The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism ed. by Jonathan Kahana, and: Essays on the Essay Film eds. by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan (review)

Reflecting on the nature of book collecting, Walter Benjamin observed, "There is in the life of a collector a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order."¹ These words are a fitting entry point to discuss two new anthologies, Jonathan Kahana's The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism and Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan's Essays on the Essay Film. Is there a more characteristic tension animating the epistemological impulse of scholars such as these than to attempt to tame the unruly construct of the documentary film in all its permutations?

Both volumes adeptly balance this order and disorder by featuring written works that generate dialogues within, rather than impose strict boundaries on, their objects of inquiry—the capacious "documentary" for Kahana, and the more narrow (but no less thought-provoking) "essay film" for Alter and Corrigan. Such dialogues, whether within the individual volumes or exchanged across the two, will undoubtedly inspire students, scholars, and filmmakers to pursue new modes of inquiry and cinematic practice.

Jonathan Kahana's The Documentary Reader is an expansive collection of more than one hundred entries. The reader is structured around what Kahana refers to as documentary's "seven ages."² Each section features historical and contemporary texts related to key trends that trace the evolution of documentary history and form. Thus, a part on cinema's early nonfiction iterations gives way to a second on documentary's varied interwar modernisms. Middle sections cover World War II propaganda and the sponsorship-heavy 1950s, the emergence of vérité and other observational modes, and documentary's "radical" turn during the late 1960s and 1970s. The two concluding sections address more recent moments, documentary's subjective and postmodern configurations, and the most current period, which Kahana labels "transnational and transmedial crossings" to address the field's porous boundaries and "uncertain horizons."³

Short essays introducing each section allow Kahana to mitigate his discomfort in imposing a necessary order onto what John Grierson himself famously called a "clumsy description."⁴ Echoing Grierson, Kahana calls the volume's structure a "convenient fiction."⁵ In prefacing each section, he situates key texts and trends within their broader context. Here fissures in historical periodization and theoretical orientation emerge. To name just one example, in introducing observational documentary, Kahana remarks that the seemingly anarchic ethos of Ricky Leacock's 1961 call for an "uncontrolled cinema" mirrors the more conservative Griersonian models he seeks to challenge, for both call to "take the apparatus out of the studio, and use it to tell the unique story of a location."⁶ Kahana also notes Lindsay Anderson's fondness for Humphrey Jennings's Spare Time (1939), a notably playful work that was able to transcend the limitations of conservative government oversight.⁷ By placing works within each section—and across sections—in dialogue with each other, such orienting essays make this anthology especially useful for students new to documentary who are eager to find their footing.

Competing theories and formulations duke it out within and across sections. Consider again, for example, the contested terrain of observational cinema. Treatises on "direct" cinema, cinéma vérité, and Free Cinema, among others, are interspersed with scholarly critiques of "fly-on-the-wall" objectivity. Kahana writes that such "critiques challenge us to rewatch, reread, and reconsider, neither to praise nor bury but to better understand the mythology and persistent appeal of the vérité style."⁸ Such contradictions, of course, are what make documentary both a slippery and an intellectually satisfying field of study. Its practitioners and theoreticians have never been monolithic. Why should we expect...