The essay film in the United States has not been thoroughly investigated, even if it has existed in the US cinematic landscape from the earliest years throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Beginning with early theories of the essay film that emerged from Europe, the chapter explores the relationships between American essay film and bordering forms like documentary, art film, and experimental cinema. The final pages of the chapter analyze the contributions of filmmakers belonging to the LA Rebellion and influenced by Third Cinema and conclude with a mention of newer forms like the video essay and desktop documentary.

This chapter examines relationships between documentary screen-media and jazz from the 1950s to today. As a mode of production which often lays claim to “truth” and “reality,” documentary’s reflexive relationship with jazz is interrogated for its enduring power to keenly shape ideas about both jazz and documentary itself. Concert-films, meta-narrative documentaries, and biographical film are introduced as key repositories of jazz culture that reflect and codify jazz history and meaning. The use of jazz in nonjazz documentaries is also explored as an example of jazz’s integration into screen-media’s cultural vernacular and the aesthetics of the everyday. Throughout the chapter, attention is given to examples in which ideas about jazz and US democracy are propagated through documentary film practice, reception, and aesthetics.

This chapter examines the nonfiction subgenre of graphic journalism or visual reportage. It first presents the major forerunners of the genre, including Kurtzman, Crumb, and Brabner and Merkle, then further addresses the characteristics of such graphic works from three perspectives: history, documentary, and authorial presence. The analysis of “history” highlights the difference between journalism as a report on recent, noteworthy events and the more distanced view presented in the graphic novel, which requires extensive research and comes much after the time of the events, thereby adding a historical perspective often lacking in journalism, even when the graphic works include a witness account of the authors themselves, as in Joe Sacco’s work, typically. The chapter studies the “documentary” aspect through the effort to represent the experience of others, with particular attention to the encounter between authors and cultural others. Finally, the chapter examines the pivotal role of the graphic “author-journalist” as curator and sometimes character in their own reportage, either directly (Delisle) or in more understated forms (Backderf).

This chapter situates the documentary movement of the 1930s and its preoccupation with the folk within the larger history of American modernism. I show how “the culture concept” emerged within the overlapping fields of anthropology and folklore to guide the practice of ethnography and its “study of modernity’s others” in the age of US imperialism and world war. For some Black and Native ethnographers, the folk offered an avenue for staking a claim of history, contribution, and modern belonging. New Deal documentary projects repurposed the folk as stalwart protagonists of the past, the backstory to a centralized narrative of national culture and its constituent parts. By contrast, many documentary books destabilized representations of the folk, producing a more self-reflexive account of social relations of power. While some texts anticipated the Cold War turn to the plight of the individual, others took aim at the racial fault lines of American exceptionalism.

This chapter traces the history of the essay film from its origins in D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein (and theorizations by writers such as Hans Richter and Alexandre Astruc) to its manifestations in contemporary experimental cinema and video art installations such as John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea. The author argues that the essay film is uniquely positioned to incorporate and respond to political and social crisis.

The Federal Writers’ Project’s experiment in documentary modes points to the wealth of African American documentary texts offering responses to the welfare state and its attendant ideologies. These texts – neither properly belonging to a single decade nor fitting conveniently with forms of literary production we usually study – challenge the way we periodize and categorize African American literature. This chapter explores several of these intertexts: Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941), Roi Ottley’s New World A-Coming (1943), Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy’s They Seek a City (1945), and Henry Lee Moon’s Balance of Power: The Negro Vote (1948). It illuminates their dialogue with the New Deal cultural projects and how Black writers reoriented how they engaged with history, urban space, and culture between the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights era.

From the Great Depression to the early 1950s, Chicago was the center of African American literary production. On the South Side, writers such as Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank Marshall Davis, Margaret Walker, and William Attaway authored works that broke new ground in African American letters. They came of age artistically in the wake of the Great Migration, and the migratory experience and the challenges of creating new lives in the city became the grand themes of their writing and underpinned a broader creative flowering first manifested in the vibrant jazz and blues of the 1920s. Through local institutions, New Deal cultural agencies, and left-wing artists’ organizations, writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance interacted with performing and visual artists and social scientists, achieved unprecedented critical and commercial success, and sought to build infrastructures supporting black cultural initiatives. Collectively, they created a body of literature that was thematically powerful enough to portray a time of massive economic desperation and social dislocation while stylistically supple enough to incorporate many of the formal innovations of literary modernism.

Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un chien andalou (1929) and L’âge d’or (1930) are often considered to be both the beginning and the end of surrealist cinema. But such hasty contentions obscure a rich tradition of surrealist filmmaking. This chapter discusses the defining characteristics of Buñuel and Dalí’s pioneering films, before proceeding to demonstrate that while the broader surrealist film tradition is notably indebted to these early experiments, it is also marked by an astounding heterogeneity. Surrealist filmmakers in France, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia have employed a range of formats, including documentary, feature film, and animation, from the 1930s up to the present. Providing an overview of surrealist film in a wider context, the chapter looks at how Michel Zimbacca’s documentary films interrogate notions of Western supremacy, Nelly Kaplan’s feature films depict anarchic revolts against patriarchy, and Jan Švankmajer’s films use animation to give life to inert matter in inventive ways.

This chapter continues to uncover Steinbeck’s interest in Mexico (and the Mexican Revolution) and his relevance as a thinker on the Global South and its social inequalities. Turning to Steinbeck’s collaborative projects in Mexico, the documentary film about water sanitation, The Forgotten Village, and The Pearl--both novel and film made with the Mexican director Emilio Fernandez--we encounter experimental artistic forms that embody a transamerican political vision. If The Forgotten Village fails in its efforts to politicize and improve the living conditions of the indigenous peoples it depicts, then The Pearl represents a more successful attempt to participate in history. Comparing the novel and the film reveals a creative dialogue between Steinbeck and Fernandez, in which the novel’s techniques of sound and vision look forward to its existence as a film. Together with a new understanding of uncertainty and of a human consciousness extending into and capable of changing the world, The Pearl has a curious temporality that imagines society on the verge of revolutionary change.

The central purpose of this chapter is to account for a poetry of war resistance that directly engages the clandestine activities of the national security state. How do poets help us to see anew a highly mediated form of warfare that nonetheless conceals itself in the black ops, redacted docs, dark money, and classified landscapes comprising the secretive theaters of “low visibility” twenty-first-century violence? War writing has come from numerous camps of American verse over the past seventeen years; I will argue, however, its most sustained treatment appears in three overlapping communities: Middle Eastern American poetries, documentary poetics (or “docpo”), and left communist circles. Philip Metres’s Sand Opera, Solmaz Sharif’s Look, Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, Sinan Antoon’s The Baghdad Blues, and Khaled Mattawa’s Tocqueville are exemplary, as are works by Lawrence Joseph, Craig Santos Perez, Ara Shirinyan, Etel Adnan, Joshua Clover, Hilary Plum, Hayan Charara, Allison Cobb, Samuel Hazo, Anne Boyer, CAConrad, Judith Goldman, and Jena Osman, among others.

In the summer of 2003, around 500,000 people marched on the streets in Hong Kong in protest against the government’s attempt to introduce legislation relating to national security under Article 23 of the Basic Law. As many commentators observed at the time, the protest was also a process of identity formation: Since the demonstration presented itself as a fight to protect the city from the intrusion of repressive Chinese legal norms, it created a bond among the protestors and their supporters and fostered a sense of what it means to be a “Hong Konger.” Tammy Cheung, an independent documentary filmmaker, attempted to capture the event on film, and the result was July (2004; 七月). Her challenge was to make a cinematic record that only presents the factual unfolding of the protest, but communicates the sensation of being in the midst of its charged atmosphere and enables viewers to share the sense of community that it created. I explore what it might mean to create a record of this constitutional controversy through an analysis of the themes, structures, and cinematography of Cheung’s film.

Chapter 7 draws on the work of trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth to argue that Occupy Central can be understood as a form of cultural trauma in Hong Kong. Focusing on independent documentaries about the movement, including Chan Tze Woon’s Yellowing (2016; 亂世備忘); Evan Chan’s Raise the Umbrellas (2016; 撐傘), Nora Lam’s Road Not Taken (2016; 未竟之路), and James Leong’s Umbrella Diaries: The First Umbrellas (2018; 傘上:遍地開花), I examine how different filmmakers try to capture in their work an event with which the city is still, to a great extent, coming to terms. I will also show the continuities between Occupy and the anti-extradition bill protests, and discuss the role of cinema in the more recent episodes of unrest.

The chapter argues that John Dos Passos in his novel Manhattan Transferappropriates cinematic immediacy effects and documentary aesthetics for the sake of literary innovation and cultural intervention. His formal innovations—the narrative’s montage structure, shifting focalization, and sampling of mass media item—allow the novel to convey the complexity of modern city life while opening up a critical perspective on mass media discourse and urban consumer culture. The chief strategy Dos Passos uses to critically refract popular mass culture is the creation and subsequent dissolution of immediacy effects that encourage the readers to grapple self-reflexively with the text, their reading strategies, and the represented social realities. The novel’s documentary style creates an urban world that seems recorded rather than imagined. Yet the novel continually disrupts this impression of immediacy: its disjunctive structure and surprising narrative shifts confront the readers with their interpretive routines and push them to develop new ways of reading that enable them to cope with both the novel’s experimental form and the depicted cultural practices.