The Intellect Handbook of Documentary

The growth of documentaries and their role in culture, activism, and social impact.

The Intellect Handbook of Documentary is an important go-to resource for practitioners, scholars, and students in this burgeoning field. It tackles key topics and debates including the role of documentary in post-truth culture, the rise of streaming giants, and the implications for national documentary cultures, as well as the shifting, increasingly hybrid, practices of documentary activism and the professionalization of impact. Featuring work by key figures in international documentary scholarship and talented emerging scholars, the Handbook is a landmark publication for documentary studies in the twenty-first century.

The Handbook is broad in its scope, incorporating historical, theoretical, empirical, and practical scholarship. It is organized around ten key themes and debates: What and where is documentary (studies); documentary in an age of epistemic uncertainty; documentary histories; documentary and the archive; audio and visualities; documentary relationalities; beyond the Anthropocene; digital and documentary practices; documentary and (new) politics; and a golden age of documentary distribution and funding. Importantly, the Handbook incorporates the voices and practices of practitioners from the Global South, challenging the dominance of Western voices in documentary scholarship.

Kate Nash is professor of media and communication at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She is the author of New Documentary Ecologies (with Craig Hight and Catherine Summerhayes) and Interactive Documentary: Theory and Debate. She is also coeditor of Studies in Documentary Film.


Deane Williams is associate professor of film and screen studies at Monash University, Melbourne. He is the author of Australian Post-War Documentary Film: An Arc of Mirrors, Michael Winterbottom (with Brian McFarlane), the three-volume Australian Film Theory and Criticism (co-edited with Noel King and Constantine Verevis), The Cinema of Sean Penn: In and Out of Place, and Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality and Technology (with Julia Vassilieva).