Reclaiming Popular Documentary ed. by Christie Milliken and Steve F. Anderson (review)

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, documentary film and television have become far more popular and widely available than in previous decades. Yet the scholarship on documentary has tended to privilege the most formally inventive and politically radical documentary films, from Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, 1961) to Tongues Untied (Marlon T. Riggs, 1989) and The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012). Noël Carroll pointed out this tendency to focus on the “art-documentary” in 1996, and the trend has continued.1 It is easy to dismiss popular documentaries, from fawning celebrity portraits to protracted true-crime miniseries, but doing so leaves a vital area of film and media understudied at the very moment when audiences are viewing and engaging with documentary media more than ever before. Reclaiming Popular Documentary is an excellent start to correcting this oversight. Edited by Christie Milliken and Steve F. Anderson, the volume contains invigorating contributions that cover a wide swath of documentary media. In the introduction, Milliken and Anderson ask, “What is the relationship between documentary and entertainment and between popular documentary and advocacy? Can popular documentary be productively reconceived in relation to genre, modes, or rhetorical forms? Assuming the