in Nuremburg, Germany), American director Pare Lorentz's 1936 The Plow That Broke the Plains (a New Deal film addressing the Dust Bowl), and Harry Watt and Basil Wright's 1936 Night Mail (a key work of British documentary depicting the British postal service's operations) became foundations of courses on documentary film, while widely read texts situated documentaries and their makers in national frameworks (see, e.g. Grant and Sloniowski 1998). As a result, through the end of the twentieth century, documentary scholarship frequently echoed interwar authors' confidence in documentary's links to the nation, as well as the authors' arguments about the nation's self‐evidence – its readiness to be documented. As Stephen G. Tallents, founder and director of the Empire Marketing Board, wrote in his The Projection of England, “national projection” was “the art” “of “throw[ing] a fitting presentation” of a country “upon the world's screen,” through a combination of “honest self‐expression” and “honest confidence” (Tallents 1932: 37). Nationality, in Jeníček's theory of cinema, was something a camera could simply capture.
In the 2000s, documentary's embrace of networked technologies, and the turn by a growing number of film and media scholars to archival and cultural‐historical methods, unsettled the nation's central position in documentary studies. At the same time that formats such as interactive documentaries (i‐docs) underscored the connectivity undergirding a significant subset of contemporary documentary, linking viewers and locations (see Aston et al. 2017), historical research pointed out that, long before the rise of digital technology, documentary worked between and among geographies. In her work on UNESCO, for instance, Zoë Druick emphasized the role of the “international” in giving shape to postwar documentary (Druick 2008), while new approaches to the work of Joris Ivens, and to interwar radical documentary, highlighted the importance of internationalism to documentary, and documentary to internationalism (Waugh 2016). Much of this work employed transnational approaches, underscoring that even when documentary undertook “national” projects, it often did so with personnel, material, and ideas from elsewhere (Ivens's Power and the Land is a classic example: produced for the U.S. Film Service yet directed by the peripatetic Dutch communist). (See also Druick and Williams 2014; Malitsky 2013). Moreover, by turning their attention to a wider range of institutions, films, and historical sources, scholars called into question the very definition of the nation in and for documentary. In revisiting documentary's interwar foundations, for instance, Lee Grieveson and Jonathan Kahana demonstrated that British documentary and American New Deal documentary were as much a matter of the state – the set of institutions governing a territory – as of the nation (a more contested, and thus difficult‐to‐define, idea) (Grieveson 2011; Kahana 2008).
The essays in this section continue in this vein, underscoring documentary's investment in borders and geopolitical frameworks, yet pointing to the considerable variety of, and overlaps between, the format's geographies. The essays shift between lenses and scales – starting small, with the American town in the aftermath of World War II. In “A Distant Local View: The Small‐Town Film and U.S. Cultural Diplomacy and Occupation, 1942–1952,” Martin Johnson examines three nonfiction films produced in the early 1950s by the Reorientation Branch of the United States Army's Civil Affairs Division: A Town Solves a Problem (1950), Women and the Community (1950), and Social Change in Democracy (1951). Destined to be shown in countries occupied by the United States after World War II, the films depicted life, work, and governance in three small towns: respectively, Pittsfield, Vermont; Monroe, New York; and Biloxi, Mississippi. While the films were intended to positively portray the United States to audiences in Germany, Japan, and Korea (and particularly to offer instruction in democracy), Johnson makes clear that their geopolitics were not limited to “national projection.” Indeed, when screened in the towns where they had been made, the documentaries also served as “local films,” showing places and faces that, familiar at home, doubled as diplomatic representatives abroad. Johnson's essay demonstrates both this imbrication of the local, the national, and the international in films that were primarily works of propaganda – a mode of cinema typically understood in chauvinistic national terms – and the instability at the heart of the “national,” whose portrayal in documentaries such as these depended on multiple material factors.
Raisa Sidenova's essay, “The Topographical Aesthetic in Late Stalinist Soviet Documentary,” chronicles the Soviet government's postwar attempts to rein in such divergences between documentary's geopolitical imaginaries. Sidenova argues that, from 1945 to 1953, the dominant genre in Soviet nonfiction film was the “geographical documentary” – a format that attempted to foster pride in the Soviet Union after its World War II victory and to give audiovisual shape to the country's new boundaries (which now included the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). Films such as Soviet Armenia (Sovetskaia Armeniia, 1951), Soviet Lithuania (Sovetskaia Litva, 1951), Soviet Turkmenistan (Sovetskii Turkmenistan, 1950), and Soviet Georgia (Sovetskaia Gruziia, 1952) used a standardized set of devices – an episodic structure, a lack of individual characters, synchronized sound, and a “totalizing view of Soviet life” – that Sidenova characterizes as a “topographical aesthetic.” While this standardization emphasized the Soviet Union's ideological uniformity (in the process masking the distinct nationalities, ethnicities, and cultures in the regions the films depicted), its formulas also offered a “survival strategy” for filmmakers under Zhdanovism, the brutal, anti‐Western and anti‐cosmopolitan cultural policy that lasted from the end of World War II to Stalin's death in 1953. Sidenova's essay is one of the first to explore Soviet documentary in this period. She shows not only how the postwar Soviet government attempted to harness, in new ways, documentary's historic links to publics and polities, but also the diversity of institutions and film forms that comprised postwar Soviet documentary (which, in addition to dedicated documentary film studios, was also situated in popular‐science and newsreel studios).
While Johnson and Sidenova investigate state‐sponsored nonfiction film, Paul Fileri explores the complex geopolitical dynamics in “unofficial” French postwar documentary – that is, films made without government support (and at times with government opposition). In “The Work of Displacement in Colonial Documentary: History, Movement, and Collectivity Between the Postwar Metropole and Colonial French West Africa,” Fileri closely analyzes two films made as part of the struggle for decolonization in francophone Africa: René Vautier's Africa 50 (Afrique 50, 1950) and Mamadou Sarr's and Paulin Soumanou Vieyra's Africa on the Seine (Afrique sur Seine, 1955). He argues that the films must be seen both within the contexts of French or African cinema and as a response to the history of the state‐sponsored colonial documentary, to whose form the films respond. Africa 50 and Africa on the Seine do not resolve this geographic instability; instead, as Fileri describes, they give voice to the filmmakers' powerful experience of “displacement” between the (French) metropole and the colonies. Displacement is legible at once in the films' production history – as Fileri writes, Africa 50's makers “[cut] across and mix[ed] African and French cultural expression and locations” – and in their aesthetics, which depend not only on the use (and reuse) of documentary footage, but also on the filmmakers' experience of censorship by the French state. Ultimately, the films find “belonging” outside of official geopolitical boundaries: for instance, in experiences of “solidarity and fraternity” depicted in Africa on the Seine.
Fileri's destabilization of media‐geopolitical commonplaces (such as the notion that a documentary must be from somewhere) is echoed in the section's final essay, Naoki Yamamoto's “Negation of the Negation: Tracking Documentary Film Theory in Japan.” Turning his attention to how ideas about documentary moved, Yamamoto examines the reception, in Japan, of Rotha's 1936 Documentary Film – a book, as Yamamoto writes, that “ignited surprisingly fierce and long‐lasting debates among its local readers.” Focusing on readings of Rotha from the late 1930s to the mid‐1950s by film critics Tsumura Hideo, Imamura Taihei, and Hanada Kiyoteru, Yamamoto considers these critics' discussions of Rotha, their own theories of documentary film, and their interactions with one another. He argues that the reception of Rotha's theories in Japan was “elliptical,” echoing the development of Japanese film theory in general, whose “critical debates … developed in constant dialogue with ideas or concepts imported