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In Documentary Across Disciplines, editors Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg have curated a provocative cross-disciplinary collection of writings that redefine the idea of the documentary. This is a book that expands the idea of non-fiction media beyond designations usually found in film studies. It explores topics relevant to contemporary issues, such as the representation of truth and reality, the changing forms of legal evidence and indexicality, and ideas about subjectivity and agency informed by postcolonial theory: topics relevant to contemporary visual art, new media studies, literature, and ethnographic practices in the social sciences. In their introduction, the editors explain that Documentary Across Disciplines emerged out of a desire to reframe or redefine documentary practice in the context of what is often referred to as "the documentary turn" in contemporary visual art. Referencing the proliferation of documentary media projects within the international art exhibition context, the book grapples with the project of expanding the conception of documentary practices beyond film studies for the benefit of a wide range of documentary practitioners. Offering "a corrective to historical myopia" and challenging "the claims of novelty that sometimes accompany documentary in an art context" (18), many of the chapters provide reconsiderations of historical works from experimental film, ethnography, literature, and the visual art world in order to offer new ways of thinking about the definition of documentary.
Artfully edited by Balsom and Peleg, the entries in this book not only stand alone as individual pieces but reflect upon each other, sometimes referring to or even reframing works mentioned in a previous chapter, revealing ways in which the entries are literally or figuratively in conversation. This intertextuality makes sense, as this book project emerged out of the biannual Berlin Documentary Forum sponsored by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt under the artistic direction of Hila Peleg. But rather than being a compilation of forum proceedings, Documentary Across Disciplines is a creative and thoughtful reflection upon the theoretical and aesthetic concerns emerging at the conferences in 2010, 2012, and 2014. Many of the chapters offer case studies for interdisciplinary and noncanonical understandings of the documentary form from across and beyond film, to include new media and practices beyond the moving image. Innovative essays discuss the use of photography as...