American Documentary Film explores key themes, moments and movements in US documentary over the course of more than a century of cinema. In spite of the ambitious title, this is not a survey or exhaustive history of documentary. Rather, this is an effort to distil important aspects of the documentary idea while tracing the form's development over time, focusing on the ways documentaries have engaged with US national identity and perceptions of American belonging. Moreover, by tracing lineages of the documentary idea that might not be seen as ‘typical’ or wholly representative of the form, I hope to suggest documentary's open-endedness and fluidity. Documentary has long been a negotiated concept: a site of personal, social, intellectual and aesthetic investment keenly fought over and debated.

I'll start by briefly outlining some ideas behind – and limits of – the book's title, American Documentary Film: Projecting the Nation. First, though the term ‘American’ features prominently, I would stress that the idea of ‘America’ is a contested one, not only through questions of what constitutes ‘American’ identity, but in the ways that the term ‘America’ manages to elide the rest of the Americas in one fell swoop. With this in mind, critics like Malini Johar Schueller and Mary Renda employ the terms ‘USAmerican’ and ‘U.S. American’, respectively, in efforts to draw attention to the implicit hegemony of common usages of ‘America’ and ‘American’ (Schueller 1998; Renda 2001).