Literary journalism isn't just you-are-there scenes and dialogue, cinéma vérité in print. The genre ranges widely between narrative and criticism. Susan Faludi, a Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative journalist who became famous for her 1991 book on anti-feminism, Backlash, is one of the best of the narrative critics, a fact sometimes overlooked because Backlash was closer to traditional muckraking. The book that followed, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, veered toward narrative, to the point that Faludi's arguments--central to her work, which is polemical in the best sense--were sometime lost. In 2007, she published The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, a work of criticism that drew heavily on her instincts as a narrative writer. 

The same might be said of her latest essay, "Facebook Feminism, Like it Or Not," published in The Baffler. The bulk of the essay is a historical analysis of the way capitalism can co-opt feminism and women's rights movements; it's bookended by two set pieces, the first of which -- an account of a rally led by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, is a strong entry in the long tradition of skeptical reports from religious revivals. Like Mencken in Dayton in 1925, without the snark, like Sarah Comstock marveling over the theatrical power of Aimee Semple Mcpherson in 1927, Faludi gives us the power of Sandberg's presentation even as she reveals what she'll argue is the con. It's bait-and-switch as literary technique, well worth studying.
--Jeff Sharlet

Peter Trachtenberg, one of the most innovative -- and wittiest -- nonfiction writers at work, on "thin facts," "thick facts," and Another Insane Devotion. 

The 1993 film Silverlake Life: The View From Here, by Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman, is a documentary classic. It began when Joslin started keeping a video diary of his lover Mark Massi's struggle with AIDS. Then Joslin began dying of AIDS. Massi, in better shape, took over the camera. When he died, a former student of Joslin's, Peter Friedman, edited the film. The result, according to Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly,  is

a glory of documentary-making and an important addition to the defiant stockpile of AIDS-inspired art being created in these modern Plague Years: Silverlake Life: The View From Here is intimate and dry-eyed, charming and powerful, idiosyncratic and wrenching. It's also, at times, blessedly comic and light. The grace of the film, which won the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival, is in its ability to mix dying with living-deftly, wittily, superbly--so that we come to know these men as full individuals.

Now some students of filmmaker Abraham Ravett, a professor at Hampshire College, have carried on that legacy, editing 10 hours of footage for a film left incomplete when Joslin died. The result this time is called Architecture of Mountains. Reports the Valley Advocate: 

"This came about because I was teaching a class on recycled material in visual arts and writing as well,” explains Ravett. “I called [Hampshire alum] Ken Levin and asked whatever happened to the footage. He said, ‘It’s been sitting in my garage in L.A.—I didn’t know what to do with it.’ I told him about this course and asked if he would consider letting us take a look at it.”
...
For Ravett, working with the footage provided another surprising resonance with Joslin’s later work. In Silverlake Life, Joslin films himself in bed late at night. The roots of that idea can be seen in Architecture. In that film, Joslin explains that he wants to get at his own dreams, so he installs a camera and a light, all set to go on at random intervals in the night, in hopes that he could convey his dreams. Since Joslin blurs the lines between fact and fiction in Architecture, it’s not immediately apparent whether he actually created that setup.

Ravett says that Joslin really did. “He was truly awakened—he had an alarm that turned on the camera. There’s a mixture of truth and non-truth [in the film], but ultimately he’s very self-concious—he was, always. He was interested in the power of dreams, the subconscious. He wanted that in the film. What strikes me is how prescient he was in terms of how he looked in that footage [and how he looked in Silverlake Life]. For us it was really startling.”

Read more in The Valley Advocate.

"A 'beautiful image' can very well be the worst thing that can happen to a scene."

49 more rules for filmmakers, many of them applicable to writers and editors, from the great Wim Wenders, here.

"When I say, 'interviewing,' I am talking from the perspective of a narrative or creative nonfiction writer. Interviewing for news is somewhat different; reporters usually know, more or less, the information they need to unearth. The writer of narrative, by contrast, is often seeking the unknown — the story behind the facts. You won’t always know the story until you hear it; your job as an interviewer, often, is to keep your subject talking."

--Lee Gutkind, "How to Listen