Screening Reality: How Documentary Filmmakers Reimagined America

by Jon Wilkman

From Edison to IMAX, Ken Burns to virtual environments, the first comprehensive history of American documentary film and the remarkable men and women who changed the way we view the world.

Amidst claims of a new “post-truth” era, documentary filmmaking has experienced a golden age. Today, more documentaries are made and widely viewed than ever before, illuminating our increasingly fraught relationship with what's true in politics and culture. For most of our history, Americans have depended on motion pictures to bring the realities of the world into view. And yet the richly complex, ever-evolving relationship between nonfiction movies and American history is virtually unexplored.

Screening Reality is a widescreen view of how American “truth” has been discovered, defined, projected, televised, and streamed during more than one hundred years of dramatic change, through World Wars I and II, the dawn of mass media, the social and political turmoil of the sixties and seventies, and the communications revolution that led to a twenty-first century of empowered yet divided Americans.

In the telling, professional filmmaker Jon Wilkman draws on his own experience, as well as the stories of inventors, adventurers, journalists, entrepreneurs, artists, and activists who framed and filtered the world to inform, persuade, awe, and entertain. Interweaving American and motion picture history, and an inquiry into the nature of truth on screen, Screening Reality is essential and fascinating reading for anyone looking to expand an understanding of the American experience and today's truth-challenged times.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, History, Art

512 pages, Hardcover

First published February 18, 2020

Reviews

[Biblio Files (takingadayoff) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whew, this is a fat book, filled with the fascinating history of documentary film. From the very first short silent films to newsreels and travelogues, to instructional films for soldiers to filmstrips for students, to Ken Burns' Civil War series, it's all here. It covers TV as well, with Edward Murrow's confrontation of Joseph McCarthy, the groundbreaking series Victory at Sea, and the introduction of reality television with PBS' American Family. Since it's about American documentary, one of my favorite documentaries, The Up Series, isn't here, but Screening Reality will have you thinking about documentary in new ways, so you can re-evaluate your favorite docs whether they're covered here or not.

[Maynard Handley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Basically a history of lefty documentaries in the US. Fine, if that's what you want, but not what I was after.

A small fraction of the book (by far the most interesting section, but spread throughout the book) is devoted to the changing technologies that allowed for the creation of new types of documentaries.
A small fraction is devoted to some interesting milestones in the development of TV.
But almost everything else is about lefty documentaries about America. And not even especially interesting aspects of this phenomenon.

Consider what's missing. Very little about the rise of the nature documentary or the science/history documentary (a little about the early Disney stuff, a few words about the formation of the Discovery Network). Nothing about the "extreme sports" documentary beyond a few words regarding the early surfer documentaries. Likewise for concert documentaries.
Pretty much zero discussion of the various documentaries panned (but that tells us that they were considered significant!) by _Documentary Now_.

For this author, the only documentary that matters is the documentary that's about American society and how it isn't Woke enough. Even this slant could have been made interesting if there had been some attempt to also look at documentaries created by non-wokists, whether right-wingers, religious zealots, or in the grip of some other madness. But there was no interest, apparently, in pursuing alternative propaganda voices (dare one say because doing so would make too clear just how much every one of these enterprises is ultimately a political and politicized enterprise)?

So a lousy, disappointing book. Not, I think, because the author is a bad person, just because the author lives in a particular bubble, surrounded by similar people all saying the exact same thing; and with no interest in exploring anything outside that bubble.

[Lance Eaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wilkman provides a fascinating look at the role of film in re-presenting reality. The book doesn't focus on the news but rather the realm of documentaries captured video of important events (e.g. Kennedy assassination), reality television as a genre, and ephemeral content since the birth of film. What's striking about this book is that the average reader might not realize just how much nonfiction video exists and how much they have been exposed to over the years, but by the end of the book, they'll see a much richer web of such content throughout their viewing engagements. It's a fascinating and thorough piece of work that brings readers up to the election and few years or so of the Trump presidency; making an argument of sorts, directly and indirectly, that our fascination with film and our inability to come to a clear consensus about how it should be used (when driven by personal, professional, and capital interests), has resulted in a dwindling of sorts of video to capture reality and more often, plays a significant role in distorting a reality of consensus. Given how the few years after the book have played out politically, it feels pretty spot on. Yet, the book offers more than just a historical analysis of documentary videos. It highlights a range of key works, significant genres, and major figures that can prove fascinating to learn about and extend one's "to watch" list extensively. Even more compelling, Wilkman has done his due diligence in research finding innumerable interconnections and useful comparisons as he brings readers through this century-long history. The end result is readers have a firm understanding of the history, the challenges of the industry, and a sense of the impact of the industry on everyday people.