Historicizing twenty-first century documentary: A review of Jihoon Kim's Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary and Kate Nash's Interactive Documentary: Theory and Debate

What counts as documentary in the twenty-first century? More importantly, is documentary studies capable of contributing to a discourse that can both define the contours of and point beyond the past twenty-odd years of digital experimentation? During this time, documentary has been productively disassembled and its component parts strung about the white cube and strewn across the internet; however, it would seem its cinematic self has not developed much beyond the performative and reflexive 'new documentary' of the 80s-90s. In all likelihood, twenty-first-century new media documentaries exceed the horizons of documentary studies scholarship. In response, Jihoon Kim's Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary (New York: Oxford Press, 2022) and Kate Nash's Interactive Documentary: Theory and Debate (New York: Routledge, 2022) draw together an impressive array of alternative approaches. This review will compare how both books historicize this century's documentary in relation to the last.

Automated summary

This article discusses the definition of documentary in the modern era and the contribution of documentary studies to digital experimentation. It also introduces two books that offer alternative approaches and historical context to twenty-first-century documentaries.