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, and artists deeply dedicated—“the passionate commitment to and direct engagement with the lived world” (Juhasz and Lebow, 2015: 1).

      This relationship between documentary media and the past is the subject of A Companion to Documentary Film History. In this book, a cluster of major scholars address the textual, industrial, and social aspects of this media form. Among the many recent works, A Companion to Documentary Film History is the only anthology that focuses its attention on the history of the documentary. Its goal in this capacity is both to shed light on central historical issues, be they related to reception, geography, authorship, multimedia context, or movements, and to do so by highlighting a breadth of historiographical approaches. Crucially, it achieves this by radically expanding the purview of what counts as documentary.

      Recent years have witnessed growth in scholarship on nonfiction film practices that are seen by many to be peripheral to documentary. Travelogues, newsreels, industrial films, educational films, home movies, film diaries, science films, and promotional films were “considered too quotidian, too topical, too instrumental or too ephemeral to have a place in the documentary tradition” (Kahana, 2016: 3). Their aesthetics were too inconsequential, their voices too muted, their purposes too obvious. The new scholarship on this work, however, has transformed the field of documentary history by expanding the (cinematic) objects of consideration—and it has done so methodologically as well with its focus on materialist and archival histories. Challenging dominant auteurist and national cinema paradigms, such work highlights the conditions of film production and the context of its use, including the reasons for commission, the understanding of intended audience, the proposed purposes, and so forth. Doing so does not only make the subfield of documentary richer and more generative—though certainly it does that—but it is also historically necessary.

In Michael Cowan’s book on Walter Ruttmann, for example, he expands beyond Ruttmann’s more commonly considered experimental films to include his sponsored work on advertising films, industrial films, medical films, and Nazi propaganda. For Cowan, Ruttmann was not exemplary in this range of work, as “all of them [the Weimar avant‐garde] made sponsored films before and after 1933”—a practice which expanded beyond Germany, “encompassing filmmakers such as Joris Ivens, Len Lye, Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Rene Clair, and many others” (Cowan, 2014: 12). This fusion never goes away, and a combination of independent feature‐length filmmaking and commissioned shorts can be seen, for example, with Errol Morris’s work. But beyond the scope of such studies, Cowan, Malte Hagener, and others have demonstrated that thinking together experimental aesthetics and practical application in sponsored work enables a fuller understanding of these filmmakers’ aesthetics. Rather than imagining the commissioned work as a practical and time‐consuming diversion, we become open to the possibility that each practice encourages and enables innovation in form and approach in the others (Cowan, 2014; Acland and Wasson, 2011; Hediger and Vonderau, 2009; Hagener, 2007; Orgeron, Orgeron, and Streible, 2012; Dahlquist and Vonderau, 2020). The new and expanded history of documentary film is also a new way of understanding what documentary is and how it has functioned over time.

      This volume binds histories of what we might take as “classical” or “social” documentaries together with work that addresses “useful” nonfiction film practices under the heading of “documentary” (Acland and Wasson, 2011). I do so to encourage the creation of an expanded, enriched sense of documentary and nonfiction film studies and, most importantly, to account for the argument made above about the value of such a framework for understanding materialist and aesthetic histories. But there is no consensus about terminology in the field of Cinema and Media Studies, i.e. what counts as documentary and what should be described as a nonfiction genre is not at