A. and Lebow, A. (eds.) (2015). A Companion to Documentary Film. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell.14 Malitsky, J. and Sjoberg, P. (2021). The Documentary Moment. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
15 Musser, C. (2018). Documentary’s Longue Durée: Reimagining the Documentary Tradition. Charles Musser interviewed by Joshua Glick. World Records 2 (4): 1–15.
16 Nichols, B. (1991). Representing Reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
17 Nichols, B. (2010). Introduction to Documentary, 2nd edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
18 Orgeron, D., Orgeron, M., and Streible, D. (2012). Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
19 Renov, M. (1993). Toward a Poetics of Documentary. In: Theorizing Documentary (ed. M. Renov), 12–36. New York: Routledge.
20 Rosen, P. (2001). Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Acknowledgments
There are a number of people I'd like to thank for helping make this volume happen. Most important are my Theme Editors: James Cahill, Malte Hagener, Alice Lovejoy, and Brian Winston. They were all an absolute pleasure to work with – they helped identify contributors, showed sharp editorial acumen, and displayed remarkable patience and positivity. Malin Wahlberg, Alisa Lebow, and Alex Juhasz were instrumental in getting the project underway and I thank each of them for their suggestions – the volume is much stronger as a result. We worked with a number of teams at Wiley-Blackwell and I want to thank them for their efforts. At Indiana University, Zach Vaughn and Cole Nelson did timely and thorough work whenever I needed them. I believe their meticulous attention to detail is evident in the final product.
Introduction: Documentary Borders and Geographies
Alice Lovejoy
University of Minnesota
Bill Nichols has observed that when documentary film took shape, it did so at the same moment – the late 1920s and early 1930s – that critics, filmmakers, and politicians began to argue that cinema could play a role in national (and nationalist) endeavors (Nichols 2001). These projects existed in close proximity, and often informed one another. When British critic and filmmaker Paul Rotha was writing his 1930 The Film till Now: A Survey of the Cinema, for instance – a book that chronicles the history of cinema in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and the Soviet Union – he was also making nonfiction films for institutions like the Empire Marketing Board, one of the cornerstones of the British Documentary Movement (Rotha 1930). At the same moment, in Prague, filmmaker Jiří Jeníček was arguing for a Czech national cinema that could contest territorial claims by Czechoslovakia's German and Hungarian neighbors. Although Jeníček held that the “national” would reach its apex in the fiction feature, in the same years, he also was producing the short nonfiction films that he saw as a training ground for this format (Jeníček 1940: 27).
The idea that nonfiction film had a privileged relationship to the nation proved long‐lasting in documentary studies, a subfield of cinema and media studies that emerged in the 1980s – perhaps not coincidentally, the same decade when the idea of “national cinema” rose to prominence. In the subfield's early decades, films such as Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 Triumph of the Will (documenting the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremburg, Germany), American director Pare Lorentz's 1936 The Plow That Broke the Plains (a New Deal film addressing the Dust Bowl), and Harry Watt and Basil Wright's 1936 Night Mail (a key work of British documentary depicting the British postal service's operations) became foundations of courses on documentary film, while widely read texts situated documentaries and their makers in national frameworks (see, e.g. Grant and Sloniowski 1998). As a result, through the end of the twentieth century, documentary scholarship frequently echoed interwar authors' confidence in documentary's links to the nation, as well as the authors' arguments about the nation's self‐evidence – its readiness to be documented. As Stephen G. Tallents, founder and director of the Empire Marketing Board, wrote in his The Projection of England, “national projection” was “the art” “of “throw[ing] a fitting presentation” of a country “upon the world's screen,” through a combination of “honest self‐expression” and “honest confidence” (Tallents 1932: 37). Nationality, in Jeníček's theory of cinema, was something a camera could simply capture.
In the 2000s, documentary's embrace of networked technologies, and the turn by a growing number of film and media scholars to archival and cultural‐historical methods, unsettled the nation's central position in documentary studies. At the same time that formats such as interactive documentaries (i‐docs) underscored the connectivity undergirding a significant subset of contemporary documentary, linking viewers and locations (see Aston et al. 2017), historical research pointed out that, long before the rise of digital technology, documentary worked between and among geographies. In her work on UNESCO, for instance, Zoë Druick emphasized the role of the “international” in giving shape to postwar documentary (Druick 2008), while new approaches to the work of Joris Ivens, and to interwar radical documentary, highlighted the importance of internationalism to documentary, and documentary to internationalism (Waugh 2016). Much of this work employed transnational approaches, underscoring that even when documentary undertook “national” projects, it often did so with personnel, material, and ideas from elsewhere (Ivens's Power and the Land is a classic example: produced for the U.S. Film Service yet directed by the peripatetic Dutch communist). (See also Druick and Williams 2014; Malitsky 2013). Moreover, by turning their attention to a wider range of institutions, films, and historical sources, scholars called into question the very definition of the nation in and for documentary. In revisiting documentary's interwar foundations, for instance, Lee Grieveson and Jonathan Kahana demonstrated that British documentary and American New Deal documentary were as much a matter of the state – the set of institutions governing a territory – as of the nation (a more contested, and thus difficult‐to‐define, idea) (Grieveson 2011; Kahana 2008).
The essays in this section continue in this vein, underscoring documentary's investment in borders and geopolitical frameworks, yet pointing to the considerable variety of, and overlaps between, the format's geographies. The essays shift between lenses and scales – starting small, with the American town in the aftermath of World War II. In “A Distant Local View: The Small‐Town Film and U.S. Cultural Diplomacy and Occupation, 1942–1952,” Martin Johnson examines three nonfiction films produced in the early 1950s by the Reorientation Branch of the United States Army's Civil Affairs Division: A Town Solves a Problem (1950), Women and the Community (1950), and Social Change in Democracy (1951). Destined to be shown in countries occupied by the United States after World War II, the films depicted life, work, and governance in three small towns: respectively, Pittsfield, Vermont; Monroe, New York;
