Documentary: Negotiating the Public Sphere

Abstract

Jonathan Kahana, Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary Film, New York, Columbia University Press, 2008; 432pp, paperback £20; hardback £62 Elizabeth Cowie, Recording Reality, Desiring the Real, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 201 1; 296pp, paperback £18.50; hardback £56 Thomas Waugh, The Right To Phy Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary Film, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 201 1; 336pp, paperback £20.50; hardback £61.50 Documentary, once largely neglected in film dieory, has been a subject of escalating interest over the last twenty years. Partly due to documentary's uneven yet persistent resurgence since the late- 1980s, partly the result of intensified interrogations of the status of truth and authenticity in representation, a number of scholars - such as Bill Nichols, Brian Winston, Vivian Sobchack, Michael Renov and Linda Williams, to name a few - have helped recast the ways that documentaries have been analysed and taught. With Intelligence Work and Recording Reality, Desiring the Real, Jonathan Kahana and Elizabeth Cowie, respectively, contribute important historical, political, and psychoanalytic insights to an area of inquiry still testing its parameters. Thomas Waugh's The Right to Play Oneself (on at least one level a tongue-incheek reference, Waugh notes) performs a somewhat different task: 'looking back' while reasserting the value of Waugh's longstanding contributions to the field of political - or what he has called 'committed' leftwing - documentary. Much critical work on documentary - and the above books stand out - has relied on negotiating between established notions of the form as social practice (stemming in particular from the legacies of John Grierson and Paul Rotha) and transformations of the documentary idea as it interacts with its 'publics' and the changing public sphere. Documentary has long produced a kind of imagined space - and 'real' place - for social engagement. It designates more than just a cinematic 'object', as Sobchack suggests: 'along with the obvious nomination of a film genre characterized historically by objective textual features, the term also - and more radically - designates a certain subjective relation to an objective cinematic or televisual text. In other words, documentary is less a thing than an experience'.1 The idea of documentary film as experience - as socially produced and apprehended through cognitive, psychic, and bodily processes - is crucial to the readings found in Kahana's and Cowie 's books. In Waugh's writing we get a profound sense of documentary film viewing as personal experience: a site of tension, bodi empowering and potentially troubling. Kahana's approach to US documentary recognizes the mobile status that the form has long held, travelling between the domains of 'official' and 'unofficial' or 'counterpublic' iterations. Somewhat paradoxically, documentary owes its ongoing relevance to 'its simultaneous appeal to both state and capitalist institutions and their critics'. Drawing on Charles Taylor's concept of a 'social imaginary', Kahana engages documentary as a recognizable yet fluid 'metagenre' that 'helps us envision the collective consequences of our thoughts and actions, no matter how ordinary or idiosyncratic' (pi). The impact of documentary, then, lies in its ability to gesture towards worlds, experiences, emotions and structures of feeling beyond the 'evidence' it depicts. Documentary representation can make visible 'the invisible or phantom realities that shape the experience of the ordinary Americans in whose name power is exercised and contested' (p9). In this sense, documentary doesn't just reflect social consciousness, it helps us imagine ideas and futures beyond its immediate framework and subject matter; it can make palpable - and transform - ideas of citizenship and relations to a national imaginary. Critics such as Waugh, Paula Rabinowitz, and Patricia Zimmermann have been key to outlining documentary's public functions, and Kahana rightfully acknowledges these contributions while laying the stress on a history of political slipperiness and ideological conflict in US documentary. …