Recording Reality, Desiring the RealThe Right to Play Oneself

Published as part of the Visible Evidence series for Minnesota University Press, these books by two of documentary's most significant academic figures are to be welcomed. Written in a decade of unprecedented engagement with theatrical-release documentaries (Senna [Asif Kapadia, 2012], The Act of Killing [Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012], The Pervert's Guide to Ideology [Sophie Fiennes, 2012], Finding Vivian Maier [John Maloof and Charlie Siskel, 2013]) it is intriguing that both books share an interest in looking back at documentary history, although it is Thomas Waugh's title that makes this retrospective tendency explicit. The focus away from the very contemporary is slightly at odds with the shared concern with documentary's social dimension or its political role as the spur for social change, but it does serve to remind readers of the potent immediacy that documentaries such as Housing Problems (Edgar Anstey, 1935) and Not a Love Story: A Film about Pornography (Bonnie Sherr Klein, 1981) had when they were released. Although sensitive to the extent to which technological as well as social advances have impacted on the writing of film history – Waugh remarks, for instance, that ‘It is a commonplace that the DVD revolution that got under way in the mid-nineties radically altered the way we teach, study, understand, and remember film history’ (p. 156) – neither book inhabits the contemporary documentary scene

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