Documentary Filmmaking Across the Analogue-Digital Divide: Reassessing Thom Andersen’s Filmography

Abstract

This paper examines Thom Andersen’s nonfiction filmography as a lens through which to understand the broader evolution of documentary film practice from the late twentieth century into the digital era. Analysing Andersen’s early workers including Red Hollywood (1996/2014), Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003/2014), and The Thoughts That Once We Had (2015), this paper argues that Andersen’s stylistic trajectory, from the classical documentary’s rhetoric of clarity and evidentiary authority, to the subjective, reflexive essayism of his later works, indexes a fundamental shift in the material and technological conditions of nonfiction filmmaking. Drawing on theoretical debates, the paper situates Andersen’s increasing reliance on montage, found footage, and digital databases within a changing media ecology shaped by online archives and accessible digital editing tools. Andersen’s films, I argue, constitute a micro-history of documentary film’s transition from celluloid to digital modes of production. In tracing this evolution, the paper positions Andersen’s oeuvre as an exemplar of how contemporary essay film affords a rethinking of essential cinematic concepts, such as authorship, representation, and cinematic truth, within the evolving industrial and aesthetic paradigms.

Keywords: documentary, fact, nonfiction, authorial agency, cinema, history