In her essay, "Mirrors Without Memory," it's revealing that Linda Williams employs, as an example of postmodernism's "caricature of the state of representation," such a well-known photograph as that from the Yalta Conference in 1945 (9). Her neglect in specifically citing the provenance of that original image of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin reflects a broader lack of historical context for her discussions of the 'new' documentary. Kudos are due to Jonah 'of the people' Volk for pointing out Williams' flimsy unqualified use of the term, 'vérité,' but I think that Williams vagueness in terminology is but a constituent thread in a noose of historical generality about the history of documentary (most alarmingly, as her subject matter is explicitly the "New Documentary") (9).
In ramping up her case for a new 'moment' in documentary, Williams discusses the public's "new hunger for reality" without any seeming thought to the age of the WWII theatrical newsreels, Vietnam evening news footage, or even the dawn of cinema itself (12). What she seems to intend is, perhaps, an emerging theatrical popularity in America for feature-length documentaries, though it's unclear this isn't a distribution-spurred trend as much as one fomented by audiences. Many of the filmmakers she lists on page 12 (eg. Morris, Lanzmann, Ophuls, Apted) had previously been making long-form documentaries for several years—and, even, relatively popular ones at that.
Furthermore, Williams' identification of a "new presence in the persona of the documentarian" is only correct in her description of a recent preponderance of such a style in American docs (12). Europeans like Chris Marker and Marcel Ophuls had, by 1987, long-developed and comparable personas associated with their documentary style. (Will someone please recognize Michael Moore's liberal borrowing of Ophuls' on-screen approach?)
Williams seems to feel the need to address a late-1980s documentary zeitgeist but in her admitted attempt to pin down why, "documentaries mattered in a new way," she walks on the thin ice separating historical insight from Hackett-Fischerian 'prodigious fallacy' (12). Williams makes several astute observations about the developed complexity of truth-telling in Morris' and Lanzmann's films, but she would do well to better historically ensconce her analysis.
Walter Forsberg
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