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Yu Xiao, Chenxuan Gao, Ranran Qin, Documentary’s expanded fields: new media and the twenty-first-century documentary. Jihoon Kim, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2025;, fqaf020, https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqaf020
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What constitutes a documentary? Film theorists have argued the question for decades, but Jihoon Kim takes an expansive definition to reorganize and shape the various media forms that have been grouped under the heading “documentary.” In his new book “The Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary,” Kim moves discussions beyond the traditional documentary film into a consideration of gallery installations, activist videos, interactive projects, virtual reality environments, and experimental cinema. These works combine documentary and filmmaking aspirations with innovative digital technologies and the potential of networked communication. Transitions between i-docs, multiscreen art installations, and protest witness videos can be misleading, raising questions about context and target audience. Kim’s “The Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary” is a bold, valuable effort to chart the vast landscape of twenty-first-century documentary projects.
In his introduction, Kim unravels “The Documentary's Expanded Fields” through a lineage of key theorists of the avant-garde cinema and contemporary art. He alludes to the work of Gene Youngblood in Expanded Cinema (1970), which castigates the “passive” movie-going experience of traditional narrative film and celebrates artists working with new technologies, like video cameras, synthesizers, and computers. Kim further cites Lev Manovich's championing of post-media aesthetics in the digital age and Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow's urging for the documentary film to expand out of a purely narrative form into an interactive one. Kim also calls upon Rosalind Krauss's notion of the expanded field as a way of considering shifts within the practices and considerations of contemporary art, where from such postmodern premises singular mediums are transcended experiences of sculpture with architecture, landscape, photography, and performance. Kim’s conceptual framework accounts for how a broad range of projects has come to be recognized as “documentary,” as argued by renowned scholars like Erika Balsom.
