Review: Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary, by Pooja Rangan

Embodying Place

“…There is an increased global NGO interest in DST projects that dovetail global audience appetites for documentary films that are participatory—or at the very least that give the illusion of being so—by portraying film subjects as agentive in co‐crafting film narratives about their own lives. While many documentaries have been produced under the rubric of “participatory” or “collaborative” filmmaking, these films often re‐produce mainstream assumptions about poor Brown displaced youth anyway (Rangan 2017). Documentary film, like DST, can be better evaluated through the relationships created among filmmakers, subjects, and audiences both on‐ and off‐screen (Ginsburg 2018).…”

“…In this project, two co‐facilitators and I developed a five‐week participatory media project with Afghan refugee and displaced Kurdish Iranian youth about affect and homeplace. There is a concerning history of film and visual representation that treats children of the Global South as speakers of some kind of unmediated truth (MacDougall 1998; Rangan 2017). 1 I open with this vignette to point toward the process through which expressive prompts and facilitated conversations with youth developed into audio‐visual scenes of space and place.…”

“…Children and youth (Edelman 2004; Muñoz 2009), like documentaries (MacDougall 1998; Nichols 1994), are seen as truth‐tellers. This perception of telling the “real” and unmediated truth is especially pertinent in humanitarian documentaries (Rangan 2017) and humanitarian promotional materials (Bornstein 2005; Malkki 2015), both of which hinge on the “value” produced by vulnerable and precarious children and youth. Here, I follow Pooja Rangan (2017) in conceptualizing the “humanitarian” in media as the proclivity to inspire rescue and political or monetary movement among viewers—or perhaps a better word is “consumers”—of these images.…”

“…This perception of telling the “real” and unmediated truth is especially pertinent in humanitarian documentaries (Rangan 2017) and humanitarian promotional materials (Bornstein 2005; Malkki 2015), both of which hinge on the “value” produced by vulnerable and precarious children and youth. Here, I follow Pooja Rangan (2017) in conceptualizing the “humanitarian” in media as the proclivity to inspire rescue and political or monetary movement among viewers—or perhaps a better word is “consumers”—of these images. Humanitarian media about migrant and refugee youth are presented as stand‐alone projects that “speak for themselves” to audiences situated near and far.…”

Collaboration in documentary filmmaking and its discontents: Reflections from the field

“…To what extent does this collaborative approach obliterate the others it means to “help” by forcing them into a particular humanist mold of selfhood? Pooja Rangan (2017) argues that it is rather easy to fall into the trap of the “pseudoparticipatory,” using collaboration as a tool for signaling at one's own “humanitarian impulses” rather than actually sharing or building power. Moreover, it appears unrealistic, perhaps even utopian, to use collaborative practices as the answer to all of documentary's ethical pitfalls.…”