of documentary media. In his introduction to documentary cinema, Bill Nichols offered this pointed, precise explication:
Documentary film speaks about situations and events involving real people (social actors) who present themselves to us as themselves in stories that convey a plausible proposal about, or perspective on, the lives, situations, and events portrayed. The distinct point of view of the filmmaker shapes this point of view into a way of seeing the historical world directly rather than into a fictional allegory.
(Nichols, 2010: 14)
Nichols’ definition centers on the tripartite structure of documentary meaning‐making (filmmaker—subjects in the film—viewers), the film’s connection with the historical world, the form’s distinction from narrative fiction film, and the voiced, perspective of the filmmaker. It has become the default definition of much work on the topic.
Yet there is increasingly little agreement about what defines documentary or documentary film in the first place. The contributors to this volume use a range of terms to describe the films associated with their objects of study, most frequently taking their cues from the labels being used at the time—kulturfilm, film journal, propaganda film, to name a few. There is even some playfulness and defiance about the effort to define it at all. Kahana remarks that “documentary is a slippery eel” (Kahana, 2016: 1). Juhasz and Lebow open their volume somewhat surprisingly with the remark, “even if we can agree that the majority of documentaries … may be identified by certain well‐worn practices … we accept what has become commonplace in documentary studies: that documentary defies definition” (Juhasz and Lebow, 2015: 1). To be sure, definitions of documentary—and there are many who make the effort to define—depend on whether they are driven by aesthetic, epistemological, ontological, or political concerns. Many reckon with the most famous one: John Grierson’s “creative treatment of actuality,” the fundamental principles of which drive Brian Winston’s deconstruction and disavowal in Claiming the Real (Winston, 1995). The father of documentary would surely not be pleased by any inclusion of these “lower” forms of nonfiction film practices, which so often mistake “the phenomenon for the thing itself … ignoring everything that gave it the trouble of conscience, and penetration and thought” (Grierson, 1966: 201). Eschewing those labels, Michael Renov turns to poetics and rhetoric, an approach to artistic technique whose position at the border of science and art, and truth and beauty, he sees as homologous to the stance of documentary. He identifies four “fundamental tendencies or rhetorical/aesthetic functions” of documentary that emerge from particular historical, cultural, and technological contexts: to record, reveal or preserve; to persuade or promote; to analyze or interrogate; and to express (Renov, 1993: 21). From the literary to the historical, Philip Rosen emphasizes the temporal gap required for the process of “converting document into documentary” (Rosen, 2001: 263). For Rosen, it is the process of transforming “relatively unbridled visual indexicality into sense” via sequenciation, that marks documentary’s imbrication with historical meaning (Rosen, 2001: 232).
Others have sought to define documentary as an approach to speaking about the world with the world that expands beyond cinema and even photographic or pictorial‐based media. Robert Coles’s Doing Documentary Work—the first book on documentary I was assigned in graduate school—addresses documentary projects across literature, photography, and film, assessing artists’ aesthetic, ethical, psychological, and critical struggles to communicate about the world. For Coles, documentary, across these media forms, is about engaging with others, and any attempt to speak about others is inflected by the subjective position one occupies (Coles, 1998). The film historian Charles Musser likewise aims to think documentary beyond cinema, linking his interest in definition to questions of history and origins. He argues in favor of “the need to think about documentary as a formation and as a practice that is not arbitrarily tied to the appearance and rapid adoption of that term” (Musser, 2018: 2). Musser points to two strands of cultural production that help us understand documentary’s longue durée: the magic lantern and the lecture. The former links nonfiction to technology and the image while the latter points to a founding instance of documentary truth, one based in science and experienced collectively. Rather than documentary depending on technological reproducibility, he writes:
The documentary tradition should not be seen as a subset of the history of cinema—but something else. They are two perhaps incommensurate histories that intersect, overlap, and become intertwined. Documentary practices offered a method of communication that incorporated new media forms as they became available. Projected celluloid‐based motion pictures was but one of these.
(Musser, 2018: 11)
For Musser, this long view of documentary provides insight into the form’s past and offers flexibility for thinking about contemporary practices.
Definitions are multiple, varied, even contradictory. Yet, in this way, with their negotiation between precision and flexibility and their various foci, they can be helpful; they call attention to the epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic concerns of the moment of their articulation. Along those lines, the goal of this Introduction is not to attempt to define documentary but instead to introduce some of the ideas leading thinkers on the subject have put forth. Readers of the volume can then see how related conceptions are articulated by the contributors themselves, as well as how various tenets of documentary are prioritized by the work under consideration in their pieces.
Writing Documentary History
The history of documentary has often been told with a technologically determinist bent. It begins with the move from the predocumentary phase of the actuality to the classical period of documentary with the inauguration of narrative in Nanook of the North (1922) (Barsam, 1973; Barnouw, 1974). With the emergence of sound films around the 1930s, the form develops with voice‐over narration assuming the role of intertitles. The classical period sustains until approximately 1960, when the availability of portable 16 mm cameras and synchronous sound enabled a more intimate, democratic, less authoritarian model.
The more recent histories (of the last 35–40 years) are still in the process of being understood. To be sure, Direct Cinema’s claims of providing objective evidence of the world through an observational approach have been called into question across contexts and by a range of approaches. Films with reflexive and performative elements have become more common and are often highly presentational in their address, calling attention to their acts of articulation and processes of production. In so doing, they locate the truth less in the relationship between the image and reality than in the trust between filmmaker and viewer. But that’s not to say that filmmakers and viewers abandoned the possibility of documentary communicating the truth of the past (i.e. its historiographic function). As Linda Williams describes in an analysis of Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, “some kinds of partial and contingent truths are nevertheless always the receding goal of the documentary tradition” (Williams, 2013: 392). In the early 2000s some scholars saw the development of this line of (postmodern) thought—the inability of the photograph or its digital replacement to serve as a guarantor of truth—as an indication that we have moved into a “post‐documentary” moment (Corner, 2000; Winston, 2013). Yet this line of thinking never matched how documentary films were being watched. Viewers consistently and penetratingly interrogate films’ truthfulness or factuality in ways that have probably changed less in the last 40 years than most expect. Indeed, with the information age, the availability of paratextual and extratextual materials (information that is in addition to critical responses to the film) increasingly shapes the judgments viewers make about the film and those involved in its production and circulation.
But if those are some broad strokes for telling the history of documentary, the vast majority of scholarship on the topic is more concerned with specific instances, whether it focuses on a filmmaker, a movement, or a geographic area. Documentary studies began to develop as subfield of Cinema and Media Studies in the 1990s in response to a number of scholars’ interest in documentary’s underlying legitimacy (Renov, 1993; Winston, 1995; Gaines and Renov, 1999; Nichols, 1991; Kahana, 2016: 723–725). The subfield is associated by many with the academic conference Visible Evidence, also the name of