Читать книгу A Companion to Documentary Film History - Группа авторов - Страница 15

The issue of authorship is central to many definitions of documentary; for John Grierson, it is a key aspect that distinguishes the documentary from less thoughtful or refined nonfiction genres. But authorship, as the essays in this section make plain, is a highly contested issue for documentary, encompassing questions about who controls or owns the image and debate over the status of documentary as commerce or journalistic speech. In addition to the definition, legal and academic, authorship remains a key framework for histories of documentary and nonfiction film. Following these arguments, the essays in this section take it as a frictive phenomenon to be explored with rigorous attention to context. James Cahill even develops a term that captures the approach to authorship these essays take: AuNT or Author‐Network Theory, which accounts “for the interplay of forces involved in the creation of nonfiction and documentary films.” The essays in the section likewise offer innovative conceptual frameworks for understanding the role of individuals, communities, and institutions in efforts of creative labor and the agency undergirding them. They do so across history, context, and nonfiction media form, interrogating authorial functions related to, among others, the creative and the artisanal, visibility and invisibility, documentary versus avant‐garde historiography, and concluding with the issue of human subjectivity and posthuman modalities.