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Discussions of "committed" documentary by a "committed" historian of film.

Addressing the paradox of documentary.

Unique in its attention to diverse expressions of personal nonfiction filmmaking, The Subject of Documentary forges a new understanding of the heightened role and function of subjectivity in contemporary documentary practice.

This collection of essays focuses on queer, lesbian and gay documentary, arguing that documentary films and videos articulate an essential political and social urgency, acting as testaments to the importance of reclaiming history and reasserting the importance of these points of view.

Two decades ago, a father gave his daughter shoeboxes stuffed with old home movies. The daughter, a filmmaker, appropriated these family images, folding them into a film about mothers and daughters. The film, in turn, infiltrated the life of the family, creating a crack through which seeped the sexual secrets of three generations of women. In this sharply observed and visually rich book, Michelle Citron, one of the most influential independent woman filmmakers of our time, explores the life that surrounds an artist's work, its inner surprises, and the necessary fictions that shape it.Using essay, memoir, fiction, and images drawn from her family's home movies, Citron creates a series of moving narratives (even literally -- one chapter is also a flip book). She tells the story of her vital and fraught relationships with her strong-willed mother and grandmother; her transformative, near-fatal illness; life with the woman who has been her partner for twenty years; and her slow realization of the sexual abuse that marked her childhood. The book concludes with the scripts of two of Citron's best-known films, Daughter Rite and What You Take for Granted, works that resonate with and extend the themes of this book.Citron uses a series of leitmotivs that surface, disappear, and resurface: class, sexuality, incest, power, the transcendence of art, the role of the filmmaker, the ethics of autobiographical work. Hers is an account of an artist's growth and development. But here are also the lacerations of class mobility, the life-shaping power of the unspeakable, and the exquisite web of family ties. Throughout, she tests "the sly, fictitious nature of memoir against fiction's hard nugget oftruth", creating a book that both reveals and challenges this important genre.

In a world ever more complex and media-saturated, what is the value of the truth? This text provides an examination of how television, magazines, film and museums influence the way our society conceptualizes such issues as citizenship, democracy, nationhood, globalization, truth and fiction.