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on the dynamic between the fragment or “the document” and its insertion into a new context, “the documentary,” is ripe for media archaeology’s interest in the “materialities and medialities” of ruptures and originary contexts. It also aligns with the efforts of documentary scholars to continually question documentary’s definitional center and borders. The essays in this section take up this challenge, applying rigorous historical research to an array of nonfiction film material, looking “not only for the breaks and fissures, but rather for the contact zones and adhesive joints at which new formations emerge and new concepts are born.”
Audiences and Circulation
Traditionally less about entertainment than about education, instruction, and preservation, documentaries have rarely attracted substantial theatrical box office success. As a result, filmmakers and producers have had to argue that they have audience impact in a different way—by claiming that documentaries have lasting effects on viewers. But such claims, Brian Winston asserts, have little verifiability. The goal of sparking audiences to act in support of the film’s argument has been achieved on a limited basis and with limited, targeted communities. The more common effect of mainstream documentaries (for Winston, this is part of the Griersonian tradition) on a mainstream audience has been an empathetic response that seldom led to social action. But any assessment of audience impact, whether as empathy or action, has been made in the absence of an archive. As Winston notes, “Our historical understanding of viewers’ responses is trapped between the limitations of positivist social science and, essentially, anecdotage.” The essays in this section point to areas and methods that aim to redress these gaps. They urge us to reconsider established narratives of nonfiction film history: about the emerging dominance of fiction film entertainments inside and outside of the movie theater from 1907–1910 (Waller), and about the audiences and spaces of exhibition for films central to the Western European and American documentary canon in the late 1920s and early 1930s (Winston). They think through the implications of this historical (mis)understanding: on how the meaning of a film we thought we knew can be transformed both over time and across reception context (Mestman), and how those who dream of or project a certain type of audience engagement would be wise to think about how viewers have historically interacted with media technologies both old and new (Uricchio).
References
1 Acland, C. and Wasson, H. (eds.) (2011). Useful Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
2 Barnouw, E. (1974). Documentary: A History of the Non‐fiction Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3 Barsam, R. (1973). Non‐Fiction Film. New York: E. P. Dutton.
4 Coles, R. (1998). Doing Documentary Work. New York: New York Public Library.
5 Corner, J. (2000). What Can We Say about “Documentary?”. Media, Culture, and Society 22 (5): 681–688.
6 Cowan, M. (2014). Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
7 Dahlquist, M. and Vonderau, P. (eds.) (2020). Petrocinema: Modern Imaginaries and the Oil Industry. London: Bloomsbury.
8 Gaines, J. and Renov, M. (eds.) (1999). Collecting Visible Evidence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
9 Grierson, J. (1966). Grierson on Documentary (ed. F. Hardy). Berkeley: University of California Press.
10 Hagener, M. (2007). Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant‐garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919–1939. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
11 Hediger, V. and Vonderau, P. (eds.) (2009). Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
12 Kahana, J. (ed.) (2016). The Documentary Film Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
13 Juhasz, 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.
21 Spence, L. and Navarro, V. (2010). Crafting Truth. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
22 Williams, L. (2013). Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and The Thin Blue Line. In: Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, New and Expanded Edition (eds. B. Grant and J. Sloniowski), 385–403. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
23 Winston, B. (1995). Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited. London: British Film Institute.
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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