Documenting the Documentary

New And Expanded Edition

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 Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu

General Editor
Barry Keith Grant
Brock University

Advisory Editors
Robert J. Burgoyne Frances Gateward
University of St. Andrews California State University, Northridge

Caren J. Deming Tom Gunning

University of Arizona University of Chicago

Patricia B. Erens Thomas Leitch

School of the Art Institute of Chicago University of Delaware

Peter X. Feng Walter Metz

University of Delaware Southern Illinois University

Lucy Fischer
University of Pittsburgh

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 Documenting the Documentary
Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video

New and Expanded Edition

With a Foreword by Bill Nichols

Edited by Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski

Wayne State University Press

Detroit

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 © 2014 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights
reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

18 17 16 15 14    5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013948532

ISBN: 978-0-8143-3971-8 (pbk: alk. paper)—ISBN: 978-0-8143-3972-5 (ebook)

Designed by Keata Brewer

Typeset by E.T. Lowe Publishing Company
Composed in Scala

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 For
Bob, Millie, Jessica, and Xena

and for
Zoya Sloniowski-Kiff and Ethan Pano-Sloniowski,
Grandchildren extraordinaire

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13500-Documenting the Documentary_Grant.indd 6 10/3/13 10:07 AM
 contents

Foreword to New and Expanded Edition by Bill Nichols  xi

Preface to First Edition  xvii
Acknowledgments  xix
Introduction  xxiii

1. The Filmmaker as Hunter: Robert Flaherty’s

Nanook of the North. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
william rothman
2. “Peace between Man and Machine”: Dziga Vertov’s
Man with a Movie Camera . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
seth feldman
3. Paradise Regained: Sergei Eisenstein’s Que viva México!
as Ethnography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
joanne her shfield
4. Synthetic Vision: The Dialectical Imperative of Luis Buñuel’s
Las Hurdes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
vivian sobchack
5. The Art of National Projection: Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon. . . . . . 64
william guynn
6. The Mass Psychology of Fascist Cinema: Leni Riefenstahl’s
Triumph of the Will . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
fr ank p. tomasulo

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 viii Contents

7. American Documentary Finds Its Voice: Persuasion

and Expression in The Plow That Broke the Plains and The City . . . . 103
charlie keil
8. “Men Cannot Act before the Camera in the Presence of Death”:
Joris Ivens’s The Spanish Earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
thomas waugh
9. The Poetics of Propaganda: Humphrey Jennings
and Listen to Britain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
jim leach
10. “It Was an Atrocious Film”: Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts. . . 159
jeannette sloniowski
11. The “Dialogic Imagination” of Jean Rouch:
Covert Conversations in Les maîtres fous. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
diane scheinman
12. Documenting the Ineffable: Terror and Memory
in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
sandy flitterman-lewis
13. Making the Past Present: Peter Watkins’s Culloden. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
john r. cook
14. “Don’t You Ever Just Watch?”: American Cinema Verité
and Dont Look Back. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
jeanne hall
15. “Ethnography in the First Person”: Frederick Wiseman’s
Titicut Follies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
barry keith gr ant
16. The Two Avant-Gardes: Solanas and Getino’s
The Hour of the Furnaces. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
robert stam
17. Seeing with Experimental Eyes: Stan Brakhage’s
The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287
bart testa
18. “A Bastard Union of Several Forms”:
Style and Narrative in An American Family. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305
jeffrey k. ruoff

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 Contents ix

19. The Documentary of Displaced Persona: Michael Rubbo’s Daisy:

The Story of a Facelift. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322
joan nicks
20. Gender, Power, and a Cucumber: Satirizing Masculinity in
This Is Spinal Tap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339
carl plantinga
21. Documentary Film and the Discourse of Hysterical/Historical
Narrative: Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 356
lucy fischer
22. Subjectivity Lost and Found: Bill Viola’s I Do Not Know What
It Is I Am Like. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 368
cather ine russell
23. Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History,
and The Thin Blue Line. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385
linda williams
24. Documentaphobia and Mixed Modes: Michael Moore’s
Roger & Me. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 404
matthew bernstein
25. Silence and Its Opposite: Expressions of Race in Tongues Untied. . . . 424
sheila petty
26. Containing Fire: Performance in Paris Is Burning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 438
caryl flinn
27. Contested Territory: Camille Billops and James Hatch’s
Finding Christa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 456
julia lesage
28. Spike Lee’s 4 Little Girls: The Politics of the Documentary
Interview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475
paula j. massood
29. The Gleaners and “Us”: The Radical Modesty of Agnès Varda’s
Les glaneurs et la glaneuse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 494
virginia bonner
30. “You Must Never Listen to This”: Lessons on Sound, Cinema,
and Mortality from Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 507
david t. johnson

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 x Contents

31. Cultural Learnings of Borat for Make Benefit Glorious Study

of Documentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 522
leshu torchin

Bibliography  543
Contributors  549
Index  557

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