Kill the Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars

Abstract

Referencing her 2002 manifesto, Jill Godmilow’s 2022 book of the same name, Kill the Documentary, is a strident, searing, and sometimes humorous critique of what she calls documentary-as-we-know-it (DAWKI). But to call it a critique is to understate the energy of each of the hundred and seventy pages of this radical addition to the field of documentary theory and practice. Godmilow, like Trinh T. Minh-ha who suggested ‘there is no such thing as documentary’ (Balsom 2018) argues for a dismantling of the tropes of conventional documentary. And in doing so, challenges non-fiction filmmakers to take up more daring, political and collaborative modes of storytelling. Subtitled ‘A letter to Filmmakers, Students and Scholars’ this manifesto-by-any-othername overflows with neologisms, poetry, anecdotes, analysis, and filmmaking strategies that challenge what Godmilow calls ‘the liberal documentary’. For Godmilow, this ‘liberal documentary’ relies on the creation of a safe and distanced feeling of empathy through which the audience, who are usually white, middle-class and educated, feel they are ‘caring citizens’ (xi). Critiquing the often ‘lazy’ impulse of the documentary maker, Godmilow argues that many filmmakers use realist strategies to construct a passive audience by describing the world through audiovisual means. In doing so, the DAWKI offers few opportunities for the audience to engage critically in their own construction of knowledge, meaning, and ultimately hope. As a filmmaker and educator of many decades, Godmilow draws from a broad array of sources in crafting her call to arms (and action). Her influences span from Bill Nichols (who also wrote the foreword), Michael Renov and Brian Winston to experimental filmmakers like Harun Farocki, Trinh T. Minh-ha and John Greyson. Ranging across disciplines, she also finds good company in critical theorists Edward Said and Michel Foucault as well as luminaries of the written word – Susan Sontag, Ursula le Guin and Jorge Luis Borges. Not limited to the ‘big thinkers’, Godmilow also extols the usefulness of Wikipedia, as both timesaving and an example of a great collaborative project – an inserted section that made me laugh out loud. Early in Kill the Documentary, Godmilow makes note that to call this book a letter allows her to avoid ‘academic prose and theoretics’ (xix). Throughout the volume, the tone is conversational, stirring and often irreverent – assuming that the reader can think for themselves, and can make films with limited means. Early on in the book Godmilow outlines her intention to provide strategies to deconstruct and read documentaries to identify their implicit ideology. Only through what she calls reading these films ‘aberrantly’ or ‘against the grain’ (4), can we begin to understand how the use of the realist and narrative strategies create the world as knowable to an audience. For as Elizabeth Cowie suggests, knowability is created through the film, not through reality (2011, 13). Kill the Documentary has four sections, each broken into multiple subsections which make it easy to navigate and dip into – much like a book of prose or poetry. The first chapter