The Documentary Audit

Understanding the act of listening in literal and metaphorical senses, The Documentary Audit consolidates Pooja Rangan’s position as a leading scholar of documentary media. Rangan moves across a diverse array of historical and contemporary materials to elaborate a new conceptual vocabulary—one that unsettles received ideas, asks hard questions concerning documentary’s political aspirations, and is sure to prove influential. -- Erika Balsom, reader in film and media studies, King’s College London The Documentary Audit challenges readers in the best possible way to approach documentary with care, attentive to its competing claims and to the industry forces that contain and constrain it. In this impressive work, Rangan proposes that with a deeper engagement and the practice of “otherwise listening,"" documentary can ultimately succeed in modeling new listening practices that might just begin to reach the radical proposition of documentary to lead to real change. But first we must all learn how to listen better. -- Alisa Lebow, creator of <i>Filming Revolution</i> Listening with care to how voices sound, and paying close attention to how they are produced, has preoccupied me for the last 25 years—but on every page of The Documentary Audit there is a lightning-bulb moment where I am shocked, outraged—and reinvigorated. Rangan is the kind of intellectual and activist who will bring voice, sound, and documentary studies into the critical space Trinh T. Minh-ha has long urged us to hear. -- Nina Sun Eidsheim, author of <i>The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music</i>