a chronicle of the life of Kurt Gerron, a German Jewish actor who was forced to make a Nazi propaganda film and later murdered in a Nazi concentration camp.
  • the documentary film Countdown to Zero, which analyzes the likelihood of the use of nuclear weapons, has been privately screened for U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
  • the documentary Dolce e selvaggio includes both genuine and fake scenes of human death.
  • the first integrated prom in Charleston is the subject of the 2009 documentary film Prom Night in Mississippi.
  • the final twenty minutes of the 1941 documentary film Kukan shows an air attack by Japanese bombers against Chongqing, the World War II capital of China.
  • the footage filmed for the documentary film The Boys from Baghdad High had to be smuggled out of Iraq by journalists of many different news agencies.
  • the four-part A&E documentary series The Greatest Pharaohs is being used in many college and university courses on anthropology and archaeology.
  • while working on Lipstick and Dynamite, a 2005 documentary about women's professional wrestling, Neko Case found out Ella Waldek in the film was her great-aunt.
  • the creators of the 1996 documentary film The West traveled over 100,000 miles (160,000 km) to gather footage and conduct research.
  • the TV documentary series On the Street Where You Live featured contributions from locals, historians and the Grand Marshall of the 2008 Saint Patrick's Day parade in Kilkenny, Ireland.
  • the documentary Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 gets its name from an actual headline in the Harvard Crimson.
  • the Israeli documentary Paper Dolls followed the lives of five health care providers from the Philippines who perform as drag queens.
  • the television drama Hill Street Blues imitated the visual style of The Police Tapes, a low-budget documentary about a police precinct in the South Bronx.
  • the Canadian documentary film Act of God investigates the metaphysical effects of being struck by lightning.
  • in the documentary film Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy all eight Elm Street films are explored through interviews with over 100 members of the production team and cast.
  • in the 2007 documentary film Autism: The Musical, five autistic children in Los Angeles develop and star in an original stage production.
  • 51 Birch Street, a low-budget documentary about the mystery of a suburban marriage, was named one of The New York Times top ten films of 2006.
  • Rob Stewart made the 2007 documentary film Sharkwater after learning that longline fishing in the Galapagos Islands was killing the sharks.
  • A Walk to Beautiful, a film about five Ethiopian women with childbirth injuries, was picked by the International Documentary Association as the best feature documentary of 2007.
  • Jews of Iran is the first documentary film about Iran's Jewish minority.
  • Spirit of the Marathon, a documentary film about marathon runners, won Best Picture at the Mammoth Film Festival.
  • Antoni Bohdziewicz, a Polish film director, was a member of the Armia Krajowa Polish resistance and worked on a documentary film made and shown entirely in besieged Warsaw.
  • Anne Aghion won an Emmy Award in 2005 for her documentary film In Rwanda We Say…The Family That Does Not Speak Dies, which examined the situation in post-genocide Rwanda.
  • investigative journalist John Sweeney stated his outburst in the documentary Scientology and Me was a by-product of viewing the Citizen's Commission on Human Rights exhibit, "Psychiatry: An Industry of Death".
  • John Travolta's older brother Joey Travolta produced the documentary film about autism Normal People Scare Me.
  • Quentin Tarantino, a longtime fan of Australian cinema, helped put together 2008 documentary film Not Quite Hollywood, examining the "Ozploitation" B movies of the 1970s–'80s Australian New Wave.
  • American music critic and editor Smokey Fontaine is the son of English documentary filmmaker Dick Fontaine, the maker of the 1984 BBC documentary Beat This: A Hip-Hop History.
  • Target for Tonight was a 1941 documentary filmed, acted, and written by the Royal Air Force.
  • The Hate That Hate Produced, a documentary critical of the Nation of Islam, caused the group's membership to double.
  • a screening of the documentary film Rebellion: the Litvinenko Case may have led to the St Petersburg branch of the human rights charity Memorial being raided by the Russian authorities.
  • Sue Rubin, the subject of the documentary film Autism Is a World, was considered mentally challenged until she learned to communicate with a keyboard.
  • according to TV critic Gareth McLean, none of the Britons featured in the Channel 4 documentary series New Hero of Comedy are "Heroes".
  • an episode of the documentary series Hostage detailed Saddam Hussein's placing of two Irish civilians as "human shields" at sites of strategic importance during the Gulf War.
  • in her 1992 documentary film Nitrate Kisses Barbara Hammer filmed an elderly lesbian couple having sex as part of an exploration of the repression and marginalization of LGBT history.
  • American film director Jim Fields recently wrote, produced and directed a documentary called Bugeaters.
  • Welcome to Macintosh, a documentary focusing on Apple Inc. and its Macintosh line of computers, was praised by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak for being the most accurate film about the company.
  • The Land of the Settlers is a five-part documentary series made by Chaim Yavin, dubbed "Israel's Walter Cronkite", and was so controversial that his station refused to air it.
  • The Portraitist is a 2005 Polish television documentary film about the life and work of Wilhelm Brasse, the famous "photographer of Auschwitz".
  • The Silent World, an Academy Award winning documentary film by Jacques Cousteau, was the first film to use underwater cinematography to show the ocean depths in color.
  • Uncommon Friends of the 20th Century is a 1999 documentary film about businessman James D. Newton's friendships with well-known figures such as Thomas A. Edison, Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford.
  • Gandhi biographer Dinanath Gopal Tendulkar, a student of Eisenstein, is considered to be one of the pioneers of documentary film making in India.
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