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The increased visibility of documentary reflects not only timely filmmaking but also a culture in crisis. In the wake of 9/11 and what the Bush administration unleashed upon the world, Americans have begun to pay special attention to nonfiction films whose apparent solidity and "sobriety" were welcome antidotes to the discursive delirium around us. Over the past few years we have been eager to ground ourselves in the particular, the local, the human—in the kind of stories that documentary conveys so well. Documentary seems to promise a solid place to stand in a mediascape filled with ephemera, illusion, and "spin control."

In this sense, we call upon documentary to solidify and humanize history when it seems most intangible. I believe that putting a face on abstractions like collateral damage or neoliberalism is the key to documentary's current appeal and future potential. Within cinema, it is our best means to glimpse "the face of the Other," as philosopher Emmanuel Levinas would have it. The Lithuanian-born Jewish scholar was one of the great ethical thinkers of the twentieth century, yet the implications of his work are only beginning to be felt within documentary studies. Let me explain why Levinas has moved to the center of my thinking about the politics of documentary.

Over the course of a long career in Paris and elsewhere, Levinas argued for a selfless ethics of respect that grew out of "being occupied with someone other before being occupied with oneself" (Levinas, "Interview" 54–55). In our overly mediated world, humanistic documentary can provide a small source of Levinasian connection between human beings. I recognize that a screen is just a screen, but it can still be a starting place: by looking through the eyes of a compassionate filmmaker, we can see and feel faraway lives in a way that cultural atomization makes so rare. To the extent that documentary encourages this ethical rapport with the Other, it is a beautiful thing. To the extent that it substitutes for it, it is a travesty of Levinasian ethics.

Compounding my concern is the privatization of documentary consumption. Not long ago, the scarcity of "inconvenient truths" (those earlier political films from de Antonio, Kopple, Ivens, etc.) imbued them with a singular aura. De Antonio's antiwar classic, In the Year of the Pig (1969), was never viewed alone until the age of home video. Until that time, we came together to watch something rare and important and sometimes went away with a greater sense of solidarity. Learning about Vietnam or global warming was not something we did alone on the couch at home before going to sleep.

Solidarity through documentary may be harder to come by in the age of Netflix. Happy as I am to have greater access to uncommon films, I suspect that we pay a price for our increasingly private consumption of them. Spectatorship without solidarity makes documentary a beautiful distraction, little different from any other kind of art except for one pernicious possibility: documentary can promote the illusion of political activity, giving us real lives as an edifying drama that we can turn off with the click of button. When we are done learning about Falluja or New Orleans, we just slip the DVD back into its sleeve and send it away in the morning mail. Cynically, one could suggest that documentary provides the perfect vehicle for political self-nullification in an era of faux connectivity: it presents a window on the world through which we never need to step.

The danger, then, is that documentary will substitute for real politics. Although this danger is real, I remain cautiously hopeful about the political potential of the form. Unlike his teacher Heidegger, who believed that media technologies were at the root of modern disenchantment, Levinas saw their usefulness. After watching the suffering of children on French television, he commented, "Nothing is nobler than exposing man's misery" (Levinas, "In the Name" 190).

Taking his words to heart, I believe that we can begin to acknowledge our responsibility to "the Other" through documentary and that doing so will encourage what Levinas called a "reversal of the normal order of...