participatory documentary

you too, can be a documentary

documentary, Non-Fiction Project Comments Off

Feb 122013

Tom Zaniello proposes a number of new genres of digital documentary including what is an essentially marketing video like the one, which I include mainly as an excuse to listen to Sigur Ros. Tom gives himself an out, by saying that

hybrids are the rule, not the exception.

Well, OK: but i’m a little dubious that this makes the grade. It’s been quite a few years since we’ve been happy with propaganda (ie marketing) as documentary, but I’m beginning to feel that if it’s digital and online, people will call marketing a doco. Criticality, guys! And where have all out sophisticated engagements with the nature of non-fiction gone? They seem to have stayed in the cinema. I don’t think videos such as this would make the grade in any documentary festival anywhere – and while it might sneak in on some commercial TV stations, surely some programming exec somewhere would be sitting uncomfortable on his/her plush seat?

More interesting are Zanielli’s other new categories, Remixes/Mashups and Faux Docs

To me, a remix is always likely to be some sort of satire. This genre can conceivably be traced back to A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick, by Jonathan Swift (1729), in which the form and style of a political pamphlet is mashed up to satirical end. The Faux doc is similarly satirical. Also known as a mockumentary, as far as I can see.

Tom also mentions some great early participatory UGC documentary making by guerillavision. These docs are early examples – albiet more highly edited – of what Kate Nash has called collaborative webdocs. The beauty of editing the UGC is that you can still have an authorial voice and present an argument. Unedited collaborative webdocs suffer from the randomness of the content that is submitted to them. It can’t be ‘massaged’ into any sort of shape, and whether you have a progression of ideas, or 10 people saying the same thing, is entirely whimsical. While it might be valuable to sift through similar statements looking for contrasts and agreements in the style of a categorial argument (Nichols/Nash), it might also be plain boring…. At least to the outsider. Maybe collaborative webdocs are designed for insiders, and then they become a celebration of a community.

Reference

Nash, Kate (2012). ‘Modes of Interactivity: Analysing the webdoc’ Media, Culture & Society, 34(2), 195-210.

audience rules

documentary, Non-Fiction Project, web Comments Off

Jan 192013

In New directions for documentary, a speech delivered to the RIDM Doc Festival and Market in Amsterdam, Brian Newman argues that ‘the model is broken’, because old forms of distribution don’t earn enough income.We now live in an ‘attention economy characterised by overabundance, and where a participatory culture, exemplified by Twitter, vies for consumer attention with heritage media. Documentary makers must learn to leverage participatory culture. They can do this through:

crowd sourcing (community based funding);
go multi-platform;
multiple business models for each platform.

One Millionth Tower – review

documentary, Reviews, web Comments Off

Dec 312012

According to Angela Watercutter on Wired, One Millionth Tower by Katerina Cizek, Mike Robbins + friends:

…was carefully crafted to be watched on the internet. It uses interactive tools to illustrate the Toronto residents’ ideas about how to improve the decaying high-rise in which they live. Powered entirely by HTML5, WebGL, and other open source JavaScript libraries, One Millionth Tower is loaded with photos and information from all over the web, and exists in an online environment that is about as close to three-dimensional as something on a flat screen can get.

“We’ve added an entire new layer to the web and One Millionth Tower is one of the first examples of that,” said Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, the force behind the Popcorn.js toolkit that powers the film. “In the same way we all got really excited when you could highlight a word on a page and create a hyperlink … that’s happening now with film. I think of this as the first real web-made documentary.”

The resulting film is unlike any before it. It can be watched without much interaction, but it’s much more fun to play with it (see “How to Watch This Movie” at right). Some aspects change even without viewer input: For instance, the time of day and weather in the film change based on actual conditions in Toronto….

The interactive movie is chock-full of photos from Flickr, street-views from Google Maps and changing environments fueled by real-time weather data from Yahoo. Everything is triggered by Popcorn.js, which acts like a conductor signaling which instruments play at what times.

This documentary can never be the same on two viewings, no matter how carefully you try to retrace your steps, because the data it pulls in is always evolving. It doesn’t make great use of UGC, but it could, the principle is there. The data being pulled in is quite well integrated too.

So well done them, this may indeed represent a future direction for participatory documentary.

an activist UGC doco

documentary, social media, web Comments Off

Dec 202012

Rise Like Lions: OWS and the Seeds of Revolution (2011) by Scott Noble is a tribute to good editing, as Noble manages to bring together UGC from various sources, captured various ways, and makes it work together.

The approach gives the work a very different, participatory mood. It’s more like a tribute to a movement / community. There is no voiceover, but textual interstices act as segues and extra information, which somehow seem less intrusive. The camerawork was, in the main, filmed ‘on the run’ and illustrates that wobblycam lack of tripod look, however it seems appropriate to the theme. Although presumably all shot on domestic equipment, it doesn’t seem problematic for small screen viewing, and since it appears to be aimed at an internet based audience, its lodef quality doesn’t intrude. Stills have also been effectively incorporated. Truly some genius editing here, pulling it all together.

Some people don’t like the image quality, but for me using UGC and found footage gives this doco an authority it wouldn’t otherwise have.

This is one of the films listed in Films for Action, a great resource for activist documentaries.

[Still from Rise Like Lions by Scott Noble]

the ‘industrialisation’ of electronic media

documentary, media politics, Non-Fiction Project, social media, web Comments Off

Dec 082012

The US movie industry developed into its current form in the 1910′s and 1920′s for a number of reasons – technical, financial, cultural and social. In the USA, it resulted in bodies to control the distribution of ‘sanctioned’ films; a new profession, the film distributor middle-man; the star system (Dominick, p 204-5), and a system of better quality cinemas. As a result, extravagant movie-length features became the norm (Dominick, p 204-5; Demers, p 156), and increased costs led to the consolidation of the industry into iconic Hollywood companies, combining production and distribution.

‘Talkies’, in the late 1920′s, led by Warner Brothers, proved very popular and eventually led to an exponential growth (Dominick 207; Demers p 157). By this time, the motion picture industry was attracting significant negative attention from moral arbiters, with its penchant for ‘sex, crime and violence’ (Demers 156-7).

Meanwhile, radio in the 1920′s was working out how to operate on a commercial basis through on-air advertising (Dominick, p 152). Linking radio stations into networks further reduced production costs. The economic power of the networks were able to attract and pay for star announcers. The success of commercial radio led to Federal regulation and licensing in the US in 1927, ad hybrid partly state supported broadcasting corporations in many Commonwealth nations (Kovarik 217-8):

Thus, by the end of the 1920′s, the framework for modern radio broadcasting was in place. It would be a commercial supported mass media dominated by networks and regulated by an agency of the federal government. ((Dominick, p 153)

Sound and doco

What did technical innovation do to specific genres? Let us take documentary as an example. The first Lumiere ‘documentarie’s (or actualities) were developed as a result of technical advances in cameras and projection (the cinematograph) (Demers p 153). According to Bill Nichols:

In the silent film era, documentary as a mode of representation that offered perspectives on the historical world – sustained by an institutional framework and community of practitioners, and armed with specific conventions corresponding to distinct audience expectations – did not yet exist. (Nichols)

A change of technology eventually led to a significant reconceptualisation of the documentary concept:

…the advent of sound in documentary posed an array of alternatives. These ranged from poetic narratives to evocative portraits and from studio-produced commentary to the actual speech of people in their everyday life. The choices made among these alternatives are part of a larger story of the nature and function of documentary film in the period from the late 1920s to the late 1930s when a dominant mode of expository documentary took hold and became the equivalent of the classic Hollywood mode of production.

Kovarick (p. 151) comments that sound documentaries was particularly good at propaganda. The earliest American talkie documentaries were Pare Lorentz’s U.S. government sponsored films The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937). The use of sound changed the dominant tone of documentary from ‘longings, enchantment, and idylls’ to ‘exhortation, warnings, and proposals’, largely carried by the audio track (Nichols).

Ideas about editing and collage were also revised in the light of sound:

Through the first half of the 1930s, the use of sound took many forms, often furthering the principles of collage through contrapuntal and non-synchronous forms (in The Song of Ceylon (1934), Night Mail (1936), Vertov’s Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Don Basin (1931), Rotha’s Pett and Pott (1934) and Flaherty’s Industrial Britain, produced by John Grierson (1933)). Grierson’s efforts to define and make popular the documentary as an alternative to Hollywood in fact led him to encourage considerable experimentation with sound in the early 1930s. As Lovell and Hillier note, under Grierson the documentary movement became “a laboratory for experiments in the non-naturalistic use of sound.”

Eventually, however, a dominant mode arose within the British documentary movement that took hold in America as well. It concentrated sound into speech and yoked speech to a rhetorical assertion. The speech became known as the voice of God and the assertions became labeled didacticism, or propaganda. It was into this increasingly dominant tradition, which included later British works like Housing Problems (1935) and The Smoke Menace (1937) as well as sound newsreels like The March of Time (1935), that Pare Lorentz stepped when he made his two most famous films. The ethnographic impulse became argumentative rather than observational, as it was to remain in anthropology or in the later work in cinéma verité and cinéma direct. Collage became flattened upon the Procrustean bed of expository logic, in which images serve primarily as illustration for the rhetorical claims of a spoken commentary with its problem-solving bent rather than allowing the potential of images as assembled fragments to attain full force. Collage, sound, and documentary became tamed, placed at the service of sponsors. The sponsors could vary radically in their politics and ambitions (from Stalinism to the New Deal), but their impact everywhere was both to give to documentary a dominant form at the same time as they robbed it of more complex diversity and potential subversiveness. By the late 1930s the coming of sound was complete (if not entirely embraced) and documentary was both richer (in potential) and poorer (in its prevailing practice) for it. (Nichols)

Web 2.0 and doco

If the impact of sound was to embed exposition and propagandistic argument as the dominant mode of documentary for the following 30 or 40 years, what might the impact of the network, with its hyperlinks, granular searchability, interactivity and user-generated content? The Web 1.0 era gave us many interesting documentary experiments, mianly exploring the user of hyperlinks to form non-linear paths and richly designed environments combining rich media with static html pages. In retrospect however, such documentaries did not really reinvent the documentary concept, which has always been a genre typified less by linear narrative than the mounting of arguments whose needs were forced, and indeed, ‘contained’ by linear heritage media, rather than presupposing it.

What seems more important to the documentary form since it was conceived by the industrial era of mass communication is the delivery of some sort of coherent position – conceived argumentatively, politically, or aethetically. Even documentaries in the poetic mode (or essay films) must, perhaps, attain an aesthetic, or perhaps psychological coherence to be successful. Web 2.0, typified by user-generated content and social media, threatens the possibility of such coherence.

The response of documentary makers to the challenge of Web 2.0 has to date been piecemeal. Few, if any, seem to found a way to gracefully incorporate user generated content into arguments, let alone aesthetics. Doing so will surely lead to a revolution in the documentary form. However, incorporating found content into documentary might also change the economics of making documentaries, allowing for the possibility of niche documentaries with small budgets, disseminated freely with, perhaps, sponsorship to underwrite them.

References

Demers, D (2007). History and future of mass media: an integrated perspective. New Jersey: Hampton Press.

Dominick, J R The dynamics of mass communication: media in transition. 11th edition.

Kovarik, B (2011). Revolutions in communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the digital age. New York: Continuum.

Nichols, Bill Documentary and the coming of sound. Filmsound.org: http://www.filmsound.org/film-sound-history/documentary.htm (accessed 7 December 2012)

[Poster for The Jazz Singer (1927)]

Documentary and self-promotion don’t mix

documentary, Reviews, social media Comments Off

Oct 162012

A declaration of interdependence was directed by Tiffany Schlain and is “an exhilarating montage of user-generated videos and graphics, a global mash-up demonstrating the vast potential of creative collaboration in the 21st century”. Part of a series that Schlain and team are creating, she hopes to develop a new form of cloud documentary. Her principles are:

To use the cloud to collaboratively create films with people from all over the world.
To create films about ideas that speak to the most universal qualities of human life, focusing on what connects us, rather than what divides us.
To give back as much as is received, by offering free customized films to organizations around the world to further their message.
To use the cloud to translate films into as many languages as possible.
To push the boundaries of both filmmaking and distribution by combining the newest collaborative tools available online with the potential of all the people in the world.

Interdependence is visually lovely and uplifting, but is it a documentary? And how deep runs the collaboration? Can we say that this is the sort of social media inspired documentary that I’m looking for?

Let us remind ourselves of Renov’s 4 principles for documentary aesthetics:

To record, reveal, or preserve–derived from photographic antecedents, a documentary’s realism, a film-maker’s primary desire to ‘record life as it is’, in Mekas’ words (Renov p 75);
To persuade or promote–to mount an argument in favour of a position on some issue of social or cultural import. State-supported propaganda films are extreme examples of this function;
To express–perhaps the most controversial, a documentary-makers use of aesethics to ‘add value’ to the raw record, thus possibly distorting it;
To analyze or interrogate–perhaps the most overlooked, this function seeks to analyze and question the very record that justifies the doco in the first place (Renov 83).

Interdependence probably achieves the first three, although expression runs amok, and it is easy to lose track of the actual argument. It makes no attempt at the fourth function, but as I’ve said elsewhere, many docos don’t, and Renov sets a high bar. So why am I so suspicious? Yes, I’m feeling conned, and the con goes something like this: I’m a director and going to pretend to give something to the world, but I’m really telling you about me. The message is too slick, too easy and empty. I like the odd idealistic statement, but this time I feel it’s in aid of another message: look at me. The look at me is contained in all the media surrounding the work itself, and the work itself just isn’t enough.

In internet based work in particular, the line between documentary and marketing is becoming so blurry, particularly given the ease with which social media can be made to serve marketing. When I’m talking about using social media in documentary work, I need that use to be much more substantive than marketing.

Schlain invites us to ‘engage’ by

Spread your message: We will create a free customized version of this film for your organization that will have your call to action (completing the sentence “Engage by…”) and your url at the end….
Tell us how you’ll engage: Not part of an organization? We still want to hear your ideas! After watching Engage, share with us the ways you engage in the world around you.
Translate: Help translate Engage [another film in her series] into as many languages as possible!…
Share: Please post, tweet, forward this film to your networks for a positive ripple effect….

Well, OK. But real engagement would be adding your own media, telling your own story. EG, become Youtube etc, and in the process dissolve Schlain’s own authorial voice. Instead, the people that appear in Interdependence are reading her script, and I suspect that she and her team have attempted to recruit for diversity rather than accepted whoever knocked on her virtual door (I might be wrong there but the range of people seem too perfectly diverse. Wouldn’t more Americans have been attracted to participating?).

Am I asking too much? Quite possibly. But if Schlain was a little more modest in her claims I probably wouldn’t feel as affronted. The packaging has drowned the message. What remains is artistry and rhetoric, and a latent auteurism that just won’t fly in the context of social media inspired documentary.

Documentaries shouldn’t be glib. They should be complex and multivocal.

Reference

Renov, M (2004). ‘Lost, Lost, Lost: Mekas as Essayist.’ In The subject of documentary, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 69-89

social media, documentary and #alanjones

documentary, social media Comments Off

Oct 112012

In this continuing exploration of the emergent relationship between social media and documentary, I attempt to taxonomise social media into ways in which it could be used for documentary practice.

Why would we use social media in documentary? Isn’t it full of heresay and slander; rarely authoritative, and generally too brief or informal for any type of evidentiary purpose. We may know next to nothing about the author (who may be using a pseudonym), and its engagement either with the minutiae of daily life, or the passing parade of pop culture make its subject matter either obscure or transitory.

But it is exactly to capture the flavour of lives lived that we would want to appropriate it; not in an attempt to capture and can ‘the ‘truth’, but to harvest a sense of the experience of living in this moment, this place. Social media offers a different sort of ‘truth’ from the primary sources of traditional documentary, and its widespread use would, presumably, result in a different sort of documentary.

Dorothy E Smith wrote about truth in documentary before the social media era. Her dismantling of the sort of truth relied on in traditional, expository, authoritative documentary offers a perspective on the ‘truth’ of social media. She wants to make

…a preliminary treatment of aspects of the social organization of society which are fundamental to how it is ruled, managed and administered…. Our relation to others in our society and beyond it is mediated by the social organization of its ruling. Our “knowledge” is thus ideological in the sense that this social organisation preserves conceptions and means of description which represent the world as it is for those who rule it, rather than as it is for those who are ruled. (p 267)

Even during Web 1.0 we were arguing that the Web was a great equalising and democratising force. Social media appears to be the ultimate democratic expression. But is it? Does it undermine older forms of authority and their truths? If so, how? By erecting a new truth to replace the old? Or is it merely a negative force, critical, but barely constructive? If we want to use social media in documentary contexts, we’d better be able to say why we should.

Smith’s argument is interesting and complex, but for me her most controversial move is her diagram on page 260, which I reproduce here:

The move which I question is the separation ‘social organization of production of account’ and ‘account’. Perhaps the sorts of bureaucratic and institutionalized ‘facts’ that Smith refers to can be seen in this way – an event occurs; it has an identifiable perpetrator, and the retelling of the event is organised around that perpetrator into some neat narrative resulting in actions, outcomes and possibly even morals. Told from the authority’s point of view, such narratives are written, archived, possibly even published in a coherent way with all sorts of unobserved presuppositions about what is important and what not. Such ‘truth narratives’ need a level of orchestration, to ‘get the facts straight’, before the account is actually written.

Compare, for example, a Twitter exchange about a specific topic, or a chat session in a Facebook group. Nobody is orchestrating the content and performance of social media. Sure, people like Mark Zuckerberg are determining the envelope in which things may or may not be said, but within that envelop there is a lot of wriggle room, even if you only have 140 characters. Things get said; they either fade away, or they might get retweeted, favourited and liked, and thus gain a bit more traction. Statements circulate, and a consensus of sorts emerge, if, for example, you follow the debate surrounding a hashtag like #alanjones in the time period of my graph above. The ‘text’ which is the series of tweets using #alanjones has a communal authority which emerges from the conversation, and there is no organisation of the account other than its performance over time, which swells and subsides as events unfold.

The ‘stabilized’ text (p 160) that emerges (ie, the one that gets archived on backup servers) is not seamless and univocal – it may become more so as the controversy dies and consensus emerges, but the evidence of its ‘drafts’ remain. Where Smith worries about the invisibility of the processes and structures that give rise to the final account, in social media those processes and structures are in the text; perhaps, indeed, they are the text.

Social media, in all its guises and daily practices, is surely the greatest archive-in-development that ever there was. It represents a treasure trove of quotidien opinion and pre-occupation. But the ways that social media can act as a primary source are various.

1. What’s trending
My #alanjones example. Via the use of aggregators and automated data-extractors, you can use social media to determine how important a particular topic is on a particular day, and the tenor of the emergent conversation. Even retweets and reblogs are fodder for this type of primary source – while a retweet and a reblog is a curatorial act, and perhaps the lowest form of originality, someone somewhere was interested enough to pres a button, and have that topic permanently affixed to their social record.

2. social reportage
Perhaps the most well-known and respected type of social media primary source, because it has been embraced by heritage media: ordinary people stumbling across an event and capturing it, for example, footage of the 2010 London riots. Such media may be transparently remediated into documentary (copyright notwithstanding). While it may be the most transparent use of user-generated content, as it merely extends the arm of the citizen journalist concept, it is not particularly revolutionary.

3. Confessional social media
Perhaps the hardest social media to quantify and re-appropriate, because it is personal, idiosyncratic and often boasting very amatuer production values, video diaries, instagram-style location based photos, Facebook homepages, and some uses of Twitter can provide documentary makers with insights into the events and opinions in an individual’s life. A documentarian’s interest in using such material is likely to stem from the individual’s bizarre behaviour – the Facebook page they left behind after their suicide, for example, and ethical questions can arise. However, as with Samuel Pepys among others, such diaristic behaviour is historical primary source material par excellence, a rich source of semiotic analysis, and a greatly under-explored archive.

4. Live performance
Documentary makers can incorporate social media into their actual documentary to make it a permanently evolving and up-to-date performance piece. i’m still waiting to see a good example of this.

References

Dorothy E Smith (1974) ‘The Social Construction of Documentary Reality’ Sociological Inquiry Volume: 44, Issue: 4, Publisher: Sage Publications, Inc., Pages: 257-268

[graph by geniwate]

Can participation create professional documentaries?

documentary, Reviews Comments Off

Oct 042012

According to Michael Renov, documentaries display four tendencies or ‘aesthetic functions’. They are:

To record, reveal, or preserve–derived from photographic antecedents, a documentary’s realism, a film-maker’s primary desire to ‘record life as it is’, in Mekas’ words (Renov p 75);
To persuade or promote–to mount an argument in favour of a position on some issue of social or cultural import. State-supported propaganda films are extreme examples of this function;
To express–perhaps the most controversial, a documentary-makers use of aesethics to ‘add value’ to the raw record, thus possibly distorting it;
To analyze or interrogate–perhaps the most overlooked, this function seeks to analyze and question the very record that justifies the doco in the first place (Renov 83).

Different documentaries use different ‘strategies’ to achieve these functions, including, I guess, narrative. I want to analyse two recent documentaries which incorporate social media and see how they stack up against these functions.

18 Days in Egypt (2011-12)

For the first time in history, citizens are recording an actual revolution in real time. Throughout the 18 days of the 2011 uprising–in the year since–and now–Egyptians are filming pivotal events on their cell phones, taking pictures, texting, and facebooking their extraordinary bid for freedom.
Now, “18 Days in Egypt”, the collaborative documentary project, aims to capture the events of the revolution right here… in an interactive documentary website that everyone can access now and into the future.

“18 Days in Egypt” is being powered by GroupStream, an innovative new platform for group storytelling. GroupStream believes the best stories are told together.

Here, at 18DaysinEgypt.com, you will be able to access stories from the revolution in a whole new way. (http://beta.18daysinegypt.com/#/about)

One “permanent” feature about social media documentaries is that they will never be finished (unless they’re archived). So we can’t expect a conclusion from 18 Days, and it is only with great difficulty that a significant introduction can be written, because it would presuppose a specific POV, would be applicable to multifarious and ever-changing content. An even worse handicap for an introduction to a social media documentary is that it must, on its introductory page, perform competing roles – recruit content at the same time as providing access to it.

Therefore we should perhaps be forgive the homepage of 18 Days for being almost free of actual content. Instead, let’s plunge into the individual stories, which seem randomly ordered. The first thing I saw was a series of stills in Egyptian, jokes told during the revolution.

Further stories involve the deaths at a soccer game, a guy who set up a campaign to clean up Tahrir Square, etcetera. Much of it contains interview footage, but little of it is in the first-person confessional voice of “traditional” social media. The content on the site seems mainly to have been produced by budding journalists. Already-published social media becomes a primary source. These budding journalists also incorporate professionally-produced new items that have, whether legally or not, made their way onto Youtube. As such, when unique eye-witness accounts do emerge, they have generally been remediated, and the ‘middle-man’ producer is very much in evidence. It is therefore questionable whether the site’s ideals are being met.

The design and functionality of the site also heavily constrain the style of media produced. Because it is a wysiwyg system designed for people with limited media production skills, many design decisions have been made. The constraints of the wysiwyg system make authorial experimentation somewhat more difficult, and perhaps acts against the more sophisticated self-reflexive intervention that would meet Renov’s fourth function. (It is perhaps a large call placing this function as one of the core functions of documentary – although I agree with Renov, such documentaries tend to be more interesting. Many documentaries fail on this account.)

Of Renov’s two other functions, I would say that 18 Days does a fair job in persuading its audience of its position – a sympathetic reflection on the merits of the 2011 Egyption revolution. All participants support the revolution, although they may lament individual events along the way. Perhaps my lack of Egyptian means I miss the subtleties being expressed.

The variety of style and level of production sophistication within stories, which may themselves consist of several embedded items, make the overall aesthetics difficult. Design inconsistency means that the viewer is always aware of appearances, and the issue can never slip quitely into the background so you can concentrate on the actual content. Meanwhile, the HTML5 design imposed by the system itself tends only to be as good as the skills of indidivudal users. Bad spelling, poor choice of text, poor editing, tends to impede expressivity.

In sum 18 Days:

To record, reveal, or preserve–yes, in spades.
To persuade or promote–this is implicit in the ratinale behind the site is a pro-revolution POV, and it is communicated within the people who have made stories
To express–many different media makers have a hand in this
To analyze or interrogate–perhaps the most overlooked, this function seeks to analyze and question the very record that justifies the doco in the first place (Renov 83)

Insitu (2011)

The main part of this project is an essayistic interactive video which the authors call a ‘city poem’. Situationist in philosophy, it meanders poetically through a range of perspectives on people and urban space, from artists to town planners to activists. As a stand-alone work, this doco has a lot to offer aesthetically and in terms of the intellectual ground it covers. It uses narrative conventions without really creating a narrative arc. It more closely confirms to the idea of an essay film, which Renov characterises as displaying a ‘sense of indeterminancy’ (page 76):

…the works would appear to straddle certain of the antinomies that have defined the boundaries of film scholarship: fiction/nonfiction, documentary/avant-garde, even cinema/video. Frequently, the critical appraisal of the taxonomically unstable film or video work returns to the name of the author …. (page 72)

The video is wonderful, but the interactivity is not, I think, essential to the it – it mainly consists of rollover hotspots which provide added information. Most of the time I can conceive of ways in which this information could be provided in a non-interactive video.

Around the film, an exclusive participatory poetic map of the urban space in Europe and a blog allow the debate to go beyond the film, new practices of the city to exist online and in the city.
It is a new documentary experience for the web (interactive film), the cinema (linear version for festival, cinema and tv) and the mobile (insitu app).
The city resonates.

Participatory work is added to a summary map interface, indicating the location where it was created. The media is mainly photographs related to the location, generally created and uploaded to Insitu via an iphone app. The project is aimed at the inhabitants of European cities, but it is also possible to add content located in other continents, although that content is not mapped.

The user generated content added to the European based map provides a sense of real people in real locations. My qualm, however, concerns its lack of integration with the video. The blog, which no longer appears to be updated, contains articles of relevance to the themes and making of the film, and does not appear to be open to participation.

So, in terms of Renov’s aesthetic functions, does Insitu set a new standard of documentary ‘intervention’ because of its use of social media?

To record, reveal, or preserve–the mobile media/map does do this
To persuade or promote–the mobile media/map doesn’t mount any type of argument, except in the loosest possible of sense – ‘people live in urban space’
To express–the interactive video certainly does this, and some of the participatory media may add to it (for example, the piece from Bogota seems to mount a situationist argument but my Spanish is limited)
To analyze or interrogate–the interactive video is highly theoretically informed and reflective, and backed up with some of the material in the blog. It would appear that many of the participants share a situationist perspective, and as early adopters of technology and media experimenters, we can perhaps assume that they are interrogating the media the use/create. However, the Insitu system (possibly for technological reasons rather than authorial intention) constrains participant media greatly, and therefore limits self-expression. Added to participants’ limited ability to interact with the main product, the interactive video itself, I feel this function needed to be expanded, if we really are to consider the participation to be significant.

Thus, the integration of the social media in the project is its weakness – it’s like the connection between the right and left brain has been cut, and the social and heritage aspects of the project don’t come together.

Insitu is a significant project on many levels. In terms of ideas and aesthetics, it represents a significant step-up from 18 Days. However, it has a different purpose: it does, in main, represent an older, almost auteurial model of film-making, in which the film-maker’s vision is privileged. Unlike in 18 Days, this means that the participatory stuff will always come across as the bonus, rather than the core.

These two projects represent a conundrum that documentary makers will need to face: if we are going to embrace social media and participation, can we create the sort of professional documentaries that can compete with more traditional documentary forms? On the other hand, can professional documentary makers – with their aesethic standards, their desire to present a narrative arc or argument, and their agendas – incorporate participation in a really meaningful way?

Thus the question I posed in the title of this blog entry is not wholly answered by 18 Days and Insitu.

Reference

Renov, M (2004). ‘Lost, Lost, Lost: Mekas as Essayist.’ In The subject of documentary, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 69-89

[Still from Insitu]

done and dusted

Creative, documentary, Identity and community, This working life, Transient Spaces Comments Off

May 122012

My documentary, Cyclists versus Motorists, has gone live. As usual, I never thought it would take so long. My problem with projects is that I can’t stand doing what I know how to do. I have to try something new. Well, the new thing was the focus on video — I’m not really a video person. Or that used to be the case. But then the new thing about the new thing was I thought I should look into interactive video. Hence, the use of korsakow. I also looked at Popcorn and Klynt. What I wanted to do was combine Twitter with video. You can sort-of do it with Popcorn, but it doesn’t seem to me that it is much better than sticking the vid and the Twitter widget in ordinary old HTML. Now Popcorn is just developing, and combining vids and social media isn’t its only trick, but I do feel there’s a little bit on inventing a new circle going on (and calling it HTML 5). But hey, I’m old.

Other principles that I’ve tried to put into practice are

the use of domestic technology — all the imagery and some of the audio was created using my mobile phone, I used free of very cheap editing software, and the only semi-professional thing I used was a zoom audio recorder.
use of social media – both to recruit talent, disseminate the doco, and encourage participation
A focus on the community. Apart from above, I tried not to editorialise. I wanted the interviewees to speak for themselves.

You can read more about these principles, and how to make your own participatory documentary.