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  • Historicizing twenty-first ...
    Rudin, Daniel

    Studies in documentary film, 01/2024, Volume: 18, Issue: 1
    Journal Article

    What counts as documentary in the twenty-first century? More importantly, is documentary studies capable of contributing to a discourse that can both define the contours of and point beyond the past twenty-odd years of digital experimentation? During this time, documentary has been productively disassembled and its component parts strung about the white cube and strewn across the internet; however, it would seem its cinematic self has not developed much beyond the performative and reflexive 'new documentary' of the 80s-90s. In all likelihood, twenty-first-century new media documentaries exceed the horizons of documentary studies scholarship. In response, Jihoon Kim's Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary (New York: Oxford Press, 2022) and Kate Nash's Interactive Documentary: Theory and Debate (New York: Routledge, 2022) draw together an impressive array of alternative approaches. This review will compare how both books historicize this century's documentary in relation to the last.