Documentary has wandered quite far from its origins in the early twentieth-century rise of bureaucratic state power (whether in the form of racial capitalism, progressivism, or experiments in socialism) and the government-led demand for films to document both the disappearance of preindustrial social worlds and the rise of new nation-states in their wake. Documentary’s contemporary reach extends well beyond the cinema, narrowly defined, most obviously materialized in the proliferation of audiovisual footage from mobile devices of all sorts and their circulation across a range of platforms and distribution services. In this expanded context, documentary studies faces a productive crisis in its terms and methods of analysis. How does documentary cinema operate in this expanded field of documentary media? And how can documentary scholarship address these structural changes in its concepts and methods?

The Documentary Audit provides one implicit methodological argument by turning to close readings of contemporary documentaries that not only exemplify a cinematic form, but more importantly, diagnose the broader political field of documentary listening. As Rangan argues, documentary cinema’s liberal fantasies of ethical listening, manifested in various formal techniques and modes of address, generally shore up the violence of a social order, often unconsciously. While Rangan focuses on documentary’s frequent complicity, it is worth noting that her counter examples include some MFA student productions, perhaps because the university is a key institution through which filmmakers today can claim some relative autonomy from market forces for a brief period of time, which also gives them the resources to study what otherwise remains invisible (ideally, though not always in practice and not to everyone in fair measure)—that is, the conditions of listening that reproduce us as documentary makers and consumers, or what Rangan calls the documentary audit. Documentary, here, is a pedagogical mode and hermeneutic as much as it is a medium or object of study. Documentary’s practice of auditing generally reproduces the brutal social logics behind policing borders, exploiting labor, and expanding the carceral state. Documentary films can also, in rare instances, teach us to hear the traces of resistance to this violent world, and that is its inherent value.

Rangan’s reading practice addresses a methodological distinction in visual analysis that I would describe in my own work as the distinction between representation and signification. Representational analysis is frequently how students first encounter film studies in introductory courses, where we teach them to identify various details in the content of the image, and build from there into a taxonomy of images, defining them in styles, genres, and historical sequence—this is Hollywood, this is the avant-garde, this is documentary, etc. Yet at the same time and often in confusing contradiction, I am also trying to teach students about signification, which means attending to how the image circulates in an economy, both libidinal and political, and thus carries something of “value”—a social relation that structures an image yet isn’t entirely captured in its representational material. This is one way to hear the old Cahiers du Cinéma maxim that “cinema has a relationship with the real, but the real is not what is represented.” It is the structuring real, the unconscious of the text, that I hear in Rangan’s working through of the documentary audit, made most explicit early on in her definition of the audit, drawing on the work of John Mowitt, as “the excess of hearing that conditions the field of the sensible.” The outcome of this attunement to documentary’s unconscious is The Documentary Audit’s diagnosis of the world of documentary media as fundamentally shaped by and often embracing the brutal logic of the racial capitalist world order. 

It is helpful to keep the stakes of this argument in view while following the examples in Rangan’s first chapter, on documentary’s practice of “neutral listening,” or what she describes as a phantasmatic listening vantage—the hearing of events with a perceived sense of objective detachment. What unfolds from this observation is the complex history of colonial propaganda through the films of the General Post Office film unit and their self-appointed pedagogical task of producing films that “reunite the nation by teaching audiences how to speak and listen ‘correctly’” (37). Rangan links this older legacy of documentary as colonial pedagogy to contemporary scenes of raciolinguistic pedagogy: the call center and the asylum hearing. While attentive to the differences between these scenes, Rangan hears the echoes of the colonial order in the present, then turns to two documentaries that help excavate this legacy through their troubling of the givenness of “neutral listening.” The two documentaries she discusses—Sonali Gulati’s investigation into outsourced call centers in India, Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night, (2005); and Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s countercinematic analysis of the racial logics of asylum hearings, The Freedom of Speech Itself (2012)—are both examples of failed exchange, attending to scenes where subjects are required to perform their commodification through their accented speech, whether in order to get paid as workers or to receive political asylum and enter another country. In both films, certain subjects’ accented speech is devalued within the psychosocial market place of listening, generally because their lives have been shaped by the historical legacies of colonial dispossession, which they unconsciously embody in their accented speech, and which is unconsciously heard and assigned value by the “neutral” listening ear. What’s being discussed in Rangan’s examples are the forms of production and circulation of neutral listening, the contradictions that underpin its contemporary manifestations, and the violent effects that are inherent to these conditions. In other words, these two films allow us to understand the signification of accented speech. 

In making visible these unconscious practices of listening, Rangan locates her own work within the tradition of ideology critique, studying the way documentary films interpellate us as juridical listeners. But I would suggest that her attention is not only to ideology (i.e., the ways that a system draws us into it as viewers) but also to what Marxist theorist Søren Mau has theorized as the “metabolic domination” or “mute compulsion” of the economic power of capital. Thinking Rangan’s theorization of accent alongside such a contemporary theorization of capitalism moves us as film scholars beyond the terrain of ideology critique and allows us to understand accent’s value as generated by its significance within a globalized political economy, a world in which the seemingly neutral and impersonal boundaries between profit and loss, citizen and alien, are embodied in the largely unconscious pedagogies of accent management. This is made clear in Rangan’s reading of accent as the material resonance of the subject’s history and the social field in which it is heard, which then becomes, in an alienated form, the very currency for our literal and metaphorical entry into systems of social reproduction, whether we’re in search of a better job or a better life. 

For a large part of this response, I have undertaken my own practice of conceptual translation between Rangan’s framework in The Documentary Audit and a longer legacy of Marxist structuralist and psychoanalytic debates, which are not necessarily the fields on which Rangan stages her own argument as she weaves between the terms of accent studies, disability studies, postcolonial studies, black feminisms, and abolitionist pedagogies. Nevertheless, as the readings in The Documentary Audit show, we are all subjected to totality whether we believe in it or not.

* I Detest the Term ‘Nonverbal’, Neta Alexander
* Toward Reparative Listening, Jordan Lord
* My Accented Ear, Pavitra Sundar
* The Spatial Audit, Tory Jeffay
* Outlaw Communities of Care, LaCharles Ward