The Documentary Audit

Listening and the Limits of Accountability
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-0-231-21798-9
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 280 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 140 mm x 216 mm

Reihe: Investigating Visible Evidence: New Challenges for Documentary

Documentary films are often celebrated with aural metaphors: they give “voice” to the “voiceless” and ask the public to “listen.” But when did listening become synonymous with social justice? How exactly do documentaries train audiences to listen when they ask them to right historic wrongs or hold power to account?

The Documentary Audit challenges the association of listening with accountability and charts oppositional modes of listening otherwise. Pooja Rangan develops a framework for understanding how documentary practices have, under the mantle of accountability, provided a moral cover for listening habits that are used to profile, exclude, and incarcerate.

From the British Crown’s promotional films to Zoom meeting recordings, from disability-informed filmmaking in Japan to forensic efforts to expose anti-Palestinian violence in Hebron, Rangan explores how historical and contemporary practitioners have challenged and refused the lures of normative documentary listening habits in order to listen with an accent, listen in crip time, and listen like an abolitionist. Through an interdisciplinary approach that bridges documentary and sound studies while considering raciolinguistics, disability access, and legal forensics, Rangan demonstrates how the question of listening is central to the study of documentary. Far from being a neutral ethic, The Documentary Audit shows, listening creates the reality it purports to verify—with transformative political possibilities.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rangan, Pooja

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Dokumentarfilme
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Mediensoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen

Über Autor(innen)

Pooja Rangan is professor of English in film and media studies at Amherst College. She is the author of Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (2017) and coeditor of Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice (2023).