Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary

Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary offers a theoretical mapping of contemporary non-standard documentary practices enabled by the proliferation of new digital imaging, lightweight and non-operator digital cameras, multiscreen and interactive interfaces, and web 2.0 platforms. These emergent practices encompass digital data visualizations, digital films that experiment with the deliberate manipulation of photographic records, documentaries based on drone cameras, GoPros, and virtual reality (VR) interfaces, documentary installations in the gallery, interactive documentary (i-doc), citizens' vernacular online videos that document scenes of the protests such as the Arab Spring, the Hong Kong Protests, and the Black Lives Matter Movements, and new activist films, videos, and archiving projects that respond to those political upheavals. Building on the interdisciplinary framework of documentary studies, digital media studies, and contemporary art criticism, Jihoon Kim investigates the ways in which these practices both challenge and update the aesthetic, epistemological, political, and ethical assumptions of traditional film-based documentary. Providing a diverse range of case studies that classify and examine these practices, the book argues that the new media technologies and the experiential platforms outside the movie theater, such as the gallery, the world wide web, and social media services, expand five horizons of documentary cinema: image, vision, dispositif, archive, and activism. This reconfiguration of these five horizons demonstrates that documentary cinema in the age of new media and platforms, which Kim labels as the 'twenty-first-century documentary,' dynamically changes its boundaries while also exploring new experiences of reality and history in times of the contemporary crises across the globe, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction: Documentary's Expanded Fields 1. Expanded Images 2. Expanded Vision 3. Expanded Dispositifs 4. Expanded Archives 5. Expanded Activism Afterword: Harun Farocki and COVID-19 Notes Index

About the Author :
Jihoon Kim is associate professor of cinema and media studies at Chung-ang University, South Korea. He is the author of Between Film, Video, and the Digital: Hybrid Images in the Post-media Age (2016), and completing Post-verité Turns: Korean Documentary Cinema in the 21st Century, the first-ever English-written monograph of the nonfiction film and video practices in the private and independent sectors since the 1980s.

Review :
Documentary's Expanded Fields is one of the most impressive theory monographs I've read in the past ten years and I expect that scholars in documentary studies will be citing this book for a long time. Kim's book would be appropriate to assign in graduate-level courses in Documentary Studies or New Media topics, as it will slot easily into curricula focused on histories of documentary film or theory given its robust contextualization of contemporary practices...Each chapter is theoretically rigorous and filled with examples of post-2000 work to help parse concepts, ethical orientations and typologies of the field under question. The organization is clear and argument compelling at every turn, building on ideas and frameworks rather than tearing down. By decentering documentary film, Kim makes room for a nuanced study of cinema-adjacent works and new-media projects. It is admirable work to bring these documentaries into contact with documentary film studies, while also drawing on other fields of scholarship. Kim's book yields greater value and knowledge than those who would police the boundaries with tired arguments about what is and isn't a documentary. This daring yet meticulously argued book creates a new map of documentary ecologies in the 21st century as it travels through a dizzying array of technologies, locations, formats, practices, experiences, and politics. These new, field-defying works push aside 'flattie' feature film analog documentaries. This remarkable, eye-opening, methodology-shifting book unfolds as both expanding and expansive. It insists that these new documentary ecologies demand new thinking, new theories, new analysis, and an much more capacious and unrestrained cartography.