Recording Reality, desiring the real

An examination of the history of documentary film and its contemporary forms showing how it has been simultaneously understood as factual, as story, as art, and as political. The book addresses the seeming paradox between the pleasures of spectacle in documentary and its project of informing and educating. It asks, if documentary is the desire to know reality through its images and sounds, what kind of speaking, and speaking about, emerges in documentary and how are we engaged by it, to know and to identify? The book examines as range of and video art. It argues for documentary's central place in cinema as both an art form and a form of social engagement. It considers documentary spectatorship in relation to a psychoanalytic understanding of desire, trauma, and draws on Foucault's account of knowledge.