Jonathan Kahana (1966–2019)

Abstract

Jonathan Kahana (1966–2019) Dan Streible (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Jonathan Kahana and the wall of wine. Photograph by Jennifer Horne, Bologna, 2019. Media scholar, documentary film historian, and cultural theorist Jonathan Kahana was in his prime when a rare form of lung cancer took his life at age fifty-three. He had already made an impact on documentary studies and practice with two major books and had another (on reenactment) in process when he passed away on the last day of 2019. His essays, interviews, and reviews appeared in publications ranging from Critical Inquiry and Jump Cut to Millennium Film Journal and the Brooklyn Rail. As our colleague Dana Polan put it, he had nothing less than "a world-wide reputation as one of the very best historians and interpreters of nonfiction modes of visual communication."1 Yet Kahana's influence on the field went well beyond his incisive writing. He had ongoing dialogue and interaction with media artists, such as Jill Godmilow, John Greyson, and Zoe Beloff. With filmmaker Lynne Sachs, he launched an annual Experimental Lecture series that brought legends of the avant-garde to the Tisch School of the Arts, starting with Barbara Hammer in 2007, followed by Craig Baldwin, Ken Jacobs, and Peggy Ahwesh. Born in Canada, he earned BA and BFA degrees from York University. While at the University of Minnesota for a master's degree (1992) in English, Jonathan met classmate Jennifer Horne. They became life partners and fellow film scholars. Completing a PhD at Rutgers University in 2001, he served as director of film studies at Bryn Mawr College, where he taught for five years. From 2005 to 2012, Kahana was associate professor of cinema studies at New York University (NYU), where he made a large impact. Ultimately, the University of California (UC), Santa Cruz recognized his work and hired him to lead a new Center for Documentary Arts and Research in its innovative Film and Digital Media Department. At NYU, Jonathan was active on several [End Page 305] fronts, which I was fortunate to experience when joining the department's faculty in 2006. Documentary remained his forte and passion, but he used the word capaciously, researching a broad array of nonfiction, hybrid, and experimental forms of media. His 2008 book Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary examines a funky variety of films and texts, bringing reexamination of landmark works into dialogue with neglected ones, such as Teach Our Children (1972), a Third World Newsreel short anonymously directed by teenagers Christine Choy and Susan Robeson. Serendipitously, 2008 also saw the preservation of that film and its screening at the first Orphan Film Symposium in New York, allowing Kahana to do what he did best: facilitate a discussion among scholars, archivists (Pamela Jean Smith of Pacific Film Archives, which preserved Teach Our Children), and filmmakers (Eric Breitbart, member of the Newsreel collective). I benefited from his intellectual curiosity and devotion to archival exploration when we co-taught a new course called Nonfiction Film History. Traditional documentary was part of the course, but home movies, educational films, sponsored films, and newsreels got equal time alongside cinema verité, social documentary, and compilation films. It was exciting. A milestone of his impact on the field and the department came in 2011, when Jonathan organized the international Visible Evidence conference in New York City. He saw to it that many partners and hundreds of speakers participated. He made "Archiving, Preservation, and the Material of Actuality and Documentary" a thread of the event. His wit and love of eclectic forms of media culture were visibly evident throughout. His program notes celebrated the historical diversity of New York's contributions to documentary "from Robert Frank to Grandmaster Flash; from the Workers Film and Photo League to Third World Newsreel; from Arthur Mayer and Iris Barry to Bill Sloan and the Donnell Film Library; from Anthology Film Archives to Women Make Movies; from Emile de Antonio to Jonas Mekas." He cheekily posited that a pair of cine-poems could shape the conference's experience of the Gotham location: Manhatta (1921), "a film whose metro-normative [!] view of modern life was soon enough shaded...