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James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) opened a whole, huge space for considering and pursuing documentary writing that owes more to what we will term the documentary impulse than it does to the genre of the documentary. Whereas the genre of documentary has grown in the last 60 years or so out of newspaper, magazine, radio, and tv journalism, the documentary impulse seems present in a huge array of literary and other art that is not bound, as journalism is, to the supposedly objective representation of the “facts.” In some ways, the documentary impulse may be considered a method for documenting the huge array of experiences that are, for various reasons, problematic to journalism, and to journalism’s conception of a knowable, objective reality.
That Agee – a journalist – grappled with these ideas is clear from the first pages of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; and for this reason his and Walker Evans’ text seems a valuable foundation for our consideration of What May Be Documented and how Art and Artistic structures become necessary – (and may be the only/best means) for this sort of documentation. Our goals then, in this class, circumvent attempts to define what it and is not documentary art. Instead, we will look at a variety of texts for what they may teach us about representing oftentimes hidden phenomena in the world around us.
Relevant Media
- "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" Dave Eggers
- "Here, Bullet" Brian Turner
- "Novels In Three Lines" Félix Fénéon
- "One Big Self" C.D. Wright
- "The Americans" Robert Frank
- "The God Of Small Things" Arundhati Roy
- "The Last Novel" David Markson
- "The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks" Charles Simic
- Billy Bragg
- Ken Burns
- Magic Realism: Salman Rushdie, Mikhail Bulgakov, Miguel Ángel Asturias (and so many more)
- Neutral Milk Hotel, and Jeff Mangum's obsession with Anne Frank
- Photos by John Cohen
- Richard Misrach
- Scorsese's "The Last Waltz" / songs by The Band
Relevant Online Media
- Big Shed Audio
- Cabeza de Vaca "La Relacion"
- Center for Land Use Interpretation
- Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description"
- Corwin Ericson, "Gone When Police Got There"
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez Nobel Lecture: Accurate Fantasy
- Harry Smith "Old Weird America" (video)
- Helen Levitt Photography (npr story)
- Hello Out There: the synchronistic event
- Reznikoff's "Testimony" (an interview)
- Susan Sontag "Notes on Camp"
- The Rosenbach Company (Ben Katchor and Mark Mulcahy)
- This American Life podcast
- Wendy Ewald: Literacy Through Photography
- Wisconsin Death Trip movie website
Documentary Studies Resources
Labels
- documentary links (14)
- documentary impulses (7)
- Jonathon Cohen (5)
- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (3)
- book responses (3)
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