They must be represented: the politics of documentary

Abstract

This text examines documentary in print, photography and film from the 1930s to the present day, using the lens of recent feminist film theory as well as scholarship on race, class and gender. Rabinowitz discusses the ways in which the media have shaped the truth over the decades: in the 1930s, about poverty, labour and popular culture during the Depression; in the 1960s, about the Vietnam War, racism, work and the counterculture; and in the 1980s, abut feminist and gay critiques of gender, history, narrative and cinema. A great deal of documentary expression has been influenced by developments in cultural anthropology, as committed artists brought their cameras and typewriters into the field not only to record, but also to change the world. Yet recently, the projects of both anthropology and documentary have come under scrutiny. This book argues that the gendering of vision that occurs when narratives conform to conventional genres profoundly affects the relation of documentation to subject. It goes on to define this gendering of vision in documentary as an ethnographic process. Ultimately, this polemical study challenges the construction of the spectator in psychoanalytic film theory, and articulates a new model for theorizing power relations in culture and history. Paula Rabinowitz is the author of Labor and Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America, and co-edited Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940.