Book Review

Abstract

What if there were no rhetorical questions? My classes would be a lot shorter and so would Kate Nash’s new book, “Interactive documentary: Theory and debate” (Routledge, 2022). To her great credit, the book’s provocations are given depth and dimension by emulating the polysemic form of interactive documentary itself; the user/reader may exert her own agency in a move toward expansiveness or conclusion amid a kaleidoscope of liminal possibility spaces. This is appropriate, and ultimately rewarding, in examining a process becoming. Nash takes up the “challenge” of exploration and definition thrust on documentarian– scholar–theorists–playful-human-beings by Aston et al. (2017) in their seminal examination of the form, “I-Docs: The Evolving Practices of Interactive Documentary” (Wallflower Press, 2017, reviewed in EN, 12 vol. 1). In that edited volume, the then-nascent interactive documentary form was described as “...any project that starts with the intention to engage with the real, and that uses digital interactive technology to realize this intention” (p. 2). Such parameters are broad, sweeping, and, because of that, inclusive. With deft skill, Nash points toward patterns and rhythms (not hierarchies) that add to a fuller understanding of this collaborative process/product and the way in which its creators and users are implicated. She begins to offer structure, appropriately, in the beginning, the place from which the form springs—the database. It is a system of organization with (at least) two lofty ideals at its center: “the desire to escape narrative as a dominant mode of organization for documentary and, flowing from this, a desire to foster polyvocality, producing a space in which multiple voices might speak” (p. 17). By interrogating the database as a sort of agnostic entity (but, is it?), she questions the building blocks of narrative; is it friend or foe, colonizing or inclusive, apolitical or authoritarian? Again, those rhetorical questions. But, herein, Nash suggests answers or possibilities that fundamentally Book Review