The Oxford Handbook of American Documentary

by Glick, Joshua; Aufderheide, Patricia

• ISBN13: 9780197554647
• ISBN10: 0197554644
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780197554654
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2025-06-02
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Oxford Handbook of American Documentary offers new approaches to the study of documentary produced within, or connected to, the United States. Leading scholars of nonfiction and emerging voices in the field examine documentary as a dynamic cultural form that draws on wide-ranging technologies, coheres around different representational modes, and is used for a variety of artistic, political, and entertainment purposes. A pressing concern of many of this volume's authors - like many of the filmmakers they write about - is documentary's ability to not just reach viewers, but to actively engage them in building a more equitable and just world.

This volume's twenty-six essays place the act of documentary making within a broader historical context, including macro-level analysis of how policy initiatives or economic shifts impact filmmakers as well as granular attention to how participants of a social movement use film to galvanize support for a cause. Additionally, The Oxford Handbook of American Documentary addresses the ways in which the stylistic tropes and rhetorical conventions of documentary are used to manipulate for political power or profit.

Author Biography

Joshua Glick is Visiting Associate Professor of Film & Electronic Arts at Bard College. He is the author of Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History. He also co-curated the exhibition, Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. Professor Glick's current book project explores how documentary on the left and right of the political spectrum reshaped the media industries and created oppositional visions of social change in an era of polarization.

Patricia Aufderheide is University Professor in the School of Communication at American University. Among her many published works are Kartemquin Films: Documentaries on the Frontlines of Democracy, Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction and Reclaiming Fair Use (with Peter Jaszi). She has been a Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellow, and among her awards are the International Communication Association's Communication Research as an Agent of Change Award and the International Documentary Association's Preservation and Scholarship Award.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Locating American Documentary: Politics, Infrastructure, Practice, by Joshua Glick and Patricia Aufderheide

Section I: Dynamics of Infrastructure
Chapter 1: The Political Documentary Film Essay is Infrastructural, by Alexandra Juhasz

Chapter 2: The Political Economy of Documentary Archives, by Josh Shepperd and Laura Garbes

Chapter 3: Documentary Circuits: The Distribution of Documentary Film in the United States, by Nora Stone

Chapter 4: The Documentary Commons: A Critical Challenge to Cinema's Impact Frameworks, by Angela J. Aguayo

Section II: Public Policy, Public Media
Chapter 5: Copyright, Self-Censorship, Fair Use, and Documentary Film, by Patricia Aufderheide

Chapter 6: Regulating Documentary: Television, Conservative Activism, and the Expressive Power of Policy, by Allison Perlman

Chapter 7: What Does Democracy Look Like? Documentary and the Demos in Public Television, by Laurie Ouellette

Chapter 8: Government Documentary During the Cold War: The United States Information Agency's Global Outreach, by Hadi Gharabaghi and Bret Vukoder

Section III: Movements for Equity and Justice
Chapter 9: By, About and For: Contemporary Indigenous Documentary, by Colleen Thurston, Choctaw, and Erica Cusi Wortham

Chapter 10: Elizabeth Mitchell, Documentary, and the Invention of the Black Cinematic Atlantic, by Ellen C. Scott

Chapter 11: The Art of Advocacy: Mexican American Documentary, by Carlos Francisco Parra

Chapter 12: Absence and Presence in Post-Stonewall Queer Documentary: Queer Radicalness, Assimilation, and the Gray Space Between, by Ronald Gregg

Chapter 13: From Observed Patient to Filmmaker: Disability and Documentary in the United States, by Linnéa Hussein

Chapter 14: Documentary as Ecocinema: Form, Ethics, and Environmental Justice, by Kristi McKim

Chapter 15: Racial Affect and Populist Epistemologies: Citizens United and Conservative Documentary, by Michael M. Reinhard

Section IV: The Politics of Performance
Chapter 16: Character Driven Documentary, by Chris Cagle

Chapter 17: Deep Fake: Borat's Subsequent Return to America in a Post-Truth Era, by Leshu Torchin

Chapter 18: The Case for Abolishing True Crime, by Brett Story and Pooja Rangan

Section V: Documentary Across Media
Chapter 19: Documentary's Longue Durée (Elaborated): Beginnings, Formations, Genealogies, by Charles Musser

Chapter 20: Black Tourism: Home Movies as Resistance, by Elizabeth Patton

Chapter 21: Reframing Asian American Documentary Media, by Denise Khor

Chapter 22: Environments of Race and Place: The Urgencies and Enmeshments of Participatory Community Media, by Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann

Section VI: Technologies of Immersion and Augmentation
Chapter 23: Situating the Interactive and Immersive Documentary, by William Uricchio

Chapter 24: XR and Documentary: Affinities and Resistance, by Julia Scott-Stevenson
Chapter 25: Documentary and Wildlife, by Scott MacDonald
Chapter 26: Another Way of Viewing: Documentary and the Digital Humanities, by Lauren Tilton

Epilogue: Insights From Practitioners, by Patricia Aufderheide