Documentary Goes Popular

While the documentary genre has frequently been conceptualized as a democratic tool with civic potential, the ways popular advocacy documentary functions in the process of social change is unclear. We need more information about the relationship between documentary agitation and collective organizing for social change, as well as about how this function shifts with the visibility of popular attention. Mainstream commercial culture is more than at odds with a commons of democratic exchange. The advocacy film is a time-honored tradition in documentary history, made specifically for the aims of democratic exchange. This type of film is produced for political causes by activists or advocates who are not closely connected with the government or decision makers. Often the director is constructed as a central creative force. Central figures usually function as surrogates for the film in public interviews and engagements; the speakers are often connected to sponsoring organizations. In this chapter, I first address the historical linage of popular documentary and its movement from the vernacular to the popular. Then, I examine the ways popular advocacy documentary in popular form has morphed in recent years, providing insight into the potential of the genre to make contact with the political structure.

Street Tapes

The proliferation of screen media and the saturation of everyday life with digital culture led to dramatic shifts in public communication, challenging our sense of what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century. Digital technologies have expanded the capacity to author and circulate information in unforeseeable ways. Cell phone video recordings became evidence of an unprovoked police attack, leaving traditional news outlets with little original content. Shifts in online engagement and mobile recording patterns at the turn of the century have enabled people who exist outside of business, state, and mainstream media sectors to create visible documentary moving image discourse that circumvent traditional media content. The standardization of the internet at the turn of the century brought people together in new ways, paving the way for social media and newly formed social networks. Visibility through digital production, online self-publishing, and circulation through social networks offer more than the opportunity to gather an audience; these forms of communication consistently disrupt, contribute, penetrate, challenge, focus, and reframe important public conversations in our culture. This chapter focuses on accidental witnessing of racial struggle and representation of police brutality in documentary history. This chapter has implications for what bodies get to move freely through a documentary commons and what bodies do not.

Conclusion

This chapter centers on the idea of the documentary commons as a framework for understanding documentary’s engagement with social change. In the developing public commons, the documentary impulse is a way of life and articulation of political information that produces a kind of democratic exchange with new patterns of public communication. With the pervasive use of cameras and live broadcasts, the documentary impulse is realizing its potential to create participatory media cultures. Among the topics in this chapter are the possibilities for future research and contributions to theories of social change, participatory media cultures, collective identification, and agency. This chapter also addresses the political economy of social change documentary, the ideological glass ceiling of mass media, and the role of professional opportunity and education in shaping social change expectations.

Subjugated Histories and Affective Resistance

Starting in the early 1970s, many documentaries began addressing the shifting cultural climate surrounding the issue of abortion in the United States. While some consideration has been given to how abortion has been represented on television and in motion pictures, scant attention has been paid to how the documentary genre has forged the public space for this controversial issue. This chapter briefly maps and assesses how feminists have documented and utilized the documentary genre to recover women’s history and reclaim public space for reproductive justice and the failures to accomplish these aims as access to reproductive care continues to erode. The chapter tracks how women, engaged in feminist struggle, create documentary commons specific to the collision between lived experience and social expectations. The chapter focuses particularly on a moment in 2005 when Third Wave feminist and activist filmmakers attempted to engage abortion politics through the documentary confessional mode. Tracking the move from public confession to representations of an escalating and violent antichoice movement brings the struggle into sharper focus. Analysis of these documentaries and their parallel activist interventions includes interviews with three directors, archival material, and ethnographic research.

A Critical History of Documentary and Participatory Media Cultures

Despite the increasing tendency for documentary to function as political discourse, there is little historical work addressing the rhetorical and material influence of documentary in public life. These stories of documentary impulse and political struggle have been only erratically recorded. Documentary scholarship frequently addresses the issues that surround the process of social change, focusing on the screen as the central location for communicative exchange, but there are many other sites of struggle for those working on the ground with documentary and the political process. This chapter will cover the broader questions of documentary and social change, how it functions in relation to generating participatory media cultures. The chapter will specifically address the shifts in the documentary commons and how opportunities for social change emerged as it moved through the introduction of portable analog video recording equipment in the late 1960s and on into a digital culture of new media. This chapter will contribute to articulating the ways in which documentary is a distinct form of discourse that engages the political in patterned ways, creating a mediated commons for the engagement of political struggle.

Laboring under Documentary

The impulse to record and document labor struggle is almost as old as the concept of documentary itself. From the Worker’s Film and Photo League to the activist programming of Labor Beat, documentary has had an intimate relationship with the labor struggle. This chapter addresses the history of labor documentary production in the United States as an expression of radical ideology. Challenging the aesthetic form and content of the mainstream media, the labor movement is a loosely connected network of activists and artists across the country, engaged in efforts to produce media outside mainstream institutions. Specifically, this chapter focuses on elements of labor history that made significant contributions but are now largely ignored and undocumented: the efforts of radical women, rank-and-file amateur videographers, and undocumented workers. Existing on the fringes of the mainstream and counterculture, the work of women in alternative media in the early 1970s reflected a direct relationship between their lived experience, the camera, and political engagement, embodying a liberated agency that is magnified by the documentary camera. The chapter creates a portrait of the documentary commons as it expands and works for citizens in their daily lives. They represent a whole population of radical activists carving out a space for themselves to engage labor and social change with their cameras.

Introduction

We are living in a historical moment that will be known for its emphasis on media engagement. The evolution of mobile media technology, the ubiquity of social media, and the omnipresence of multiple media platforms in each of our lives have led to new and evolving modes of interaction with the experience of the media screen. The interactive conditions of digital culture in the United States align with a significant historical moment: growing political and social upheaval, economic crisis, dissatisfaction with representative government, and disillusionment with state institutions. Together, these conditions have given rise to an emerging participatory media culture(s) engaged in addressing problems, exposing exploitation, facilitating media witnessing, and taking back the means of media production and circulation. The chapter argues for an understanding of documentary practice as a mediated commons. This book focuses on how the visual culture(s) of documentary moving images are harnessed as a means of resistance in forms that include witnessing, petition, solidification, polarization, and promulgation. It will examine the ways in which documentary as a mode of production engages in the process of social change.