Stefanie Baumann sent a query to the Visible Evidence listserv on 06/20/2025, asking for literature recommendations on historical and contemporary film collectives to help with the programing of Docs Kingdom. This list is the responses to her query. Databases and bibliographies are at the bottom of this list.
Suggested Scholarship:
Adamson, Morgan. 2018. Enduring Images: A Future History of New Left Cinema. Univ Of Minnesota Press.
Aufderheide, Patricia. 2024. Kartemquin Films: Documentaries on the Frontlines of Democracy. Univ of California Press. (explores Kartemquin’s links to other groups, such as Newsreel, Chicago Newsreel, Rising Up Angry, and Chicago Women’s Liberation Union as well)
Bauer, Petra, and Dan Kidner, eds. 2010. Working Together: Notes on British Film Collectives in the 1970s. Focal Point Gallery.
Boyall, Jessica Williams. 2024. “A Politics of Working-Class Culture and the Culture of Working-Class Politics: The Aesthetics and Activism of Amber Film and Photography Collective and the Berwick Street Film Collective.” Open Library of Humanities 10 (1): 1. https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.10172.
Cizek, Katerina and William Uricchio. 2022. Collective Wisdom. The MIT Press.
Clayton, Sue, and Laura Mulvey, eds. 2021. Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Dickinson, Kay. 2018. Arab Film and Video Manifestos: Forty-Five Years of the Moving Image Amid Revolution. Palgrave Pivot.
Dickinson, Margaret, ed. 1999. Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain 1945-90. British Film Institute.
Dixon, Oliver. 2025. “The Chronotopes of Radical Film: Collective Exhibition and the Social Practice of ‘Cinema Action.” Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ) 14 (1): 11–28. https://doi.org/10.1386/miraj_00138_1.
Ethnocine Collective. 2024. “Visualizing Ethnography: Feminist Praxis in Anthropological Film.” In The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Anthropology, edited by Pamela L. Geller. Routledge.
Gauthier, Guy. 2004. CinémAction, numéro 110 : Le cinéma militant reprend le travail. Charles Corlet.
Girish, Devika. 2022. “Covert Operations: Public-Making and Unmaking in Deepa Dhanraj’s Something Like a War.” In Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, edited by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg. The MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544528/feminist-worldmaking-and-the-moving-image/.
Grant, Paul Douglas. 2016. Cinéma Militant: Political Filmmaking and May 1968. Wallflower Press.
Guilford, Josh. 2022. “Dossier \ Disorganized Organization: Signs of Life in the Film-Makers’ Cooperative’s Paper Archive.” World Records 4 (March): 171–88.
Hering, Tobias, ed. 2014. Der Standpunkt Der Aufnahme: Perspectives of Political Film. Archive Books & Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst.
Hudson, Dale, and Patricia R. Zimmermann. 2015. Thinking Through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places. Palgrave Macmillan US. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137433633.
Hughes, John, dir. 2006. The Archive Project. Early Works with the assistance of the NFSA, AFC, Film Victoria, ABC TV Arts and Music and Effects, Melbourne. 98 minutes.
Hughes, John. 2015. “A Work in Progress: The Rise and Fall of Australian Filmmakers Co-Operatives, 1966–86.” Senses of Cinema, no. 77 (December).
Hughes, John. 2017. The Archive Project: The Realist Film Unit in Cold War Australia. Atom Pub.
Hughes, John, and Tom Zubrycki, dirs. 2022. Senses of Cinema | Trailer. 02:26.
Ingram, Emily. 2022. “The Film Collective Born of Revolution.” Magazine. Tribune, November 8.
Jager, Claire, Monique Schwarz, and Sue Weis. 1987. “Reel Women: From the Boot of an Old White Valiant.” In Don’t Shoot Darling!: Women’s Independent Filmmaking in Australia, edited by Annette Blonski, Barbara Creed, and Freda Freiberg. Greenhouse Publications.
James, David E. 1989. Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties. Princeton University Press.
Kishore, Shweta. 2023. “Re-Framing Documentary’s Victims: Documentary and Collective Victimhood at Indian Media Collective Chalchitra Abhiyan.” Studies in Documentary Film 17 (1): 14–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1887989.
MacKenzie, Scott, ed. 2014. Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology. University of California Press.
Maule, Rosanna. 2023. Sustainable Resilience in Women’s Film and Video Organizations. Routledge.
Mayer, So. 2023. “The Political Radicalism of British Film Collectives.” Frieze, no. 233 (March).
Nichols, Bill. 1980. Newsreel: Documentary Filmaking on the American Left. Edited by Garth S. Jowett. Ayer Co Pub.
Presence, Steve, Mike Wayne, and Jack Newsinger, eds. 2021. Contemporary Radical Film Culture: Networks, Organisations and Activists. New York: Routledge.
Ratto, Matt, and Megan Boler, eds. 2014. “Making Publics: Documentary as Do-It-with-Others Citizenship.” In DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media. MIT Press.
Rose, Mandy. 2014. “CollabDocs.” CollabDocs, February 18. (Blog)
Roudé, Catherine. 2017. Le cinéma militant à l’heure des collectifs: Slon et Iskra dans la France de l’après-1968. Le Spectaculaire-Cinéma. Presses universitaires de Rennes.
Third World Newsreel. n.d. “Third World Newsreel: Reflections on Progressive Media since 1968.” Accessed July 15, 2025. (includes a series of articles on the film collective)
Williams, Deane. 2008. “A Realist Film Unit and Association in Australia.” In An Arc of Mirrors: Australian Post-War Documentary Film. Intellect Books.
Young, Cynthia A. 2006. Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left. Duke University Press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/soul-power.
Zimmermann, Patricia R., and Helen De Michiel. 2017. Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice. Routledge.
Databases:
The Radical Film Network (RFN), the largest database of radical film organisations in the world lists lots of collectives: https://radicalfilmnetwork.com/.
Bibliographies:
Writings on the Dziga Vertov Group: https://www.witz.com.br/dzigavertov/bibliografia.html
Collectives (only the ones mentioned in the listserv conversation included here):
Wikipedia’s list of film collectives
The New Black Film Collective (TNBFC)
A lot of information about the Yugantar Film Collective (likely the first feminist film collective to be founded in India, in the 1980) archived here: https://yugantar.film/