Kill the Documentary : A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars Hardback

by Jill Godmilow

Part of the Investigating Visible Evidence: New Challenges for Documentary series

Hardback

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Description

Can the documentary be useful? Can a film change how its viewers think about the world and their potential role in it?

In Kill the Documentary, the award-winning director Jill Godmilow issues an urgent call for a new kind of nonfiction filmmaking.

She critiques documentary films from Nanook of the North to the recent Ken Burns/Lynn Novick series The Vietnam War.

Tethered to what Godmilow calls the â€œpedigree of the realâ€ and the â€œpornography of the real,â€ they fail to activate their viewersâ€™ engagement with historical or present-day problems.

Whether depicting the hardships of poverty or the horrors of war, conventional documentaries produce an â€œus-watching-themâ€ mode that ultimately reinforces self-satisfaction and self-absorption. In place of the conventional documentary, Godmilow advocates for a â€œpostrealistâ€ cinema.

Instead of offering the faux empathy and sentimental spectacle of mainstream documentaries, postrealist nonfiction films are acts of resistance.

They are experimental, interventionist, performative, and transformative.

Godmilow demonstrates how a film can produce meaningful, useful experience by forcefully challenging ways of knowing and how viewers come to understand the world.

She considers her own career as a filmmaker as well as the formal and political strategies of artists such as Luis BuÃ±uel, Georges Franju, Harun Farocki, Trinh T.

Minh-ha, Rithy Panh, and other directors. Both manifesto and guidebook, Kill the Documentary proposes provocative new ways of making and watching films.