Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me  and Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning  come from different cultural spaces, but they share a strikingly similar project: documenting what it means to inhabit a body that society has marked as vulnerable. Coates writes about Black embodiment in the United States as something constantly shaped by fear, surveillance, and the historical weight of racism. In Paris Is Burning , queer and trans performers of color make their own worlds

Comparing Mysterious Object at Noon  to Night and Fog  highlights how hybrid documentary forms can approach reality from very different angles while still relying on a mix of modes to produce meaning. Both films combine documentary material with elements that push beyond a single mode, but they do so for different purposes. Thinking about them together helps clarify what hybridity actually accomplishes and how it relates to Nichols’s framework. Mysterious Object at Noon is o

Clifford Geertz’s idea that culture is made up of “webs of significance” people create for themselves is actually a useful way to think about Minding the Gap. Geertz argues that culture is not just behavior or tradition but a whole system of meaning people use to interpret their lives. When I look at the film through that lens, it feels a lot like an ethnographic study of a Midwestern skate community. Liu is not just filming Zack, Keire, and himself as individuals. He is show