Reclaiming Popular Documentary ed. by Christie Milliken and Steve F. Anderson (review)

Over the past twenty years, documentary film and television have become far more popular and widely available than in previous decades. Yet the scholarship on documentary has tended to privilege the most formally inventive and politically radical documentary films, from Chronique d'un été (Chronicle of a Summer, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, 1961) to Tongues Untied (Marlon T. Riggs, 1989) and The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012). Noël Carroll pointed out this tendency to focus on the "art-documentary" in 1996, and the trend has continued.¹ It is easy to dismiss popular documentaries, from fawning celebrity portraits to protracted true-crime miniseries, but doing so leaves a vital area of film and media understudied at the very moment when audiences are viewing and engaging with documentary media more than ever before.

Reclaiming Popular Documentary is an excellent start to correcting this oversight. Edited by Christie Milliken and Steve F. Anderson, the volume contains invigorating contributions that cover a wide swath of documentary media. In the introduction, Milliken and Anderson ask, "What is the relationship between documentary and entertainment and between popular documentary and advocacy? Can popular documentary be productively reconceived in relation to genre, modes, or rhetorical forms? Assuming the popular is defined in contrast to other categories (either implicitly or explicitly), what might those other categories be?"² The editors' capacious framing is wise because documentary's commercial relevance has not drained it of truth-telling potential or political urgency. The entrance of documentary into the mainstream media marketplace has only complicated its cultural standing.

The anthology's first section covers the exhibition contexts of popular documentary. Contributors Ezra Winton and Patricia Aufderheide consider two institutions that remain important to the documentary film ecosystem: the film festival, specifically Toronto's Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, and public television, including the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The choice to foreground these two institutions is strategic—a reminder that while streaming services have invested heavily in documentary films and series, they are not the saviors of documentary. Film festivals and public television continue to be central sites for the circulation of documentaries, formation of critical consensus, and launch of new documentarians' careers. Archivist Rick Prelinger suggests some imaginative alternatives to these stalwart if imperfect institutions, however, in the book's final section, "Engaging Audiences." In film events such as Lost Landscapes of San Francisco (2006–2020) and No More Road Trips? (2013), Prelinger has assembled archival footage of a particular place or activity and screens it for audiences who are encouraged to react and chime in during the screening. The popularity of these film events is a strong argument for creating new spaces and conditions for communal engagement with documentary cinema. Prelinger acknowledges that his practice appears arcane against the streaming service landscape. He writes, "I do not seek to bury the algorithm. But I question any retreat from public assembly, especially if such retreat occurs under the rubric of engagement, as so much interactive cinema asserts.… I would also argue that restoring big-screen experience coupled with direct, dialogical participation is a route toward staging the meeting of difference without its dilution, a means to an end rather than an end in itself."³

The most groundbreaking section of Reclaiming Popular Documentary is its third, "Short Forms and Web Practices." The short online documentary is of outsized importance in today's mediascape but has commanded comparatively little scholarly attention within documentary studies. Anthony Kinik, Michael Brendan Baker, and Allison de Fren explore what the prevalence of short web docs means for professional and amateur documentarians—who they partner with, what subjects they take on, and how they develop their formal strategies—as well as for people who watch, share, and comment on them. For instance, Kinik investigates the convergence of documentary film and journalism. As the internet thoroughly transforms print journalism, leading newspapers and magazines have begun hosting short...