A Companion to Documentary Film History

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data

Names: Malitsky, Joshua, editor of compilation.

Title: A companion to documentary film history / [edited by] Joshua Malitsky.

Description: First edition. | Hoboken : Wiley‐Blackwell [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020025445 (print) | LCCN 2020025446 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119116240 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119116295 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119116301 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Documentary films–History and criticism.

Classification: LCC PN1995.9.D6 M3285 2020 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.D6 (ebook) | DDC 070.1/8–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025445LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025446

Cover Design: Wiley

Cover Image: © image by Rainer Ganahl, ganahl.info (artist’s website), Kai Matsuyima Gallery, NYC

Weihong Bao University of CaliforniaUSA

Luca Caminati Concordia UniversityCanada

James Leo Cahill University of TorontoCanada

Zoë Druick Simon Fraser UniversityCanada

Paul Fileri American UniversityUSA

Alla Gadassik Emily Carr University of Art + DesignCanada

Jane M. Gaines Columbia UniversityUSA

Oliver Gaycken University of MarylandUSA

Malte Hagener Philipps University MarburgGermany

Alice Lovejoy University of MinnesotaUSA

Steven Jacobs Ghent UniversityBelgium

Brian R. Jacobson California Institute of TechnologyUSA

Martin L. Johnson University of North CarolinaUSA

Joshua Malitsky Indiana UniversityUSA

Mariano Mestman Universidad de Buenos AiresArgentina

Joshua Neves Concordia UniversityCanada

Philip Rosen Brown UniversityUSA

Raisa Sidenova Newcastle UniversityUK

William Uricchio Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyUSA

Gregory A. Waller Indiana UniversityUSA

Thomas Waugh Concordia UniversityCanada

Brian Winston Lincoln UniversityUK

Naoki Yamamoto University of CaliforniaUSA

Yvonne Zimmermann Philipps University MarburgGermany

Joshua Malitsky

Indiana University

Documentary media has a more prominent role in the contemporary global zeitgeist than it ever has before. Documentaries are produced by massive government agencies, by leading broadcast corporations, by independent collectives, by individuals, and by a host of formations in between. They are viewed in theaters, on broadcast and cable or satellite television, in public spaces, at workplaces, in schools, in galleries and museums, in planes, trains, and automobiles, and in homes. We access them on screens small and large, projected in theaters, on walls, and on personal devices, be they phones or personal computers. We watch them in one sitting or over the course of days, weeks, or months. A way of speaking about the world with images and (often) sounds connected to the world, they have become increasingly integral to how we experience our personal and professional lives. And whereas they serve a host of different functions, they have become perhaps the most significant form through which we think in depth about the past.

Scholarship on documentary and nonfiction film has grown substantially in the last 30 years and exploded in the last 10. A handful of excellent volumes on the current state of documentary studies have either recently been published or are forthcoming. Some serve as introductory textbooks, such as Louise Spence’s and Vinicius Navarro’s Crafting Truth (Spence and Navarro, 2010). Some have sought to encapsulate the “present agenda of concerns” in documentary studies such as Brian Winston’s The Documentary Film Book (Winston, 2013) or the volume that Patrick Sjoberg and I produced entitled The Documentary Moment (Malitsky and Sjoberg, 2021). Others focus on debates and statements that have taken place over the history of documentary, such as Jonathan Kahana’s The Documentary Film Reader (Kahana, 2016). Alexandra Juhasz’s and Alisa Lebow’s A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film (Juhasz and Lebow, 2015), with which this book is affiliated, is an authoritative as well as an activist study of “documentary’s world‐changing aspirations,” participating in the project to which it sees documentaries, scholars, and artists deeply dedicated—“the passionate commitment to and direct engagement with the lived world” (Juhasz and Lebow, 2015: 1).

This relationship between documentary media and the past is the subject of A Companion to Documentary Film History . In this book, a cluster of major scholars address the textual, industrial, and social aspects of this media form. Among the many recent works, A Companion to Documentary Film History is the only anthology that focuses its attention on the history of the documentary. Its goal in this capacity is both to shed light on central historical issues, be they related to reception, geography, authorship, multimedia context, or movements, and to do so by highlighting a breadth of historiographical approaches. Crucially, it achieves this by radically expanding the purview of what counts as documentary.

Recent years have witnessed growth in scholarship on nonfiction film practices that are seen by many to be peripheral to documentary. Travelogues, newsreels, industrial films, educational films, home movies, film diaries, science films, and promotional films were “considered too quotidian, too topical, too instrumental or too ephemeral to have a place in the documentary tradition” (Kahana, 2016: 3). Their aesthetics were too inconsequential, their voices too muted, their purposes too obvious. The new scholarship on this work, however, has transformed the field of documentary history by expanding the (cinematic) objects of consideration—and it has done so methodologically as well with its focus on materialist and archival histories. Challenging dominant auteurist and national cinema paradigms, such work highlights the conditions of film production and the context of its use, including the reasons for commission, the understanding of intended audience, the proposed purposes, and so forth. Doing so does not only make the subfield of documentary richer and more generative—though certainly it does that—but it is also historically necessary .