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Michael Renov. The Subject of Documentary. Visible Evidence, Volume 16. Series edited by Michael Renov, Faye Ginsburg, and Jane Gaines. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004. 286 pp. ISBN 0-8166-3440-8, $59.95 (cloth); ISBN 0-8166-3441-6, $19.95 (paper).
In an era of proliferating digital video, reality TV, and online essayistic and autobiographical reportage, Michael Renov's The Subject of Documentary provides a timely compendium of essays dedicated to the cultural nuances and highly contested terrain of fact-based documentary practices. Published in 2004 by the University of Minnesota Press, the text charts the evolution of subjectivity in documentary practice and theory from primitive cinema to modernist avant-garde to the autobiographical essay to the antiestablishment collectivist productions of the counterculture 60s to digital video and personal websites, ending only just before the maturation of online blogging as a social force of reckon. Renov credits his teaching, and specifically his interaction with students, first at UC Santa Barbara Film Studies Department-where the first chapters of this volume were written-and then for the past eighteen years at USC School of Cinema-Television, for inspiring him "to think about the meanings and implications of subjectivity in the realm of nonfiction" (ix).
The volume is divided into three macro sections: "Social Subjectivity," which deals with the overlap of personal concerns and the "political urgency" of social agency (xviii); "The Subject in Theory," which delves "into subjectivity within documentary discourse through reference to ideas drawn from psychoanalysis, as well as certain strands of postmodernist theory and ethical philosophy" (xxii); and "Modes of Subjectivity"-here Renov focuses on the "graphological dimension," "the ways" for instance "in which self-inscription is constituted through its concrete signifying practices" (xxiii). These three parts contain fifteen micro-sections, or chapters, comprised largely of discrete papers Renov has presented or published in other forums. Over half of these "chapters" for example were prompted by the author's engagement and close alignment with Visible Evidence, an academic conference (and book series) launched in 1993 that is devoted to issues of documentary film and media-making (ix).
The Subject of Documentary is a loose yet fitting amalgamation of some two decades worth of study conveniently arranged according to theme, not chronology, and packaged to give a useful comprehensive overview of the thinking of one of the most consistently focused...