Читать книгу A Companion to Documentary Film History - Группа авторов - Страница 14

Practically from its inception, documentary has been seen as having a privileged relation to the nation. It was in the 1920s and 1930s—the period of documentary’s early maturity—that politicians started to believe cinema could influence citizens. Nonfiction filmmakers’ arguments about what cinema could and should do were often made by those working for the state. Buttressing this notion was many filmmakers’ conviction that the film camera could uniquely capture nationality, both in established forms and in emerging states. This close connection between nonfiction film and national identity came to the fore again in the 1980s and 1990s when the emergence of national cinema studies coincided with the birth of documentary studies. In recent years, however, new approaches (archival and cultural‐historical), new forms, and newly available sources have pointed to the internationalism of not only current projects but historical ones as well. As Alice Lovejoy notes, this transnational work “highlighted the importance of internationalism to documentary, and documentary to internationalism.” The essays in this section build on this principle, noting documentary’s consistent concern with borders and geographic frameworks but also highlighting the extraordinary variety of geographies under consideration in this research. They do so across scale, moving from the local town level in the United States to regional/supranational dynamics in the Soviet Union to unsponsored challenges to colonialism in French West Africa to the reception of Western documentary film theory in Japan. In addition to illuminating a range of conceptual issues related to the geographical, the essays in this section are all concerned with a particular era in documentary, from the end of World War II to the mid to late 1950s, a significantly understudied period in nonfiction film history.