in democracy), Johnson makes clear that their geopolitics were not limited to “national projection.” Indeed, when screened in the towns where they had been made, the documentaries also served as “local films,” showing places and faces that, familiar at home, doubled as diplomatic representatives abroad. Johnson's essay demonstrates both this imbrication of the local, the national, and the international in films that were primarily works of propaganda – a mode of cinema typically understood in chauvinistic national terms – and the instability at the heart of the “national,” whose portrayal in documentaries such as these depended on multiple material factors.
Raisa Sidenova's essay, “The Topographical Aesthetic in Late Stalinist Soviet Documentary,” chronicles the Soviet government's postwar attempts to rein in such divergences between documentary's geopolitical imaginaries. Sidenova argues that, from 1945 to 1953, the dominant genre in Soviet nonfiction film was the “geographical documentary” – a format that attempted to foster pride in the Soviet Union after its World War II victory and to give audiovisual shape to the country's new boundaries (which now included the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). Films such as Soviet Armenia (Sovetskaia Armeniia, 1951), Soviet Lithuania (Sovetskaia Litva, 1951), Soviet Turkmenistan (Sovetskii Turkmenistan, 1950), and Soviet Georgia (Sovetskaia Gruziia, 1952) used a standardized set of devices – an episodic structure, a lack of individual characters, synchronized sound, and a “totalizing view of Soviet life” – that Sidenova characterizes as a “topographical aesthetic.” While this standardization emphasized the Soviet Union's ideological uniformity (in the process masking the distinct nationalities, ethnicities, and cultures in the regions the films depicted), its formulas also offered a “survival strategy” for filmmakers under Zhdanovism, the brutal, anti‐Western and anti‐cosmopolitan cultural policy that lasted from the end of World War II to Stalin's death in 1953. Sidenova's essay is one of the first to explore Soviet documentary in this period. She shows not only how the postwar Soviet government attempted to harness, in new ways, documentary's historic links to publics and polities, but also the diversity of institutions and film forms that comprised postwar Soviet documentary (which, in addition to dedicated documentary film studios, was also situated in popular‐science and newsreel studios).
While Johnson and Sidenova investigate state‐sponsored nonfiction film, Paul Fileri explores the complex geopolitical dynamics in “unofficial” French postwar documentary – that is, films made without government support (and at times with government opposition). In “The Work of Displacement in Colonial Documentary: History, Movement, and Collectivity Between the Postwar Metropole and Colonial French West Africa,” Fileri closely analyzes two films made as part of the struggle for decolonization in francophone Africa: René Vautier's Africa 50 (Afrique 50, 1950) and Mamadou Sarr's and Paulin Soumanou Vieyra's Africa on the Seine (Afrique sur Seine, 1955). He argues that the films must be seen both within the contexts of French or African cinema and as a response to the history of the state‐sponsored colonial documentary, to whose form the films respond. Africa 50 and Africa on the Seine do not resolve this geographic instability; instead, as Fileri describes, they give voice to the filmmakers' powerful experience of “displacement” between the (French) metropole and the colonies. Displacement is legible at once in the films' production history – as Fileri writes, Africa 50's makers “[cut] across and mix[ed] African and French cultural expression and locations” – and in their aesthetics, which depend not only on the use (and reuse) of documentary footage, but also on the filmmakers' experience of censorship by the French state. Ultimately, the films find “belonging” outside of official geopolitical boundaries: for instance, in experiences of “solidarity and fraternity” depicted in Africa on the Seine.
Fileri's destabilization of media‐geopolitical commonplaces (such as the notion that a documentary must be from somewhere) is echoed in the section's final essay, Naoki Yamamoto's “Negation of the Negation: Tracking Documentary Film Theory in Japan.” Turning his attention to how ideas about documentary moved, Yamamoto examines the reception, in Japan, of Rotha's 1936 Documentary Film – a book, as Yamamoto writes, that “ignited surprisingly fierce and long‐lasting debates among its local readers.” Focusing on readings of Rotha from the late 1930s to the mid‐1950s by film critics Tsumura Hideo, Imamura Taihei, and Hanada Kiyoteru, Yamamoto considers these critics' discussions of Rotha, their own theories of documentary film, and their interactions with one another. He argues that the reception of Rotha's theories in Japan was “elliptical,” echoing the development of Japanese film theory in general, whose “critical debates … developed in constant dialogue with ideas or concepts imported from abroad.” More broadly, Yamamoto calls into question the idea that there are “unique,” “nation‐based theories and practices,” asking us to pay attention, instead, to the “actual conditions that informed these activities' emergence at a specific moment in history.” He also critiques the common assumption that the West was the primary point of origin for theories of cinema. Documentary theory in Japan, he argues, emerged as part of a larger international conversation about cinema, one in which Japanese critics and filmmakers played an active role.
While all four of these essays examine documentary's geographies, they are also concerned with the history of documentary, and documentary theory, at a distinct moment in time: from the end of World War II to the mid to late 1950s. Wedged between the flourishing nonfiction film cultures of the 1930s and World War II and the emergence of cinéma vérité/direct cinema (as well as the essay film) in the late 1950s – and defined politically by the polarized height of the Cold War – the first postwar decade is typically remembered as a period of sober, unimaginative films. In Bert Hogenkamp's words, “the common view was this: after the 1930s nothing happened” (Hogenkamp 2001: xi). These essays, however, make clear that from North America to East Asia, from Europe to Africa, filmmakers, film institutions, and governments were deeply invested in working out what documentary – in its production, distribution, and exhibition – could mean and do in the postwar world. Moreover, to the argument that this period was formally barren, films as divergent as Soviet Armenia, Africa 50, and A Town Solves a Problem respond that the question of documentary form in these years was not only active, but had very much to do with geopolitics. If, as these essays demonstrate, these geopolitics extended beyond the nation (or at least any simple understanding of it), so too did the conversations that helped shape documentary, and its films, institutions, and theories.
References
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2 Druick, Z. (2008). “Reaching the Multimillions”: Liberal Internationalism and the Establishment of Documentary Film. In: Inventing Film Studies (eds. L. Grieveson and H. Wasson), 66–92. Durham: Duke University Press.
3 Druick, Z. and Williams, D. (2014). The Grierson Effect: Tracing Documentary's International Movement. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the British Film Institute (Cultural Histories of Cinema).
4 Grant, B. and Sloniowski, J. (1998). Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
5 Grieveson, L. (2011). The Cinema and the (Common) Wealth of Nations. In: Empire and Film (eds. L. Grieveson and C. MacCabe), 73–113. London: BFI.
6 Hogenkamp, B. (2001). Film, Television and the Left in Britain, 1950–1970. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
7 Jeníček, J. (1940). Krátký Film. Prague: Nakladatelství Václav Petr.
8 Kahana, J. (2008). Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary. New York: Columbia University Press.
9 Malitsky, J. (2013). Post‐revolution Nonfiction Film: Building the Soviet and Cuban Nations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
10 Nichols,
