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Kill the Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars [Pehme köide]

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Can the documentary be useful? Can a film change how its viewers think about the world and their potential role in it? In Kill the Documentary, the award-winning director Jill Godmilow issues an urgent call for a new kind of nonfiction filmmaking. She critiques documentary films from Nanook of the North to the recent Ken Burns/Lynn Novick series The Vietnam War. Tethered to what Godmilow calls the pedigree of the real and the pornography of the real, they fail to activate their viewers engagement with historical or present-day problems. Whether depicting the hardships of poverty or the horrors of war, conventional documentaries produce an us-watching-them mode that ultimately reinforces self-satisfaction and self-absorption.

In place of the conventional documentary, Godmilow advocates for a postrealist cinema. Instead of offering the faux empathy and sentimental spectacle of mainstream documentaries, postrealist nonfiction films are acts of resistance. They are experimental, interventionist, performative, and transformative. Godmilow demonstrates how a film can produce meaningful, useful experience by forcefully challenging ways of knowing and how viewers come to understand the world. She considers her own career as a filmmaker as well as the formal and political strategies of artists such as Luis Buñuel, Georges Franju, Harun Farocki, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Rithy Panh, and other directors. Both manifesto and guidebook, Kill the Documentary proposes provocative new ways of making and watching films.

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Kill the Documentary is a brilliant, angry book. An honest book. A brave book. Guggenheim Fellow and award-winning filmmaker Jill Godmilow has written a stirring call to arms. -- Cynthia Close * Documentary Magazine * Creatively curious pages -- Ezra Winton * Cineaste * Jill Godmilow marshals a pantheon of hard-hitting, tough-minded films that refuse to be herded into the realist corral. Godmilows letter, or manifesto, like most manifestos, draws a line in the sand. Which side are you on becomes the question. Stay put and miss the point, or step on through to the other side and restore for yourself some of the nuance and subtlety that is foreign to the spirit of a manifesto. -- Bill Nichols, from the Foreword This provocative and engaging book by acclaimed filmmaker Jill Godmilow raises important questions for anyone concerned about the future of political documentary. She maps out an original approach to postrealist documentary that champions moral engagement, social activism, aesthetic daring, historical grounding, and intersectional participation for bold twenty-first-century filmmaking. -- Deirdre Boyle, author of Ferryman of Memories: The Films of Rithy Panh In her captivating and original Kill the Documentary, filmmaker and critic Jill Godmilow offers a pleain the form of a letter, which is a manifesto, and forty propositions, and a tool kitfor making postrealist nonfiction, for making film useful and fruitful. In her scathing critique of great documentaries, and her offering up of her own counter-canon, she insists that filmmakers and viewers can begin again by refusing the pedigree, pornography, and cultural imperialism of the real, and by supporting postrealist strategies: interventionist and interactive, performative and formal. Honestly, I dont agree with all she says, or every one of the 144 films she honors, and thats her urgent books point and purpose: I can and should make my own. -- Alexandra Juhasz, Brooklyn College, CUNY Kill the Documentary is a provocative manifesto for rethinking the documentary. Godmilow provides a shield against the tear-soaked sentimentality and nostalgia of the Ken Burns style of packaging history. A new tool in the film teacher's kit, this book is useful beyond discussions of documentary. The passion of her prose is infectiousa welcome relief for student reading assignments. -- DeeDee Halleck, professor emerita, University of California, San Diego This book will be a gold mine for any instructors putting together an Introduction to Documentary Filmmaking syllabus or for cinematic autodidacts hungry to experiment with alternative modes of nonfictional filmmaking. -- Jaimie Baron * Film Quarterly * Herein lies the specificity and refreshing nonconformity of [ this] book: it pushes the reader not only to see through the ideological premises of conventional formats, but also to delve into the multiple configurations that generate subversive experiences . . . [ Godmilow's] persistent faith in the importance of developing critical awareness and in the agency of art to intervene into reality despite the omnipresent capitalist realism in the global neoliberal society radiates a compelling force. -- Stefanie Baumann * Radical Philosophy *

Manifestly Radical: A Foreword xi
Bill Nichols
Acknowledgments xvii
I Call This Book a Letter xix
Introduction---a Letter to Filmmakers 1(6)
1 Abandon the Conventional Documentary---Reject Realism as the Only Authentic Nonfiction Form
7(20)
The Pedigree of the Real
8(5)
The Pornography of the Real
13(8)
The Imperialism of the Real
21(6)
2 Take Action---Make Useful Postrealist Films
27(30)
What's in This Name Postrealism?
31(6)
Follow Bunuel---Refuse the Codes That Encourage Useless Empathy
37(3)
Poetry---a "Best Practice" for the Nonfiction Filmmaker
40(17)
3 Forty Postrealist Strategies to Learn from and Borrow
57(70)
Resist---an Essential Postrealist Stance
57(5)
The Author of the Film Is Always Present, One Way or Another
62(1)
Defamiliarize by Making Substitutions---Try Rats
62(2)
Decontextualize
64(2)
"Preposturize" (That's Not a Real Word---I Know)
66(2)
Try Camp---There Are Many Routes to Useful Experience
68(1)
Demolish It, Burn It Down
69(1)
Syncopate It, Unwrap It
70(1)
Dwindle, Diminish, Chop It to Dust
71(3)
Decompress Gender Relationships
74(1)
Create Radical New Space; Perform the Unthinkable There
75(1)
Suck Out the Pornographic---Interrogate the Apparatus
76(1)
Recalibrate a History
77(1)
Perform What Could Have/Should Have Been
78(2)
Promote Criminal Behavior with a Straight Face
80(1)
Recast the Terms the Poetry
81(1)
Pirate from Films and Texts to Examine and Remap Them
82(3)
Jiggle and Juggle It Around
85(2)
List Everything That Pertains---Reveal the Essence of All
87(1)
Record Social Rituals, What They Offer, Whom They Ignore
88(2)
Postrealist Film as a Koan
90(1)
Make Maps So the Lay of the Land Can Be Grasped
91(2)
Reject Pessimism---Collaborate with Other Filmmakers
93(1)
Reject the Westerncentric Games Anthropologists Can Play
94(1)
Reject the Cliches of Journalism
95(1)
Dodge the Privileged Gaze
96(1)
Excessify It----I Mean Blow It Up Big and Let Us Ponder It
97(2)
Animation Anyone?
99(1)
Mix Indigenous Humor with Colonial Nightmare---Blend Carefully
99(2)
Collaborate Intensely with Your Social Actors
101(4)
Make Us Stare at It---Make Us Count the Time
105(3)
Misaddress an Audience; Produce a New Uninhibited One
108(1)
Shoah, an Education in Impossible Filmmaking
109(2)
Want More? Study This Superb Postrealist Film
111(4)
Ten Thousand More Strategies: Here's a Good One
115(1)
When You're Forbidden to Make a Film, Get Started Making It
116(2)
Exploit Sound and Its Absence
118(2)
Can You Dance a Nonfiction Film? Can You Drum a Useful Tale?
120(1)
What Is the Political Usefulness of the Postrealist Film?
121(3)
Finally, Some Useful Notes from the Poets
124(1)
Afterword
125(2)
4 The Toolkit
127(44)
The Questionnaire: For Doing a Close Reading of a Documentary Film
128(5)
Definitions of the Documentary Over the Years
133(2)
The Unspoken Pleasures of the Documentary-as-We-Know-It
135(1)
The Documentary Writ Broad in Just Five Sentences
136(1)
Where to Find All the Postrealist Films I've Mentioned (Though Some, at Times, Tend to Disappear)
137(4)
Teach Yourself Poetry Just the Basics
141(14)
Five Superb Hybrid Feature Films to Study
155(5)
A Brief Review of the 2017 Burns/Novick PBS Series The Vietnam War
160(3)
"Kill the Documentary as We Know It," Jill Godmilow, 2001
163(1)
What Happened to Jill in Poland and How Postrealism Entered Her Life
164(2)
I Want to Be Useful
166(3)
144 Feature Films You Should See Before You Croak
169(4)
Filmography
173(4)
Notes 177(8)
Bibliography 185(6)
Index 191
Jill Godmilow is professor emerita in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. Her acclaimed films include the Academy Awardnominated Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman (1974); Waiting for the Moon (1987), which won best feature film at the Sundance Film Festival; and What Farocki Taught, which was featured at the 2000 Whitney Biennial. In 2015, she was knighted by President Komorowski of Poland and awarded the Knights Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland for her film Far From Poland.

Bill Nichols is professor emeritus in the School of Cinema, San Francisco State University. He is the author of numerous books, including Introduction to Documentary.