The fifth title in the Docalogue series, this book examines Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s 2021 documentary, Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).
This book will be of interest to students and scholars in multiple areas including but not limited to archival studies, Black studies, cultural studies, documentary studies, historiography, and music studies.
Films about people fleeing intolerable conditions, heading for promised lands of opportunity, have been flooding festival screens for at least the last ten years. As dumentary subjects, displaced people crossing deserts and seas, waiting in nowhere zones for asylum, are significant subjects for filmmakers committed to social justice. Documentarians can put names and faces to migrants, hear their stories, and witness their humiliations; they can recognize the humanitarian helpers along the way, as well as the brutality of those who hold them back. The best of migrant cinema, though, dignifies the migrant through aesthetic techniques of framing, lighting, and portraiture, and is best described as experimental non fiction. Given their homelessness, their fugitive status, and their open-ended journeys, the migrants’ plight lends itself to experimental treatments that challenge the cliches of conventional TV journalism.