Bodies on the Line: Documentary and Progressive Politics in the Age of Neoliberalism.

The late 1980s and '90s was an inflection point for American documentary. Filmmakers drew on an emerging media infrastructure to create a wide breadth of projects. What individuals as disparate as Michael Moore, Christine Choy, Marlon Riggs, and the collective Paper Tiger Television shared was the belief that documentary offered an incisive means to engage with the overlapping crises of the day: the erosion of the welfare state, government neglect of the AIDS epidemic, the devastating impact of industrial relocation abroad, efforts by the United States to secure oil interests in the Middle East, and the deregulation of the media industries. At the same time, there was hardly ideological or formal unity between projects. More reflective, dialogic filmmaking that challenged conventional norms of nonfiction practice co-existed with modes of direct cinema observation. Just as some filmmakers worked independently, others pursued the backing of commercial companies at a moment when the industry looked to capitalize on documentary as a profitable investment. While scholars have devoted significant attention to late twentieth-century documentary, they have tended to focus on individual auteurs, a cluster of films emblematic of a "postmodern" style, or the expanding footprint of nonfiction film and television within the marketplace. The literature has not fully accounted for the array of forces that shaped documentary during this period as well as the resonance of projects within local communities and the national body politic. This article examines the endeavors of filmmakers across indie Hollywood, HBO, PBS's POV series, and public access television to demonstrate how documentary became a central part of the US media landscape and constituted a critical means of resisting neoliberal governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]