Book & Video Recommendations

Highly recommended: Erik Barnouw's classic Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. As in all endeavours, you can't fully appreciate the present or anticipate the future without understanding what's come before. This delightful survey of the past 100-plus years of blending art with reality puts documentary filmmaking in political and social perspective, and should be required reading for all practitioners AND consumers of Web multimedia journalism. It will inform your thinking about the way the depiction of real life on film can inspire our own ideas, attitudes and behaviors.

Take a look at our other book and video recommendations at KobreGuide's Amazon store. You'll find more Documentary titles, in addition to Multimedia and Photojournalism selections.

And best of all, you can actually download feature-length Documentary Videos on Demand -- rentals for instant online viewing, for just a couple bucks each. (So you can see, for instance, The Weather Underground, if you want to find out more about that terrorist who Obama is said to be palling around with.)

There's even a Michael Moore documentary which he is making available for free! It's called Slacker Uprising, and it's a video diary from Moore's cross country tour in 2004, aimed at getting the slackers of the nation to get up off the couch and coerce their neighbors into going to the polls to vote. Which, like all good documentaries, makes it especially timely right now!