Filming History from Below: Microhistorical Documentaries, by Efrén Cuevas

Abstract

Efrén Cuevas’s Filming History from Below: Microhistorical Documentaries will appeal to media scholars, archivists and historians interested in the complex links between images, the archive and history. Cuevas argues that a certain category of film—the “microhistorical documentary”—constructs historical narratives through a reduced scale of observation, an insistence on human agency and the appropriation of archival images via varying levels of reflexivity and imagination. Cuevas’s book is especially rewarding for scholars curious about the diverse evidentiary roles of one specific type of audiovisual archival source: the home movie. According to Cuevas, microhistorical documentaries typically appropriate once-private sources, including home movies, found in family archives. Cuevas persuasively demonstrates that documentarians’ appropriations of home movies as evidence can produce an alternative vision of the past that prioritises the daily experiences of those typically omitted from traditional histories. On one hand, this focus on microhistorical methods and the appropriation of home movies provides a rather limited theoretical lens for studying a modest subgenre of documentaries. On the other hand, this spotlight on a relatively narrow cinematic process paves alternative pathways toward addressing much broader concerns relevant to multiple disciplines. Even if a reader is not directly invested in viewing and/or studying these kinds of documentaries, Cuevas presents substantive claims applicable to familiar scholarly conversations about the archive’s power and limitations, the evidentiary force of images, the relationship between narrative structures and history, the ethics of appropriation and much more. As in the documentaries analysed throughout the book, Cuevas microscopically scrutinises the particular to reveal new ideas that have typically gone unnoticed