BOOK DATA Jill Godmilow, Kill the Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. $120.00 hardcover; $30.00 paper. 224 pages.In 2002, filmmaker Jill Godmilow published an eleven-point manifesto in the Journal of Film and Video entitled “Kill the Documentary as We Know It,” which quickly became required reading for anyone interested in the ethical and epistemological problems posed by documentary film. Godmilow was at that time already a well-known and widely admired filmmaker. Her 1974 collaboration with musician Judy Collins, Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman, a powerful biography of the female conductor Antonia Brico, received an Academy Award nomination (and was later added to the National Film Registry). Her 1984 experimental documentary, Far from Poland, had become a key text in the deconstruction of documentary film’s claims of “taking you there” and offering access to “reality.” Her 1987 feature film, Waiting for the Moon, a biopic about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, had won Best Feature Film at Sundance. What Farocki Taught, her shot-by-shot remake of Nicht löschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire), Harun Farocki’s 1969 film about the production of napalm at Dow Chemical Company, premiered at the 1998 Rotterdam International Film Festival and was featured in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. In other words, long before Twitter followers, she had a platform, and she helped change the way filmmakers and scholars thought about nonfiction filmmaking.In “Kill the Documentary as We Know It,” Godmilow astutely and succinctly identified many of the key problems plaguing documentary form, particularly its extractivist tendencies marshaled in the service of making viewers feel better about themselves. Kill the Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars serves as a book-length follow-up to that essay twenty-odd years later. Notably, it begins with a disclaimer: “Calling it a letter accounts for my avoidance of academic prose and theoretics—rather writing often informally and personally to filmmakers” (xix). Indeed, the inclusion of “scholars” in the subtitle is misleading. This book is overtly and exclusively addressed to film students and other aspiring filmmakers, especially those who are unaware of the long tradition of experimental documentary filmmaking, a term by which I mean that broad and varied selection of nonfiction films that actively engage questions of the real, the impossibility of its accurate or objective representation, and the questionable ethics of filming others. Scholars, however, may be disappointed.In Kill the Documentary, Godmilow’s ire is directed mostly at “realist documentaries,” “conventional documentaries,” “traditional documentaries,” and “the-documentary-as-we-know-it,” as well as the kinds of viewers they implicitly address and thereby construct (8–9). As she puts it, such documentaries offer viewers “the momentary satisfaction of concerned citizenship” without necessarily leading them to any sort of self-awareness, let alone action (16). Godmilow, speaking the language of Marxist apparatus theory, is scathing in her critique of these films and their imagined self-satisfied liberal middle-class viewers, who wallow in the “pornography of the real” at the expense of those pictured (13).Certainly, many viewers do leave a film like Hoop Dreams, Steve James’s 1994 documentary about a pair of African American boys from the inner city trying and failing to make into to the NBA, feeling sad for the boys but also feeling like better people simply for caring about them. The “fraudulent intimacy” offered by such films is, in Godmilow’s view, exploitative, unethical, and mystifying in its failure to reveal viewers’ own complicitly in what they see on-screen (16). She is equally enraged by films like the eighteen-hour miniseries The Vietnam War (Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, 2017), which she regards as using realist strategies to put forth a misleading and self-exonerating version of the war as the truth about it. (Her most recent film, For High School Students: Notes and Images from the Vietnam War (2021) composed entirely of still images accompanied by Godmilow’s voice-over narration, attempts to speak back to this seemingly closed version of the war.)Godmilow wants filmmakers instead to make what she calls “useful postrealist films” (27). These are—in contrast to conventional documentaries—antimimetic, interventionist, interactive, self-reflexive, poetic, counterhegemonic, and antispectacular. She wants a nonfiction cinema that shakes viewers’ most foundational epistemological assumptions, that defamiliarizes the real to the point that all social constructions suddenly become visible as such, that topples the hegemonic discourses that underpin the military-industrial regime under which she believes everyone today lives. She calls for films that generate a paradigm crisis within the viewer, making way for a new imaginaire social in which capitalism, militarism, and the pursuit of power are no longer the structuring elements of a society.For those who are familiar with experimental documentary, her examples of existing “postrealist” films will read as already canonical: Las Hurdes (Land without Bread, Luis Buñuel, 1933), The Battle of San Pietro (John Huston, 1945), Le sang des bêtes (Blood of the Beasts, Georges Franju, 1949), Rat Life and Diet in North America (Joyce Wieland, 1968), The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (Stan Brakhage, 1971), Crossroads (Bruce Conner, 1976), De grands événements et des gens ordinaires (Of Great Events and Ordinary People, Raúl Ruiz, 1979), Reassemblage (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1982), Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985), S21, la machine de mort khmère rouge (S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, Rithy Panh, 2003). A new generation of documentary filmmakers, who may never have seen these films, will find her ready-made screening list invaluable. Notably, she offers close examinations of several of Farocki’s films (which I agree should be more widely seen and taught). For those who already know documentary history, however, the absence of more-recent examples will be glaring.Like the films she references, Godmilow’s arguments here are not new. Documentary theorists have been making similar arguments against “realist” documentaries—ones that implicitly promise the viewer a false sense of unmediated access to the real, that objectify their subjects for the viewer’s audiovisual consumption, that offer a story format that seemingly resolves the “problem” by the end, and/or that give the passive viewer a (false) sense of being a good person who cares about other people—for decades now. (Indeed, Godmilow’s earlier statement did so in 2002.) Nevertheless, Godmilow reiterates these critiques eloquently and vehemently, refreshing them for a new generation of readers—undergraduates and aspiring young documentarians, in particular—who want to make a different kind of documentary than what Netflix is pumping out.Alongside these great if well-worn examples and well-chosen quotations from sources such as Theodor Adorno, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Ai WeiWei, Godmilow outlines specific strategies for aspiring nonfiction filmmakers to help them avoid the pitfalls of the ideologically complicit conventional documentary. She encourages filmmakers to borrow strategies like the ironic lack of empathy for the Hurdano people apparent in the voice-over of the narrator in Las Hurdes; Farocki’s calm, uninflected demonstration of napalm’s effects on living bodies that “compels objective, accurate observation of mundane routine evil” in Inextinguishable Fire; the defamiliarizing power of Wieland’s substitution of rats for US draftees fleeing conscription in the Vietnam War in Rat Life and Diet in North America; and many others (46).The “Toolkit” section at the end of the book operates as a guide to trying out experimental documentary tactics, even giving the reader assignments. This book will be a gold mine for any instructors putting together an “Introduction to Documentary Filmmaking” syllabus or for cinematic autodidacts hungry to experiment with alternative modes of nonfictional filmmaking.Kill the Documentary is not, however, a work of scholarship. In fact, Godmilow’s book reminds me why the distinction between filmmaker and film scholar is still important. The medium of the filmmaker is sound and image, and Godmilow’s own brilliant films are a testament to her skill and insight as an audiovisual artist and activist. The medium of the scholar, however, is still (largely) writing. When scholars coin terms, they do so by carefully sifting through the histories, contradictory meanings, and varied connotations of existing words in order to produce a novel word or phrase for something that already exists but that there has, as yet, been no way to specify. This is the art of theory, of philosophy: creating precise language for something that no one has yet been able to articulate.For this reason, I must take issue with Godmilow’s rampant and awkward neologisms as well as her elision of the substantial amount of relevant, perceptive writing on documentary already in print. Calling a book-length publication a “letter,” particularly if you explicitly include scholars in your address, does not excuse the writer from looking up the most recent scholarship on a topic or looking around a bit to see if anyone else has already offered helpful terms for speaking about the films that interest you. The terms Godmilow puts forth are poorly chosen, carelessly defined, and sometimes even in active use by scholars discussing something else.For instance, although she coins the term “postrealist cinema” to describe such objects, this is a misnomer. The prefix post- means “after,” but the kind of filmmaking she describes has existed alongside what she terms “realist” filmmaking since cinema’s invention. The term “realism” generally refers to a style of fiction that offers viewers a sense that what is on-screen could really happen—but does not suggest that it did actually happen. By contrast, any film that presents itself as a documentary implicitly suggests that what is seen refers to actual events, regardless of its style, so Godmilow’s usage is confusing rather than clarifying. In fact, if the cinema she reveres is post-anything, it is poststructuralist in that the films she cites are self-reflexive, aware of their own positioning, of the partiality of their representations, and/or of the constructed and limited nature of all communication systems. Indeed, the category of “poststructuralist documentary” would be a much more productive and accurate one.She also calls for a “useful cinema,” by which I understand she means politically (or existentially) useful, a cinema that wakes people out of their consumer stupor and leads to an enlightened form of being in and engagement with the world. However, Godmilow disregards how deeply the idea of usefulness is bound up in the capitalist discourses and structures she despises. She advocates for a poetic cinema that can change ways of seeing. Yet, in her terminology, she denies art’s fundamental and necessary uselessness and ignores how its resistance to utility lies precisely in its power to change the horizons of human imagination. Moreover, “useful cinema” is not her invention: it is a term already in use to talk about educational, industrial, and other films produced for a defined purpose within a particular institutional setting, as in Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson’s 2011 collection Useful Cinema.Moreover, Godmilow’s book feels like it should have been published decades ago. It is a time capsule of an earlier moment in the history of documentary and documentary theory. In a way, my own history is contained in this time capsule: Las Hurdes was the film that forever shook my own epistemological foundations when I was an undergraduate—over twenty years ago. The films she cites, the arguments she makes, the concepts she references are the ones I first encountered and became enraptured by in film courses in the late 1990s, a time when Godmilow herself was teaching at Notre Dame.Godmilow is undoubtedly an inspirational instructor, and there is nothing wrong with building on the work of prior luminaries. Buñuel, Farocki, and Wieland’s films have not ceased to resonate—nor have they ever ceased to be taught. These films, arguments, and ways of thinking remain important. Yet, Godmilow fails to acknowledge that there have been some very material changes in the past twenty years. For instance, many of the films she cites work (in the transformative sense that she describes) only when they are projected in a theater space. Twenty years ago, it was possible to see experimental films projected on 16 mm in a dark auditorium at most universities and some art-house theaters; now, most people watch experimental work on a computer or, at best, a large HDTV screen. (Have you ever tried to watch The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes on a laptop? Don’t.) Godmilow calls for transformative documentary, but the cinema theater, that space of oneiric potentiality, has become a rarity—except for multiplexes, which are unlikely to screen Brakhage.1Moreover, the “conventional documentary” has also changed since the rise of streaming services, binge watching, and the cultural obsession with the crime documentary’s narrative structure. Godmilow gives few actual examples of conventional documentaries. Hoop Dreams, The Vietnam War, Nanook of the North, and The Fog of War are her go-to references, and these are not representative of contemporary mainstream documentary. How, for instance, would Godmilow cinematically deconstruct the performative, postmodern, reality-TV- and social-media-inflected logics of Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness (Eric Goode, Rebecca Chaiklin, 2020)? In the era of phrases like “truthiness” and “alternative facts,” sincere (though futile) attempts to accurately replicate the real seem almost quaint. Indeed, the kind of documentary Godmilow wants to kill was already on its deathbed twenty years ago. The new breed of “realism” exemplified by Tiger King requires a new set of strategies to challenge its hegemony.In his foreword to Kill the Documentary, Bill Nichols characterizes the book as a manifesto, and manifestos by their nature are polemical and reductive in order to stake a claim. But do these claims still needed to be staked—or need to be staked once more? The manifestos I most admire—the Statement of the New American Cinema (circa 1961) and the Oberhausen Manifesto (1962), for instance—recognized that cinema, including documentary, that seeks to challenge the established limits of human thinking at a particular moment in time cannot be made without a robust, noncommercial financial structure. The New American Cinema, which called for and tried to create an alternative funding and distribution structure in the 1960s, struggled. The Oberhausen Manifesto succeeded because its signers successfully convinced the German government to fund its films. Hence, they did not have to pander to existing audiences; their task was to produce new kinds of audiences.A documentary is not a kind of text, not an object that can be “killed.” Rather, it demands a mode of reception, an attitude that accepts what appears on-screen as a true and faithful representation of the historical world that the audience shares.2 Yet, these days conspiracy theorists constantly elicit this mode of reception on false premises: uploading their “documentaries” to YouTube, successfully convincing vulnerable and gullible viewers not to get vaccinated against a dangerous virus, or to join a violent mob convened by false claims. In this context, what is needed are documentaries that help constitute viewers who cannot be used in this way, who recognize that evidence, reasoned argument, and corroboration are the only tools that exist for distinguishing truth, however partial, from disguised fiction. If anything needs to be “killed,” then, it’s the passive documentary consumer, who can be so easily instrumentalized by power based on a lie—not outmoded forms that have already been superseded for decades.