Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary

By Jonathan Kahana

(Columbia University Press, 2008)

Jonathan Kahana, associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, where he is also co-director of the certificate program in culture and media, establishes a new genealogy of American social documentary in his new book, Intelligence Work.  Kahana proposes a fresh critical approach to the aesthetic and political issues of nonfiction cinema and media. And he argues that the use of documentary film by intellectuals, activists, government agencies, and community groups constitutes a national-public form of culture, one that challenges traditional oppositions between official and vernacular speech, between high art and popular culture, and between academic knowledge and common sense.
    Placing iconic images and the work of celebrated filmmakers next to overlooked and rediscovered productions, the author demonstrates how documentary collects and delivers the evidence of the American experience to the public sphere, where it lends force to political movements and gives substance to the social imagination.