Remaking History: Jay Leyda and the Compilation Film

In that sense, Louis Marcorelles's Living Cinema: New Directions in Contemporary Filmmaking captures the spirit of the 1960s far more accurately but entirely ignores the value of this well-established and vital tributary of documentary filmmaking.4 Similarly, A. William Bluem's Documentary in American Television, published just a year after Leyda's book, devotes just one chapter (almost entirely on Project XX, NBC's acclaimed series of compilation films) to it, and Eric Barnouw's classic text, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, published a decade later, makes no more than passing mention of this form.5 None of these books scrutinizes the formal, ethical, and aesthetic complexities of the compilation film. [...]we have had to wait for the recent publication of Jaimie Baron's The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History (2014)6 to find a significant elaboration on the insights Leyda offers in his seminal book.