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 thoughtthe 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 Boysoften
nude for speed and agility in the woods
or on the watercomposed 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.