Politics of Documentary

The Politics of Documentary BFI, 2007 (buy it here)

‘immensely readable… a thought-provoking perspective… a thoroughly enjoyable workout for the intellect’ Vertigo Magazine – read the full review

“consistently asks probing questions about the turbulent intersections of nonfiction film, cultural theory, and global politics” Cineaste

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When the film‐maker Morgan Spurlock told an American festival audience ‘we live in a world where independent documentary film has truly become the last bastion of free speech’ he won a round of applause from the packed house. Michael Chanan’s wide‐ ranging and illuminating study of international documentary film‐making re‐ reads its complex history and present flourishing from the perspective of this fundamentally democratic aim.

This book traces the history of the documentary from the first Lumière films to Grierson and his contemporaries, through to Free Cinema, Cinema Vérité and Direct Cinema, up to the current resurgence documentary with high profile films such as those of Michael Moore.

The book’s thematic approach takes in topics such as the documentary before documentary how documentary film language works, the veracity of the image, the construction of the soundtrack; the migration of documentary to television, political documentary, censorship, first‐ person film‐making, and the relation of the archives to history and memory. Drawing on examples of documentary cinema in Japan, Iran and Latin America as well as Europe and the USA, Chanan argues that documentary provides a crucial public space in which ideas are debated, opinion is formed and those in authority are held to account.

Vertigo, vol.3 no. 7, Autumn 2007, p.16

The Politics of Documentary Michael Chanan’s argument considered Reviewed by Martin Carter

Trying to define the documentary film is by any measurement an uphill task. Is documentary a genre? Does it have a greater claim to ‘truth’ (whatever that might mean) than a fictional feature or short? Quite simply, what is it? Just trying to answer such basic questions about the form immediately opens up cans of worms by the shelf‐load. Therefore in his attempt to construct an understanding of documentary Michael Chanan certainly has his work cut out.

It is a pleasure then to report that his latest book, disguised by a rather dry title, is an extensive Historical, conceptual and yes, political review of the documentary film that is immensely readable whilst always remaining challenging and erudite. Chanan provides us with a selective history of the form that, whilst including such usual suspects as Vertov, Jennings and the Free Cinema movement, introduces us to overlooked filmmakers such as Japan’s Kamei Fumio and Akira Iwasaki. His chapter dealing with documentary in 1930s Japan is an alarming reminder of how narrow our knowledge and experience of such filmmaking is in the West.

The politics of the book’s title are tackled in a subtle manner with refreshingly little space given to the more obvious filmmakers with an overtly political stance (Leni Riefenstahl and Michael Moore barely get a mention). Instead Chanan chooses to explore the underlying influences of politics on documentary filmmaking. It is these forces which are shown to be crucial to the production, reception and consumption of documentary films and he vividly demonstrates how that they are capable of being transformed and translated in different ways through techniques such as montage and voice over, and more pervasively, by an ever changing historical perspective.

Chanan also attempts to answer some of the basic questions about the form (such as those raised above). One of his most persuasive lines is his attempt to construct a description of what documentary film is. Borrowing from Wittgenstein he posits documentary as being a ‘family’ of film forms inked by a common gene pool that like family resemblances can be identical, similar or totally different. This approach, in itself, proves an elegant way to bring together the menagerie of films gathered under the umbrella term documentary; from Emile de Antonio to Patrick Keiller, Jean Rouch to Nick Broomfield, and Agnes Varda to Errol Morris, to name only a few.

This book will be invaluable to exponents and students of documentary filmmaking, giving a fresh perspective on its history and techniques. For those who may want better to understand the history and codes of the form, it provides a thought‐provoking perspective that takes in not just those who have made the films but also the ideas of such figures as Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, making this volume a thoroughly enjoyable workout for the intellect.

The Dream That Kicks

The Dream That Kicks : The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain
Routledge, Second Edition, 1996

‘An extraordinary study of the cultural/ideological “site” of cinema at the moment of its birth.’ Encylclopaedia Britanica

‘It confronts – head on – the most basic questions of the aesthetics, economics, technology and ideology of cinema.’ Wide Angle

‘Not only is the book a careful study of early British cinema but it is equally an important exploration of what it means to write film history.’ Cine Tracts

Repeated Takes

Repeated Takes, A Short History of Recording and its effect on Music
Verso, 1995

“Until the development of the radio and the gramophone, people only heard music when they played it themselves or when they heard other people playing it. Music was bound by time and space. Now, music is everywhere, streaming through the interstices between the lumpy materials of life, filling the gaps in the continuum of human activity and contact, silting up in vast unchartable archives. In Repeated Takes, Michael Chanan has written a concise history of the technology that has wrought this change and the commercial and creative forces that have shaped it. His account is elegant and impressively well-informed. He ranges across the entire technical field, from Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877 to the samplers and MIDI technology of the Nineties. He tracks in detail the peristaltic movements of the market, as it ingests and digests each technical innovation and reacts to and directs the whim of the punters and the creativity of musicians. And he has a strong grasp of the way different musical cultures – different ‘musics’ – from Machaut to Maderna, Tin Pan Alley to dub reggae, have adapted themselves to the revolution they have been caught up in, and been changed by it.” Nicholas Spice, London Review of Books, 6.7.9

“Implanted in our awareness to the point of transparency, the mechanical reproduction of sound has increasingly conditioned 20th-century artistic experience, yet has done so in ways we take for granted. Michael Chanan dredges up its story from our collective experience. More than that, in Repeated Takes he draws conclusions and comes up with come pretty credible analyses and explanations. Like Henry Petroski in The Evolution of Useful Things, Chanan dispels the myth that things are invented through the pure force of genius in due season…The final chapters on new technology and its effect on copyright make fascinating reading for anyone connected with the music industry.” Nicholas Williams, New Statesman and Society, 7.7.9

“No strangers to the studio craft of overdubbing and effects, on Kid A/Amnesiac Radiohead finally and utterly abandoned the performance model of rock recording and went fully into concocting sonic fictions using the mixing desk as instrument. Answering a fan’s query on Radiohead’s Web forum, Greenwood talked about being obsessed with “the whole artifice of recording. I see it like this: a voice into a microphone onto a tape, onto your CD, through your speakers is all as illusory and fake as any synthesizer–it doesn’t put Thom in your front room. But one is perceived as ‘real’, the other somehow ‘unreal’… It’s the same with guitars versus samplers. It was just freeing to discard the notion of acoustic sounds being truer.” Speaking on the phone, Greenwood says the idea was influenced by reading Michael Chanan’s 1995 meditation on recording, Repeated Takes. “The more concerts we do, the more dissatisfied we get with trying to reproduce the live sound on a record. In a way it can’t be done, and that’s a relief really, when you accept that, and recording just becomes a different thing.” The Wire, 2001

Musica Practica

Musica Practica: The Social Practice of Western from Gregorian Chant to Postmodernism, Verso, 1996

The idea of writing a history of music spanning around 1,000 years might seem highly impractical, but Michael Chanan has attempted just that. He is not writing a history of compositional style or even of composers’ lives so much as a social history of music, taking in the economic factors which have contributed to the development of music as a profession – how the division of labour has provided us with the standard roles whih we now accept asgiven, and which govern the production, distribution and consumption of music.

“As an extension of the idea of music within society, Chanan also deals at length with the effects of technology on the art, from the invention of printing, through the development of the classical instruments, right up to what he calls ‘the age of electro-acoustics’. One of the real strengths of the book is its refusal to limit itself merely to the consideration of classical music, which thereby allows the reader to understand its specific characteristics more fully.” BBC Music Magazine, March 1995

“…in many ways, Musica Practica can be seen as a kind of greatly expanded translation of [Attali's] Noise, written this time from the standpoint of a musician… which provides a necessary and detailed supplement to Attali – a very practical venture indeed.” The Musical Times, January 1995

Memories of Underdevelopment

‘Memories of Underdevelopment’ by T.G.Alea, (Michael Chanan, Ed.)
Rutgers University Press, 1990 (Rutgers Films in Print)

The book includes the script of the film, the novella by Edmundo Desnoes on which it is based, and a collection of readings about the film.

From Handel to Hendrix

From Handel to Hendrix, The Composer in the Public Sphere Verso, 1999

A study of the composer as a public figure in the light of Habermas’s study of the transformation of the public sphere, taking its cue from the German philosopher’s remarks about the bourgeois concert audience, the emergence of criticism and the development of autonomous music. Follows the fate of the composer through successive incarnations, from Handel, Bach and Rousseau in the eighteenth century to contrasting examples such as Kurt Weill and Duke Ellington, or John Cage and Pierre Boulez, in the twentieth. Calling on recent work in feminist and gay musicology, the book investigates themes such as subjectivity and identity in Schubert and Chopin alongside questions of the political economy of music and the composer’s progressive marginalization from the centre of musical life.

Read a review by Sean Cubitt or this one in the LA Weekly

Cuban Cinema

Cuban Cinema University of Minnesota Press, 2004

This is the second edition of ‘The Cuban Image: Cinema and Cultural Politics in Cuba’ (BFI/Indiana University Press,1984)

Read a review in Afterimage