The Oxford Handbook of American Documentary offers new approaches to the study of documentary produced within, or connected to, the United States. Leading scholars of nonfiction and emerging voices in the field examine documentary as a dynamic cultural form that draws on wide-ranging technologies, coheres around different representational modes, and is used for a variety of artistic, political, and entertainment purposes. A pressing concern of many of this volume's authors - like many of the filmmakers they write about - is documentary's ability to not just reach viewers, but to actively engage them in building a more equitable and just world.
This volume's twenty-six essays place the act of documentary making within a broader historical context, including macro-level analysis of how policy initiatives or economic shifts impact filmmakers as well as granular attention to how participants of a social movement use film to galvanize support for a cause. Additionally, The Oxford Handbook of American Documentary addresses the ways in which the stylistic tropes and rhetorical conventions of documentary are used to manipulate for political power or profit.
The Oxford Handbook of American Documentary offers a valuable resource for students and scholars interested in documentary produced within, or connected to, the United States. The Handbook provides an understanding of how documentary has shifted throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the ways in which past trends and movements have shaped our current environment of political polarization and an increasingly fractured media landscape.
Introduction: Locating American Documentary: Politics, Infrastructure,
Practice, by Joshua Glick and Patricia Aufderheide
Section I: Dynamics of Infrastructure
Chapter 1: The Political Documentary Film Essay is Infrastructural, by
Alexandra Juhasz
Chapter 2: The Political Economy of Documentary Archives, by Josh Shepperd
and Laura Garbes
Chapter 3: Documentary Circuits: The Distribution of Documentary Film in the
United States, by Nora Stone
Chapter 4: The Documentary Commons: A Critical Challenge to Cinema's Impact
Frameworks, by Angela J. Aguayo
Section II: Public Policy, Public Media
Chapter 5: Copyright, Self-Censorship, Fair Use, and Documentary Film, by
Patricia Aufderheide
Chapter 6: Regulating Documentary: Television, Conservative Activism, and the
Expressive Power of Policy, by Allison Perlman
Chapter 7: What Does Democracy Look Like? Documentary and the Demos in Public
Television, by Laurie Ouellette
Chapter 8: Government Documentary During the Cold War: The United States
Information Agency's Global Outreach, by Hadi Gharabaghi and Bret Vukoder
Section III: Movements for Equity and Justice
Chapter 9: By, About and For: Contemporary Indigenous Documentary, by Colleen
Thurston, Choctaw, and Erica Cusi Wortham
Chapter 10: Elizabeth Mitchell, Documentary, and the Invention of the Black
Cinematic Atlantic, by Ellen C. Scott
Chapter 11: The Art of Advocacy: Mexican American Documentary, by Carlos
Francisco Parra
Chapter 12: Absence and Presence in Post-Stonewall Queer Documentary: Queer
Radicalness, Assimilation, and the Gray Space Between, by Ronald Gregg
Chapter 13: From Observed Patient to Filmmaker: Disability and Documentary in
the United States, by Linnéa Hussein
Chapter 14: Documentary as Ecocinema: Form, Ethics, and Environmental
Justice, by Kristi McKim
Chapter 15: Racial Affect and Populist Epistemologies: Citizens United and
Conservative Documentary, by Michael M. Reinhard
Section IV: The Politics of Performance
Chapter 16: Character Driven Documentary, by Chris Cagle
Chapter 17: Deep Fake: Borat's Subsequent Return to America in a Post-Truth
Era, by Leshu Torchin
Chapter 18: The Case for Abolishing True Crime, by Brett Story and Pooja
Rangan
Section V: Documentary Across Media
Chapter 19: Documentary's Longue Durée (Elaborated): Beginnings, Formations,
Genealogies, by Charles Musser
Chapter 20: Black Tourism: Home Movies as Resistance, by Elizabeth Patton
Chapter 21: Reframing Asian American Documentary Media, by Denise Khor
Chapter 22: Environments of Race and Place: The Urgencies and Enmeshments of
Participatory Community Media, by Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann
Section VI: Technologies of Immersion and Augmentation
Chapter 23: Situating the Interactive and Immersive Documentary, by William
Uricchio
Chapter 24: XR and Documentary: Affinities and Resistance, by Julia
Scott-Stevenson
Chapter 25: Documentary and Wildlife, by Scott MacDonald
Chapter 26: Another Way of Viewing: Documentary and the Digital Humanities,
by Lauren Tilton
Epilogue: Insights From Practitioners, by Patricia Aufderheide
Joshua Glick is Associate Professor of Film & Electronic Arts at Bard College. He is the author of Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History. He also co-curated the exhibition, Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen, at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. Professor Glick's current book project explores how documentary on the left and right of the political spectrum reshaped the media industries and created oppositional visions of social change in an era of polarization.
Patricia Aufderheide is University Professor in the School of Communication at American University. Among her many published works are Kartemquin Films: Documentaries on the Frontlines of Democracy, Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction and Reclaiming Fair Use (with Peter Jaszi). She has been a Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellow, and among her awards are the International Communication Association's Communication Research as an Agent of Change Award and the
International Documentary Association's Preservation and Scholarship Award.
