Table Of Content
The Right to Play Oneself
VISIBLE EVIDENCE
Michael Renov, Faye Ginsburg, and Jane Gaines, Series Editors
Volume 23 :: Thomas Waugh
The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on
Documentary Film
Volume 22 :: Alisa S. Lebow
First Person Jewish
Volume 21 :: Malin Wahlberg
Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology
Volume 20 :: Jeff D. Himpele
Circuits of Culture: Media, Politics, and Indigenous
Identity in the Andes
Volume 19 :: Jennifer Deger
Shimmering Screens: Making Media in an Aboriginal
Community
Volume 18 :: Abé Mark Nornes
Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar
Japanese Documentary
Volume 17 :: Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner, Editors
F Is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing
Volume 16 :: Michael Renov
The Subject of Documentary
Volume 15 :: Abé Mark Nornes
Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through
Hiroshima
Volume 14 :: John Mraz
Nacho López, Mexican Photographer
Volume 13 :: Jean Rouch
Ciné-Ethnography
Volume 12 :: James M. Moran
There’s No Place Like Home Video
Volume 11 :: Jeffrey Ruoff
“An American Family”: A Televised Life
Volume 10 :: Beverly R. Singer
Wiping the War Paint off the Lens: Native American
Film and Video
(continued on page 313)
VISIBLE EVIDENCE SErIES, VoLumE 23
The Right to
Play Oneself
Looking Back on Documentary Film
Thomas Waugh
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
See page 301 for publication information on previously published material in this
book.
Copyright 2011 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a re-
trieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechani-
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of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Waugh, Thomas.
The right to play oneself : looking back on documentary film / Thomas
Waugh.
p. cm. – (Visible evidence ; v. 23)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-4586-2 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8166-4587-9 (pb :
alk. paper)
1. Documentary films—History and criticism. I. Title.
PN1995.9.D6W38 2011
070.1'8—dc22 2010032601
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In memory of Peter Adair, Artie Bressan,
Guy Hocquenghem, Curt McDowell,
Richard Schmiechen, Stuart Marshall, and
Marlon Riggs, who did make us queer
Harlan County, U.S.A.’s after all.
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Contents
Preface: Of Pulses, Panaceas, and Parallel Universes ix
Acknowledgments xxi
1 Why Documentary Filmmakers Keep Trying to Change
the World, or Why People Changing the World Keep
Making Documentaries (1984) 1
2 Dziga Vertov, 1930s Populism, and Three Songs of Lenin (1975) 19
3 Bread, Water, Blood, Rifles, Planes: Documentary Imagery of the
Spanish Civil War from the North American Popular Front (1990) 57
4 Acting to Play Oneself: Performance in Documentary (1990) 71
5 Beyond Vérité: Emile de Antonio (1977; 2008) 93
6 Sufficient Virtue, Necessary Artistry: The Shifting Challenges
of Revolutionary Documentary History (2006–2008) 155
7 Lesbian and Gay Documentary: Minority Self-Imaging,
Oppositional Film Practice, and the Question of Image
Ethics (1984) 193
8 Walking on Tippy Toes: Lesbian and Gay Liberation
Documentary of the Post-Stonewall Period (1997) 219
9 “Words of Command”: Cultural and Political Inflections
of Direct Cinema in Indian Independent Documentary (1990) 239
10 Joris Ivens and the Legacy of Committed Documentary (1999) 267
Notes 283
Filmography 289
Bibliography 295
Publication History 301
Index 303
Preface
Of Pulses, Panaceas,
and Parallel Universes
Every two years I flee the snows of Montreal to participate in the
Mumbai International Film Festival for Documentary, Short, and
Animation Films (MIFF), and its eclectic showcase of both celebration
and self-flagellation keeps this “documentary expert” honest. MIFF
offers the usual panoply of new nonfiction work, as well as opportuni-
ties for taking the pulse of twenty-first-century documentary provided
by any large and bulimic international festival, opportunities height-
ened paradoxically by the festival’s somewhat marginal orbit far from
the epicenters of Europe and North America. Dire prognoses for the
future of documentary are usually rampant, and astute insights into its
crises—whether financial, aesthetic, ideological, or ontological—are on
offer at every tea-and-samosa stall. But there are also the reassurances
to be gleaned unexpectedly from bold new small works from grass-
roots energies and unknown makers—and also works recycled from
the past seen in a strange new retrospective light (for example, the
2008 revival of Flaherty’s The Land [1942] took on never-noticed reso-
nance in a place with its own dire agrarian crisis seventy years after
the American one). The Mumbai festival serves a sometimes erratic
menu of choices, tastes, voices, and formats—and unfortunately levels
of quality—unavoidable with any event that can’t afford to compete
with the prestigious documentary gatherings in Amsterdam, Toronto,
and Yamagata. But this was the price we gladly pay. At least MIFF
isn’t as overwhelmed by fifty-two-minute television documentaries
as the North American festivals (a situation I’ve described elsewhere
as “the nefarious influence of television cable windows on the cur-
rent state of documentary . . . the polite strangulation of authorial
subjectivity, point of view, and aesthetic resourcefulness.”1). On the
other hand, the festival increasingly evidences a slight slowdown in the
ix
