The Oxford Handbook of American Documentary

The Oxford Handbook of American Documentary offers new approaches to the study of documentary produced within, or connected to, the United States. Leading scholars of nonfiction and emerging voices in the field examine documentary as a dynamic cultural form that draws on wide-ranging technologies, coheres around different representational modes, and is used for a variety of artistic, political, and entertainment purposes. A pressing concern of many of this volume’s authors - like many of the filmmakers they write about - is documentary’s ability to not just reach viewers, but to actively engage them in building a more equitable and just world.

This volume’s twenty-six essays place the act of documentary making within a broader historical context, including macro-level analysis of how policy initiatives or economic shifts impact filmmakers as well as granular attention to how participants of a social movement use film to galvanize support for a cause. Additionally, The Oxford Handbook of American Documentary addresses the ways in which the stylistic tropes and rhetorical conventions of documentary are used to manipulate for political power or profit.

Joshua Glick is Visiting Associate Professor of Film & Electronic Arts at Bard College. He is the author of Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History. He also co-curated the exhibition, Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. Professor Glick’s current book project explores how documentary on the left and right of the political spectrum reshaped the media industries and created oppositional visions of social change in an era of polarization.

Patricia Aufderheide is University Professor in the School of Communication at American University. Among her many published works are Kartemquin Films: Documentaries on the Frontlines of Democracy, Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction and Reclaiming Fair Use (with Peter Jaszi). She has been a Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellow, and among her awards are the International Communication Association’s Communication Research as an Agent of Change Award and the International Documentary Association’s Preservation and Scholarship Award.