Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary by Pooja Rangan (review)

Pooja Rangan's Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary is a provocative, polemical, and vital book for thinking through the often-problematic humanitarian impulse to give the camera to the Other. Traditionally, this act is located within the benevolent discourse of "giving a voice to the voiceless." Rangan argues the opposite, namely that "giving the camera to the other invents the very disenfranchised humanity that it claims to redeem." While the book concentrates on a range of non-fiction examples that fall broadly into the subgenre of "participatory documentary," Rangan's critical orientation does not rest firmly in the methods and concerns of documentary studies or media studies more generally. Rather, she works "diagonally" across those disciplines as well as disability studies, childhood studies, and animal studies using a methodology informed by the work of feminist and postcolonial scholars and the close textual analysis of deconstruction and semiotics.¹ This intellectually expansive approach enables Rangan to trenchantly interrogate essential questions about documentary ethics, human rights, representation, authorship, spectatorship, and medium.

Fundamentally, Rangan sets out to explore "the reality effects of participatory documentary," especially when they operate in the mode of emergency, offering the concept of "immediations," which she defines as "the documentary tropes of evidencing … attributes of humanity in all their immediacy." In other words, Immediations analyzes how "humanist tropes of documentary immediacy" exploit the "circumstance of labors of disenfranchised individuals" that simply work to "reinforce their status as other" while fulfilling British documentary pioneer John Grierson's vision for the humanitarian mission of realist documentary.² For Rangan, those disenfranchised individuals, largely illegible to documentary tropes that signify "humanity," are represented in the figures of the child, the refugee, the person with autism, and the animal, all of which are explored in separate chapters. These figures exceed the humanist ethical paradigm of the Other as articulated by Emmanuel Levinas that has been used to undergird part of the ethical logic of participatory documentary. Immediations works to create and explore a new space that includes an ethics after humanism and legibility as well as representation beyond the traditional inclusionist logic that informs the tenets of documentary realism.

The first chapter closely analyzes the 2004 documentary Born into Brothels (Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman). The film, which won an Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2005, explores Briski's efforts to "save" the children of prostitutes in Calcutta, India, by teaching them photography so they could document their lives and then sell those images to fund their escape from the world of sex work. One of the many generative concepts Rangan coins and explores here is the notion of "feral innocence" within what she calls the "enduring humanitarian myth of childhood innocence." The concept of feral innocence speaks to the aesthetic appeal that the children's photographs possess while affirming two complementary myths: "the myth of the child's untutored genius and the myth of photographic spontaneity." The photographs also both disavow and depend on the spectacle of the children's seemingly barbaric lives. The production of the photographs is also a form of labor, and Rangan further argues that Briski's monetization of the images through the representation of feral innocence "dematerializes the ideological stakes of the labor that Briski's students undertake in the name of their universal human rights." Part of this argument relies on the notion of pseudoparticipatory documentary, which Rangan contends hinges on two key points: the fact that the narrative, cinematography, and editing of Born into Brothels work to blur Briski's and the children's point of view and the fact that Briski manufactures the children as innocent victims who need immediate rescue.³

Rangan turns from this consideration of a constructed temporal urgency to a concern with the televisual discourses of liveness in relationship to catastrophes and other humanitarian emergencies. Rangan asserts that the tropes of liveness enacted by television reporting, such as Anderson Cooper's coverage of Hurricane...