The Old and The New: Updating Documentary Historiographies

Abstract

August 2005 saw the Visible Evidence XII conference on taking place at my home institution, Concordia University in Montreal. The mood was anything but laid-back and summery: the five hundred-odd participants from around the world shared the excitement not so much of an academic conference but of a World Social Forum. Poised symbolically at mid-decade, Viz Ev XII was abuzz with films, ideas, emotion, debates, and a renewed energy to translate them all into action, to assess the increasingly important place is playing in a globalized political climate. The perennial crises in documentaryfinancial, aesthetic, ideological and ontological-were much in evidence of course, but these crises seemed secondary in importance to documentary's new mainstream positioning and its potential to intervene in many spheres-within academia, within the mediascape, within the real world. The Viz Ev papers and discussions were sharpened by many encounters: of practitioners with academics (and, within the latter category, of humanists with social scientists, and of emerging with established scholars); and of local re-inventers of Quebecois cinema direct indexicality with jet-lagged, English-speaking scholars of the postmodern and the postcolonial from five continents (Africa was, sadly, symptomatically absent...). Indian activist documentarist Anand Patwardhan was the conference keynoter, offering both an emotional challenge to the insidious grip of global censorship on media, on artists and on democracy, and a reminder of the resurgence of the geopolitical solidarity documentary. At the same time, the revival of media was felt by other presenters in the turbulence of reality TV genres and above all in the renewed viability of theatrical exhibition for documentary. With the conference tuned in to all this twenty-first-century actuality-from digitality and new media to their attendant challenges around audience, forms, funding, and truth value-it might have been easy to overlook the fact that many of the more interesting and less glamorous papers were offering solid legwork in the historiography of documentary. I have often complained that Viz Ev conferences of the past were victims of amnesia, showing little interest in the history of documentary, whether issues of institutional or textual or technological practices of the past, or of canonicity, or the archive itself. Such was not the case in 2005. Individual presenters were sometimes busy probing previously little known corners of history and theory, and full panel lineups were quietly supplementing and challenging existing canons and teleologies and other paradigms for understanding history. In this specially edited issue of Canadian Journal of Film Studies/Revue canadienne d'etudes cinematographiques, I am delighted to offer, on behalf of the Viz Ev XII organizers, six fine samples of historiographical work presented in preliminary form in Montreal. Our international group of six presenters offers a range of methodologies, perspectives and corpuses. The first three are senior scholars and Viz Ev veterans who provide theoretical overviews of current questions in studies. Jane Gaines endeavours to revitalize Marxist concepts, methods and ideals for the understanding of documentary's roots in social testimony and activism from the first decades of the cinema-long before John Grierson invented the Englishlanguage term documentary and founded the institutional legacy still alive and kicking in the very city that hosted our deliberations. The ghost of Grierson may indeed have been peering down at us from his suburban bunker, but it was Dziga Vertov whose name could be heard rising more frequently above the din. …