taken over by Columbia University Press) that was one of the primary publishers of monographs and anthologies on documentary topics. This included volumes on documentary’s role in nations’ histories, on subgenres of documentary (including some on “peripheral” practices such as home and amateur movies), on individual filmmakers and individual films, on documentary’s connection with political and intellectual movements, on documentary’s relationship with other media forms, and on theoretical approaches to the form (https://www.upress.umn.edu/book‐division/series/visible‐evidence).
Other (mostly academic) presses have supported this research as well: Wallflower, which has a “Nonfictions” series, Indiana, Columbia, Oxford, and more recently California and Amsterdam have all produced books on documentary‐related topics. Academic journals are the other most significant place for the publication of historical work on documentary and nonfiction film material. Studies in Documentary Film is the only journal completely devoted to the topic, but there are fairly consistent publications in film and media‐specific journals such as Cinema Journal (now the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies), Jump Cut The Moving Image, Film History, Film Quarterly, Black Camera, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, and Screen, as well as in transdisciplinary journals focusing on critical theory, media and culture, and art criticism like Discourse, October, and Journal of Visual Culture.
This volume is designed to provide an overview of the best historical scholarship being done on documentary and nonfiction film at the present moment. Instead of selecting previously published work, however, I reached out to scholars across the globe who are doing the most innovative and rigorous work in the area. To organize this work, I have created thematic strands that I believe productively account for the dominant and emerging approaches to understanding the history of documentary film and video. I am confident that these strands will spark intellectual conversations about the material and about the historiographical approach to the material. In other words, like so many of the best documentaries themselves, I aim to produce a work that encourages careful consideration of the historical objects at hand as well as the process of object‐making that the approach entails. At some points, this is likely to be explicit. More often, however, this critical reflexivity will be evident in the creativity and meticulousness of the scholar’s approach. The thematic strands enable and encourage such critical reflexivity by creating terrain that is fertile for debate around methodology and expansive to underrepresented groups and contexts. They account for approaches that allow us to take an international and global approach. By engaging both established and developing approaches to documentary and/as nonfiction film, this volume aims to locate readers clearly in an intellectual conversation and to equip them to shape its future direction.
Thematic Strands
The volume consists of five thematic strands, each consisting of an introduction by an expert in the area and three to five essays.
Documentary Borders and Geographies
Practically from its inception, documentary has been seen as having a privileged relation to the nation. It was in the 1920s and 1930s—the period of documentary’s early maturity—that politicians started to believe cinema could influence citizens. Nonfiction filmmakers’ arguments about what cinema could and should do were often made by those working for the state. Buttressing this notion was many filmmakers’ conviction that the film camera could uniquely capture nationality, both in established forms and in emerging states. This close connection between nonfiction film and national identity came to the fore again in the 1980s and 1990s when the emergence of national cinema studies coincided with the birth of documentary studies. In recent years, however, new approaches (archival and cultural‐historical), new forms, and newly available sources have pointed to the internationalism of not only current projects but historical ones as well. As Alice Lovejoy notes, this transnational work “highlighted the importance of internationalism to documentary, and documentary to internationalism.” The essays in this section build on this principle, noting documentary’s consistent concern with borders and geographic frameworks but also highlighting the extraordinary variety of geographies under consideration in this research. They do so across scale, moving from the local town level in the United States to regional/supranational dynamics in the Soviet Union to unsponsored challenges to colonialism in French West Africa to the reception of Western documentary film theory in Japan. In addition to illuminating a range of conceptual issues related to the geographical, the essays in this section are all concerned with a particular era in documentary, from the end of World War II to the mid to late 1950s, a significantly understudied period in nonfiction film history.
Authors, Authorship, and Authoring Agencies
The issue of authorship is central to many definitions of documentary; for John Grierson, it is a key aspect that distinguishes the documentary from less thoughtful or refined nonfiction genres. But authorship, as the essays in this section make plain, is a highly contested issue for documentary, encompassing questions about who controls or owns the image and debate over the status of documentary as commerce or journalistic speech. In addition to the definition, legal and academic, authorship remains a key framework for histories of documentary and nonfiction film. Following these arguments, the essays in this section take it as a frictive phenomenon to be explored with rigorous attention to context. James Cahill even develops a term that captures the approach to authorship these essays take: AuNT or Author‐Network Theory, which accounts “for the interplay of forces involved in the creation of nonfiction and documentary films.” The essays in the section likewise offer innovative conceptual frameworks for understanding the role of individuals, communities, and institutions in efforts of creative labor and the agency undergirding them. They do so across history, context, and nonfiction media form, interrogating authorial functions related to, among others, the creative and the artisanal, visibility and invisibility, documentary versus avant‐garde historiography, and concluding with the issue of human subjectivity and posthuman modalities.
Films and Film Movements
The third section of this volume focuses on how scholars of nonfiction film work with both individual films and bodies of films as a way of understanding cinema’s relationship to the past. Like the other categories, a “movement” is one of the most enduring frameworks scholars have for classifying bodies of films—both nonfiction and fiction. However, the connective tissue that links films within a movement is not always self‐evident. The essays in this section interrogate those connections by addressing films that have been classified as part of film movements but do so in a way that establishes new, unanticipated connections with other films—those thought to be part of that movement as well as those outside of it—and cultural currents. As such, they urge us to reconsider the dominant associations of film movements with European cinema and with fiction film. Moreover, the term movement in scholarship on documentary film often takes on multiple meanings, referring to both the body of films and, frequently, the political movement with which they are aligned. The essays in this section explore in depth the implications of thinking of these films in relation to the movements with which they are associated. Sometimes this requires rigorous attention and sensitivity to the politics of the moment (Waugh), at others it requires reimagining what constitutes the movement itself (Gaines), and still at others it requires subverting the accepted genealogies of one of the most prominent movements in film history (Caminati).
Media Archaeologies
Media archaeology is an approach to studying media history that aims to challenge what many see as teleological narratives of progress and technological development. Applying Michel Foucault’s archaeological approach to media and technology, scholars sought to identify forgotten examples in media history and to do so explicitly across media. It aims to radically destabilize narratives about media history, hierarchical relations across media, and the epistemological stability of cinema, radio, television, new media, and other forms.