The Subject of Documentary

by Michael Renov
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2004
288 pp. illus., 28 b/w. Trade, $59.95; paper, $19.95
ISBN: 0-8166-3440-8; ISBN: 0-8166-3441-6.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University

mosher@svsu.edu

Alas, in one way this book suffers a fate similar to this author's own computer book, parts obsoleted shortly after publication by a new generation of software. It was no fault of Michael Renov to see his book appear a shortly before the unprecedented success of Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11, or the documentaries, Supersize Me on McDonalds' food, or The Control Room on the Arab television network Al-Jazeera. Though Moore is mentioned nowhere, this 17 year collection of Renov's writings on documentary film is still far from obsolete. The author is a professor of critical studies at the USC School of Cinema-Television, and six of the 15 chapters were inspired by the Visible Evidence conferences. He studies a wide range of films, beginning with Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929), where the filmmaker projects and delegates subjectivity upon his editor-wife and cameraman-brother, and John Grierson in 1930s Great Britain. Jonas Mekas' Lost, Lost, Lost showed us displaced Lithuanian exiles in 1940s New York, and contrasts with Chris Marker's later poetic accumulation of global images in films like Sans Soleil. Today, we are bombarded with "reality TV" like "Cops" or "America's Funniest Home Videos," plus staged situations of spousal, vocal or fashion model competitions, surgical or home makeovers, contests to eat bugs or remain popular during team games with strangers on a claustrophobic island, until we scream: What is reality? What is documentary?

Early on, the author defines documentary as "autobiography in film and video," the medium where its author, narrator and protagonist are all identical. Documentaries easily shift, from stentorian 1960s nonfiction TV productions on social problems to Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool where documentary footage was incorporated inside the fiction. Alan and Susan Raymond's An American Family, shot in 1971, broadcast on PBS in 1973, only once let on that the Bill Loud family was being observed and filmed; their update 12 years later was more subjective and introduced the filmmakers. Lynne Hershman's First Person Plural was a psychoanalytic diary with roots in Michel de Montaigne's sixteenth-century autobiographical essays, among a spate of 1970s confessional on-camera monologues by George Kuchar, Sadie Benning, Wendy Clarke, Hershman and others.

The topic of death has long haunted documentary, as it does life itself. Whether the A-bomb burning a hole in the film stock, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah on France and the Holocaust or Abraham' Ravett's Everything for You on (like Art Spiegelman's comic book Maus) his father and the Holocaust. War inspired anti-Japanese propaganda in World War II as it did stilted media imagery of Iraqis in the first Gulf War (and their near-eradication from history in the current Iraq war). Rather than defining his community solely by the tragedy of AIDS in the 1980s, Marlon Riggs celebrated and interrogated African American homosexuals in the San Francisco Bay area, as Alan Harris' 1995 Vintage: Families of Value showcases three sets of black gay siblings.

Renov analyzes phenomena of the 1980s in relation to "post-60s theoretical interventions that challenged certain fundamentals of Western thought––the adequacy of history, the centrality of the subject, the coherence of master narratives." We are offered critical tools of Freud filtered through Lacan, Althusser, Kristeva and Zizek, Brecht upon documentary praxis, Derrida on "hermetics", and "new historicism" informing film theory. Renov uses theory judiciously and effectively, never letting it blur the lens by which he watches the movie that's unspooling before him. In the 1990s Renov turned his attention to new documentary media, like the LA Link video project linking disparate teenagers, the Quantel Domino video system, Jim Campbell's digital art installations, and the phenomenon of autobiographical websites (recalling Steven Rubio's essay on that topic in the online journal Bad Subjects).

The New York Times noted in mid-March 2005 how videotapes of the demonstrations at the 2004 Republican Convention disproved the New York Police Department's version of events. New York Newsreel, topic of Renov's especially welcome 1987 essay, documented mobilizations against the Vietnam War in the 1960s to similarly counter the power structure's summary. The student strike movie Columbia Revolt (1968) was Newsreel production number 14, and Summer '68 was shot among the demonstrators at that summer's Chicago Democratic Convention. From late 1967 through 1968, Newsreel screened their work every Saturday evening at ten at the Film-Makers Cinemathèque in Manhattan. They resurrected the Lumière brothers’ term "actualities" for raw footage documenting the day's events. The collective was made up of previously independent filmmakers Robert Kramer, Norm Fruchter, Robert Machover, John Douglas, David Stone, and Peter Gessner. Robert Kramer wanted their films to "explode like grenades in peoples' faces or open up minds like a good can opener". While Kramer died in 1999, other principals remain alive and active. John Douglas is now a photographer and artist in Vermont (http://www.redrat.net), who created powerful 3D animations employing imagery of skeletons, rifles, flooded houses and smart-bomb footage to comment on the first Gulf War. His Homeland Security series digitally assembles scowling, bewhiskered brigades of vigilant Green Mountain Boys––often nude for speed and agility in the woods or on the water––composed out of images of the sexagenarian artist himself.

It is not only this reviewer's regional bias that makes him regret the omission on any reference to two documentarians from Michigan, Greta Schiller and Ken Burns. Schiller's Before Stonewall and Paris Was a Woman, on aspects of twentieth-century gay culture, certainly help shape a context appreciative of Marlon Riggs. The more prominent Burns' television productions, from "The Civil War" to "Unforgiveable Blackness," have greatly affected public perception of the documentary form in the United States. There's even a technique in Apple's iMovie software called "Ken Burns," for zooming in slowly and portentously among still images. The omissions do not mean that Michael Renov's The Subject of Documentary, with its thoughtful writings on documentarians over the decades, doesn't have a place on a filmmaker or critic's film studies shelf. Yet this valuable book would benefit from reprinting with an updated and expanded introduction.