The new personal-essay documentary

The first-person essayistic documentary — the director as narrator, the subject as occasion for autobiographical reflection, the form as personal excavation — has been the most-copied documentary mode of the last five years, and its imitators are starting to expose the form's limits. What Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell and Kirsten Johnson's Cameraperson demonstrated as a form has been widely adopted, sometimes brilliantly and sometimes as a shortcut around the harder work of documentary craft.

The best examples still work. Ross Kauffman and Katy Chevigny's continuing work in the essayistic register produces documentaries that respect the form's specific demands — the director has to be interesting enough to justify sustained attention, the personal material has to earn its inclusion, and the reflection has to be rigorous enough to survive the audience's skepticism. The form is unforgiving. Bad essayistic documentary is unusually painful to watch. Good essayistic documentary is unusually rewarding.

The problem with the imitators is that the essayistic form has become the default for a certain kind of arthouse documentary regardless of whether the individual film requires it. Directors who would previously have made observational documentaries about their subjects are now making essayistic documentaries about themselves-in-relation-to-their-subjects, and the resulting films are often about the director when they should be about the subject. That is a specific artistic failure, and the industry has been slow to name it because the form is fashionable.

The counter case is that the essayistic mode is a legitimate response to a specific historical moment — the erosion of confident authorial voice in journalism, the rise of first-person writing across cultural criticism, the growing awareness that documentary has never been the neutral observer it presented itself as. All of that is true. The essayistic documentary is a legitimate reckoning with those developments, and its rise is not simply fashion.

What documentary criticism should be pushing back against is not the essayistic mode as such but the assumption that first-person is always more honest than third-person, and that observation is always more suspect than reflection. Those assumptions have become critical defaults, and they produce readings of essayistic documentaries that are systematically more generous than the same critics would apply to observational work. That double standard is not defensible, and the next generation of documentary criticism should abandon it. The best essayistic documentaries deserve their reputation. The imitators do not.