Documentary across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics by Patricia R. Zimmermann (review)

No longer a fixed object, documentary is moving to iterative, shape-shifting forms. With multiple screens and transmedia structures, it continues a parallel documentary history that displaces the auteur, character development, and story arcs. These parallel histories recalibrate documentary with a more place-based, political practice of collaboration, collectivity, and community. They tell what postcolonial historiographers call crooked stories, an incomplete, fragmented process.

—patricia r. zimmermann, documentary across platforms

"DOCUMENTARY NOW! AND THEN . . ."

By the time an intellect, researcher, and writer has published more than two hundred research articles and essays, her areas of expertise and proclivities surface and could become synonymous with the scholar herself. A reputation evolves—one that might begin to encase her publications within the chosen, canonical texts and define her role as that of gatekeeper of specialized knowledge. Conversely, Patricia R. Zimmermann's internationally known scholarship is multimodal and enmeshed in conversations with a globally diverse network of media makers, film fans, and fellow scholars. She idles in a central node before she tugs, and sometimes yanks, into view for her readers multiple connective threads that horizontalize other scholars', enthusiasts', artists', activists', archivists', and community group members' ways of seeing and documenting the world. She then enjoins them to respond to provocations and reassess assumptions.

While decentering linear and binary historiographical approaches to understanding documentary photography, experimental films, or home movies, she brings into question the precision of homogenous definitions for "documentary" and "independent film" or the role of the archive. She entices and collaborates with others to consider how genres, classes of media, and institutions morph and are, and have historically been, changed by a proliferation of newer image-making technologies and shifting funding and distribution structures. She also cultivates conversations about the transformational power of participatory, place-based, transnational, digital, and new media making and the rise of screen cultures. She sheds light on those who question, are hindered by, and work under the radar from forces that shape cultural heritage production and preservation. She documents her own and others' activated responses to political and economic determinants that allow people in positions of power to monopolize distribution of media images, influence what receives wider recognition, decide what is funded or preserved, dictate what tools are used, and lobby for or against what constitutes the public domain.

Zimmermann's invitations to reassess and engage in her own work have taken several forms over the past twenty-five years. They include essays for journals or exhibition catalogs, books, magazine articles, public presentations, handouts for public screenings, and postulates to arouse further conversation. They incorporate personal accounts, deep dives into the archival record, theoretical musings, and the occasional call to arms. Now one can read a thematically arranged selection of this remarkable career in a new collection. She has anthologized twenty of her previously published pieces, and other written "speculations," in one book titled Documentary across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics. In it, Zimmermann reconceptualizes documentary as an "octagon" or a "complex ecology" informed and shaped—but not definitively—by aforementioned factors. Thinking about documentary as an ecology makes room for opening up definitions and reconsidering the genre and the practice as multifaceted, plural, fluid, socially and politically engaged, and part of the material world of built environments and technologies. Zimmermann's own diverse approaches to writing about her subject matter, especially when juxtaposed in one publication, emulate the multiplicity of stories and collaborative methods for documenting them.

Almost on a meta-level, her various styles of writing support her main stated objectives: "reverse engineering" the literal infrastructures and processes that have historically defined documentary practice, and long-favored historiographical and epistemological frameworks in which it has traditionally been embedded theoretically. As she pulls divergent nodes (and modes) into focus for readers, a whole ecology emerges that includes polyphonic, mobile, and activated manifestations of documentary practices already set in motion by subaltern community media makers and by artists who continually resist a monocultural approach to media...