Received: 19 October 2019 Revised: 15 June 2020 Accepted: 17 June 2020

DOI: 10.1111/gec3.12536

ARTICLE

The anti-geopolitical cinematic eye: Documentary

film and critical geopolitics

Edward C. Holland

Department of Geosciences, University of

Arkansas, Arkansas, USA
Abstract
This article considers documentary film as a format for cri-
Correspondence
tique and alternative viewings of the geopolitical. To do so,
Edward C. Holland, Department of
Geosciences, University of Arkansas, 340 N. it reviews work in film studies on documentary film, empha-
Campus Drive, 216 Gearhart Hall, sizing the theorization of the documentary ethos and the
Fayetteville, AR 72701.
role of filmmakers in determining how documentaries
Email: echollan@uark.edu
depict reality. Identifying three points of consonance
between documentary films and critical geopolitics, it
reviews the geopolitical nature of many topical choices, the
importance of authorial intent and creation, and the viewing
of documentaries as texts whose interpretation is deter-
mined by their creators and viewers. The conclusion advo-
cates for documentary film as a basis for a return to the
consideration of format in critical geopolitics.

KEYWORDS

anti-geopolitical eye, critical geopolitics, documentary film,

popular geopolitics

1 | I N T RO DU CT I O N

Documentary film is an understudied topic in critical geopolitics. With a handful of notable exceptions (e.g.,
Dodds, 2008; Dodds & Jensen, 2019; Laketa, 2019), work in the field on film has focused on feature films. However,
documentary as a genre of film resonates in the contemporary geopolitical moment. The traditional aim of documen-
tary films has been to cultivate an informed public through the use of visual representation and filmic techniques
broadly classed. The postmodern critique of the genre has drawn into question the distinction between reality and
representation as elicited by the visual and the image (Gaines, 1999; Gaines and Renov, 1999). Documentaries are
frequently geopolitical in their content and scope and appeal to audiences from the local to the global; with their
claims to veracity, the expectations of viewers are distinct from the audiences of feature films (Van Munster & Syl-
vest, 2015a, 2015b). At the same time, the networks of creation and distribution for documentaries have been
democratized to allow alternative voices to emerge.

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https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12536
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This article offers an overview of the relevance of documentary film to critical geopolitics, foregrounding the
topics, reception, and influence of such films. Certain formats—and documentaries are one—lend themselves to an
“active role” in the use of media for challenging the geopolitical status quo (Crane & Grove, 2018). I situate documen-
tary film at the nexus of visuality, affect, and oppositional narrative, and argue that such films open up the possibility
for alternative interpretations of geopolitics to emerge (Fregonese, 2020; Koopman, 2011; Ó Tuathail, 1996a). In
addition, documentaries are an avenue for greater conversation between the fields of critical geopolitics and film
geography (Sharp & Lukinbeal, 2015). I eschew the analysis of a specific film as case study and instead address points
of convergence between extant work on documentary film and critical geopolitics as analytical perspective.
The article first reviews the wide-ranging literature that theorizes documentary film, with its articulation of a
documentary ethos and the challenges associated with such a positionality in the postmodern context. The subse-
quent section brings these perspectives into conversation with critical geopolitics and highlights three themes of
convergence: the consideration of geopolitical topics in documentary film; the choices made by filmmakers in creat-
ing these films; and the intersection of critical geopolitics and film geography as mediated by the documentary
genre.

2 | T H E O R I Z I N G D O C U M E N T A R Y F I LM

Documentary is a slippery category, difficult to precisely define given the manifold ways in which moving images are
now deployed to present and represent reality. Aufderheide (2007, p. 2) offers some purchase on the concept, defin-
ing documentaries as “portraits of real life, using real life as their raw material, constructed by artists and technicians
who make myriad decisions about what story to tell to whom, and for what purpose.” This definition acknowledges
the non-fictional content of documentary film while also noting the importance of creative choices made in the pre-
sentation of this material. Underpinning this aim to represent the world and its reality is an ethical position that
delimits the documentary as category, what can be termed a documentary ethos, which “seeks to portray the
world—including its challenges and problems, whether in a transparently realist manner or one that offers a self-
reflexive point of view—as a means to impart new knowledge and information” (Kaganovsky, MacKenzie, &
Stenport, 2019, p. 2). Aufderheide (2007) further identifies six subgenres of documentary film: advocative, ethno-
graphic, historical, propagandistic, nature, and government affairs. These subgenres are more topical than stylistic,
however, and do not fully acknowledge the varied techniques (either realist or experimentalist) and directorial per-
spectives (including observational and participatory) of documentary filmmaking. This ethical position and the classi-
fication of documentary films have been drawn into question by postmodern critiques of the genre (Gaines and
Renov, 1999).
The use of images to document reality emerged as practice in the 19th century. By the end of the 1800s, the
Lumieres' cinematographe was portable and modifiable; it could capture, print, and project images all-in-one (Bar-
nouw, 1993). The films that resulted—proto-documentaries that gathered footage from cities all over the world—
“allowed viewers a glimpse into a world often constructed to be perceived as radically different from one's own”
(Kaganovsky et al., 2019, p. 4). The term documentary itself, coined by John Grierson in the 1920s, derives from the
French description of travel films, documentaire (Aitken & Dixon, 2006). By this time, documentary had emerged as a
distinct genre from fictional film; as Nichols (2016, p. 10) writes, “[t]he differentiation was gradual, and incomplete,
but the result was that a new form of filmmaking achieved recognition around the world.”
Beyond a foundational aim of knowledge generation, documentaries have been used to verify claims and gener-
ate proof of accomplishment, while more recent interventions offer a feminist critique of such masculinist practices
(Nichols, 2016). The documentary ethos is increasingly relevant to this evolution, as it “allows for the viewer to in
part not only experience the point of view of the Other but to do so in such a way that challenges and destabilizes
one's own certainties” (Kaganovsky et al., 2019, p. 14). Following Dodds and Jensen (2019, pp. 160–161), “we might
ask how the documentary ethos reveals something about what is made audible, visible, legible, and knowable” about
HOLLAND 3 of 11

any number of topics with which such films engage. Holding the documentary ethos in tension with the style, con-
tent, and interpretation of such films acknowledges the postmodern questioning of any unassailable truth or claims
to objectivity (Gaines and Renov, 1999). This critical turn in the theorization of documentary film is complimented by
the democratization of filmmaking through participatory video, documentary-as-activism, and Indigenous films, and
distribution through online platforms such as YouTube.
The role of filmmakers is of central importance in the creation of documentaries as filmic resemblances of reality,
and directors often acknowledge the choices made in this process (Gaines, 1999; Van Munster & Sylvest, 2015a).
The distinction between cinéma vérité—as observational and interventionist—and direct cinema—with its aim to
objectivity through the filming of subjects and events—is useful for conceptualizing the role of the filmmaker and
their agency. The latter approach intends for the subject to be unaware of the camera and filming; in the former, the
camera is acknowledged and the filmmaker can intervene in filming and actively make artistic choices. More gener-
ally, Van Munster and Sylvest (2015a, p. 233) endorse what they term “arrangements of perceptibility… [as] an ana-
lytical focus on how we perceive and how we are able, allowed, or made to perceive” by the makers of documentary
films. This approach leaves aside the objective-subjective binary and engages with the representational structure
used in certain documentaries (e.g., An Inconvenient Truth as an expository and instructional film that relies more on
text than image). Here, the distinction between documentaries and feature films is of secondary importance (Sha-
piro, 2008); instead, the common techniques of filmmaking take center stage in interpreting how the filmmaker
chooses to present and represent their story.
The writings of early Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov (1984) provide an initial frame for the role of the documen-
tarian in the theorization of the genre. Vertov's perfectible camera—or cinema-eye (kinoglaz)—was intended to
replace the imperfect human eye; along with his collaborators, Vertov (1984, pp. 14–15) took “as the point of depar-
ture the use of the camera as a kino-eye, more perfect than the human eye, for the exploration of the chaos of visual
phenomena that fills space.” Following Cowie (1999, p. 19), “The camera eye functions…as a mastering, all-seeing
view, as well as a prosthesis, an aid and supplement to vision whereby we are shown a reality that our human per-
ceptual apparatus cannot perceive.” The Soviet film historian Jay Leyda (1960) writes of Vertov's role in filming the
Russian Civil War and his efforts through the Kino-Pravda series to communicate the reality of building socialism to
the Soviet public. In apposition to other early documentary filmmakers, such as Robert Flaherty, “Vertov offers us a
more analytical and participatory model, a radically ethical stance toward the world as captured by the ‘objective’
eye of the camera” (Kaganovsky et al., 2019, p. 11; see also Gaines, 1999). The filmmaker makes multiple decisions
in composing a documentary film; in acknowledgement of this synthetizing role, Vertov adopted the practice of
signing his films as composer as his career progressed (Leyda, 1960).
These decisions are not solely made by the director, however. The contemporary Finnish cinematographer
Heikki Färm has shot a series of performative documentaries in the experimentalist vein, with topics ranging from
immigrants to the cultivation of gardens; grouped together, these films endorse a self-reflexivity “that stirs the aes-
thetic boundaries of the documentary genre” (Hongisto, 2016, p. 199). In turn, it is necessary to consider the aes-
thetic choices made both individually and collaboratively in the composition and production of documentary film.
This inclusive approach should be broadened to consider the contexts of production and distribution; “[t]he meaning
of a film is shaped not only by its composition but also by who is responsible for its circulation, when and where the
film is screened, and the contextual information provided to the audience” (Schiller, 2009, pp. 499–500). The impri-
matur associated with certain personalities and venues, for example, lends legitimacy to the interpretation of docu-
mentaries as authentic and accurate (e.g., Bill Moyers on public television; Nisbet & Aufderheide, 2009).

3 | D O C U M E N T A R Y FI LM A N D C RI T I C A L G E O P O L I T I C S

Work in geography on documentary film has a long history and is closely tied to the discipline's role in exploration
and empire-building (e.g., Manvell, 1956a; Wright, 1956). Representations of landscape and space were initially taken
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at face value in this work; with the postmodern turn, geographers began to critically analyze the purported objectiv-
ity of documentaries (Burgess, 1982). Kennedy and Lukinbeal (1997, p. 46) complicate the binary of feature and doc-
umentary film as determined by concepts of objectivity and factual representation; in fact, “neither are unbiased
representations of reality.” Like novels and non-fiction books, feature films and documentaries hold the question of
objectively depicting reality in tension. The false promise of objectivity “looms nowhere larger than in the making of
‘documentaries,’ which explicitly take as their subject matter events which have occurred in the social world” (Natter
& Jones III, 1993, p. 149). For Natter and Jones III (1993), Michael Moore's clear statement of his ideological position
in the documentary Roger & Me makes the film more rather than less objective. Documentary itself, in using the tech-
niques of film and frame, “is inherently and unavoidably perspectival,” meaning that objectivity is untenable “particu-
larly when it is taken to mean the finished (and hence fixed) presentation of an already given social reality” (Natter &
Jones III, 1993, p. 149). When its perspective is evident, documentary film has the power to mobilize and influence
social movements (e.g., Gasland and anti-fracking mobilizations that emerged in response to the film; Vasi, Walker,
Johnson, & Tan, 2015). The genre's complex relationship with objectivity does not obviate its power.
Feature films have been one of the central subjects of critical geopolitical analysis from the earliest attempts at
outlining an agenda for research (Ó Tuathail, 1996a; Sharp, 1998). Following Power and Crampton (2005, p. 197),
“film is important in the study of critical geopolitics because it represents a constitutive element in the production of
political geographies and because political spaces, places and landscapes are implicit tools in the production of film.”
Predominant themes include the thematic representation of global politics, most commonly through films that either
focus on war or take these events as their backdrop (e.g., Dalby, 2008; Dodds, 2008; Scharf, 2005; Ó Tuathail, 2005).
In response, some film analysis attempts to challenge hegemonic narratives or interrogate the sites from which such
narratives are produced (Anaz & Purcell, 2010; Dodds, 2013; Ridanpää, 2017); this body of work positions film as a
type of anti-geopolitics, a concept of particular relevance to documentaries (Dittmer & Bos, 2019; see discussion
below). The turn to non-representational theory and the study of film in critical geopolitics foregrounded the role of
affect and audience response (Carter & Dodds, 2011; Carter & McCormack, 2006; Dittmer & Dodds, 2013;
Dodds, 2006). Films employ familiar representations of the geopolitical to produce an emotional response in their
audiences (e.g., Rocky IV, Dittmer & Bos, 2019) but also elicit more-than-representational reactions through technol-
ogies, aesthetics, and environments.
However, documentary film has received limited treatment in work in critical geopolitics, despite their extensive
consideration of geopolitical themes, the use of documentary to elicit a range of affective responses, and the anti-
geopolitical potential of the format. Dodds (2008) offers one exception, noting the commercial appeal of documen-
tary films in post-9/11 America. The highest grossing documentary film of all time is Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/
11, which was released in 2004 and comments on the United States' invasion of Iraq the previous year.1 Moore's film
is advocative (Aufderheide, 2007) or even propagandistic; as Dodds (2008, p. 484) writes, “The purpose of the docu-
mentary was to not only expose the mendacity of the [Bush] administration but also to prevent it from securing a
second term of office.” Laketa (2019) offers another important exception, considering how experimentation with the
documentary format can unsettle dominant ideologies through the creation of a fantastical geopolitics. The discus-
sion in these articles dovetails with the consideration of ethics, objectivity, and auteurship in the making of docu-
mentary film as considered primarily in communication studies and film geography more broadly (Aufderheide, 2012;
Sanders, 2010; Sharp & Lukinbeal, 2015).
An entry point for the study of documentaries in critical geopolitics is to build on the notion of an anti-geopoli-
tics, a concept that has been diversely theorized but generally revolves around the attempt to resist hegemonic geo-
political narratives through subaltern critique (Fregonese, 2020; Koopman, 2011; Ó Tuathail, 1996b;
Routledge, 2003). Documentary film as a type of anti-geopolitical cinematic eye acknowledges Vertov's (1984, p. 19)
claim that with the technology of the camera “the presentation of even the most ordinary things will take on an
exceptionally fresh and interesting aspect.” As first theorized by Ó Tuathail (1996b, p. 173), the anti-geopolitical eye
“disturbs and disrupts the hegemonic foreign policy gaze,” a dominant perspective that reduces geopolitical narra-
tives to iconic images and soundbites. Documentary film as mediated by the filmmaker and the technology of the
HOLLAND 5 of 11

camera has the potential to disturb and disrupt such narratives that achieve ordinariness through their hegemony
(Fregonese, 2020).
This position rests on broader considerations of documentary images and visuality in critical geopolitics. Through
what Campbell (2007, pp. 379–380) terms “the visual performance of the social field,” images and pictures “bring the
objects they purport to simply reflect into being.” This instantiation is dependent on the topics, subjects, and repre-
sentative choices made in presenting such images. So while the anti-geopolitical cinematic eye questions the hege-
monic gaze it also relies on certain choices made by the creator. Further underpinning the approach endorsed here is
Hughes's (2007, p. 992) questioning of work in critical geopolitics that has heretofore been limited to exploring more
popular formats (e.g., feature film); rather, “recognition of different types of agents, embodied ‘visions’ and affects so
far left out of the frame of critical geopolitics analyses might go some way towards redressing this imbalance.”

3.1 | Geopolitical themes in documentary film

Geopolitical themes in contemporary documentaries range across experiences of war, the global south, neoliberalism,
and international relations broadly classed, and this is far from an exhaustive list. The proliferation of such films is a
result “of a broader trend where steadily increasing amounts of information and interpretations of a wide range of
themes in international politics are visualized and theorized in the public sphere” (Van Munster & Sylvest, 2015a, p.
243). Recent events of geopolitical importance have received significant attention. For example, a number of notable
films have covered the Syrian civil war and its effects, including Last Men in Aleppo, The Cave, The White Helmets, and
Of Fathers and Sons. When Two Worlds Collide takes up an anti-geopolitical narrative with its emphasis on the indige-
nous campaign against oil production in northern Peru. Some documentaries with geopolitical themes are more his-
torical in their focus; The Act of Killing recounts the campaign against communists in 1960s Indonesia, but has also
been critiqued as a snuff movie for the way in which perpetrators recreate murders (Fraser, 2014). Bryan Fogel's Ica-
rus, about the doping scandal at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia and subsequent fallout, evolves from a
first-person directorial intervention into an attempt at understanding how doping worked and the fallout in the inter-
national community; it can also be viewed as a reprise of a cold war era narrative about Russia and Russian sport.
There are manifold examples of geopolitical themes in documentary film, and this is far from an exhaustive list.
The challenge of classification in contemporary documentaries is particularly evident when length is accounted for,
as shorter films cover geopolitical topics using a variety of perspectives and narrative techniques—with YouTube as a
common distribution channel. As an example, web-based platforms were integral to the distribution of Kony 2012, a
documentary produced by the U.S.-based NGO Invisible Children that documents the group's attempts to capture
Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda (see Gregory, 2012; Laliberté, 2013).2 Argu-
ably, the slipperiness of documentary film as a category when defined by either content, directorial intent, length, or
distribution venue has precluded systematic analysis of such films in the critical geopolitics literature.
More generally, the documentary ethos is being challenged by technology, geopolitics, and the financing of film.
This challenge has less to do with the realist versus experimentalist binary in the making of such films than with the
attempt to ascribe authenticity and factuality through the label documentary. Nisbet and Aufderheide (2009, p. 450)
write how documentaries now “are considered part of a larger effort to spark debate, mold public opinion, shape pol-
icy, and build activist networks.” As such, some documentary films trend towards propaganda, and documentary film
as anti-geopolitical cinematic eye is not uniform across the genre (Icarus, e.g., reproduces a more conventional geo-
political script). In Critical Geopolitics, Ó Tuathail (1996a) invokes the World War II propaganda films of the director
Frank Capra in making a broader critique of the popular narrative emergent around Nazi war strategy and the role of
geopolitik. Prologue to War, the first in the series, “framed the entire war as a struggle between a free and a slave
world, an argument given powerful visual form by graphic sequences showing a world divided into two hemispheres,
a hemisphere of dictatorial darkness and a hemisphere of freedom and light” (Ó Tuathail, 1996a, p. 93). Although the
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films were ostensibly non-fictional, both the content and cinematography underscore the explicitly political messag-
ing of Capra's films in support of the American war effort. More generally, propaganda films draw on the power of
cinema to project a certain vision of the world that does not necessarily challenge, but rather reinforces, hegemonic
narratives (Ó Tuathail, 1994).

3.2 | Creative agency and auteurship

The agency of creator(s) is increasingly important in the critical geopolitics literature, and serves as an important con-
nection between hegemonic narratives, the visual, images and film, and the consumptive practices and interpreta-
tions of audiences (Holland & Dahlman, 2017). The focus on creative intent partially addresses “the question of
whose alternative voices are privileged or silenced in these anti/counter-geopolitical moments” (Nicley, 2009, p. 19).
There is a politics and geopolitics associated with choices made in representation and agency in the presentation of
contested themes, particularly when the documentary has connections to the state in the form of subsidies for pro-
duction or distribution (Dodds & Jensen, 2019).
Ultimately, the accuracy of a documentary's representation depends on the choices made by the director as cre-
ator. Documentary films that are advocative are produced across the political spectrum and emphasize the wide-
spread use of documentary as communication venue; Dinesh D'Souza's 2016: Obama's America, which was released
to theaters in 2012 and is currently fifth in the list of highest grossing documentaries, emulates Fahrenheit 9/11 in
intent. Ongoing shifts in the media landscape—with new films being released directly to streaming services like
Netflix and Hulu—affect the ability of directors to communicate their messages to audiences of various sizes in ways
that are not yet fully clear.
Beyond the objective-subjective binary, emergent in the literature on documentary film is the making of such
movies by academics themselves (including geographers, e.g., Brickell & Garrett, 2013; Collard, 2016; Mason, 2017).
Documentary filmmaking has a long history in geography as traditionally conceived, particularly in connection to
exploration. Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North and Moana (Manvell, 1956b), resulting from trips to the high Arc-
tic and South Pacific respectively, are commonly classed as documentaries but also include contrived elements, as
the characters modified their behavior based on direction from Flaherty (see also Smith, 2002). Other excursions into
expeditionary filmmaking have striven for objectivity or more explicitly acknowledged this blending of fiction and
non-fiction (Dodds, 2002; Garrett, 2011). Debates over the use of film as a venue for the dissemination of research
findings and participatory videos as methodology underscore the flexibility—or slipperiness—of documentary as a
category and output (e.g., Baptiste, 2016; Callahan, 2015; Kindon, 2003). Though the technique is perhaps less com-
mon in geography than other social scientific disciplines such as sociology and anthropology, there is a burgeoning
literature on how and why to use film in the research process (Garrett, 2011; Jacobs, 2013; Lorimer, 2010; Vélez-
Torres, 2013). These films are non-fictional, and reflections on their aims and content acknowledge the relative
importance of the filmmaker in determining the narrative. The process of making documentary films is also imbri-
cated in questions of research output, interpretation, and the relevance of scholarship to the general public
(Koopman, 2017; Varotto & Rossetto, 2016).
The potential of documentary film as a research venue raises concerns about the limitations of format and tex-
tual interpretation. Recording as a technology is centrally important to documentary films, and recent advances in
this technology make possible novel forms of documenting and viewing. What Vannini and Stewart (2017) refer to
as the GoPro Gaze—in reference to the use of a GoPro camera in documenting point-of-view action by its user—aug-
ments the tourist gaze and changes the nature of video consumption. Wearable cameras as research technique have
their drawbacks, as does the refashioned form of expeditionary documentary that many GoPro users undertake (e.g.,
Duru, 2018; for a more general critique of contemporary forms of expeditionary geography, see Mott & Rob-
erts, 2014). The viewer as consumer also matters in this dynamic. As Sharp and Lukinbeal (2015, p. 27) write in
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acknowledging the processual nature of viewing film, “a film text is always re-written as it is read depending on the
positionalities of the viewers and the context of their viewing.”

3.3 | Critical geopolitics, documentary film, and film geography

This role for the viewer builds on the author-text-reader model of film analysis as applied in film geography. The
model that Sharp and Lukinbeal (2015) use as the basis for their review aligns with the dominant themes in work on
feature films in critical geopolitics: alternative readings of narratives (author), representation (text), and affect
(reader). The author modality incorporates aspects of auteurship as well as the economics of production and the flex-
ible specialization in production companies that contribute to the making of a film. Questioning dominant narratives
and acknowledging the sites where and the manner in which they are produced is at the heart of critical geopolitics;
for documentary films, the author modality encompasses the role of the creator discussed previously but also con-
siders important questions about whose narrative is privileged—who and where is featured in the film, and why—in
content that makes claims to veracity and knowledge generation.
Film as text demands an understanding of content and message, as well as the larger context of production.
Although an area of potential alignment between critical geopolitics and film geography, Sharp and Lukinbeal (2015)
argue that geographers—including those in the field of critical geopolitics—sometimes fail to attend to film as film.
They suggest an engagement with dialectics as used in the work of Natter and Jones III (1993), as well as the notion
of film as simulacra or as a geography in and for itself. Rather, much work in the field has emphasized affect and
other more-than-representational interpretations of film, as part of Dittmer and Gray's (2010) reframing of popular
geopolitics. Format and textual readings of documentaries have relevance when held in tension with authorial intent
and reader reception—to reiterate the author-text-reader model. Conversations across these elements of documen-
tary film is particularly important with the increased distribution of content on the internet and the rise of social
media as a method for communicating about the geopolitical. The turn away from format and film-as-text has
resulted in some inattention to the manner in which communicating geopolitical narratives has evolved in the past
decade or so—a point to which I return in the conclusion.
The reader-centered approach foregrounds the viewer, as conditioned by the haptical and affective environ-
ment, in film analysis; the approach dovetails with the affective turn in film analysis as well as popular geopolitics,
noted above. The subjectivity of narrative as interpreted by the viewer in documentary film necessarily holds in ten-
sion the accuracy of any attempt at recording the truth. In turn, the reader-centered approach is one basis for the
greater engagement between cultural studies and popular geopolitical approaches to film that Sharp and
Lukinbeal (2015) endorse. As an example, Riding and Wake-Walker (2017, p. 67) offer a critical reflection on the
making of the film Bridges <Bosnia 20>, described as documentary-poetry that attempts “to deconstruct ever-present
ethnic and identitarian debates in Bosnia-Herzegovina.” The interspersing of scenes with the contextualization of
the film, violence as spectacle, and the siting within the geopolitical narration of Bosnia as quagmire or genocide
elicits an affectual response in the reader that complements the watching of the film.

4 | C O N CL U S I O N

For the project of a critical geopolitics, documentary film is a medium that influences how counter-hegemonic inter-
pretations of the geopolitical are developed (Holland, 2012; Hughes, 2007). The analysis of documentary films
beyond geography has privileged a documentary ethos that acknowledges an aspiration to the depiction of reality
but also the challenges associated with such. These films ramify the dominant narratives that emerge within specific
geopolitical cultures; no longer is a dominant set of discourses cultivated through the invocation of predictable
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storylines and scripts. Instead, documentary film as a type of oppositional format challenges the overarching narra-
tion of a common geopolitical telos based on a consensual set of geopolitical visions and discourses.
Mediating this interpretation is the fact that documentary films are not objective depictions of reality and should
not be positioned against feature films as part of a truth-fiction binary (Kennedy & Lukinbeal, 1997). Instead—and
similar to other cultural products that adopt the form of more mainstream outputs—documentary film relies on a sim-
ilar format to tell its story in a distinct way. Sustained attention to format is still relevant in critical geopolitics, to
compliment themes such as affect and audience response that have received increased attention in the past decade
(Dittmer & Gray, 2010). The consideration of format—or, put another way, documentary film as text—allows for a
nuanced interpretation of how non-fictional filmic representations work to shape geopolitical cultures and narratives
across a range of country contexts.
Interpreting documentary films as text—despite its limitations due to topical choices, the subjectivity of repre-
sentation, and the nature of authorial intent—is an approach that endorses a return to format as a consideration of
critical geopolitical analysis. One way forward is the representations-in-relation approach discussed by Ander-
son (2019, p. 1122), which proposes a “shift to the question of what representations do rather than what they stand
in for” (for a case study using this approach, see Lukinbeal, 2019). This approach does not mean jettisoning non-rep-
resentational theory, but rather endorses an understanding of how textual representations operate on their own and
in larger configurations or contexts. Documentary films as filmic resemblances of reality that build on, reinterpret,
and make reference to the world both through the eyes of the audience and the agency of the filmmaker should be
considered as texts and in context (Gaines, 1999).

ORCID
Edward C. Holland https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3914-0505

ENDNOTES
1
This ranking is according to the website Box Office Mojo, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=
documentary.htm. At the time of writing (October 2019), second place was March of the Penguins, followed by Justin
Bieber’s concert film, Never Say Never. At the time of publication, the above URL was no longer working but could still be
accesed via the Wayback Machine.
2
Kony 2012 had been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube as of the time of writing (October 2019). It was the
first video to receive more than one million likes.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Edward C. Holland is an Assistant Professor of Geography in the Department of Geosciences at the University
of Arkansas. He is a political geographer with wide-ranging research interests in critical geopolitics, political vio-
lence, and religion, with a general focus on the Russian Federation. He received his PhD in Geography from the
University of Colorado at Boulder and subsequently held postdoctoral fellowships at the Kennan Institute for
Advanced Russian Studies and the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies. In spring 2017, he
was a visiting Fulbright scholar at Kalmyk State University in Elista, Kalmykia, Russia. His scholarship on critical
geopolitics has previously appeared in Geopolitics and Popular Communication.

How to cite this article: Holland EC. The anti-geopolitical cinematic eye: Documentary film and critical
geopolitics. Geography Compass. 2020;e12536. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12536