Historicizing twenty-first century documentary: A review of Jihoon Kim’s Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary and Kate Nash’s Interactive Documentary: Theory and Debate

ABSTRACT

What counts as documentary in the twenty-first century? More importantly, is documentary studies capable of contributing to a discourse that can both define the contours of and point beyond the past twenty-odd years of digital experimentation? During this time, documentary has been productively disassembled and its component parts strung about the white cube and strewn across the internet; however, it would seem its cinematic self has not developed much beyond the performative and reflexive ‘new documentary' of the 80s-90s. In all likelihood, twenty-first-century new media documentaries exceed the horizons of documentary studies scholarship. In response, Jihoon Kim's Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary (New York: Oxford Press, 2022) and Kate Nash's Interactive Documentary: Theory and Debate (New York: Routledge, 2022) draw together an impressive array of alternative approaches. This review will compare how both books historicize this century's documentary in relation to the last.

KEYWORDS:

• Documentary
• historiography
• film
• interactive documentary
• documentary studies
• postmodernism

What counts as documentary in the twenty-first century? More importantly, is documentary studies capable of contributing to a discourse that can both define the contours of and point beyond the past twenty-odd years of digital experimentation? During this time, documentary has been productively disassembled and its component parts strung about the white cube and strewn across the internet; however, it would seem its cinematic self has not developed much beyond the performative and reflexive ‘new documentary’ of the 80s–90s. Attempts at fitting documentary into a historical narrative, as a field that expands in cognizance of its own history, have been all but abandoned since Bill Nichols’ Introduction to Documentary (2001). Nichols’ account of twentieth-century documentary is based on a typology of ‘modes’ – technological, social and aesthetic transformations, to which documentary responds in generational/decadal cycles. E.g. cinema verité both reacted to the expository mode (30s–50s) and created possibilities for participatory and radical documentaries of the 70s – which, at their most political, emphasized the subject to the exclusion of the artist. In so doing, Nichols argued these films had lost their ‘voice’ – a term indicating both aesthetic construction and argumentation (1983).

It may well be the loss of ‘voice’ described by Nichols remains relevant, only now in terms of the relationship between multimedia and cinematic documentaries. According to Michael Renov, ‘New [digital] methods for representing the self in everyday life’ have collapsed public/private distinctions such that ‘the traditional modes of documentary exposition’ no longer suffice (1999, 318). In all likelihood, twenty-first-century new media documentaries also exceed the horizons of documentary studies scholarship. In response, Jihoon Kim’s Documentary’s Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary (New York: Oxford Press, 2022) and Kate Nash’s Interactive Documentary: Theory and Debate (London: Routledge, 2022) draw together an impressive array of alternative approaches. This review will compare how both books historicize this century’s documentary in relation to the last.

Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary

Kim’s Documentary's Expanded Fields is a sweeping account of contemporary ‘expanded’ documentary. Drawing from Gene Youngblood’s idea of ‘expanded cinema’ and Caroline Krauss’ ‘expanded field,’ Kim proposes the tensions underlying narrative-based documentary cinema no longer apply; instead ‘emerging documentary practices and artifacts remediate the modes of traditional documentary cinema’ in dialectic of continuity and discontinuity (2022, 11). That is to say, media production and viewer engagement dynamically relate to new media platforms, which are themselves foundational for ‘the shifting political and cultural conditions of reality in the twenty-first century’ (13).

While asserting that emerging documentary remediates ‘traditional’ documentary, Kim rejects Nichols’ attempt to organize documentary into historical periods wherein technology and documentary modes, platforms and ‘underlying epistemological assumptions’ dynamically interrelate (12). Kim’s typologies find less certain historical purchase. For instance, the fourth chapter defines i-docs as ‘performative archives’ that mediate viewer interaction with ‘traditional documentary cinema’ through hypertextual, collaborative and experiential modes (148). Rather than relating the latter to observational or performative modes and the ‘given moment in time’ to which they belonged, Kim defines performativity as the reconfiguration of documentary’s ‘systems of preserving, classifying, and gaining access to its traditional materials,’ which in turn impacts ‘the viewer's experience and memory of them’ (151).

Here, Kim takes for granted documentary’s increasingly tenuous links to history as fact and fiction become blurred, and truths multiply. The binaries of fact/fiction, subjectivity/objectivity, actuality/creative content no longer apply (10), while the apparently contingent, helter-skelter deployment of documentary across platforms reflects contemporary political instability. Kim must nevertheless distinguish twenty-first-century documentary from the 1980s–1990s New Documentary. His solution is a five-chapter ‘topological map’ of the experiments in which documentary form and media have been ‘dismantled and redrawn’: image (digitization/manipulation), vision (disembodied camera), dispositif (video installation), activism (online videos) and archive (i-docs).

Interestingly, Kim’s key theoretical texts date to the 70s, when, for Nichols, documentary had lost its ‘voice.’ That decade was precisely when for Krauss the modern was ‘expanding’ to the postmodern. Similarly, Kim suggests a set of tensions has ‘expanded’ documentary into a cultural space beyond the cinematic object – suggesting our moment is akin to that of Krauss, a sort of neo-postmodernism. His concept handily encapsulates the many different (and often spatial) experiments going on today, but also represents documentary as an ‘elusive artifact’ unmoored from history.

Interactive Documentary: Theory and Debate

Unlike Documentary’s Expanded Fields, Nash’s Interactive Documentary stakes out a documentary and digital media studies approach focused exclusively on i-docs. As Nash rightly notes, documentary has historically incorporated multimedia, although it has generally been treated as a filmic and televisual object ( 2021, 2). It follows that the relationship between interactive documentary and documentary cinema is both ‘evolutionary and revolutionary,’ a ‘dialogue between past and future’ (2). Documentary’s interactive offspring inherits concerns having to do with the act of ‘claiming the real.’ To the traditional fact/fiction tensions of documentary, Nash adds real/virtual and representation/action. These latter categories are mediated by performativity, as a ‘negotiation between various agents within the context of a creative process’ (9). Documentary interactivity goes beyond one-way cinematic spectatorship to facilitate two-way informational flows. The i-doc user is just as much a performer as the subject or author, producing a tension between a product or ‘text’ and the performance or ‘process’ (13). This ‘draws attention to relationality, process, and meaning as a field of possibility’ (7), or the ‘possibility space’ (18) of a database documentary’s ‘voice.’ Paradoxically, databases foster a certain lack of control and are generally embraced as destabilizing narrative and predetermined meaning (14) in order to ‘foster polyvocality’ (17) – what Nash considers the politics of interactivity. If for Kim databases mediate traditional documentary, for Nash the three main formal paradigms – narrative, categorical and poetic – elicit performative user responses. In each instance, the opposition between ‘the database and narrative as communicative logics’ (18) acts as a generative catalyst.

Power and documentary aesthetics

Both Kim and Nash are concerned with how power relations shape the aesthetic form of new media documentary. Nash’s second chapter compares historical debates on power, documentary and interactivity. She notes that neither amateur participation in the creative-technical process of twentieth-century documentary nor crowdsourcing of i-docs fully equalizes power (45). Rather than power relations per se, Kim is concerned with how social media has ‘expanded’ the participatory documentary from a ‘closed’ (argumentative) text to ‘open’ media ecosystems. In their push for social change, ‘vernacular videos’ expand the ‘activist documentary's subject’ into a ‘hybrid documedia system’ (192) making the ‘boundaries between documentary filmmaking and other nonfiction media practices, and between the professional and the amateur’ less relevant (120). Like Kim, Nash accounts for how interactivity decenters elite debate, fosters collective control and develops into civic cultures (61–62). For example, i-docs reconceive of documentary ‘voice’ as public debate over notions of citizenship, collective identities and strategic communications (68).

As Brian Winston observed, twenty-first-century documentary closed the distance between author and viewer (2017, 3). This ‘closeness’ is not new, but has periodically surfaced in documentary since at least the 1930s. Much like Winston’s merger of ‘filmer and filmed,’ Youngblood believed a ‘time of radical evolution’ (i.e. 1970) called for the fusion of art and life: ‘Life becomes art when there's no difference between what we are and what we do’ (1970, 42). Youngblood’s view was common in the romantic, countercultural milieu then prevailing. One must consider ‘expanded cinema’ a byproduct. The same attitude does not prevail today; Kim’s interpretation of ‘expansions’ presupposes political destabilization. Yet they also express utopian aspirations and therefore contradiction. On the one hand, emerging documentary is said to speak in a ‘vernacular’ language (YouTube), on the other hand, it is a completely rationalized field of technology specialists (i-docs). In reality, YouTubers have only slipshod access to history embodied in the general social intellect of documentary art, while the i-doc obscures layers of code and design under a façade of ‘user-friendly’ immediacy.

I would propose an alternative framework based on Benjamin, for whom the post-enlightenment age of massification drew author and viewer together while at once expressing a contradiction between commodity and art, in that artists became specialists who must improve the ‘apparatus’ of aesthetic production in order to render it legible (2005a, 777). Benjamin's theory of art was negative, indicating historical disintegration. Adorno, in dialogue with Benjamin, emphasized that these very extremes – between, for instance, high and low art – pointed beyond the larger historical crisis of bourgeois society under capitalism (1977, 123). Following Benjamin and Adorno, rather than Youngblood, we might observe the persistence of the twentieth century in ‘emerging documentary practices’; the latter has not escaped but rather intensified documentary cinema’s nineteenth-century (bourgeois) fetish for technique and lens-based technology.

Space and the documentary lens

For Kim, the expanded field is defined not only by the confluence of author and subject but the detaching of the documentary lens from the human camera operator (e.g. drones). If the documentary camera is ‘an anthropomorphic extension of the human sensorium,’ these new (mostly online) documentary films and videos ‘decentralize the human-centered understanding of the world’ to go beyond human perception (69). Yet this was already a feature of Dziga Vertov’s ‘kino-eye,’ which was much more optimistic about the possibilities of a dialectical relationship between technology and human.

Nash focuses less on the lens than on perception per se. She uses documentary studies scholarship on re-enactment to classify digital games with ‘factual ambition’ as documentary (14). Just as affect/argument, fact/speculation and historic/present are mediated by the ‘voice’ of documentary (88), realistic models of staging (91) (e.g. games where the player takes on the role of a journalist) can be read through their ‘procedural verisimilitude’ (85). Similarly, in simulating reality, VR can function as an ‘empathy machine’ with ‘reality effects’ – the ‘modeling, representation, and experience – by linking digital media experience to truth claims’ (83). Following Nichols, Nash suggests that simulation can approximate montage effects by mimicking lived experience (83). Its style can be realist, journalistic and non-specific yet historical – juxtaposing fact and fiction.

Kim is also concerned with how evidentiary or experiential digital data visualizations manipulate image, yet as mentioned above avoids binary tensions. He instead argues that ‘postfilmic media technologies’ express ambivalence about notions of scientific truth that can be leveraged to destabilize the hierarchical relation between ‘lens-based capture’ and ‘graphic or manipulated imagery’ (62). Elsewhere, he explores the apparatus or dispositif of video installation – ‘a media assemblage of heterogeneous components that expands and migrates the forms of cinema’ in the exhibition space (109). Through installation, these dispositifs reconfigure ‘the observational, poetic, reflexive, and performative modes of documentary cinema’ as well as fragment and rework the essay film (120). It is not clear, however, whether these experiments truly inspire i-docs and ‘vernacular videos.’

Along similar lines, Nash compares i-doc big data visualizations to the Griersonian and Mass Observational schools. She notes that documentary has always been characterized by ‘discourses of sobriety’ verging on scientism – fetishizing its own claims of objectivity. For instance, Grierson’s approach was attuned to a sense of applied sociology, wherein stories constitute a class typology in alignment with the politics of the social welfare state (123–124). To the extent that it was in dialogue with Surrealism, the Mass Observation movement broke from the Griersonian approach by ‘taking montage and fragmentation as prompts to foster unconscious association.’ In so doing, it probed the limits of the scientific method of data collection – and meaning more generally (126). If i-docs have used data visualization techniques ‘as a means by which to provoke awareness of reality by engaging the limits of rationality and analysis and prioritizing intuition’ (130), does this mean that twenty-first-century documentary correlates to Mass Observation’s critique of documentary scientism?

Historicizing twenty-first-century documentary

The comparison, while compelling, is not entirely convincing, as Nash identifies no comparative movement to Surrealism today. Nor is her ‘possibility space’ an aesthetic category. This last point brings the discussion back to the significance of documentary studies for both authors. Both stake out the continuities and discontinuities between present and past. In this respect, Nash benefits from sustained engagement with the idea of documentary ‘voice.’ More so than Nash, Kim is invested in drawing connections to 1970s activism and art criticism – most significantly, Youngblood and Krauss. And yet, unlike the 30s Surrealism or even 70s notions of ‘expansion’ that orient to utopian futures, neither Kim nor Nash specify the conditions of possibility for twenty-first-century documentary. Both avoid the modernistic approach of treating aesthetic history as self-enclosed canons, à la Nichols’ ‘modes.’

One can interpret Nichols’ idea of documentary ‘voice’ as a defense of modernism. It was the crisis of the latter to which Krauss’ idea of ‘expanded field’ responded. Kim conceives of ‘expansion’ as ‘dismantling a group of material and technical hierarchies that underlie traditional sculpture … blurring the boundaries between what sculpture is and what it is not’ (9). Krauss was however not dismantling hierarchy, but rather framing sets of logical operations in which the defining limit of sculpture’s ‘field’ outstripped the limits of traditional media.

In a sense, Krauss proposed an immanent dialectical critique of art-critical historicism, which was no longer historically aware. Oppositional cultural tensions had ‘expanded into culture’ – pointing beyond modernism into postmodernism. Her ‘mapping’ explained what might ‘address the root cause – the conditions of possibility – that brought about the shift into postmodernism’ (1979, 44). By contrast, Kim maps how ‘emergent digital technologies and platforms’ reshape ‘the image, vision, apparatus, memory, and activism of documentary cinema’ (11). Yet these categories are not interpenetrated dialectical tensions pointing beyond themselves.

Perhaps as Huyssen believed, the end of history is a ‘post-avant-garde dusk’ in which the distinction between aesthetic theory and practice has been abandoned, while the ‘media-specific differences between film, literature, and theory’ has not – resulting in ‘a night in which all cows are gray’ (1995, 147). For Habermas, a ‘new historicism’ – precisely the accusation Krauss leveled at modernist criticism – was already evident in postmodernism, which neither ‘remove[d] the distinction between artifact and object of use’ nor enabled ‘everyone to be an artist’ but instead illuminated the primacy of the aesthetic (1985, 11).

Postmodernism, in other words, pointed the way back to modernism. Then and now, art remains a specialized field, in which historically specific aesthetic knowledge is created, and periodically wiped out (Benjamin 2005b). This dynamic is evident when Nash observes that with the 2020 disappearance of Adobe Flash, i-docs experienced a ‘mass extinction’ (140). Perhaps it is not only, as Kim (citing Renov) claims, the ‘new technologies have challenged the old definitions’ (23), but that these technologies symptomize the extent to which historical change escapes our aesthetic imagination. This leaves us with several concluding questions. Does the 70s repeat itself in a new historicism today? Is the new media documentary a cul-de-sac leading back into the twentieth century, a regression rather than an expansion? By organizing recent experiments and consolidating the debate, Kim and Nash’s books pose the illusive question of where the twenty-first-century documentary is going, anyway.

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Daniel Rudin

Daniel Rudin is an artist and scholar focused on the role of the ‘Left’ and ‘state’ in cinema, including democratization and the ‘new cinema’ in the Philippines, twentieth-century avant-garde film and documentary. His art practice explores dividing lines between the documentary and the experimental through multi-channel installation, while his journalistic work has focused on labor issues. He is currently writing about the historical relation of multimedia documentary to documentary film, concluding an article on Philippine video activism, working on a comparative study of Lino Brocka and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and developing a short film about labor discontents in the Philippines. Daniel lectures on video and documentary at the University of California, Merced.