A Companion to Documentary Film History. Группа авторов

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      Introduction: Expanding Documentary Histories

      Joshua Malitsky

       Indiana University

Documentary Film and the Documentary Tradition

      Documentary media has a more prominent role in the contemporary global zeitgeist than it ever has before. Documentaries are produced by massive government agencies, by leading broadcast corporations, by independent collectives, by individuals, and by a host of formations in between. They are viewed in theaters, on broadcast and cable or satellite television, in public spaces, at workplaces, in schools, in galleries and museums, in planes, trains, and automobiles, and in homes. We access them on screens small and large, projected in theaters, on walls, and on personal devices, be they phones or personal computers. We watch them in one sitting or over the course of days, weeks, or months. A way of speaking about the world with images and (often) sounds connected to the world, they have become increasingly integral to how we experience our personal and professional lives. And whereas they serve a host of different functions, they have become perhaps the most significant form through which we think in depth about the past.

Scholarship on documentary and nonfiction film has grown substantially in the last 30 years and exploded in the last 10. A handful of excellent volumes on the current state of documentary studies have either recently been published or are forthcoming. Some serve as introductory textbooks, such as Louise Spence’s and Vinicius Navarro’s Crafting Truth (Spence and Navarro, 2010). Some have sought to encapsulate the “present agenda of concerns” in documentary studies such as Brian Winston’s The Documentary Film Book (Winston, 2013) or the volume that Patrick Sjoberg and I produced entitled The Documentary Moment (Malitsky and Sjoberg, 2021). Others focus on debates and statements that have taken place over the history of documentary, such as Jonathan Kahana’s The Documentary Film Reader (Kahana, 2016). Alexandra Juhasz’s and Alisa Lebow’s A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film (Juhasz and Lebow, 2015), with which this book is affiliated, is an authoritative as well as an activist study of “documentary’s world‐changing aspirations,” participating in the project to which it sees documentaries, scholars, СКАЧАТЬ