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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.

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]

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

3 reasons to use social media

Contemporary Media Work Practices, Networked Media Comments Off

Oct 132012

Do you have

a deep desire to connect with other people in a positive way?
a heart for justice or a desire to improve things?
a profound love of creativity?

In which case,welcome to the social media club! It’s where you belong, according to 3 Steps to Living an Authentic Life Online : @ProBlogger.

Yes, it’s idealistic stuff. And yes, there are plenty of marketers who renounce those ambitions to make a buck. But I truly hope that there will always be enough quality social media with some integrity to save it from the marketing wasteland. Sometimes I mourn the passing of a Web in which marketing was difficult.

I wish I had a blanket Marketing filter. Of course the difficulty is that my friends and follows so often fall into the trap of thinking they’re participating when all they are doing is RTing someone’s marketing. Very clever of the marketers, of course, but the quickest way for me to stop following you.

[idealistic by kygp, on http://www.flickr.com/photos/kygp/2628433299. Post written for Networked Media and CMWP, courses at RMIT University.]

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]

5 rules for being a media professional

Contemporary Media Work Practices, Networked Media, This working life Comments Off

Oct 082012

In the era of user-generated content, what does it mean to be professional? There is so much fantastic UGC, it shouldn’t be about whether you get paid or not. And you can’t rely on the quality of your gear to answer the question, either, as Phil Rhodes argues:

Few people will shoot their childrens’ birthday party with an F65, and it’s unlikely that the next superhero blockbuster will be shot on a Canon 5D. But there’s now a huge middle ground, bigger than ever before, in which it’s not inconceivable that cameras like the C300 might end up on anything from low-budget shorts to much wealthier TV shows, documentaries, corporates, features, wedding videos, or almost any genre you could name.(RedShark)

Here are some first ideas on redefining professionalism:

Professionals complete what they have committed to.
Professionals maintain a consistent style and quality.
Professionals take ownership of their work.
Professionals understand the importance of drafting and editing.
Professionals are always expanding their horizons.

Portrait by Andy Newman explores what ‘professional’ means in the context of contemporary photography. It’s a beautifully shot traditional little vid doco, but the editing is a little jarring.

Some reflections from Andria Lindquist:

I think one of the things with being creative is just the willingness to try things out, and see what it looks like afterwards….also, go with your gut and be confident about it.

The things that I am most proud of are my drive and my consistency.

Whether you’re doing it with your phone or your doing it with a 3000-dollar camera, it [needs to] change the way you look at things….being a professional photographer happens when its in every aspect of your life. It is the means for your living, not just in a monetary sense, its carried through in every day, and everywhere you go, you’re a photographer and that’s who you are.

Saying what you want is not something that people do, and I fail at it all the time but I try to do it.

You have to protect yourself from being spread too thin because then you don’t have the same drive and passion to go with your full heart on something.

Some reflections from Cory Staudacher:

Anything that I want to put out, I’ve thought about it, I’ve refined it. Like, this is quality enough for me personally that I’m going to share it. People love consistency …

A lot of people stop from starting because of fear of failing.

[Post written for Networked Media and CMWP, courses at RMIT University]

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]

defining documentary

documentary, social media Comments Off

Sep 242012

Just what is a documentary? According to Vaughan, the documentary response

…is one in which the image is perceived as signfiying what it appears to record; a documentary film is one which seeks, by whatever means, to elicit this response; and the documentary movement is the history of the strategies which have been adopted to this end.” (Vaughan p58)

The devil is in the detail, as he goes on to explain – in particular, the onus is on the viewer to decide. I don’t mind that, but what I want to explore is what types of media this definition lets through the gate.

Just about everything?

Everything published on Cowbird, whose mandate is

The basic idea of Cowbird is to tell short stories based on your personal experience.

That’s OK, but what about every act of confessional social media, no matter how disorganised, structured and random?

What I find surprising about Vaughan’s definition is that it leaves out the element of narrative. It’s a stampede as every form of non-fiction, including an essay, for example, gets through the gate. Surely others attempting a definition want to say something about narrative?

Presumably many hands were involved in this anonymous Wikipedia definition:

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record.

Karina Wilson proposes something that more meets my expectation:

Documentary texts are supposedly those which aim to document reality, attempting veracity in their depiction of people, places and events. However, the process of mediation means that this is something of a oxymoron, it being impossible to re-present reality without constructing a narrative that may be fictional in places.

Narrative structure of some sort may be essential for something to be a documentary. This can be as loose as a progression of ideas, which commences with some sort of introduction, and ends in a non-random way. But if those ideas remain completely disorganised, with no suggestion of a navigational path at least some of the time – then it doesn’t make the cut.

What I’m trying to do is rule out disorganised non-fiction social media as documentary. It places projects such as 18 Days in Egypt and Insitu in a contentious position, and that’s what I want to needle away at (some time soon).

Reference

Vaughan, Dai (1999) ‘The Aesthetics of ambiguity’ in For Documentary: twelve essays. Berkeley: Univ. California Press, pp. 54-83

[Image: "Gate" by fauxto_digit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fauxto_dkp/2960164980/]

the paradoxical soul of social media

documentary, social media Comments Off

Sep 192012

In her video diary Video Diary 1: Towels Over My Windows, PinkBarbieDolly talks about her migraines. It has been viewed nearly 42000 times. It’s just one tiny example of how social media is being used, neither the most, nor the least interesting. A girl telling her story. She plays quite well to the camera. Too well? Is she really real?

Social media has become infinite – not only is the amount of activity humanly unquantifiable, but the content published and the media types harnessed within it are as varied as humanity itself. Although each platform has parameters and limitations, our ability to repurpose, recombine, embed, remix and link, through and between many different social media applications, means that most forms of media (with the exception of long-format text) can be communicated this way.

But there is one core facet of social media that can never be traded, remixed, mashed up or curated away – not without large costs, anyway. There is an assumption that we implicitly rely upon when we look at other people’s social media, a foundation which, when it is questioned, feels something like a betrayal: the authorial reality of the social author. Unlike any form of traditional professional publishing, the ‘chain of custody’ between text and writer must have no gaps – no actor, no editor, no publisher, not even a second opinion. We want to believe that the alleged publisher is the author, and that the author, if they are writing non-fictionally, are writing about their own experience or opinions. It’s a non-negotiable.

Every writer is also an editor, even if all the editing happens before the text gets actually inscribed. However, PinkBarbieDolly does more than edit what she says in her head. She’s cutting her vids before they are uploaded. She does it reasonably well. Not to mention, she’s carefully made up and performing for the video. The room is interestingly non-descript. When we write in social media – or anything else – we assume a character of sorts. We might have a specific interest that we’re going to dedicate our blog to. We might have some cause we’re going to market through Twitter. On Flickr, maybe we’re only going to upload photos taken with our Canon. We might be sending a postcard to our aunt. Whatever, we’re playing to our audience, and that’s OK. It’s still the real you.

But does PinkbarbieDolly play too well to the camera?

Do you have to be naive to be real?

Or does our media saturated age mean that we all instinctually know how to perform?

Phil Gyford made versions of Samuel Pepys’ diary for WordPress and Twitter. These texts have been edited, published, re-mixed and everything you can think of to get them to where they are today. It is doubtful that Pepys is aware of it, although it is, to some extent, Pepys’ text. But we can’t read Pepys-in-social-media niavely, and it becomes a clever consensual joke, and a probe into the limits of social media. We don’t care about the reality question. (Another exception: the consensual hallucinations of pornography lovers.)

But usually, it seems, we do. We really don’t like acting on social media. Lonelygirl15, a serial web video diary which fooled the Youtube world, made us feel betrayed. We cared for Lonelygirl15. She was personable, and we shared her pain and triumphs as if she were our friend.

We can have a similar relationship with characters in long-running soap operas, and indeed, some soap opera stars find themselves not being able to step out of character when they are in public, despite their best intentions. Their audience won’t allow them to. But there is a core ontological difference between a soap opera character and the Lonelygirl15. She is consciously working against our assumption that she is honestly representing her life. That assumption is enshrined in the core of social media.

Social media is more like reality tv, whose ultimate promise is that ‘you-will-get-to-know-how-this-person-ticks’. But reality tv is produced and edited by other people. The protagonists are manipulated into scenarios beyond their own control. Thus do we get to know their secrets. On social media, we choose what to reveal and what to disclose. These choices are made with a greater or lesser degree of niavety, but they are made us, and so the integrity – the chain of authorial custody – remains.

Definition of REFERENT
one that refers or is referred to; especially : the thing that a symbol (as a word or sign) stands for. Merriam Webster[3]

The referent in social media is not really the object referred to, it is the author. The author is always the object under discussion, regardless of his or her actual topic. I can tell my Twitter followers that I liked Batman: Dark Knight Rises, but what I’m stressing is the I (the subject) in that statement, not the object.

To betray the implied nexus between you, the real human viewer, and you, the real human author is to betray the whole economy of social media. People don’t act when they view social media, do they? The honesty has to work both ways.

The ambiguity in the term ‘referent’ makes it unusable for my purposes. I’m going to call it authorial indexicality. My neology is inspired by Bazin on the indexical quality of photographic and cinematographic imagery:

In traditional photography, there is a literal, cause-and-effect, point-for-point relationship between the object that stands before the lens, and the image that is inscribed on the photographic plate by light reflected off that object. The mechanistic nature of the camera eliminates any imposition of the artist’s hand: “for the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man” (2004: 13). Bazin bases his entire “ontology of the photographic image” (2004: 9–16) on its “essentially objective character. . . . In spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before
us. . . . Photography enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction” (2004: 13–14). (Bazin, quoted by Shaviro, pg 64)

I want to try to repurpose the authorial indexicality of social media: I want curate these strangers telling their stories into other, bigger stories that join dots between individuals. What will happen to authorial indexicality in such a documentary? I don’t know, but hopefully the aura of the original will still haunt the work.

References
Shaviro, STEVEN ‘Emotion Capture: Affect in Digital Film’ Projections Volume 1, Issue 2, Winter 2007: 63-82 © Berghahn Journals (http://www.dhalgren.com/Othertexts/EmotionCapture.pdf)

Bazin, Andre´. [1946–1957] 2004. What Is Cinema? Vol. 1. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

[Image from PinkBarbieDolly Video Diary 1: Towels Over My Windows]