Reclaiming Popular Documentary

Steve F. Anderson, Christie Milliken

Description

New Books Network interview.

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.

Acknowledgments
Part I: Popular Documentary Today
1. Pop Docs: The Work of Popular Documentary in the Age of Alternate Facts, by Christie Milliken and Steve F. Anderson
2. Reclaiming the Popular for Public Interest Documentary, by Ezra Winton
Part II: Documentary Ecologies
3. Public Television's Role in the U.S. Documentary Ecology, by Patricia Aufderheide
4. On (Not) Falling from the Sky: Fly-Over Global Documentary as Capitalist Body Genre, by Zoë Druick
5. Accelerating Deceleration: Slow Violence and Time-Lapse Cinematography, by Devon Coutts
Part III: Short Forms and Web Practices
6. From Elegy to Kitsch: Spectacles of Epistephelia in Food, Inc. and Early Food Documentaries, by Sabiha Ahmad Khan
7. Errol Morris, The New York Times, Docmedia, and Op-Docs as Pop Docs, by Anthony Kinik
8. Popular Music & Short Form Nonfiction: Is the Web a Forum for Documentary Innovation?, by Michael Brendan Baker
Part IV: Auteurs, Politics and Popularity
9. From the Essay Film to the Video Essay: Between the Critical and the Popular, by Allison de Fren
10. Errol Morris and the Ends of Irony, by Jonathan Kahana
11. Vérite: Lauren Greenfield and the Challenge of Feminist Documentary, by Shilyh Warren
Part V: Documentary Genres
12. Citizenfour and the Anti-Representational Turn: Aesthetics of Failure in the Information Age, by S. Topiary Landberg
13. Of Kids and Sharks: Victims, Heroes and the Politics of Melodrama in Popular Documentary, by Christie Milliken
14. Strategies of the Popular Music Documentary's Recovery Mode, by Landon Palmer
Part VI: Engaging Audiences
15. Assembling Nanking: Archival Filmmaking in the Popular Historical Documentary, by Dylan Nelson
16. Virality is Virility: Viral Media, Popularity and Violence, by Alexandra Juhasz
17. Populism, Participation and Perpetual Incompletion: Performing an Urban History Commons, by Rick Prelinger
18. The Armchair Juror: Audience Engagement in True Crime Documentaries, by George S. Larke-Walsh
19. New (Old) Ontologies of Documentary, by Steve F. Anderson
Index

Sujets

• Genres
• Media Studies
• Social Science
• Popular Culture
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Película fotográfica
• Documentary film
• YouTube
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 06 juillet 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253056900
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
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1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.org
2021 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2021
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Milliken, Christie, editor. | Anderson, Steve F., editor.
Title: Reclaiming popular documentary / edited by Christie Milliken and Steve F. Anderson.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020057344 (print) | LCCN 2020057345 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253056870 (hardback) | ISBN 9780253056887 (paperback) | ISBN 9780253056900 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Documentary films-History and criticism. | Motion picture audiences.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.D6 R373 2021 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.D6 (ebook) | DDC 070.18-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057344
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057345
Dedicated to Jonathan Kahana
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
1. Pop Docs: The Work of Popular Documentary in the Age of Alternate Facts / Christie Milliken and Steve F. Anderson
Part I. Popular Documentary Today
2. Reclaiming the Popular for Public Interest Documentary / Ezra Winton
3. Public Television s Role in the US Documentary Ecology / Patricia Aufderheide
Part II. Documentary Ecologies
4. On (Not) Falling from the Sky: Fly-Over Global Documentary as Capitalist Body Genre / Zo Druick
5. Accelerating Deceleration: Slow Violence and Time-Lapse Cinematography / Devon Coutts
6. From Elegy to Kitsch: Spectacles of Epistephilia in Food, Inc. and Early Food Documentaries / Sabiha Ahmad Khan
Part III. Short Forms and Web Practices
7. Errol Morris, the New York Times , Docmedia, and Op-Docs as Pop Docs / Anthony Kinik
8. Popular Music and Short-Form Nonfiction: Is the Web a Forum for Documentary Innovation? / Michael Brendan Baker
9. From the Essay Film to the Video Essay: Between the Critical and the Popular / Allison de Fren
Part IV. Auteurs, Politics, and Popularity
10. Errol Morris and the Ends of Irony / Jonathan Kahana
11. V rit : Lauren Greenfield and the Challenge of Feminist Documentary / Shilyh Warren
12. Citizenfour and the Antirepresentational Turn: Aesthetics of Failure in the Information Age / S. Topiary Landberg
Part V. Documentary Genres
13. Of Kids and Sharks: Victims, Heroes, and the Politics of Melodrama in Popular Documentary / Christie Milliken
14. Strategies of the Popular Music Documentary s Recovery Mode / Landon Palmer
15. Assembling Nanking : Archival Filmmaking in the Popular Historical Documentary / Dylan Nelson
Part VI. Engaging Audiences
16. Virality Is Virility: Viral Media, Popularity, and Violence / Alexandra Juhasz
17. Populism, Participation, and Perpetual Incompletion: Performing an Urban History Commons / Rick Prelinger
18. The Armchair Juror: Audience Engagement in True Crime Documentaries / George S. Larke-Walsh
19. New (Old) Ontologies of Documentary / Steve F. Anderson
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to acknowledge the many individuals who have supported this project since its inception, especially our acquiring editors at Indiana University Press, Allison Chaplin and Janice Frisch. The manuscript benefited greatly from the press s meticulous review process, which included extremely insightful, generous, specific-and, of course, anonymous-feedback from reviewers to whom we will never be able to adequately express our respect and appreciation.
This volume is deeply inspired by and indebted to many years of association with the Visible Evidence community, with whom many of the ideas and topics included in the book were incubated, tested, and refined. Within this community, special gratitude is due to our longtime mentor and colleague Michael Renov, who set both of us on the path toward documentary studies many years ago at the University of Southern California and who continues to create pathways for generations to come. We are additionally grateful to our contributors for their patience and responsiveness at every stage of this process, and the even greater patience of our family members-especially Jay, Jack, Leo, Charlie, Emily, Holly, Quiller, and Ginger-without whose support none of this is even imaginable.
This volume is dedicated to the memory of Jonathan Kahana, whose untimely death as this volume achieved its final form represents an incalculable loss for the field as well as the many people who knew and loved him.

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