"Documentaries are often seen and celebrated as "giving voice" to the "voiceless." However, documentaries don't just engage and speak to us about the world we share. Their most common oral and aural conventions model listening habits and practices that shape and influence how viewers think about marginalized populations and in turn society and structural inequalities. Attending to the many registers of the term "audit" - an auditory counterpart of the gaze; a form of moral and administrative oversight; aritual of verification; an informal mode of pedagogy - Pooja Ranjan develops a framework for understanding and critiquing three common listening habits that emerged historically in documentary filmmaking: neutral listening, entitled listening, and juridical listening. Ranjan examines older documentaries in conversation with the work of contemporary postcolonial, queer/crip, anti-Zionist, and anti-racist documentary practitioners. More specifically, she considers early sound films advertising the British Crown's telecommunications services and call center documentaries; collaborations among documentarians, people with disabilities, and disability activists in Japan and the USA before and after the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act; and forensic efforts to document and expose anti-Palestinian and anti-Black state violence in the Occupied West Bank and Chicago's Southside. In discussing these films, Ranjan reveals the ways in which the liberal values of objectivity, access, and justice have come to frame documentaries. Throughout, she also examines oppositional modes of listening that exemplify how documentary foregrounds resistant methodologies and epistemologies, disability media and access aesthetics, and abolitionist approaches to media."--
Pooja Rangan develops a framework for understanding how documentary practices have, under the mantle of accountability, provided a moral cover for listening habits that are used to profile, exclude, and incarcerate.
Documentary films are often celebrated with aural metaphors: they give “voice” to the “voiceless” and ask the public to “listen.” But when did listening become synonymous with social justice? How exactly do documentaries train audiences to listen when they ask them to right historic wrongs or hold power to account?
The Documentary Audit challenges the association of listening with accountability and charts oppositional modes of listening otherwise. Pooja Rangan develops a framework for understanding how documentary practices have, under the mantle of accountability, provided a moral cover for listening habits that are used to profile, exclude, and incarcerate.
From the British Crown’s promotional films to Zoom meeting recordings, from disability-informed filmmaking in Japan to forensic efforts to expose anti-Palestinian violence in Hebron, Rangan explores how historical and contemporary practitioners have challenged and refused the lures of normative documentary listening habits in order to listen with an accent, listen in crip time, and listen like an abolitionist. Through an interdisciplinary approach that bridges documentary and sound studies while considering raciolinguistics, disability access, and legal forensics, Rangan demonstrates how the question of listening is central to the study of documentary. Far from being a neutral ethic, The Documentary Audit shows, listening creates the reality it purports to verify—with transformative political possibilities.
