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Ethnographic film workshop

Apr 112013

fiction is the only way to penetrate reality

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Jan 152013

Moi, un Noir (1957) by Jean Rouch (narrative in French with Portugese subtitles), depicts the daily life of three young Nigerians working as casual labourers in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

These men are immigrants from Niger who have travelled to this large city in order to become successful. The central character is Edward G. Robinson, who speaks to the audience in a voice-over narration, which gives the film its unique style. Throughout the film there is a sense that the young protagonists wish to be somewhere else, but are unable to get anywhere. (Turkestana)

The film’s melancholy tone derives from the first person narrative of the main character Edward G. Robinson, who with his friends adopt imaginary Hollywood personas to create fictionalised identities to cope with poverty and being so uprooted. We get great insight into Robinson’s life, desires and opinions – including his blindspots – with this technique, without Rouch needing to add his own narration or questions. Rouch said about Moi un Noir:

Fiction is the only way to penetrate reality – the means of sociology remain exterior ones. In Moi, un noir I wanted to show an African city – Treichville. I could have made a documentary full of figures and observations. That would have been deathly boring. So I told a story with characters, their adventures and their dreams. And I didn’t hesitate to introduce the dimensions of the imaginary, of the unreal – when a character dreams he’s boxing, he boxes … the whole problem is to maintain a certain sincerity towards the specatator, never to mask the fact that this is a film … once this sincerity is achieved, when nobody is deceiving anybody, what interests me it the introduction of an imaginary, of the unreal. I can then use the film to tell what cannot be told otherwise. (Telerama, no 872, Translated and quoted in Eaton p 8)

References

Eaton, Mick (1971). Anthropology – Reality – Cinema: the films of Jean Rouch. London: British Film Institute.

Jean Rouch Moi, un Noir (1957) Films de la Pleiade – Pierre Braunberger, Roger Fleytoux an CNRS.

supermax

documentary, Reviews, web Comments Off

Jan 102013

Prison valley, an interactive documentary about the America prison system focusses on the supermax prison in the Colorado desert. It is a surprisingly narrative driven work, given it functions in an interactive environments, its structure seems somewhat inspired by gameplay. You are caught up with the highly professionally produced story-telling and the characters of the indidivudals who deal with the prison.

Although this project has plenty of rich interactive elements, it has no UGC, nor the ability of users to add content beyond a forum. It is driven by strong storytelling, great characters, and wonderful imagery enhanced sensitively with a great audio track. An expository voice over is slightly softened because the directors have put their own actions in the frame, however really the things that make this docoumentary so strong are its conventional elements.

So I love this documentary, but really, I love you conventionally.

[image: still from Prison Valley - as close as you can get to the supermax]

Curation is the zeitgeist of our times

social media, This working life, web Comments Off

Dec 302012

Producer Steve Rosenbaum‘s antidote to digital overload:

To separate signal from noise, there’s an emerging class of information superheroes called Content Curators. They’ve got ties to a number of legacy job descriptions, but they’re in some ways extraordinarily new. Think of them like Journalists who’ve climbed into a time machine and been transported to the future, where there are more sources, and more tools, and stunning and sometimes reckless speed.

Curators are both collectors and creators. Capturing the zeitgeist of the web, and knitting together images, text, links, and video along with their own original content to create a focused, contextually relevant editorial for an overloaded world. For a journalist the decision is simple. Embrace your new role as a curator and be part of solving digital overload, or continue to create stand-alone acts of original journalism and have your voice increasingly drowned out by the rising tide of unfiltered information.

But can’t people curate their own stuff? No.

People will pay for clarity, authority, context, and speed. So, how does the changing nature of the web change the need for curation?. It turns out – it speeds it up. We’re now moving to a place where a large amount of the information being created and consumed is images. Cisco, the web technology and networking giant, predicts that 62% of web traffic will be video by the year 2015.

Which makes video a big prize for curators, and a big pain point in the world of digital overload

So, a new job description is born:

…what the web needs most are focused, topic oriented editorial specialists. Individuals who can gather information, provide context, separate information and ideas from data and noise. A new brand of journalist that can bring a distinct editorial voice to a curated content environment.

For some journalists, the idea of being both a finder/filter of content and a creator may seem like they’re giving up the part of the job that they most love. But rising tide of Digital Overload has created an over abundance of unfiltered content, and a growing need for curators to turn a noisy web into a infinite number of trusted verticals.

[image: a Wordle of a paper I'm writing, in which I argue that UGC curation is the future for documentary]

Narrative cubed

documentary, This working life, web Comments Off

Dec 102012

Tell a story but link to the historical and other factual elements, such as in War Horse. This seems increasingly to be an approach favoured in transmedia narrative, according to the Sandra Gaudenzi on the i-docs blog.

Another approach is to use transmedia and cross-media fiction techniques to deliver a doco, such as Operation Ajax. A great way to get a new generation into non-fiction content … while also, possibly excluding those stuck in heritage media? The price we pay for such a dynamic media culture, I guess: your technology more or less chooses your audience.

Now that no one has to convince anybody anymore that transmedia is here to stay, the important message is for me to keep being innovative – rather than trying to copy complex, and sometimes unnecessarily ambitious, strategies. As Michel Reilhac (Executive Director, Arte France Cinema – although it was announced that he will step down in the new year!) did emphasize: we are maybe coming out of the over enthusiasm for connectedness and multi-platformity. Now that convergence is not an utopia anymore, we’ll might have to use it for a purpose. Is transmedia compatible with a logic of “less is more”?

Mixing fact and fiction by a strategic use of cross-medium – yeah, but if the innovations don’t seem to have a reason, you’re being a technologist, not a media maker.

operating in the dark

Contemporary Media Work Practices, Contemporary Media Work Practices, documentary, Reviews, This working life, web Comments Off

Dec 012012

PressPausePlay (free legal bittorrent download) is an uplifting and informative documentary about freedom and digital creativity. Most of the examples are from the music ‘industry’. Rahrahs from the likes of Seth Godin are balanced by the dour tones of Andrew Keen.

Is the status of creativity and creatives changing? In this wide-ranging documentary, we are asked to reflect upon the creatives ‘industries’, and consider whether changing production methods means that we are entering a post-industrial creative era. Some love it, some hate it, and some, most interestingly, are equivocal. Among the more or less fully converted is Seth Godin:

It used to be you didn’t become an artist to be rich, you became an artist because you had an idea to share, you had an emotion to share, and that’s where we’re heading again, and we’re going to see more people do more art in more ways than ever before.

Yes, but how? And what are the financial practicalities? And is it really ‘art’? In an environment in which ‘Any kid can use a cracked version or buy a version of Reason or Logic or Ableton and in about five minutes do what took 6 months or years 20 years ago’, Moby wonders:

Everybody’s equally excited and afraid, noone really knows where their next paycheck is coming from, but they’re really excited at their ability to create work and communicate directly with an audience.

These people are technological determinists. Bill Drummond says: ‘The technology always comes first. Then the artist comes along (Jimi Hendrix) … And abuses it and changes it …. So in that sense technology is great. I’m not so sure it’s as simple as that, for in the use and abuse the technology gets changed, but anyway, that’s perhaps not the most important issue. Rather, it’s what digital does to the very concept of art and media. According to David Weinberger:

In the creative world, it used to be that we knew where to go to get art, where to get entertainment, and they were in boxes, sometimes the boxes were Tv boxes, sometimes they were building boxes or the front page of newspaper which is a nice little box. That’s fantastic but of course there’s a price to pay to that old way as well, which is that somebody else is making your decisions and they are also human beings, its’s a very limited necessarily range of tastes and opinions and ideas and traditionally unfortunately fairly typically its been representative of particular empowered groups… Typically white guys …

I’m not sure art is a good term to use with digital products. It seems to me tied to a means of production and a historical production period in which reproducability was difficult if not impossible. So when Seth Godin says something like:

Art has been round for a really long time, but its only in the last fifty years that there’s been an industry, eg the music indusy, the movie industry. That’s new.

I just wish he’d use a less loaded phrase, such as ‘creative products’. It would avoid a whole lot of problems. That aside, I love the way several interviewees historically contextualise our creative period.

PressPausePlay also interviews the founders of production company Shilo, Andre Stringer and Tracy Chandler:

Andre Stringer:

The easiest way to understand Shilo is we’re a traditional production company for the most part, but we’ve come at it from a very untraditional sort of way. The traditional model says, there’s a director, there’s a post house, there’s an editorial company, there’s an advertising agency… And each of them has their own stake in what they’re making and there’s always this fight against it. By…harnessing all those things and saying like nowadays the guys who direct are sometimes the guys who design, the guys who direct are also sometiems the dudes who edit. That blended model really changes the whole landscape and it also sort says that anybody can do anything.

They must have worked out how to deal with egos very well … in industrial media, everyone likes to have their patch of expertese. Or is it more that that’s how we learned to function? It was safe, maybe even easy, maybe even necessary given the gear we had. But it didn’t give you much freedom unless you were at the top of the tree.

Tracy Chandler:

If a designer comes at directing something they might have a different approach than a traditional director might have and so comes out with a different product . It’s not just about whether something is better or worse, its about something can be different because people are coming at it from a different perspective.

Andre:

What having the ability to do more of the work ourselves gives us is the abili to be more free, more visceral, more alchemic with the way that the components come together. A lot less of it has to be extremely pre-planned and mo of it can be entirely improvisational, very much of the moment…Most of it comes out of the grassroots, learn-it-yourself, do-it-yourself mentality

Tracy:

There’s no formal training for what’s going on in the professional world right now.

[This is one of two posts written about PressPausePlay. Here's the other. Still from PressPausePlay.]

youtube confessions

documentary, social media, web Comments Off

Nov 282012

We’ve all seen them – heartfelt autobiographical pieces to the computer camera, uploaded, with little or no editing, to Youtube. How are we to understand the phenomenon of the Youtube confession?

Michael Renov argues that it is a function of the personal video camera to elicit this type of media, in comparison to the industrial film cameras of heritage media. Autobiography has made a leap of mediums in the post-industrial age because of technology. He excavates the pre-history of the Youtube confession, starting with Jean Rouch in Chronique d’un ete (1961), who muses:

…the camera… becomes a kind of psychoanalytic stimulant which lets people do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. (Rouch quoted by Renov, p 197)

Rouch continues:

…the camera… was not a brake but let’s say, to use an automotive term, an accelerator. You push these people to confess themselves and it seemed to us without any limit. Some of the public who saw the film said the film was a film of exhibitionists. I don’t think so. It’s not exactly exhibitionism: it’s a very strange kind of confession in front of the camera, where the camera is, let’s say, a mirror, and also a window open to the outside. (quoted by Renov, p 197)

Thus, Renov argues that the camera has become:

…a kind of two-way glass that retains a double function: it is a window that delivers the profilmic to an absent gaze and, at the same moment, a reflective surface that reintroduces us to ourselves. Rouch’s insight brilliantly anticipates what the video apparatus (with the playback monitor mounted alongside the camera) realizes. (Renov, p 197)

The new personal video technology meant that people could have a different relationship with the moving image, because the subject of the moving image could become the self, and the camera becomes a “camera-stylo”, the moving image equivalent to the pen (Renov, p 198).

Confession can serve many ends, as Renov reveals in a number of video confession works. In Anger (1986) by Maxis Cohen ‘confession has taken the place of penance’:

I am suggesting that first-person video confessions, addressed to an absent confessor/Other, mediated through an ever-present apparatus, constitute a discursive formation significantly different from the truncated dialogue, one that offers particular insight into the specificities and potentialities of the medium itself.
First-person video confessions satisfy Foucault’s formulation of confession as ‘a discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement,’ with the ‘speaking subject’ understood as necessarily and simultaneously the ‘enunciating subject’. (Renov, p200)

Video gives the confession ‘exchange value’:

Video preserves and deepens that dynamic of privatization and entrepreneurship. Now, with the help of their cameras, videomakers can exhume their deepest fears and indiscretions all on their own–then put their neuroses on display. In a sense, first-person video confession is uniquely suited to its moment. Born of late-stage capitalism, it endows therapeautic practice with exchange value.
There are other ways to understand the advantage of the first-person format. As Rouch demonstrated with Marceline’s soliloquy in Chronique d’un ete, the presence of the camera or recorder is sufficient to spur self-revelation. In the case of video confessions, the virtual presence of a parter–the imagined other effectuated by the technology–turns out to be a more powerful facilitator of emotion than flesh-and-blood interlocutors. (Renov, p 204)

The reality TV phenomenon illustrates another of late capitalism’s fetishes (see Fetveit 1999), which also, arguably, feeds into the impetus to confess.

The confessional moment establishes a ‘zone of liminality’ (Renov, p 212), even if it functions outside criminological, religious, or other formal institutional settings, because, so long as it is addressed to a public, it is a ‘threshold moment’ (Renov, p 212), holding a promise of moving on to another state. On the criminal confession a la Detective John Kelly in NYPD Blue:

“By confessing, he finds the first possibility of a return to the community after he had put himself, through his deed, outside its limits.” In that liminal zone, no emotion, no promise, no sign of remorse remains unthinkable. (Renov, p 212, including quote by Reik).

What, then is the role of the internet, as publisher and distributor, of a confessional video? It amplifies effects already identified by Renov, that:

To return to Foucault’s characterization, ‘one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile’.(Renov, including quote of Foucault, p 203)

It is as if the performer is confessing to her own conscience (super-ego) which has been manifested in the internet, second-gessing all the ways her behaviour might be assessed and trying to repond to them. The limits of the confession is her own sense of self, and it is perhaps those limits in which revelation most lies. The internet is the authority, the public(s) to which the confessor addresses. The confessor must possess an internalised sense of who this public is, its likely values and interests, so that s/he knows how to confess – what the scope of the confession should be, where the guilt, or shame, or despair lies that needs explaining.

If the ear of the other indeed contributes to the (re)construction of the speaking self, it is only on condition that the positions of self and other, confessor and confessant, remain fluid and reciprocal. (Renov, p 214)

An interesting observation, when transferred to a confession published online, in which there can be no expectation of any specific person confessing, but rather a potential for specific people to confess; meanwhile, the culture of confession that generally pervades social media platforms impart a sense of generalised reciprocity.

The impact of incorporating confessional video footage into a documentary may be profound (leaving aside the ethical issues).

Speaking in the first person edges the documentary form toward the diary, essay, and aspects of avant-garde or experimental film and video. The emphasis may shift from convincing the audience of a particular point of view or approach to a problem to the representation of a personal, clearly subjective view of things (Nichols, 14).

Such documentaries may become subjective, exploratory, and rather melancholic; with a subtext about an attempt to communicate. Exposition may counter to their power.

In The Love Tapes (1978-?) by Wendy Clarke, Renov explores the power of seeing your confession on the auto-playback screen attached to the camera:

The screen/mirror also becomes a blank surface on which an active projection of the self, rather than a scrictly receptive introjection, reigns triumphant. At last, in a reversal of broadcast fortunes close to Brecht’s dream, the television stops talking and just listens. Video becomes the eye that sees and the ear that listens, powerfully but without judegement or reprisal. (Renov p 206)

I think we don’t listen to social media and UGC all that often. It can be hard work, because it is not professionally made. But if we did, we’d find much wonderful, powerful, disturbing content.

References

Fetveit, Arild ‘Reality TV in the digital era: a paradox in visual culture?’ Media Culture Society 1999 21: 787
Nichols, B (2001). Introduction to documentary. Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press,
Renov, M (2004). ‘Video confessions’, in The subject of documentary, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp 191-215.

[Scene from Chronique d'un ete (1961) by Jean Rouch]

the death of film

documentary, Non-Fiction Project Comments Off

Nov 152012

Great presentation by Florian Schneider at the Video Vortex conference about how the networked changes documentary, much food for thought. Brought to my attention by Seth Keen. In the background Schneider is playing Joris Iven’s documentary about the Phillips lightbulb factory, an archetypal Fordist work environment. Schneider riffs off this to ponder not only differences in industrial and post-industrial work-practices, but how that might translate into a distinction between industrial and post-industrial (radically networked) documentary.

Some of the take-aways for me were:

What would be innovative means of the documentary today which would exceed a merely descriptive or illustrative approach towards this subjects? Which startegies both productive and narrative at the same time, could replace this linearity of the assembly line, let alene conventional filmic storytelling?

Schneider wants to achieve, as Ivens does for 1930′s industrialisation, “a visual reconstruction of a technical as well as a social division of labour which seems to have become entirely invisible. We are not able to produce any kind of image or pictorial representation of the network …”

We have to discuss the aesthetical potential of contemporary network production and read it against the grain. Rather than being exclusively concerned with the distribution and the circulation of moving images within the networked environment… we have to understand how we can use the very same conditions of the network in order to produce, to create, or to develop or to experiment with new kinds of aesthetics which I would under the current circumstances claim to be aesthetics of resistance.

What is at stake is the production of a new vision, and rather than what to see, it is a new way of how to see things. It has to do with an optical experience of the networked character of objects and subjects.

Challenges for image-making “appear on an ethical and political level, but at the same time maybe most importantly they appear in terms of aesthetics.”

Schneider is “intrigued by the reinvention of the mode of the documentary under networked conditions”. There’s a paradox afoot: “The network itself appears as a redundant array that documents any possible move – it locks, it captures, it records, it stores any interaction between subject and object. Its reality is documented before it comes into being, let alone before it becomes a subject for criticism – this is the whole idea of programming…”

So “A reinvention of the documentary needs to start from this paradox of the networked condition which questions it [ie, documentary] and documentary fights a losing battle when it appears in its traditional form.”

Schneider proposes a mode of documentary chracterised by 5 characteristics:

an emancipation of the documentary from its carrier medium
A peculiar relation to the unexpected, the unforseeable and the incalculable which resists the network condition. The documentary filmmaker is mostly occupied with waiting for something to happen which cannot be foreseen.
“..to do with the fact that the digitisation of film has triggered a complete re-definition of editing … Today we are connecting streams of data [instead of cutting into film stock]…which “only affects the metadata as opposed to the material itself.” Metadata has become a completely different element, no longer the province of librarians.
“The documentary as we know it always emerges out of a desire, and the technical realisation of the desire, to get out of the hermetic spaces of the studio, and to get into the streets, to capture a public life, appropriating a reality that would exist independently from the film-making.”
the documentary is anticipatory film-making which edits past events.

I’m not going to pretend I understand the last point, but the others pose significant challenges to the documentary project. The last vestiges of observational film-making must fall away, but the question is, to be replaced with what? What price do we pay for coherence? What do we surrender, by farewelling it? And what do we gain? And who is the ‘we’ ….

Schneider’s 6 points which require aesthetic debate today:

“HTML5 means that we can finally talk about source codecs and container formats; such issues have become mainstream. So the relationship between the legible and illegible is very interesting. In the digital/network, that which is not readable in the image becomes endangered to extinction – ie, if it’s not reduced to metadata it doesn’t exist. So images become less complex. It means the death of film – we need to look forward to the illegible and unforseeable. Not everything can/should be reduced to text.”
Exploring an absolute out of field. “The reinvention of the documentary will tae place out of the field and not inside the frame. The networked environment allows filmmakers to work with sources that are not necessarily and not ultimately captured in the original processes of shooting.” The network gives access to content which is not in the frame, its not understandable who speaks or where it comes from but it is “perfectly resent.” It demands a passage from the one to the many-voiced.
de cadrage (framing) – “There is a substantial and permanent destabilisation and renegotiation and re-organisation of the frame.” Because of all the different gear that is used, you don’t really know what will get displayed. “the content of the image is constantly fleeing a proper framing. It is crossing the border of the picture in order to make itself common with alien information, unrelated events, or inappropriate(d?) flows.” The frame can’t be re-adjusted (recadrage). “De cadrage is the condition of the networked image.”
Asynchronization – “we have to give up one of the main virtues of the aesthetics of analogue film-making – the retrospective synchronization of the movement of the image with additional flows, and this is most notably the flow of the soundstream.” We are irrevocably out of synch. It might overcome the enslavement of the sound by the image.
Discontinuity – “Current online aesthetics are mainly characterised today by weaving every item into a mesh of similarities and connotation, also known as tagging” … this “reintroduces the mechanisms of a conventional reality that reduces complexity and heterogeneity to concepts and terminologies that are based on sameness, identity and similarity.”
missing 6th point!

And the conclusion?

The question is how can we see the network, or better, what would be networked ‘seeing’?

an intimate distance

documentary, social media Comments Off

Nov 122012

What sort of authority does social media provide as documentary source material? I’m going to ponder this question by contrasting the idea of social-media-as-archive with the Albert Kahn archive, as discussed by Paula Amad in her recent book. The Kahn archive doesn’t contain documentaries, but raw, unedited footage – source material for possible documentaries.

Kahn cameramen were asked to capture the everyday:

…Brunhes [one of the Archive founders] focussed on the unknown within what was already visible. He stressed that human geography was not driven by ‘the ambition to discover on the earth phenomena which have never been seen before’… but rather its role was to perceive already known phenomena ‘under a particular light’. Far from adhering to some naive fascination with just looking, Brunhes and Kahn were united in their desire to learn how to see the ordinary and the banal with new eyes. In fact, Brunhes warned his operators before they left on their missions that they must ‘know how to see, learn how to see’. (Amad, p77)

Brunhes ‘… expected an order to arise out of the disorder of multiple facts in constant evolution that characterised the true geographical landscape.’ (Amad, p 71)

The institution of some sort of order is one way to understand the distinction between pre-documentary and documentary. Indeed, Amad quotes Greirson’s critique of archives such as Kahn’s:

The little daily doings, however finely symphonized, are not enough. One must pile up beyond doing or process to creation itself, before one hits the higher reaches of art. (Grierson, quoted by Amad, p90)

Bill Nichols seems to accept the Griersonian project when he describes ‘the passage of document to documentary’, which Amad elaborates as “..the path, that is, from a fragmented accumulation of filmed views to a deliberate arrangement of filmed facts within a larger poetic or persuasive narrative form’ (Amad p 65).

It is as if Kahn and Brunhes were asking the archive viewer to assemble their own documentary, according to their own tastes and historical perspective. They were, it seems, totally focussed on the future historical reception of the archive. Each category in the Kahn archive was understood by Brunhes as “in a state of Bergsonian “becoming” resonant of a wider condition of modernity in which everything around us is in a state of change and ‘nothing is really stable’.” (Amad, p77)

Thus the Kahn cameramen toured the world trying to capture an everyday that would never be the same again.

I don’t think many social media authors are focussed on the historical reception of their document. They are trying to communicate, here and now, about what is on their mind, and this communication often borders on ‘the horror of the everyday’ (I’m misquoting Amad here, pg. 95):

The speaker is making all her editorial decisions, and aesthetics more or less go out the window in her desperation to communicate. The intimate distance that this video diary creates is painful to us in more ways than one. It’s raw. It rambles. But we get a stranger’s pain.

This one tiny episode from the virtually infinite social media archive that is growing by the second, which could be pre-documentary source material if only professional documentarians would come along and organise it. In its anonymity and unprofessionalism, it throws up questions of authority which are quite different from those of the Kahn archive. With Kahn, we want to know why this scene and was any of it staged (apparently some of it was). My authority questions concerning this woman all concern her identity. She is her own authority, I need to know her name (her username is not her real name). I need to create some sort of consensus idea of her, I need to see that all her digital traces add up. I want to be able to quote her properly. But I’m not doubting the veracity of her lived experience. I don’t think she’s staging anything. Maybe I’m being naive, but I can’t imagine any motivation other than a desperate desire not to feel so isolated. and if I can get all that, then perhaps I can start adding her story to other stories, start finding the pattern, the bigger picture. It will take a lot of listening.

One of the most recognizable ways in which pre-documentary film emphasized the simple, if never innocent, process of ‘just looking’ is through the omnipresent acknowledgement of the camera by those being filmed–one of the dominant characteristics of the Kahn films. In reaction to the overwhelmingly visible (or acknowledged) camera in early nonfiction films, by the 1920′s support had developed for the idea that a hidden (or unacknowledged) camera resulted in a more candid and truthful depiction (and eventual decoding) of everyday life. This position actually became a point of principle in emerging and more socially radical forms of “fly on the wall” observational filmmaking … Kahn’s films, however, encapsulate a prior model of filming in which the diclosed witnessing of social reality–implicitly (if not explicitly) understood as a reality necessarily (and even more so in the case of the autochromes) shaped by the presence of the camera–provided the norm. (pp73-4)

Video diaries published in Youtube are the antithesis of fly on the wall observational film-making. The performance is all about the existence of the camera. She pressed the record button herself! But that doesn’t damage their authenticity. It certainly promotes an ethic. But these works are their own genre, and documentarians attempting to appropriate such work must acknowledge the material and psychological circumstances that underpin their production.

Reference

Amad, P (2010). Chapter 2. Counter-archive: film, the everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planete. New York: Columbia university Press, pp 64-95.

the anthropology of social media

documentary, social media Comments Off

Oct 182012

Claude Levi-Strauss thought that it was the anthropologist’s job to endure the dross of everyday routine,

…the thousand and one dreary tasks which eat away the days to no purpose…

in order to get from them some unknown or new information about the subject people (Amad, page 66). Of course, Levi-Strauss developed his structuralist approach out of his observations, but perhaps the observation of everyday life may be justified less in terms of a grand narrative, and more in terms of compact, thematic journeys such as are material for documentary makers.

Albert Kahn was a French banker.

From 1909 to 1931, he commissioned photographers and film cameramen to record life in over 50 countries. The images were held in the Archive of the Planet, a collection of 180,000 metres of b/w film and more than 72,000 autochrome plates, the first industrial process for true colour photography, of which the museum now has the largest collection in the world. (The Albert Kahn Archive)

Famously, there is no middleman collector in social media, other than the system/s itself, the system that displays our efforts, that categorises and ranks their popularity, that archives them or makes them inaccessible with software updates. As we progress to Web 3, that system is getting more and more predictive; its ‘editorial’ ability requires more active intervention to get to gems like this one from newlywed08 – nearly unwatchable in terms of its production quality, but rich as an anthropological artefact. A young woman tells her story of suffering from ante-natal depression, which is usually under-acknowledged in a family’s euphoria surrounding the approaching birth of a new child.

So many questions arise – the ‘need for immediate medication’ – why now and not three months ago? Is that a good idea when so pregnant? The subject’s apparent isolation and lack of support; the subject’s own apparent acceptance of the medicalisation of her condition; why did she want to create a video diary about this? Was this her only way to get any support? She seems to be addressing her friends – who are they? Are they F2F friends? Are there bigger issues? Are there reasons why life in early twenty-first century New Zealand (and other similar nations) might give rise to ante-natal depression? Or has it always been a condition that goes under-reported? Might there be other ways to understand it, apart from the medicalised one?

A documentary-maker must transform that which is merely endured into something if not celebrated, at least re-conceived and reworked so as to extract the stuff good documentaries may be made of – connections to bigger issues, emotionally appropriate expressivity, universal or social contextualisation, as well as what this already is, an artefact from the real world/lived experience.

The archive of social media has a different nature than that of the Khan Archive, which was captured and curated by Western men and whose subject matter was ostensibly not themselves. One of its founders, Brunhes, proclaimed its purpose was

…to employ those instruments which have just been born [color photography and cinematography] in order to capture and conserve the facts of the planet which are about to die (Brunhes, quoted an interpolated by Amad, page 69)

Rarely does social media exhibit such an organised sense of mission, or such dramatic urgency – perhaps when it covers the unfolding of some newsworthy catastrophe. You could say that the Kahn archive is not really fascinated by the everyday at all, because the material looks forward to a future (now) when what has been recorded is not everyday.

On Topsy, ‘coffee’ has been mentioned 152,000 times in the last 7 days. And that is only the tweets that Topsy considered significant.

There is something extraordinary about this statistic, but it is also completely everyday. This is the sort of information only possible from social media. Extracting it, and adding it to the latent coffee narrative that can be created … that’s how we lift the social media document out of its insignificance and into documentary.

Reference

Amad, P (2010). ‘Chapter 2: Keep your eyes open – From pre-documentary to documentary film in the Kahn Archives’, in Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planete, New York: Columbia University Press.

[image from the Kahn Archive]