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Renov, Michael. The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2004. 286 pages. Paperback. $19; cloth, $59.95.
REVIEWED BY CHARLES TRYON
Michael Renov's The Subject of Documentary traces the recent history of autobiographical documentary in a book that contributes to scholarship in both documentary studies and autobiography studies. Because the book collects material that Renov has published over the last fifteen years, it also provides a useful overview of the thinking of one of the more important recent theorists of documentary cinema. Although much of the book previously has been published, it does provide new avenues for scholars of documentary film, autobiography, and digital media. In the book, Renov traces "the 'turn to the subject' in documentary production in the 1990s" (xi) and then addresses the political importance of this particular turn in scholarship as well as in documentary production. Because many of the chapters began as conference papers and remain relatively brief, the chapters sometimes read as if they are anticipating larger, more sustained arguments; however this "essayistic" quality also reinforces Renov's observations regarding the "situated" nature of all writing. Renov's approach to autobiographical documentary is most compelling when he makes connections between autobiographical film and the "essayistic," a concept he develops through a lineage starting with Montaigne and running through Adorno to the later Barthes. Drawing from this tradition, Renov notes that essays combine "descriptive and reflexive modalities" in which representations of the world are "consciously filtered through the flux of subjectivity" (70). By aligning the documentary project with this notion of "epistemological uncertainty," Renov is able to separate the documentary from the exploitative impulse of transforming documentary subjects into objects of knowledge.
Renov divides the book into three major sections, "Social Subjectivity," "The Subject in Theory," and "Modes of Subjectivity," with each section approaching documentary's encounter with subjectivity in different ways. The book's first section, "Social Subjectivity," details the ways...