Reclaiming Popular Documentary

Christie Milliken, Steve F. Anderson

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780253056900
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The documentary has achieved rising popularity over the past two decades thanks to streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. Despite this, documentary studies still tends to favor works that appeal primarily to specialists and scholars.

Reclaiming Popular Documentary reverses this long-standing tendency by showing that documentaries can be—and are—made for mainstream or commercial audiences. Editors Christie Milliken and Steve Anderson, who consider popular documentary to be a subfield of documentary studies, embrace an expanded definition of popular to acknowledge the many evolving forms of documentary, such as branded entertainment, fictional hybrids, and works with audience participation. Together, these essays address emerging documentary forms—including web-docs, virtual reality, immersive journalism, viral media, interactive docs, and video-on-demand—and offer the critical tools viewers need to analyze contemporary documentaries and consider how they are persuaded by and represented in documentary media.

By combining perspectives of scholars and makers, Reclaiming Popular Documentary brings new understandings and international perspectives to familiar texts using critical models that will engage media scholars and fans alike.

1

POP DOCS

The Work of Popular Documentary in the Age of Alternate Facts

Christie Milliken and Steve F. Anderson

Isolation and indifference are the enemy. With regimes of knowledge increasingly fragmented and politicized for short-term gain, the stakes of documentary media and collective discourses of truth are higher—and more difficult to negotiate—than ever. This volume aims to carve a space between the well-trodden domains of documentary studies and popular culture, arguing that it is at this conjunction that we find some of the most vital forms of engagement with the most pressing issues of our time. Through a series of individual investigations, Reclaiming Popular Documentary articulates a concerted sense of the interconnection between viewing subjects and the topics of documentary investigation that resonate most broadly. Whether we focus on popular entertainment genres, specific films or auteurs, or changing modes of exhibition and viewing, the stakes that loom large in all directions are nothing less than the functioning of democracy, the decency with which humans treat each other, and the ultimate survival of the planet. Of course, we do not suppose that documentary media offer the best or only platform to engage such issues, but we insist on the value of unflinching critique that targets the products of popular culture as well as the industries, infrastructures, and predispositions that produce them. Popular documentary is uniquely suited to oppose the drift toward isolation and indifference by bringing people together and inducing them to care about issues of consequence. By reclaiming the intersection of documentary and the popular, we hope to reinvigorate awareness of the capacity for documentary media to play a key role in mobilizing the power of collective intelligence, cultural awareness, and social action.

The renewal of documentary in recent decades has taken place in the context of significant social, environmental, technological, and geopolitical changes. In a time of proliferating voices, documentary functions as a global commodity, its distribution enabled by the rise of digital networks and social media, the increase in specialized cable programming, and the expansion of genres and festivals designed to appeal to broad publics. At the same time—and with notable exceptions—collective critical attention to “popular” documentary has remained relatively underdeveloped in the burgeoning field of documentary studies.¹ Indeed, among the many subfields of cinema and media studies, documentary studies has often seemed remarkably willing not only to neglect works that may be considered popular but actually to malign them compared with works that are more commonly privileged but less often seen. There are, of course, exceptions: a veritable subgenre of documentary publishing has accrued around a handful of—mostly white Western, male—auteurs such as Michael Moore, Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, Morgan Spurlock, and a few others. Several monographs on documentary published over the past decades devote chapters to specific films or subgenres that would be categorized as “mainstream,” particularly recent work on environmental documentary, music, biography, and sports docs or even notorious festival or box office successes.² Any perusal of major film studies conference programs—including the pathbreaking, documentary-focused Visible Evidence—from past decades certainly confirms attention to popular documentaries on a case-by-case basis. But never before has a single volume assembled a deliberative, critical engagement with issues specific to popular documentary. Even the Visible Evidence book series published by University of Minnesota Press, an innovative collection of twenty-eight volumes dedicated to the study of documentary that ran from 1997 to 2014, produced no single volume that offers sustained engagement with the complex interstices of documentary studies and the popular.

Over a decade ago, Ruby Rich argued that “documentary studies has tended toward a kind of isolation: from other directions in cultural studies, from international perspectives on its own traditions, and from alternative methods for assessing standards of truth telling and representational veracity within documentary traditions . . . the coherence of documentary studies as practiced most normatively is sometimes bought at the expense of imaginative possibility.”³ While media studies, film studies, and cultural studies have widely expanded their objects of analysis, documentary scholars have tended to focus on traditional forms, embracing new critical models, to be sure, but ultimately sustaining the divide between “high” and “low” in terms of documentary practices, platforms, and publics. To some extent, this lacuna must relate to the lack of coordinated attention to popular appeal, spectatorial pleasure, and reception in documentary film scholarship. Yet despite the florescence of many popular subjects, forms, and practices, documentary studies has remained surprisingly inattentive to the role of documentary in popular culture.

Reclaiming Popular Documentary explores how the recent explosion of popular documentary troubles or enlivens existing theories and critical methodologies for understanding its role within a dense and rapidly changing landscape of popular media. This collection deliberately casts a wide net over a predominantly twenty-first-century time frame in order to represent and theorize popular documentary as a dynamic and varied subfield. It presents essays by both leading and emerging theorists as well as historians and makers who reflect critically on technological innovations, new articulations of old modes, documentary film festivals, changing distribution platforms and practices, privileged and underrepresented auteurs, and the redomaining of established genres, modes, and practices.

At earlier moments in the evolution of the field, the very notion of “popular documentary” might have seemed like an oxymoron, slipping into the large fissures separating documentary studies’ sober discourse and postmodernism’s playful recuperation of pop culture. With that said, we acknowledge that the history of documentary film is characterized by periods of intense productivity and florescence followed by moments of relative languish. Documentary has enjoyed many periods of popularity, with its emergence and consolidation around the feature-length format (perhaps most famously via the popular anthropological documentaries of Robert Flaherty); Soviet agitprop and European avant-gardist experimentation in the 1920s; its institutionalization and consolidation in Great Britain, the United States, and Canada in the 1940s; and particularly the vast apparatuses of investment and expansion during World War II in the service of the war propaganda, battle records, training, and indoctrination films. Direct cinema and cinema vérité as they emerged in the 1960s and 1970s constitute another period of intense productivity and formal innovation, with particular subgenres such a biodocs, music docs, identity politics documentaries, and natural history, historical, and movement documentaries continually in production and circulation. Our focus is on the ongoing period of productivity that began without abatement in the late 1980s and the amplification of scholarly attention to documentary that coincides with this proliferation, facilitated by the blockbuster successes in that decade and beyond with films such as Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988) and Michael Moore’s Roger and Me (1989).

Reclaiming Popular Documentary builds on the momentum already well underway among documentary scholars to theorize an expanding range of nonfiction media genres and tactics: docudrama/dramadocs, reenactment, animation, documentary games, and virtual reality, to name only a few.⁴ This anthology takes the discussion a step further by sharpening our understandings of documentary as a particularly vital form of media culture, preserving both a rigorous commitment to the “documentary contract” as well as concessions to fiction-based tendencies and the pleasures of the popular.⁵ While questions of access to truth and the trustworthiness of media continue to be overshadowed by superficial debates over “fake news” and “alternate facts,” Reclaiming Popular Documentary offers an insistent reminder that discourses of truth have never been reducible to a simple binary. The analytical tools and methods developed over many decades by scholars of documentary media bring much-needed historical and critical perspectives to the complex evolution of authority in fields from politics to journalism. By assuming popular media as a forum for serious analysis of social issues, this book asserts the relevance of documentary as a central component of today’s media landscape.

In the context of cinema and media studies, documentary continues to be a particularly vibrant area of study, as evidenced by the publication of numerous documentary-related volumes in the last ten years. Yet a survey of this field reveals that “popular documentary” has been embraced within neither the realm of popular culture nor that of documentary. The voluminous (more than six-hundred-page) A Companion to Popular Culture (2016) from Wiley Blackwell, for example, includes only a single chapter devoted to documentary; and while popular forms (especially reality television and nature programming) are routinely referenced in documentary-oriented volumes, no previous book has explicitly articulated the concerns and stakes of documentary in terms of popular media.⁶ We believe popular documentary occupies a position of adjacency and resonance with several particularly dynamic areas of documentary publishing and that the time is ripe for defining and claiming popular documentary as a significant area of intersectional scholarship.

Given the expansive terrain that the term popular documentary implies, this collection makes no claims to be exhaustive. In a sense, these essays cumulatively illuminate the multifaceted connotations of popular outlined by Raymond Williams in Keywords as variously “widespread,” “well-liked by many people,” “inferior kinds of work,” work made with a sense of calculation to “win favor with the people,” and/or “culture actually made by the people for themselves.”⁷ Our contributors were invited to establish their own take on what popular documentary means and to develop their arguments in relation to a common series of questions motivating the anthology as a whole and shaping its coherence. Accepting as axiomatic the ongoing resurgence of documentary, we ask what kinds of knowledge, theory, and practice are made possible by framing documentary as popular? What is the relationship between documentary and entertainment and between popular documentary and advocacy? Can popular documentary be productively reconceived in relation to genre, modes, or rhetorical forms? Assuming the popular is defined in contrast to other categories (either implicitly or explicitly), what might those other categories be? Can terms like highbrow, lowbrow, and even middlebrow be productively applied to documentary?

By positing the popular as a productively ambiguous term, our contributors engage a wide variety of texts and contexts: some films by well-established auteurs (such as Laura Poitras and Errol Morris), others by filmmakers who have had award-winning commercial and festival success but who generally remain off the academic radar, and still others that are collaborative and community-based projects, as well as more recent web-based, televised, or immersive projects. This anthology tactically integrates the voices of makers and scholar-makers along with more traditional historians and theorists of documentary. In keeping with our commitment to blurring the lines between popular and scholarly discourse, we find that creators bring a unique awareness of documentary’s evolving role within popular culture. We are additionally interested in complicating the convention of asking makers simply to reflect on the process by which their work is created. Dylan Nelson’s reflection on the role of archival footage in her historical documentary Nanking, for example, expands into a broad and theoretically grounded reflection on the complicated role of entertainment, narrative, and referentiality in the use of archival footage. Likewise, Rick Prelinger’s account of his construction and staging of a series of film “events” engages issues of spectatorship, community, and liveness in particular spaces and times. Documentary filmmaker and scholar Allison de Fren focuses not on her own acclaimed work as a video essayist but on the historical and economic contexts in which videographic scholarship continues to blur the lines between textual analysis, essayistic video, and fan remixes. And in her contribution to this volume, longtime documentary filmmaker and scholar Alexandra Juhasz turns her attention not to motion picture media but to the cultural economy of the internet and the role and limitations of social media for spreading information and sustaining cultural debates. In combination, we view these perspectives as offering a crucial counterpoint to more traditional studies of documentary theory and history.

A subgenre of popular documentary that raises provocative ambiguities is that of the digital documentary, a permeably bounded category that includes web-docs and mobile and interactive documentaries, or “i-docs,” as well as transmedia documentaries, documentary games, and various experiments with nonfiction in the domains of virtual and augmented reality. Here too, the definitional status of the popular remains fluid in relation to these emerging documentary forms. Simply because a work is distributed online and therefore has the potential to reach a global audience does not necessarily locate it within the realm of the popular. As Steve F. Anderson notes, the still emerging form of VR documentary, for example, is insistently promoted as a site of popular intervention in social and environmental issues, even though its total viewership achieves barely a fraction of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Pop Docs: The Work of Popular Documentary in the Age of Alternate Facts
• Part I. Popular Documentary Today
• Part II. Documentary Ecologies
• Part III. Short Forms and Web Practices
• Part IV. Auteurs, Politics, and Popularity
• Part V. Documentary Genres
• Part VI. Engaging Audiences
• Index