The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

authors have chosen to survey the genre and retrieve texts through descriptive analysis.
Barnouw’s pedagogical volume is particularly saturated with scores of titles of films from
around the world, and moves through history describing how they came to be produced
and what they look like. There are gem-like moments where Barnouw touches on the
importance of d/e, such as when he describes the Danish Underground’s efforts in WWII,
wherein armed guerrillas commandeer a cinemahouse, show subversive films critical of
the Nazi regime, then disappear after the screenings. (Barnouw, 1993, p. 251) The film
scholar connects these unorthodox methods for disseminating documentary with a
palpable shift in the Danish populations’ perceptions toward the Germans and the war
itself. (Ibid)
Renov has provided students of documentary with compilations of essays entitled,
Theorizing Documentary (1993), Collecting Visible Evidence (co-edited with Gaines,
1999), and his newest book, The Subject of Documentary. 11 Renov’s indexes like the bulk
of material itself, contain no mention of distribution nor exhibition, and like his peers, he
steers steadfastly toward a thick description of texts and time periods, with nary a
mention of where the same films are screened or how they come to be screened. His
latest offering is less an analysis of the genre than it is an exploration into the practices of
self-ethnography and self-reflexivity through the subjective practices in various forms of
non-fiction, including mediums beyond cinema.
While not as prolific in volumes specific to documentary, Bruzzi has concentrated
more on cinema in general, but offers New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (2000),
a survey of documentary production-oriented activity of the last two decades leading up
11 It should be mentioned that Thomas Waugh has been influential as an academic writing on
documentary, and will continue in the vein of Renov’s latest with his forthcoming, The Right To
Play Oneself: Essays on Documentary, slated to be published in 2008.
51