Kill the Documentary

In Kill the Documentary, the award-winning director Jill Godmilow issues an urgent call for a new kind of nonfiction filmmaking. In place of the conventional documentary, she advocates for a “postrealist” cinema.

Jill Godmilow is professor emerita in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. Her acclaimed films include the Academy Award–nominated Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman (1974); Waiting for the Moon (1987), which won best feature film at the Sundance Film Festival; and What Farocki Taught, which was featured at the 2000 Whitney Biennial. In 2015, she was knighted by President Komorowski of Poland and awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland for her film Far From Poland.

Bill Nichols is professor emeritus in the School of Cinema, San Francisco State University. He is the author of numerous books, including Introduction to Documentary.

Bill Nichols, from the Foreword:
Jill Godmilow marshals a pantheon of hard-hitting, tough-minded films that refuse to be herded into the realist corral. Godmilow’s letter, or manifesto, like most manifestos, draws a line in the sand. Which side are you on becomes the question. Stay put and miss the point, or step on through to the other side and restore for yourself some of the nuance and subtlety that is foreign to the spirit of a manifesto.

DeeDee Halleck, professor emerita, University of California, San Diego:
Kill the Documentary is a provocative manifesto for rethinking the documentary. Godmilow provides a shield against the tear-soaked sentimentality and nostalgia of the Ken Burns style of packaging history. A new tool in the film teacher's kit, this book is useful beyond discussions of documentary. The passion of her prose is infectious—a welcome relief for student reading assignments.

Alexandra Juhasz, Brooklyn College, CUNY:
In her captivating and original Kill the Documentary, filmmaker and critic Jill Godmilow offers a plea—in the form of a letter, which is a manifesto, and forty propositions, and a tool kit—for making postrealist nonfiction, for making film useful and fruitful. In her scathing critique of “great” documentaries, and her offering up of her own counter-canon, she insists that filmmakers and viewers can begin again by refusing the pedigree, pornography, and cultural imperialism of the real, and by supporting postrealist strategies: interventionist and interactive, performative and formal. Honestly, I don’t agree with all she says, or every one of the 144 films she honors, and that’s her urgent book’s point and purpose: I can and should make my own.

Deirdre Boyle, author of Ferryman of Memories: The Films of Rithy Panh:
This provocative and engaging book by acclaimed filmmaker Jill Godmilow raises important questions for anyone concerned about the future of political documentary. She maps out an original approach to “postrealist” documentary that champions moral engagement, social activism, aesthetic daring, historical grounding, and intersectional participation for bold twenty-first-century filmmaking.