Kill the Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars by Jill Godmilow (review)

Abstract

In Kill the Documentary, celebrated documentarian and educator Jill Godmilow argues we must do away with the “documentary-as-we-know-it,” replacing such “conventional documentaries” with a postrealist cinema. Godmilow calls her missive to filmmakers, students, and scholars, delivered in accessible language and free of heavy-handed theorizing, a “letter.” (In his foreword, film scholar Bill Nichols calls it a “manifesto” [xi].) The author’s reasons for parting ways with conventional documentaries are varied, beginning with how they typically focus on delivering a dramatic narrative, building empathy for individual on-screen figures, and offering reassuring climaxes and neat conclusions, all with the pretense of showing us “reality.” Furthermore, such conventional documentaries are regularly guilty of offences such as servicing cultural imperialism by promulgating an image of “us” and “them” that situates the Western viewer as the ultimate arbiter of knowledge, not illuminating underlying social or economic structures, and flattering liberal viewers into believing they are well-informed citizens. Among the productions Godmilow singles out for extended criticism are Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922), for fuelling Western fantasies of a heroic but backward indigenous Other; Hoop Dreams (Steve James, 1994) for focusing on two adversity-defying individual African American characters instead of exploring structural economic oppression and racism; and The Vietnam War (Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, 2017), for neatly consigning this war to the history books without pressing the viewer to consider the moral question “who am I next to this?” (59). Documentaries like these are, Godmilow writes, “a relatively useless cultural product, especially for political change” (2); they fascinate and seduce us, rile our emotions, and then send us contentedly on our way believing we have witnessed reality and are better people for the experience (19). These arguments echo well-versed criticisms of the documentary, from the apprehension that Griersonian reform-minded productions typically serve as “liberal consensus documentaries” (to borrow a term from activist film programmer and scholar Ezra Winton), to Susan Sontag’s linking of indexical photographic images with voyeurism, or studies that show how well-intended documentary film festivals can reduce the travails of Global South constituencies to little more than an entertaining spectacle for Global North audiences.