The Role of Documentary in the Contemporary American Political Scene
- The Not So Good Old Days
In order to supplement the full-length articles presented in this issue, we approached a number of luminaries in the field of documentary scholarship and asked them to provide short responses on the place of documentary in the current American political climate. We asked these scholars to respond to the widespread impression that, in recent years, there has been an upswing in commercially successful documentaries as well as an increase in the visibility of documentaries with overtly political messages. Alongside these two trends, respondents were also given the opportunity to comment on the attention the public and critics now give to the political potential of documentary films—even ones, like March of the Penguins, that do not yield overtly political messages or hope to effectuate political change. The scholars who answered our call—Michael Curtin, Jeanne Lynn Hall, Ben Levin, Randolph Lewis, Betsy McLane, Bill Nichols, Diane Waldman, Janet Walker, and Jerry White—offer a wide range of insights touching on such divergent issues as contemporary distribution trends, media conglomeration, the waning interest in aesthetics, and the limits of documentary as a political tool. The reader will no doubt find this collection of statements a stimulating primer to the tasks confronting contemporary documentary filmmaking in America.
Michael Curtin is professor of media and cultural studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His books include Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War Politics (Rutgers University Press, 1995) and Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV (University of California Press, 2007). He is also coeditor of BFI’s International Screen Industries book series.
