Can the documentary be useful? Can a film change how its viewers think about the world and their potential role in it? In Kill the Documentary, the award-winning director Jill Godmilow issues an urgent call for a new kind of nonfiction filmmaking. She critiques documentary films from Nanook of the North to the recent Ken Burns/Lynn Novick series The Vietnam War. Tethered to what Godmilow calls the “pedigree of the real” and the “pornography of the real,” they fail to activate their viewers’ engagement with historical or present-day problems. Whether depicting the hardships of poverty or the horrors of war, conventional documentaries produce an “us-watching-them” mode that ultimately reinforces self-satisfaction and self-absorption.

In place of the conventional documentary, Godmilow advocates for a “postrealist” cinema. Instead of offering the faux empathy and sentimental spectacle of mainstream documentaries, postrealist nonfiction films are acts of resistance. They are experimental, interventionist, performative, and transformative. Godmilow demonstrates how a film can produce meaningful, useful experience by forcefully challenging ways of knowing and how viewers come to understand the world. She considers her own career as a filmmaker as well as the formal and political strategies of artists such as Luis Buñuel, Georges Franju, Harun Farocki, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Rithy Panh, and other directors. Both manifesto and guidebook, Kill the Documentary proposes provocative new ways of making and watching films.

"Kill the Documentary is a brilliant, angry book. An honest book. A brave book. Guggenheim Fellow and award-winning filmmaker Jill Godmilow has written a stirring call to arms." - Documentary Magazine

"Creatively curious pages" - Cineaste

"This book will be a gold mine for any instructors putting together an “Introduction to Documentary Filmmaking” syllabus or for cinematic autodidacts hungry to experiment with alternative modes of nonfictional filmmaking." - Film Quarterly

"Herein lies the specificity and refreshing nonconformity of [this] book: it pushes the reader not only to see through the ideological premises of conventional formats, but also to delve into the multiple configurations that generate subversive experiences . . . [Godmilow's] persistent faith in the importance of developing critical awareness and in the agency of art to intervene into reality despite the omnipresent ‘capitalist realism’ in the global neoliberal society radiates a compelling force." - Radical Philosophy