Michael Baker is a PhD candidate in the Communication Studies department. His dissertation, Rockumentary: Genre, Style, Performance, and Sound in Documentary, combines film studies, popular music studies, and sound studies in its examination of unattended issues in documentary film as they relate to a corpus of work primarily concerned with Western popular music. He is a graduate of the MA Film Studies program at Concordia University and the Honours BA Film & Video program at York University.
Michael has published articles in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies and Fibreculture along with numerous book chapters and encyclopedia entries. He is a part-time faculty member in the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University.
Michael is co-editor (with Thomas Waugh and Ezra Winton) of Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada (McGill-Queens, 2010), the first anthology dedicated to the subject of the NFB's ground-breaking socially-engaged film programme, and appears in the CBC documentary series Love, Hate, and Propaganda: World War II for a New Generation discussing the NFB's wartime activities. He is a past recipient of the Film Studies Association of Canada Gerald Pratley Award for innovative research in Canadian cinema studies.
Research interests: Documentary; Popular Music & Film; Film Genre; Film Sound; Film Style; Film Technology; Film History; Canadian Cinema.
Contact: michael.baker2 [at] mail.mcgill.ca
Dissertation Abstract:
My dissertation combines film studies, popular music studies and sound studies in an examination of unattended issues in documentary film as they relate to a corpus of work primarily concerned with Western popular music. The project proposes a genre category ("rockumentary"), charts its history, and applies it to a coherent grouping of film texts not simply reducible to their subject matter, but rather consisting of a complex system of stylistic conventions, sound-image relationships, representational strategies and extra-filmic systems of meaning and exchange. I offer a detailed formulation of the rockumentary genre in terms of film style before expanding upon established theoretical models pertaining to sound in film in order to better incorporate documentary into existing scholarly discourse on the subject, and I propose an analytical model with which performance in rockumentary can be assessed, evaluated and discussed. The project, funded in part by the FQRSC Bourses de doctorat en recherche, involves extensive formal analyses and the close reading of film texts in conjunction with histories of popular music and the film and music industries. It supplies new tools for the study of genre, performance and sound in nonfiction film.