Studies In Documentary Film: Volume: 2 | Issue: 1

Volume 2 Number 1 – 2008 3–7

Editorial The field of digital documentary: a challenge to documentary theorists Craig Hight Articles

9–31

Primetime digital documentary animation: the photographic and graphic within play Craig Hight

33–45

In and out of this world: digital video and the aesthetics of realism in the new hybrid documentary Ohad Landesman

47–59

Digital video and Alexandre Astruc’s caméra-stylo: the new avant-garde in documentary realized? Bjorn Sorenssen

61–78

Documentary expression online: The Wrong Crowd, a history documentary for an ‘electrate’ audience Debra Beattie

79–98

Undisclosed Recipients: documentary in an era of digital convergence Sharon Lin Tay

79–98

Undisclosed Recipients: database documentaries and the Internet Dale Hudson

SDF 2.1_cover.indd 1

Studies in Documentary Film gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Monash University Publications Grants Committee

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2.1 Studies in

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intellect Journals | Film Studies

ISSN 1750-3280

ISSN 1750-3280

Volume Two Number One

Documentary Film

Studies in Documentary Film | Volume Two Number One

Studies in

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Studies in Documentary Film Volume 2 Number 1 2008 The scope of Studies in Documentary Film (SDF )

Journal Editor

Studies in Documentary Film is a new refereed scholarly journal devoted to the history, theory, criticism and practice of documentary film. This journal will enable a considered approach to international documentary film history, theory, criticism and practice serving a vibrant and growing international community of documentary film scholars. The journal published articles and reviews, in English, from researchers throughout the world seeking to broaden the field of documentary film scholarship. Some of the topics proposed include; New approaches to documentary history; New developments in documentary theory; New technologies in documentary film; International trends in documentary film practice; Formal innovation in documentary film modes; Intersections of documentary practice and theory; Critical accounts of national documentary movements (particularly largely ignored cinemas); Documentary auteurs; Political documentary; Critical writing on new documentary films. Prospective guest editors may approach the editor with a proposal for a themed issue or series. Prospective book reviewers and publishers should approach the Reviews Editor directly.

Deane Williams

Editorial Board

Associate Editors

Ian Aitken – Hong Kong Baptist University Moinak Biswas – Jadavpur University West Bengal John Corner – University of Liverpool Nick Deocampo – Mowelfund Film Institute Phillipines Annie Goldson – University of Auckland Helen Grace – Chinese University of Hong Kong John Hughes – Melbourne Bert Hogenkamp – Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision Fernão P. Ramos – State University of Campinas Brazil Keyan Tomaselli – University of KwaZulu-Maal, Durban Lee Daw Ming – National University of the Arts Taiwan Xinyu Lu – Fudan University, China Michael Renov – (USC) Jane Roscoe – SBS Sydney Janet Walker – University of California Santa Barbara Wu Wenguang – China

Advisory Board

Film and Television Studies School of English Communications and Performance Studies Monash University Building 11A Clayton Campus Wellington Road Clayton 3800 Melbourne, Australia Tel: +61 (3) 9905-4226 E-mail: [email protected]

Editorial Assistant Sally Wilson

E-mail: [email protected]

Derek Paget Reading University UK

Abé Mark Nornes University of Michigan

Book Reviews Editor Helen Grace Professor Department of Cultural and Religious Studies Hui Yeung Shing Building, Chung Chi College The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong Tel: (852) 2609-6623 E-mail: [email protected]

Chris Berry Goldsmiths – College University of London Ib Bondebjerg – University of Copenhagen Stella Bruzzi – Royal Holloway University of London Steve Lipkin – I Western Michigan University Sheila Schvarzman – State University of Campinas Brazil Belinda Smaill – Monash University Diane Waldman – University of Denver Charles Wolf – University of California, Santa Barbara Studies in Documentary Film is published three times per year by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK. The current subscription rates are £33 (personal) and £210 (institutional). Postage within the UK is free whereas it is £9 within the EU and £12 elsewhere. Advertising enquiries should be addressed to: [email protected] © 2008 Intellect Ltd. Authorisation to photocopy items for internal or personal use or the internal or personal use of specific clients is granted by Intellect Ltd for libraries and other users registered with the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) in the UK or the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) Transactional Reporting Service in the USA provided that the base fee is paid directly to the relevant organisation.

ISSN 1750–3280

Printed and bound in Great Britain by 4edge, UK.

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Notes for Contributors General Articles submitted to Studies in Documentary Film should be original and not under consideration by any other publication. They should be written in a clear and concise style. Language The journal uses standard British English. The Editors reserve the right to alter usage to these ends. Referees Studies in Documentary Film is a refereed journal. Strict anonymity is accorded to both authors and referees. Opinion The views expressed in Studies in Documentary Film are those of the authors, and do not necessarily coincide with those of the Editors or the Editorial or Advisory Boards. Submission • Submit the article as an email attachment in Word or in Rich Text Format. • Your article should not normally exceed 8,000 words (excluding ‘Notes’), but longer pieces of up to 10,000 words may be considered. • Include an article abstract of 150–200 words; this will go onto the Intellect website. • Include a short biography in the third person, which will be included in the journal issue. Please also give your contact details, and an email address, if you wish. • Provide up to six keywords for Indexing and abstracting services. • Place these items at the beginning of your file, with the headings ‘Abstract’, ‘Contributor’s Details’, and ‘Keywords’. Presentation • The title of your article should be in bold at the beginning of the file, without inverted commas. • The text, including the notes, should be in Times New Roman 12 point. • The text, including the endnotes, must be double-spaced. • The text should have at least 2.5 cm margins for annotation by the editorial team. • You may send the text justified or unjustified. • You may, if you wish, break up your text with sub-titles, which should be set in ordinary text and bold, not ‘all caps’. Quotations • Quotations must be in English. For reasons of space we cannot publish the original text. • Quotations must be within single inverted commas. Material quoted within cited text should be in double inverted commas.

• Quotations must be within the body of the text unless they exceed approximately four lines of your text. In this case, they should be separated from the body of the text and indented. • Omitted material should be signalled thus: [...]. Note that there are no spaces between the suspension points. • Avoid breaking up quotations with an insertion, for example: ‘This approach to mise-en-scène’, says MacPherson, ‘is not sufficiently elaborated’ (MacPherson 1998: 33). References • The first mention of a film in the article (except if it is in the title) should include its original title, the director’s surname (not Christian name), and the year of release, thus: The Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom, Vertov, 1929). In all subsequent references the title should be translated into English, unless the film is known in all markets by its original title, for example San Soleil • We use the Harvard system for bibliographical references. This means that all quotations must be followed by the name of the author, the date of the publication, and the pagination, thus: (Walker 2005: 15). PLEASE DO NOT use ‘(ibid.)’. Note that the punctuation should always FOLLOW the reference within brackets, whether a quotation is within the text or an indented quotation. • Your references refer the reader to a bibliography at the end of the article, before the endnotes. The heading should be ‘Works Cited’. List the items alphabetically. Here are examples of the most likely cases: Anon. (1931), ‘Stalin i kino’, Pravda, 28 January 1931. Aitken, I. (1989), ‘John Grierson, Idealism and the Inter-war Period, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 9.3, pp. 247–258. Corner, John. (1996), The Art of Record: A Critical Introduction to Documentary, Manchester: Manchester UP. Youngblood, Denise. (1991a), Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918–1935, Austin: University of Texas Press. — (1991b) “History” on Film: the historical Melodrama in Early Soviet Cinema’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 11: 2, pp. 173–184. Dermody, Susan. (1995), ‘The Pressure of the Unconscious Upon the Image: The Subjective Voice in Documentary’, in Leslie Devereaux and Roger Hillman (eds) Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology and Photography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California P, pp. 292–310.

• ‘Anon.’ for items for which you do not have an author (because all items must be referenced with an author within the text) • year date of publication in brackets • commas, not full stops, between parts of item • absence of ‘in’ after the title of a chapter within a monograph, but please use ‘in’ after chapters in edited volumes • name of translator of a book within brackets after title and preceded by ‘trans.’, not ‘transl.’ or ‘translated by’ • absence of ‘no.’ for the journal number • colon between journal volume and number • ‘p.’ or ‘pp.’ before page extents Web references These are no different from other references; they must have an author, and that author must be referenced Harvardstyle within the text. Unlike paper references, however, web pages can change, so we need a date of access as well as the full web reference. In the list of references at the end of your article, the item should read something like this: Collins, F. (2006), ‘Memory in Ruins; the Woman Filmmaker in her Father’s Cinema, http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/ firstrelease/fr1201/fcfr13a.htm Accessed 3 December 2006. Notes Notes appear at the side of appropriate pages, but the numerical sequence runs throughout the article. Notes should be kept to a minimum. In general, if something is worth saying, it is worth saying in the text itself. A note will divert the reader’s attention away from your argument. If you think a note is necessary, make it as brief and to the point as possible. Use Word’s note-making facility, and ensure that your notes are endnotes, not footnotes. Place note calls outside the punctuation, so AFTER the comma or the full stop. The note call must be in superscripted Arabic (1, 2, 3). Illustrations Articles may be accompanied by images. It is the author’s responsibility to supply images and ensure they are copyright cleared. Images should be scanned at 300 dpi resolution, saved as tiff files, and sent electronically to the Editor at [email protected]. Do NOT insert images into a word document. Please ensure you insert a figure number at the appropriate position in the text, together with a caption and acknowledgement to the copyright holder or source. Transliteration We follow the Library of Congress transliteration, using a straight apostrophe: for the soft sing and a curly inverted comma ‘as apostrophe and for quotations.

Any matters concerning the format and presentation of articles not covered by the above notes should be addressed to the Editor. The guidance on this page is by no means comprehensive: it must be read in conjunction with Intellect Notes for Contributors. These notes can be referred to by contributors to any of Intellect’s journals, and so are, in turn, not sufficient; contributors will also need to refer to the guidance such as this given for each specific journal. Intellect Notes for Contributors is obtainable from www.intellectbooks.com/journals, or on request from the Editor of this journal.

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Studies in Documentary Film Volume 2 Number 1 © 2008 Intellect Ltd Editorial. English language. doi: 10.1386/sdf.2.1.3/2

The field of digital documentary: a challenge to documentary theorists Craig Hight University of Waikato Documentary has always responded, in an often dynamic fashion, to the possibilities afforded by new technologies. The adoption of portable camera and sound equipment, for example, gave documentary film-makers the means to experiment with innovative approaches to capturing the socialhistorical world, helped to reinvigorate interest in the genre amongst a new generation of practitioners and reintroduced its potential to audiences. The relationship between documentary and digital technologies, however, offers the potential for a far more extensive and permanent transformation of fundamental aspects of documentary culture. The possible changes are many and varied. They involve a transformation of the very materiality of texts themselves, as their constituent elements are transposed into computer files able to be easily accessed, distributed, combined and manipulated for a variety of ends. Those who we might refer to as following “conventional” documentary forms are increasingly experimenting with digital-based means of capturing footage and a new palette of post-production techniques, resulting in the stretching of familiar documentary modes of representation into new directions. The production base of documentary culture itself is broadening as digital platforms foster far more direct, if not yet fully democratic, forms of participation, especially from the ranks of groups we might have previously consigned to the relatively ‘passive’ role of audience members. Both professional and amateur film-makers are also exploiting the varieties of forms of interactive, crossplatform engagement through DVD and the World Wide Web, as well as using these media as new avenues for distribution of more conventional documentary texts. All of these developments can, somewhat clumsily at this stage, be grouped under the label of ‘digital documentary’. Collectively, they offer the potential to change the nature of documentary practices, aesthetics, forms of political engagement and the wider relationship of documentary culture as a whole to the social-historical world. Such a shift poses a considerable challenge to documentary theory, which has emerged in discussion around a canon of cinematic and, to a lesser extent, television texts produced from a relatively well-understood collection of audio-visual technologies. If we return to Bill Nichols’s well-known three-part definition of documentary (Nichols 1991) – involving a community of practitioners within a particular institutional context, familiar modes of documentary representation and a set of assumptions and expectations of audiences – it is possible to argue that the digital transformation of each part of this definition suggests a radical shift in the basis of documentary culture. SDF 2 (1) pp. 3–7 © Intellect Ltd 2008

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It is very easy to fall in line with technological determinists and proclaim a ‘digital revolution’, with its suggestion of a collapse of the existing regimes of documentary discourse and practice, which are now to be fractured into a myriad of forms that we will struggle to label as ‘documentary’. However, a much more useful approach is to adopt Lister’s suggestion that when considering the impact of the digital we make a distinction between the continuities of cultural forms and discourses and their divergence across media platforms. Instead of deriving wider speculations based simply on shifts in technology, it is necessary to consider such changes within a wider framework of ‘continuities and transformations’ (Lister 2000: 322), involving a focus on the cultural meanings central to each. It is also useful here to draw upon Bolter and Grusin’s notion of ‘remediation’ as an initial framework for conceptualizing the relationships between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media – they focus on the tendency toward twoway patterns in the appropriation of cultural forms. At this early stage it is possible to delineate two broad dynamics at play within this emerging field of digital documentary. These overlap and inform each other, collectively transforming the technological basis of documentary practice even as they reinforce and expand the significance of documentary as a cultural form. First there is the integration of digital technologies within conventional documentary practice, a process containing the potential to reshape the production, post-production and distribution of film and television documentary (just as the development of the technologies of these media drew upon and reshaped earlier documentary photography practices). The second dynamic is the appropriation by digital platforms of aspects of documentary’s discourse and aesthetics, refashioning these especially within more participatory online cultures. Here we see both the convergence of documentary forms with other ways of conveying meaning and a divergence as ‘splinters’ of documentary modes familiar from ‘analogue’ media emerge within new digital contexts. There are multiple opportunities for documentary researchers within this wider spectrum of continuities and transformation. The manner in which digital technologies are increasingly incorporated into ‘conventional’ documentary practice ranges from the increasing use of digital camcorders and other mobile devices as the main means of gaining footage, to the reliance on desktop-based (or mobile, laptop-based) digital non-linear editing systems. These developments draw upon wider trends within visual culture, not least the continuing spread and domestication of the means to document and capture aspects of the social-historical world. Devices such as webcams, phonecams, amateur camcorders and other means of visual surveillance are all drawn upon within contemporary documentary, which has expanded to include not only regimes of institutionalized surveillance but also more personalized forms of expression and surveillance. The emergence of films such as Jonathan Cauoette’s oft-cited and celebrated Tarnation (2003), for example, can be used to suggest both a further democratization of the means of production and an increasing emphasis on the autobiographical. The implications of a reliance on non-linear editing practices is difficult to predict, but here also there are profound possibilities. The full range of montage and editing techniques are converted by computer software 4

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programmes such as iMovie into an easy process of the ‘drop-down’ selection of special effects. Cauoette’s extensive play with the built-in functions of iMovie, for example, are central to Tarnation’s kaleidoscopic aesthetic, including its full exploration of caption presets. Just as the possibilities of word processing have altered writing practices, and perhaps the craft of writing as a conceptual exercise, will such readily available editing software lead to similar fundamental changes in the nature of the (documentary) film-making process? For example, what effect on film-making practice will follow from the inclusion within iMovie of a preset selection for something that is labelled the ‘Ken Burns effect’, which mimics that director’s trademark panning of photographic material as a central device for the construction of historical narrative? Digital theorists have noted the possibilities that derive from the ability of desktop computer software to merge existing traditions of photography, information design (especially typographic and graphic design), and the varieties of moving image production (Lister 2000: 305) into an expanded palette for motion graphics. The result, argues Manovich, is a distinctive ‘hybrid, intricate, complex and rich visual language’ (Manovich 2006: 11), one that is becoming more and more accessible to amateur media producers. A transformation is already complete in the area of documentary distribution. The emergence of Digital Versatile Disc (or Digital Video Disk, or DVD) as a medium has allowed for the rise of specialist distributors such as docurama.com catering to new domestic markets for conventional documentary texts. DVD is a platform that also has the potential to construct a variety of frames for documentary texts, as background, ‘making of ’ and update materials included as DVD ‘extras’ provide an insight into the nature of documentary practice employed by film-makers and television producers (Hight 2005). A documentary is potentially ‘reframed’ by these new layers of information that might previously have appeared as separate, extra-textual prompts for audience encounters with a documentary. The two-disc DVD release of Capturing the Friedmans (2003) suggests the possibilities for reframing, as the discs’ extras problematize the argument of the documentary text itself by including alternative forms of evidence and the dissenting responses of participants in the documentary. One wider potential for the DVD medium, then, appears to be the fostering of reflexive perspectives toward mainstream documentary practice as a whole. The possibilities for online distribution are also considerable. We can access downloads of complete documentary films1 or the institutional spaces for documentary shorts ranging from the video diary approach of the BBC’s Video Nation,2 to the four-minute allowance of Channel 4’s FourDocs3). The World Wide Web creates opportunities for the distribution of independent documentary productions, such as those of Robert Greenwald,4 or the widely-known 9/11 conspiracy film Loose Change,5 not to mention the proliferation of user-created material that often conform quite loosely to the documentary project available on Web 2.06 sites such as YouTube and MySpace. The explosion of such content reinforces a kind of ‘YouTube’ aesthetic; amateur footage, edited on a desktop, intended almost as throwaway pieces of culture, often produced as a direct response to other online material. This kind of online environment provides for both The field of digital documentary: a challenge to documentary theorists

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1. Such as http://www. documentary-film.net/ 2. Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/ videonation/ 3. Available at http://www.channel4. com/fourdocs/ 4. Available at http://www. robertgreenwald. org/ 5. Available at http://loosechange911. com/ 6. O’Reilly offers a definition of Web 2.0 at T. O’Reilly (2005), ‘What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models of the Next Generation of Software’, available at http://www. oreillynet.com/pub/a/ oreilly/tim/news/ 2005/09/30/ what-is-web-20.html Accessed 11 November 2006.

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the flowering of the work of new documentary auteurs, and also their swamping within an ocean of more mediocre offerings. The World Wide Web also fosters new digital forms of media that incorporate and transform elements of documentary aesthetics, and occasionally conform to the documentary project, such as webcams (Hight 2001) and forms of websites that operate within a documentary frame. Further afield within digital media are computer games that draw upon archival material as forms of evidence, focus on the reconstruction of historical events or claim to provide a simulation of social-historical experience. Computer games, DVD and online sites all allow for the exploration of spatial metaphors for the presentation of referents to the social-historical, a radical departure from the norms of continuity and evidentiary editing that are central to an analogue-based ‘commonsense’ appreciation of documentary form. Such developments pose their own challenges to documentary theory. How does the creation of pathways through databasecentred content relate to the creation of narrative and argument that are of such central concern to documentary practice? Ultimately, the encounter with digital documentary texts contains the challenge for documentary theorists to revisit, reconceptualize and clarify those things that make ‘documentary’ distinctive from other kinds of symbolic forms. The challenge is ultimately to either redefine ‘documentary’ itself or abandon a collective term in favour of identifying a number of distinct practices that overlap the digital and analogue, moving and still image, photographic and graphic, two- and three-dimensional, and distinct practices of engagement centred on a clearly-defined continuum of interactivity and participation. The pieces in this special issue offer specific sites within this broad field of ‘digital documentary’, with each contributor theorizing the intersection of documentary and the digital within specific texts across quite different media. Craig Hight discusses key patterns in the use of digital-based animation within primetime television documentary series, identifying three key animation ‘modes’ and the implications they pose to television documentary practice and aesthetics. Ohad Landesman explores the challenges that the aesthetic of digital video (DV) poses to discourses of documentary realism when used in cinematic hybrids such as Michael Winterbottom’s In This World (2002), Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten (2002) and Hany Abu-Assad’s Ford Transit (2002). Bjørn Sørenssen uses the short films of YouTube user ‘Geriatric1927’ as a key case study to discuss recent advances in amateur digital-based audio-visual production. He positions the explosion of online amateur videography within a historical perspective informed by Alexandre Astruc’s much earlier observations on the emergence of a consumer base for portable film technologies. Debra Beattie builds from her own experience as a digital practitioner, discussing the issues that arise from the use of Quicktime virtual reality reconstructions and nonlinear narrative in the production of her 2003 online documentary The Wrong Crowd. And finally, Dale Hudson and Sharon Lin Tay offer complementary commentaries on digital pieces from the 2007 online exhibit ‘Undisclosed Recipients’. Tay explores the implications for documentary representation of the digital mediations at the heart of Michael Takeo 6

Craig Hight

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Magruder’s {transcription} and [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004] and Christina McPhee’s La Conchita mon amour. Hudson, in turn, considers the possibilities for plural meanings and forms of engagement offered by the database documentaries Eduardo Navas’s Goobalization and the collaborative work Permanent Transit: net.remix. References Bolter, J.D. and Grusin, R. (2000), Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hight, C. (2001), ‘Webcam sites: the documentary genre moves online?’, Media International Australia, 100, pp. 81–93. —— (2005), ‘Making-of Documentaries on DVD: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and Special Editions’, Velvet Light Trap, 56, pp. 4–17. Lister, M. (2000), ‘Photography in the age of electronic imaging’, in L. Wells (ed.), Photography: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edition, London: Routledge, pp. 305–47. Manovich, L. (2006), ‘After Effects or The Velvet Revolution’, Millennium Film Journal, 45/46, pp. 5–19. Nichols, B. (1991), Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Suggested citation Hight, C. (2008), ‘The field of digital documentary: a challenge to documentary theorists’, Studies in Documentary Film 2: 1, pp. 3–7, doi: 10.1386/sdf.2.1.3/2.

Contributor details Dr Craig Hight is a senior lecturer with the Screen and Media Studies Department at the University of Waikato. His research interests focus on documentary theory, including aspects of the production, construction and reception of documentary hybrids and the relationship of digital media technologies to documentary practice. With Dr Jane Roscoe he has co-written a book on mockumentary entitled Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality (Manchester University Press, 2001). He is currently writing a book on television mockumentary series. Contact: Screen and Media Studies Department, University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand 3240. E-mail: [email protected]

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Studies in Documentary Film Volume 2 Number 1 © 2008 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sdf.2.1.9/1

Primetime digital documentary animation: the photographic and graphic within play Craig Hight University of Waikato Abstract

Keywords

The increased use of digital-based animation techniques within primetime television documentary series needs to be viewed in the context of a number of challenges to the documentary genre emerging from a more competitive television broadcasting environment. Since the 1990s television producers looking for a more cinematic and popular aesthetic have integrated computer-media imaging (CMI) and computergenerated imaging (CGI) into documentary practice, layered into a text either in-frame or in-sequence. Patterns in the ways these animation techniques have been used can be grouped into three key modes: ‘symbolic expositional’, ‘graphic vérité’ and ‘invasive surveillance’. The development of these modes has expanded the means of (television) documentary representation, and been closely associated with the emergence of more playful and layered mediations of social and historical knowledge.

documentary animation computer-mediated imaging computer-generated imaging photorealism evidentiary layering

Both animation and documentary are notoriously difficult to define. A working definition of animation could be ‘the artificial creation of the illusion of movement in inanimate lines and forms’ (Wells 1997: 10). This is a definition that, as Wells suggests, is both broad enough to cover the myriad of techniques employed by animators and yet inadequate to precisely identify where animation sits within the full spectrum of audio-visual forms. As a set of techniques, animation has long been incorporated into documentary culture. The avant-garde and short-film realms have more frequently been a site for exploration and experimentation in documentary animation while mainstream cinema and television have tended to use these techniques in a number of quite formulaic ways. A full account of documentary animation within documentary as a whole could begin as early as Eadweard Muybridge’s experiments in animated sequences of photographic stills, and offer a trajectory that includes the influential avant-garde work of Dziga Vertov’s Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera) (Vertov, 1929), the more formulaic use of animation in examples such as Frank Capra’s Why We Fight (Capra, 1943–45), through to contemporary examples such as the satiric historical narrative cartoon of US gun culture in Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (Moore, 2002). The nature of this intersection between animation and documentary suffers from the relative neglect of both documentary and animation

SDF 2 (1) pp. 9–31 © Intellect Ltd 2008

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1. See Nichols (1994); Bruzzi (2000); Hight (2001); Roscoe and Hight (2001); Dovey (2000); Corner (2002a); Friedman (2002); Holmes and Jermyn (2003); Palmer (2003); Kilborn (2003); Murray and Ouellette (2004); Andrejevic (2004).

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researchers (Strøm 2003: 47–48; Ward 2005). Given the variety of production techniques that fall under the category of ‘animation’, analysing the role and significance of documentary animation has always involved assessing either the manner in which a specific set of techniques are used and framed within a given documentary text, or the manner in which a fully animated text works to position itself in relation to documentary aesthetics and discourses. Wells offers a useful typology of four modes of documentary animation – the imitative, the subjective, the fantastic and the postmodern – positioned in relation to the more familiar schema of conventional documentary modes of representation (Nichols 1991: 32–56). It is Wells’s modular approach that has informed the discussion of digitalbased documentary animation modes outlined below. This article focuses on some key trends in the use of digital-based animation within mainstream television documentary since the 1990s (the period when these techniques have become more prominent within primetime programming). Although the examples used below are largely from British documentary television, they exhibit patterns that are becoming manifest across similar examples of the television genre globally. The fact that these trends are so prominent within television documentary is not coincidental, as they are prompted in large part by a variety of other factors that are reshaping both the television documentary genre itself and the televisual medium as a whole.

‘Post-documentary’ culture? As with any other genre, documentary is continually evolving; it has never been fixed into an ideal form, or associated with a limited set of social-political functions, which can be championed as the epitome of the genre. It has always responded to changes to the broader social-political contexts of documentary production and to developments in media technologies. The development of hand-held film cameras, for example, served as one significant catalyst for the emergence of cinéma vérité and direct cinema, just as digital camcorders, miniature cameras and the like have been quickly incorporated into the lexicon of contemporary documentary film-making. The genre, as with all visual culture, also needs to be understood within the wider social-political contexts that shape its agendas and its forms. A number of writers have been looking to address the complexity of the documentary genre within the contemporary television broadcasting environment. John Corner’s speculations on the development of a ‘postdocumentary’ culture (Corner 2001, 2002a) attempt to position new factual forms in relation to fundamental changes within the agenda of documentary culture as a whole. He uses the term ‘post-documentary’ as a means to promote debate over the cultural significance of the proliferation of documentary hybrid forms, and the new relationships between film-makers and audiences that they might signify (rather than to suggest an explicit break from previous traditions of documentary film-making). There is not the space here to properly discuss the variety of such factfiction forms (which include docu-soaps, video diaries, reality TV, reality game shows, makeover documentaries and situation documentaries), nor the variety of debates that they have attracted.1 They collectively represent 10

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a variety of aesthetic styles, narrative structures, thematics and socialpolitical agendas, but there is little doubt that their impact on the documentary genre itself has been significant. The last two decades have witnessed the proliferation of fact-fiction texts that often have a tenuous relationship with documentary concerns, but which explicitly draw upon a variety of assumptions and expectations of factual forms (in particular the indexical quality of photographic images, which has its own complex relationship with the digital forms discussed below). Critical commentary on such forms is typically focused both on the nature of their content and the manner in which this is packaged into readily accessible forms of entertainment programming, derived from more traditional television genres such as soap opera, talk shows, game shows and tabloid journalism. Corner argues that the variety of presentation styles and the agendas that these forms reflect should be recognized as the politics and aesthetics of ‘documentary as diversion’. They represent a new function for the genre as a whole, adding to earlier non-fiction traditions that focused more on exposition, inquiry and interrogation. He suggests that their significance lies in their fostering of demands that documentary itself adapts to new forms of representation: Neither postmodern skepticism nor the techniques of digital manipulation present documentary with its biggest future challenge. This will undoubtedly come from the requirement to reorient and refashion itself in an audio-visual culture where the dynamics of diversion and the aesthetics of performance dominate a greatly expanded range of popular images of the real. (Corner 2002a: 267)

Such trends with the wider documentary culture also need to be understood in relation to more fundamental changes within social and cultural patterns of engagement with mediations of the ‘real’. These include an accelerating interaction between the social-political discourses of surveillance, autobiography and creative expression. These are manifest partly in the increasing and disquieting use of surveillance systems within modern societies, and an associated rise in the acceptance of surveillance footage within television programming (Palmer 2003). At a more intimate level these discourses are exhibited through the emergence of an amateur surveillance culture centred on camcorders and, more recently, webcams, video blogs, phonecams and amateur videography submitted to online sites such as YouTube and MySpace. These trends suggest both a transformation of distinctions between public and private space and an increased realm for personalized forms of confession and expression. These are clearly intersecting with more established traditions of personal media, such as amateur photography and videography. The aesthetic of amateur video – grainy, hand-held, accidental and partial perspectives on often spectacular events or emotional outbursts – is increasingly reinforced as the marker of authenticity. These trends are in turn associated with fundamental changes within conventional models of broadcasting. Television is always in a constant state of reinvention, but this is a process that has accelerated in response to the challenges and opportunities Primetime digital documentary animation: the photographic and graphic within play

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afforded by the emergence of the full range of digital media. The interrelation between television and digital media is not easily summarized. It is clear that the conditions that gave rise to the dominance of television as a medium within the domestic sphere have been transformed over the last two decades, and the medium has been required to refashion itself in the face of an increasingly ferocious level of competition both between proliferating television networks and from other entertainment media. There is a need for television networks to develop innovative forms of programming to hold their own against alternative entertainment and information sources, and to reorient themselves to address online forms of broadcasting, the appeal of computer games, and other forms of interactive media. Johnson (2005: 62–115) cites the proliferation of home entertainment systems and domestic DVD libraries as factors in encouraging more ‘cinematic’, complex, nuanced and layered television narratives. The medium is also more adept at exploring cross-platform possibilities such as wireless and online accompaniments to programming – online and cellphonebased voting for the multiple national variants of Big Brother (Pos, 1999) are an early instance of this. At the level of the televisual image, the layering of graphic information, especially within staple forms of programming such as news and current affairs, draws from the convergent aesthetic of the World Wide Web. The use of the televisual frame to explore intimate and spatially complicated fictional milieux (with dramatic and comedic vérité series) partly draws inspiration from the dynamic spaces of video games. Such aesthetic trends have long been observed (Caldwell 1995), and to a large extent the incorporation of computer-based animation within documentary is derived from these wider developments. Within the television environment, documentary is by no means a nurtured and protected genre, automatically respected for its social-political functions, but is required to compete for popular audiences in the same manner as other forms of television programming. The BBC itself (the producer of many of the texts discussed below) is perhaps the key example of an organization looking to renegotiate its legacy as a public service broadcaster within a more fluid, dynamic and competitive media environment. The emergence of digital documentary animation in primetime needs to be seen as symptomatic of such wider changes within television broadcasting, and of an underlying anxiety towards retaining a mass audience for primetime documentary. The result is an impetus to create a more complex, layered and spectacular aesthetic, one which is easily married with conventional modes of documentary representation and the focus on emotion, performance and intimacy that governs documentary hybrids.

Key modes in digital-based documentary animation The use of digital-based animation within primetime television documentary operates within a comparatively limited range of representational styles. As noted above, we tend not to see here the full experimental possibilities which are perhaps more open naturally to animation than other techniques. Instead of the exploration of the abstract or the avant-garde the typical television text is centred on increasingly sophisticated demonstrations of the formulaic. The broad parameters of these patterns are partly determined by the nature of the technologies employed in production and 12

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2. See Manovich’s discussion on synthetic realism (Manovich 2000: 184–98).

Figure 1: Schematic of key continua within patterns of digital animation.

post-production, and partly through the manner in which they are used to appropriate and perform familiar modes of presentation. An intersection between specific motion graphic techniques and familiar discourses of representation (outlined in the schematic in Figure 1) suggests the current territory of primetime digital documentary animation. At one pole of a continuum of techniques is the computer mediation of images (CMI), which position elements of the indexical and photographic within animation and morphing sequences during post-production. At the other pole are entirely computer-generated images (CGI), derived from the many advances towards synthetic realism achieved in fictional film-making.2 Each of these poles address the need to produce imagery that can be competitive within contemporary television programming. This continuum of techniques can be usefully seen to intersect with a key discursive continuum within animation more generally, that between photorealism and the exploration of purely symbolic or abstract forms (Wells 1998: 24–28). This is only one pathway through the discourses shaping the development of animation but a useful one for the purposes of this discussion. The term ‘symbolism’ here is intended to suggest a focused set of animation techniques particularly informed by the tradition and principles of information design, and incorporating both iconic and metaphoric forms of representation. The opposite end of this continuum, the quest for increasingly photorealistic effects, also taps into long-standing traditions within visual culture but these are more explicitly linked to the same faith in an indexical link between the photographic and actuality which still serves as a key basis for documentary culture. As Manovich notes, the field of computer graphics ‘defines photorealism as the ability to simulate any object in such a way that its computer image is indistinguishable from its photograph’ (Manovich 2000: 199), a definition that emphasizes how this pole of animation is aimed at replicating cinematography rather than human perception and experience of reality itself. The photorealistic techniques employed in television primetime documentaries involve direct referencing to documentary photography and cinematography, with its inherent tension between obscuring the role of the camera and its insistence on that camera as a faithful instrument for documenting reality. Similarly, there is a paradoxical sense of indexicality

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3. Ward has noted the significance of sound as the basis of indexicality within the wider field of animated documentary (Ward 2005: 98). He quotes Renov’s use of the term ‘acoustic indexicality’. Sound has been a neglected area of documentary theory (Corner 2002b), and is often forgotten as a remnant of the social-historical world within digital media. 4. See especially the classic texts by Edward Tufte (Tufte 1990, 1997, 2001), which cover well-established techniques of graphic representation in both print and audio-visual media. His books cover conventions for representing ‘pictures of numbers’, ‘pictures of nouns’ and ‘pictures of verbs’.

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generated through the use of CMI and CGI techniques in these series. As discussed below, photorealistic imagery is employed in a typically reflexive manner, while acoustic indexicality3 in the form of interview sound-bites and especially expositional voice-over narration, provides the key means of continuity between animation sequences and other, more conventional modes of documentary representation. From this broad schematic of digital documentary animation, the discussions below focus on three key modes in the use of CGI and CMI within primetime television documentaries over the last two decades, modes which tend to operate with distinct intersections between animation techniques and discourses.

1. Symbolic expositional mode This mode draws especially from well-established traditions of information design,4 already naturalized and deeply embedded within everyday television graphic practice. Forms of graphic presentation such as maps and the conveying of simplified statistical information through graphs and tables are standard practice within news and current affairs reporting, in increasingly layered and three-dimensional forms. Such forms enable often complex natural and social phenomena to be introduced and explained in easily digested ways, and are increasingly an immediate option for producers looking to offer simplistic three-dimensional modular reconstructions of events where there exists no footage (such as plane crashes or battle scenes). The use of animation in this way has a long history in documentary. Frank Capra’s classic Why We Fight series of Second World War ‘information’ films, for example, makes frequent use of animated maps (produced by the Disney corporation) to convey a sense of geographical movements in armed forces, underpinned with a distinct propagandist agenda (Figure 2). The use of such graphic means of representation allowed Capra and his collaborators to immediately convey a variety of information (in this case, about geography, political and ideological transformation, and an explicit threat to European security) and to shift easily between iconic and symbolic graphic forms. The ‘animated map’ has become a convention used to the point of cliché within all forms of historical documentary, especially those focused on military history. The use of CGI and CMI animation techniques allows such diagrams to appear to be more convincingly three-dimensional and hence to mesh more easily with the overall trend towards a more cinematic aesthetic within television. The History Channel’s Line of Fire series is one of any number of everyday examples that demonstrate how this existing pattern of animation has seamlessly incorporated digital technology (Figure 3). Such constructions draw upon conventions of map representation (updated to simplified three-dimensional rendered landscapes), employ symbols such as national flags to denote various players in the battle, use coloured arrows that snake over the terrain to suggest their movement, and include iconic features where needed (the sequence in Figure 3 includes three-dimensional US forces helicopters that fly ‘into’ and over the map). As is typical of editing strategies employed in expositional mode (Nichols 1991: 34–38), this sequence is intercut with grainy, hand-held 14

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Figure 2: Four stills from an animated sequence in ‘Prelude to War’, the first of Frank Capra’s Why We Fight (1939–45) series of Second World War documentary films.

actual battle footage, and talking heads and voice-over narration providing apparent expert testimony. Here the calm and rational expert testimony serves to erase any clash of the juxtaposition of the chaos of battlefield video footage with the crisp and definitive lines of the animated map. The digital battle map, in other words, is typically used to reinforce the certainty of the historical narrative that such documentaries construct. As such animation techniques have become more commonplace, there has been the extension of more metaphoric means of conveying information. The BBC series Superhuman (Bunting, Evans and Hickman, 2001) uses CGI and CMI sequences in the service of presenting medical discourse on the body, drawing especially on spatial and rhetorical forms inherent to computer-game design. Presented by Robert Winston, the series employs a symbolic expositional mode as a key part of a wider rhetorical strategy of using sequences which offer easily digested metaphors for various physical processes within the body. Some of these metaphors are relatively visually sophisticated yet still closely integrated within Winston’s rhetoric of the empowering effect of medical discovery. The most extended metaphor sequence occurs in the ‘Killer into Cures’ episode of Superhuman.5 To suggest the ways in which a young girl’s body is fighting off chicken pox, which Winston likens to a ‘war game’, we move from the girl’s older brother playing a computer game straight into the game itself. Primetime digital documentary animation: the photographic and graphic within play

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5. Portions of this analysis of Superhuman have previously appeared in Hight and Coleborne (2006).

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Figure 3: Still from an animated expositional sequence from the History Channel’s Life of Fire documentary on the 1991 Gulf War (2002). Winston compares the body to a sprawling city, under attack from viruses, and we see a CGI-generated city represented on-screen, to the sound of fast-paced electronic music. A spiked ball representing a virus spins menacingly towards the city, with the screen showing the crosshairs of the virus taking aim at healthy cells. Tank-like ‘helper t-cells’ trundle slowly around the city, and we see ‘killer t-cells’ as enormous machine guns, deliberately reminiscent of the anti-aircraft systems of the Death Star from Star Wars (Lucas, 1977), shooting and destroying the viral spiked balls. The game sequence is intercut with the girl’s recovery, then is returned to later in the episode when Winston discusses AIDS, with glowing HIV viruses creating mayhem within the CGI city’s defences. We are treated to the apocalyptic vision of the city burning as the ‘killer t-cells’ lie helpless. When the narration turns to the natural immunity to the HIV virus of Nairobi prostitutes, we see these defences come to life and begin hunting down the suddenly vulnerable HIV viruses. This sense of the human body as a landscape in which ‘battles’ occur shares an obvious affinity to the examples above, even though such sequences are used towards different discursive ends in the Superhuman series. 16

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Such forms of graphic exposition draw their legitimacy from how they are used within wider sequences, and particularly through the continuity provided by voice-over narration. A second mode of digital animation is more explicitly couched within reference to conventional forms of documentary visual evidence.

2. Graphic vérité mode Graphic vérité texts are typically aligned more closely to the photorealistic end of CGI. Here digital animation techniques are most commonly employed for dramatic reconstructions, appearing to extend the reach of the documentary lens into history itself through replicating familiar forms of documentary cinematography, particularly the aesthetic of the observational mode of documentary (Nichols 1991: 38–44). The potential, agenda and ultimate ambition of the graphic vérité mode are suggested by a programme such as Virtual History: The Secret Plot to Kill Hitler (McNab, 2004), which offers a dramatic reconstruction of the July 1944 plot by German generals to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Here actors resembling the historical figures were filmed using techniques designed to replicate the projection of archival footage (with apparent scratches on the aged black-and-white celluloid film strip, and hisses and other noise on the soundtrack). The sense of authenticity generated by this simulation is enhanced through an additional step in post-production: the actors’ faces are superimposed with CGI masks closely modelled on those of the historical figures themselves. An accompanying ‘making of ’ television special and similar production information provided on the Discovery Channel’s official website for the programme are quite explicit in articulating the programme’s overall agenda. The concept of Virtual History is to recreate an event as convincingly as possible, using documents, photographs and archive film to produce a historically accurate picture of what happened on that day. With the help of advanced computer animation, the programme makers are able to put the viewer right in the thick of the action. Unlike Hollywood movies or television drama, Virtual History portrays the characters and events as if they were actually filmed on that day. In effect, it recreates archive footage that was never shot at the time.6

The rhetoric is familiar from drama-documentary, but here the programmemakers seek to escape any taint of partiality and manipulation through the precise application of digital technique. The aim, as with all dramatic reconstruction, is to effectively deny the nature of any debate over the nature and significance of a given event and instead offer as popular orthodoxy a singular narrative of that event (Corner 1996; Paget 1998). The paradox here is that the authenticity of this version of history is claimed through the revelation and celebration of the technological basis of the illusion itself. Walking with Dinosaurs (Haines and James, 1999) is the most wellknown example of this graphic vérité mode, and has already been extensively discussed and debated (Darley 2003; Scott and White 2003; Kilborn 2003: 169–75). The series is an animated drama-documentary that successfully mimics the form of a nature documentary (Bousé 2000) – an Primetime digital documentary animation: the photographic and graphic within play

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6. From the Virtual History website, introducing the making of the series: http://www.discovery channel.co.uk/ virtualhistory/_pages/ making_of/ back_to_life.shtml, accessed August 2007.

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7. See Scott and White’s discussion of the making of documentary (Scott and White 2003: 324) where they note especially the mockumentary edge to its opening sequence.

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intersection of three forms of documentary hybridity. Using CGI animation techniques pioneered by entertainment media such as the feature film Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993), together with more conventional film-making techniques such as animatronics and background location footage, the programme-makers successfully create naturalistic narratives of the everyday lives of extinct species. Darley’s succinct critique of the agenda of the series targets the confidence of its particular pathway through paeleontological speculation on the appearance and behaviour of dinosaurs. He expresses an unease with the ultimate effect of such convincing constructions: ‘These near-flawless simulations of the world in the time of the dinosaurs – meticulous stand-ins for the real that remains forever out of reach – are completely closed, omniscient texts, allowing little or no space for questions or conflicting views’ (Darley 2003). Countering this closed frame towards the scientific knowledge that the series partly references, is the series’ deliberately reflexive and playful edge. This is revealed clearly in the ‘making of’ documentary which accompanied the series (Figure 4)7 but is also evident at key points during the series where water seems to ‘splash’ the camera lens, or the pseudo-camera operator (i.e. the computer-generated frame) appears to hide behind trees to escape the attention of dinosaurs as they seem capable of turning on the ‘camera crew’ at any time. Again, the text as a whole is framed by extra-textual material (a website and ‘making of’ documentary) which helps to convey a sense of ‘proximity’ distinguishing this drama-documentary text from pure fiction (Lipkin 2002), yet reveals the techniques of their construction as a key to the series’ promotion. This sense of the playful in television reconstructions is a significant aspect of digital-based documentary animation. It is a characteristic that presenter Robert Winston continues in one of the sequels to Walking with

Figure 4: The mockumentary first scene from The Making of Walking with Dinosaurs (James, 1999). 18

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Dinosaurs, Walking with Cavemen (Dale and Lespinois, 2003), where he plays an observer dropped into an ancient historical period to assess the nature of early human behaviour. And these tendencies are given full rein in the mockumentary-infused ITV series Prehistoric Park (Bennett, Kelly and Thompson 2006) – one logical successor to the various Walking with series – where real-life naturalist Nigel Marven travels back in time to capture and bring back to the present day prehistoric animals, in a more explicit reprisal of the science-fiction premise of Jurassic Park itself (Figure 5). It is important to emphasize that this sense of playful hybridity is not new or necessarily inherent to the graphic vérité mode. Peter Watkins explored techniques involving fake interviews and a pastiche of observational and other documentary modes within television drama-documentary as early as Culloden (Watkins, 1964) and The War Game (Watkins, 1965). But the sense of irreverence toward historical inquiry has become more prominent and integral to television documentary as the genre itself has been reoriented to address the emergence of popular television hybrid formats such as docu-soap and reality game show, as noted above. This playful sense has also become a feature of more sober examples of television drama-documentary itself. A series such as Seven Wonders of the Industrial World (Spencer, 2003), for example, integrates CGI techniques designed to convey a more credible sense of historical verisimilitude, without looking to suggest (as does Walking with Dinosaurs) that such images function as an adequate documentation or replacement of reality itself. Photorealistic CGI is used to provide a grander sense of scale to the more panoramic dramatic reconstructions, and these techniques are perfectly suited to the subject of this series, which looks at large-scale engineering feats. These digitally-enhanced reconstructions become a key part of an extended palette of techniques employed in the series, as they are intercut with archives from the period such as blueprints of the structures being portrayed, hand-held filmed reconstructions using actors, and (Watkins-derived) fake interviews with actors voicing scripts based on language taken from the historical record.

3. Invasive surveillance mode This final documentary animation mode could be seen as a logical successor to the practice of using a photographic camera as a scientific instrument (Winston 1995), which informed the explorations of photographic media by historical figures from Muybridge to Vertov. This mode involves the use of CMI and CGI to extend the range and penetration of the documentary lens, typically combining animation techniques with medical scanning imagery and forms of miniature and endoscopic cameras. This combination of techniques seems particularly suited to the televisual space, which has naturalized special effects such as time-lapse photography, time-slice photography and motion-control photography within primetime nature documentary, the use of surveillance tools within investigative reporting and contributed to wider cultures of surveillance that sustain more recent documentary television hybrids. The invasive surveillance mode continues this agenda of surveillance into the interior of the human body, and other spaces not easily open to the physical presence of the camera, in the process broadening the means of representing the documentary gaze. A series such as Superhuman Primetime digital documentary animation: the photographic and graphic within play

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Figure 5: An encounter scene from Prehistoric Park (2006) the part-mockumentary successor to the Walking with series.

Figure 6: A typical use of CGI from the first episode of the historical drama-documentary series Seven Wonders of the Industrial World (2003).

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demonstrates how easily this mode can be incorporated into conventional television documentary. Presenter Robert Winston uses three-dimensional computer-generated models of various parts of the human body, particularly skeletons and key body organs. These models are always viewed in motion, with each spinning on an axis to give the appearance of the camera tracking around these simplified representations of the body. Often key body parts are highlighted, with a model momentarily ‘freezing’ and the body part in question glowing as Winston discusses its significance. These techniques are implicated within the broader aesthetic of medical surveillance which Winston presents as an inherent, commonsense aspect of scientific discovery,8 and part of an extended, apparently omnipotent and visually spectacular perspective on the human body. In a similar manner to Winston’s earlier, somewhat groundbreaking documentary series The Human Body (Spencer, 1998), an often bewildering array of medical technologies are presented, including images from scanning electron microscopy (SEM), endoscopy, thermal imaging, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound. These medical scans become CMI animation through placing a series of scans in a sequence to mimic a tracking shot or pan along a part of the internal organs of the body (suggesting a CMI update of Muybridge’s famous experiments using multiple photographic stills to capture human and animal motion). These parallel the series’ CGI sequences which, as noted above, similarly reference ‘tracking’ shots around the human body. The effect is to suggest that the camera simply changes scanning mode as it explores the landscape of the human body (in the same way that amateur film-makers using digital camcorders can change to a green-tinged night mode). Different modes are enabled for capturing different spatial and temporal investigations into the biomechanical and chemical processes of the body. We move seamlessly from observing the exterior of the human body, to observing a schematic of its structure, to directly invading its orifices, to surveying body characteristics at a microscopic level. It is important to note, however, that this kind of penetrative voyeurism is much more palatable than an actual investigation of the corporeal body. Compare, for example, the aesthetic pleasure of CGI/CMI-dominated sequences from The Human Body (Figure 7) to those from Dr. Gunter von Hagens’s Anatomy for Beginners (Coleman, 2005), where human flesh is literally opened, through a brightly-lit postmortem, as a terrain for photographic survey. Superhuman and The Human Body make the human form apparently accessible but in a manner that is also distanced from any of the more confronting possibilities of the remnants of the human body itself. Winston’s surveillance is based on an intimacy mediated through the comforting sterility of digital technologies, perfectly matching the dispassionate penetration of the gaze of medical science itself. These series also illustrate the tendency towards the overlap of digital documentary animation modes within a given text. They demonstrate the need to treat the three modes outlined here as reference points for identifying the use of digital animation techniques within primetime television programming, rather than a fixed topography of digital animation aesthetics. Again, how such techniques are combined with and

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8. The naturalization of this mode mirrors the incorporation of computer imaging techniques within medical diagnostic procedures themselves, although not with the same degree of fluid and dynamic presentation as they appear within Superhuman (Satava 1998).

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Figure 7: A variety of stills taken from the opening of The Making of . . . the Robert Winston presented series The Human Body (1998), including CGI and CMI sequences. positioned in relation to other forms of representation in a given series is reflective of the overall agenda of the text’s producers. The Human Body, for example, uses invasive surveillance paired with symbolic exposition in order to provide a fluid exploration of the exterior and interior of the human body, with the human skin serving as no barrier to the visual presentation of body processes. Winston’s voice-over provides the logical continuity between diagrammatic and metaphoric sequences, between the quite distinct sets of aesthetics associated with the agendas of exposition and surveillance. A key point to reiterate here is how easily these are subsumed into mainstream television documentary practice. The visual complexity of these series is no more challenging for viewers than it is to accept the movement between distinct forms of representation within conventional documentary. The ultimate effect of this array of animation techniques is to expand the scope of documentary representation and to make it more visually seductive, raising the bar in terms of primetime documentary spectacle. Crucially, the omnipotence of the documentary gaze – the sense that documentary film-makers can traverse across space and time in order to construct arguments and narratives – is reinforced and extended. Series such as Virtual History and Walking with Dinosaurs suggest that even historical events can be accurately ‘captured’ by the digital-enhanced lens, taking the overlap between documentary and drama-documentary a step further. Everything, from the interior of the human body to the social-historical terrain of the past, is equally open to the documentary gaze. 22

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Evidentiary layering The fluidity with which such documentaries move between CGI, CMI and other more conventional modes of documentary representation is partly a reflection of the nature of digital practices themselves, and especially those of post-production. Digital post-production allows for the compositing of quite distinct forms of content, both in-frame (as layers to a single image) or in-sequence (edited together as shots within a sequence). Each form of content exists as computer code ready to be reshaped as needed. The effect is to erase, even at the level of the materiality of the image itself, any distinction between the photographic and graphic. Manovich, in discussing the case of cinematic production, argues that the traditional hierarchy between these practices is reversed: Live action footage is now only raw material to be manipulated by hand – animated, combined with 3-D computer generated scenes, and painted over. The final images are constructed manually from different elements, and all the elements are either created entirely from scratch or modified by hand. Now we can finally answer the question ‘What is digital cinema?’ Digital cinema is a particular case of animation that uses live-action footage as one of its many elements. (Manovich 2000: 302, emphasis in the original)

In other words, ‘production becomes just the first stage in post-production’ (Manovich 2000: 303), a development that obviously has profound implications for a cultural form such as documentary, which is so reliant on a set of assumptions and expectations centred on an indexical link to the social-historical world. A blurring of the line between the photographic (including both visual and acoustic indexicality) and graphic (in terms of a visual continuum between the symbolic and photorealistic), however, is not necessarily evidence of the complete collapse of indexicality that presumably characterizes a post-photographic era. As Lister notes, in the absence of a sense of certainty about the integrity of the image itself, the basis of authenticity becomes more centred in discourses of spectatorship and in this case the modes of reading prompted by (documentary) texts themselves. In other words, there is a need to explore in specific detail how techniques and sequences are framed in ways that encourages their reading as consistent with the expectations associated with ‘documentary’ constructions. Each of the three modes outlined briefly above work to establish a representational strategy that complements more conventional modes of documentary representation. Symbolic expositional mode typically offers an abstraction from the social-historical, a clear simplification drawing upon the clarity of graphic means of representation. It presents itself as a tool for reducing social-historical complexity to something that is aesthetically appealing yet still authentic in terms of its referent. Graphic vérité mode offers especially the promise of fulfilling the quest for a plausible verisimilitude in the service of dramatic reconstruction, in the process allowing audiences to apparently witness history itself unfolding. Invasive surveillance mode involves a reinforcement of the omnipotence of the documentary gaze, drawing especially upon a belief in a mechanically derived Primetime digital documentary animation: the photographic and graphic within play

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objectivity – even as its aesthetic is obviously mediated through graphic technologies. The tensions between the indexical and the graphic are played out in different ways within each mode. Each of these modes, in fact, demonstrate the same paradox which helps to define and characterize digital cinema (Bolter and Grusin 1999; Manovich 2000); the seamless illusions achieved through digital imaging techniques are invariably revealed in order to be celebrated as technological achievements. As noted above, often this celebration of digital technique is constructed through extratextual means, through a ‘making of ’ documentary accompanying the broadcast of a series and packaged with a DVD release, or through official websites that feature the state-of-the-art technology employed in its production at the centre of their promotion for a series. A key issue, however, is the extent to which digital documentary animation modes also generate a degree of reflexivity through their incorporation with other documentary modes. The overall aim with digital animation is invariably for there to be a consistent and persuasive integration with other representational styles employed within a television series, whether such techniques are used in-frame or in-sequence. That is, for there to be an overall ontological coherence to a documentary text that is employing digital animation at some level. It is useful here to return to and reframe a core aspect of conventional documentary construction, that of evidentiary editing. In Nichols’s words, evidentiary editing involves the following practice: Instead of organising cuts within a scene to present a sense of a single, unified time and space in which we can quickly locate the relative position of central characters, documentary organises cuts within a scene to present the impression of a single, convincing argument in which we can locate a logic. Leaps in time or space and the placement of characters become relatively unimportant compared to the sense of the flow of evidence in the service of this controlling logic. (Nichols 1991: 19–20)

As Nichols notes, this form of construction typically places a great deal of importance on the use of the spoken word to articulate the logic of the argument, to provide an overriding sense of continuity between often quite distinct forms of evidence (this is most obviously the case with the expositional mode of documentary). The concept of evidentiary layering could be used in parallel with evidentiary editing when referring to digitalbased documentary texts; to draw attention to both the wider array of means of presenting evidence available to producers, and the possibilities of post-production to provide for a more richly layered aesthetic than is normally the case for documentary. A key part of the analysis of digital documentary animation, then, involves trying to assess the extent to which in-frame or in-sequence layers (digital and otherwise) work in relation to each other. How are specific animation techniques spliced into the more conventional presentations of evidence that are intimately associated with documentary as a cultural form, such as archival footage, documents, vérité footage and interview testimony from social actors and experts? 24

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How do these graphic layers operate with the more familiar codes and conventions of (photographic) documentary? Again, it is important to position patterns within television documentary series into the wider frame constructed by the emergence of documentary hybrid forms – including older hybrids such as nature documentary and drama-documentary (both staples of primetime television programming), and the more recent hybrid formats noted above. Some of the entertainment-driven innovations developed through these recent hybrids have also been incorporated into more conventional television documentary practice, such as the use of video diaries to provide confessional forms of testimony, various surveillance techniques used within investigative reporting, or game-show elements used to construct the premise of situation documentaries. This programming environment means that the televisual space has become more naturally reflexive toward documentary construction than perhaps any time in the past, and this provides a sensibility that shapes the forms of address for contemporary documentary series. Superhuman serves as an apt illustration here. It employs a wide range of film-making techniques in the service of its central arguments and themes, including a number of key representational strategies that are utilized to communicate its particular discourse on medical knowledge. These techniques clearly reflect the influence of hybrid documentary forms, and serve as a useful demonstration of the continual expansion of such techniques available to contemporary documentary film-makers. The advantage of using such techniques within Superhuman is that they allow Winston to immediately establish a familiar frame for audiences. The ‘Trauma’ episode, for example, features a variety of spectacular archival footage, including explosions, violent attacks by animals within the natural world, shots of traumatic injuries suffered in war zones and violent automobile accidents. These are used together with footage following a car accident, with emergency services rushing to rescue its victims, then footage within the emergency room of a metropolitan hospital, all of which uses the hand-held aesthetic that saturates hybrid forms. These sequences directly reference one form within the spectrum of documentary hybrids, that which can be specifically labelled ‘reality TV’. As distinct from other hybrids, these are those programmes that focus particularly on institutions such as rescue services, police enforcement agencies, hospital personnel and procedures and the like, providing personalized narratives of people forced to deal with extreme situations (Dovey 2000; Palmer 2003). In Superhuman, the emphasis on medical services struggling to deal with the violent, unpredictable consequences of everyday life in modern societies are quite deliberately paired and contrasted with Winston’s reasonable, rational discourse of medical science and discovery represented through aesthetically sophisticated sequences employing CGI and CMI. Medical science is reinforced as the rational, necessary response to the everyday traumatic events and chronic diseases that our bodies are inevitably subject to within such societies. Despite the complexity of representational styles employed within Superhuman, the series achieves a level of rhetorical coherence that largely obscures the potential for a reflexivity toward the means of presentation themselves. Primetime digital documentary animation: the photographic and graphic within play

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9. The overall movement of these figures was organized using software similar to that employed for the Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring battle sequences.

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In comparison, the BBC series Battlefield Britain (Cranitch, 2004) is an example where in-frame and in-sequence representational layers do not attempt to develop a comparable coherence of historical narrative, and where there is intentional slippage as changes in mode open up space for reflection on the nature of their construction. Presented by father-and-son team Peter and Dan Snow, the series employs both CGI and CMI, in-frame and in-sequence, animation to present accounts of historical battles on British soil. The most important characteristic of the series is the manner in which it draws upon a sense of the presentation of military history as a game, both in terms of the enthusiasm that the presenters display toward the tools and strategies of war, and the manner in which distinctive animation elements are deployed. Peter Snow makes frequent use of an animated game board, constructed through in-frame CGI superimposed over a folded game board, which he carries onto the location of historic battles. Snow opens the game board to provide access to an animated version of the war games played by military enthusiasts using miniature soldiers. Derived from the animated maps discussed above, the board serves as a demonstration space for a kind of coaches’ play-book approach to history by showing how the battle was actually ‘played’. As the camera tracks in, we can discern individual figures moving within the mass of a military force.9 The human figures are simplified, but more detailed than the purely iconic figures usually associated with animated maps. Viewed in long shot, these (and other in-frame CGI battle sequences) are yet another version of dramatic reconstructions intended to show scale, position and movement. These game-board sequences are the key means for Snow’s presentation of an overall narrative of each battle, and serve as reference points for his on-screen and voice-of-god narration. The sequences are intercut with various other modes used to present evidence (Figure 8) including son Dan Snow’s demonstration of (and play with) remaining weapons from the historical period; fake interviews (modelled on Culloden’s template) used as a replacement for participant testimony; and more conventional (live-action) reconstructions using actors in costume on location. Other visual tools briefly employed at the beginning of each episode include CGI reconstructions of the faces of key historical figures, and a Google Earthlike zooming into a map of the location of the battlefield itself. The overall effect is to transform historical inquiry into a form of play, in more than one sense, as the authoritative play-book perspective of a leading military historian is combined in often jarring juxtaposition with hybrid-informed reconstructions of aspects of historical narrative. As with Walking with Dinosaurs and other examples discussed here, the overall sensibility is the playful articulation of a historical narrative. However, the leaping from mode to mode suggests that the series is not looking to provide a singular compelling narrative for each battle. The effect is instead to present fragmented perspectives that highlight the gaps in this narrative, as the two presenters race around the landscape, breathlessly touring battle locations and trying to sample something of the experience of each battle’s participants. The overall agenda of the three digital animation modes is as much entertainment as information and argument, involving an address to a 26

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Figure 8: Stills from the key modes used within Battlefield Britain (2004), including (clockwise from top left) location footage, CGI-animated game board, demonstration of weaponry, fake interview, dramatic reconstruction of a battle, and CGI battle shots. television audience, which celebrates the possibilities of technology and delivers a coherent message through often chaotic hybrid-informed means of presentation. It is difficult to predict the long-term implications of this pattern of television programming. Certainly the juxtaposition between distinct modes and layers of representation contains the potential for a more complex and reflexive understanding of the manner in which historical, social and political knowledge itself is constructed; however, none of the series discussed deliberately foreground such a possibility. Instead there is the naturalization of graphic forms of presenting reality, with CGI and CMI-based spectacle at times overwhelming the use of more conventional, and authoritative, techniques for presenting evidence. Some series oscillate between the photographic and the graphic, looking especially to avoid any semblance of a traditional ‘talking head’ dominated discussion of the social-historical world. To some extent, these new digital forms of aesthetic force us as viewers to consider conventional, analogue documentary in terms of the gaps that have always existed between different forms of presenting evidence from the social-historical world. There has always been a degree of ontological tension between those modes that centre their authenticity on the presence of the camera to record events, or the testimony of social actors, or on the authoritative rhetoric of a narrator. Within the (often unintentionally) reflexive space generated by hybrid television formats, audiences have Primetime digital documentary animation: the photographic and graphic within play

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arguably become more accustomed to engaging in more visually sophisticated and perhaps more critically literate readings of reality-based programming. Roscoe has suggested the use of the term ‘flickers of authenticity’ (Roscoe 2001: 13) to denote opportunities provided for viewers’ recognition of the centrality of performance within television hybrids, and their need to continually assess the authenticity of forms of expression from participants. What is striking about the integration of digital animation techniques into this television documentary aesthetic is the extent to which these kinds of textual strategies construct further layers of ontological complexity that ultimately are not designed to trouble the viewer. The sense instead is of a more playful approach to social and historical knowledge, both in terms of the rapid transitions between the graphic and photographic and in the types of address these television series favour towards their primetime audiences. To judge from the ease with which the full spectrum of documentary and related modes are combined in short-form examples of user-created content submitted to sites such as YouTube, at least some sections of these audiences are familiar and quite comfortable with a more playful sphere of mediated forms. It seems likely that such emerging patterns within wider documentary culture will prompt further momentum towards more playful and diverting examples of television documentary itself. However, the long-term implications of such trends are difficult to predict. Certainly primetime documentary animation falls easily into the aesthetic and discursive trends encompassed by Corner’s notion of a ‘post-documentary’ culture, but it is not yet clear whether these will culminate in a permanent, destablizing shift in the basis of more conventional documentary programming, or entail a new era of experimentation and innovation in documentary representation with digital-based animation at its centre. References Anatomy for Beginners (2005), directed by David Coleman, UK, television series. Andrejevic, M. (2004), Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Battlefield Britain (2004), directed by Mary Cranitch, British Broadcasting Corporation, UK, television series. Big Brother (1999), directed by Marc Pos, Endemol Nederland BV, Netherlands, television series. Biressi, A. and Nunn, H. (2005), Reality TV: Realism and Revelation, London: Wallflower Press. Bolter, J.D. and Grusin, R. (1999), Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Bousé, D. (2000), Wildlife Films, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 4–36. Bowling for Columbine (2002), directed by Michael Moore, Alliance Atlantis Communications, Dog Eat Dog Films, Iconolatry Productions Inc., Salter Street Films International, TiMe Film- und TV-Produktions GmbH, Vif Babelsberger Filmproduktion GmbH & Co., Zweite KG, Canada/US/Germany, feature film. Bruzzi, S. (2000), New Documentary: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge.

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Caldwell, J.T. (1995), Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera) (1929), directed by Dziga Vertov, VUFKU, USSR, feature film. Corner, J. (1996) ‘British TV Dramadocumentary: Origins and Developments’, reprinted in Alan Rosenthal (ed.) (1999), Why Docudrama?: Fact-Fiction on Film and TV, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, pp. 35–46. Corner, John (2001)’Documentary in a Post-Documentary Culture? A Note on Forms and their Functions’, European Science Foundation ‘Changing Media Changing Europe’ programme, Team One (Citizenship and Consumerism) Working Paper No. 1, available at: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/changing.media/publications.htm —— (2002a), ‘Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions’, Television New Media, 3: 3, pp. 255–69. —— (2002b), ‘Sound Real: Music and Documentary’, reprinted in A. Rosenthal and J. Corner (eds) (2005), New Challenges for Documentary, 2nd edn., Manchester: Manchester University Press. Culloden (1964), directed by Peter Watkins, British Broadcasting Corporation, UK, television programme. Darley, A. (2003), ‘Simulating Natural History: Walking with Dinosaurs as HyperReal Edutainment’, Science as Culture, 12: 2, pp. 227–56. Dovey, J. (2000), Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television, London: Pluto Press. Friedman, J. (ed.) (2002), Reality Squared: Televisual Discourse on the Real, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Gulf War, The (2002), Cromwell Productions, UK, television programme. Hight, C. (2001), ‘Debating Reality-TV’, Continuum, 15: 3, pp. 389–95. Hight, C. and Coleborne, C. (2006), ‘Robert Winston’s Superhuman: spectacle, surveillance and patient narrative’, The Journal of Health Psychology, 11: 2, pp. 233–45. Holmes, S. and Jermyn, D. (eds) (2003), Understanding Reality Television, London: Routledge. Human Body, The (1998), directed by Christopher Spencer, British Broadcasting Corporation, UK, television series. Johnson, S. (2005), Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter, New York: Riverhead Books. Jurassic Park (1993), directed by Steven Spielberg, Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, US, feature film. Kilborn, R. (2003), Staging the Real: Factual TV programming in the Age of Big Brother, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lipkin, S.N. (2002), Real Emotional Logic: Film and Television Docudrama as Persuasive Practice, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Lister, M. (2000), ‘Photography in the age of electronic imaging’, in Liz Wells (ed.) (2000), Photography: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edn., London: Routledge, pp. 305–47. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), directed by Peter Jackson, New Line Cinema and WingNut Films, NZ/US, feature film. Making of Walking with Dinosaurs, The (1999), directed by Jasper James, British Broadcasting Corporation, UK, television programme.

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Manovich, L. (2000), The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Murray, S. and Ouellette, L. (eds) (2004), Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, New York: New York University Press. Nichols, B. (1991), Representing Reality, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —— (1994), Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Paget, D. (1998), No Other Way To Tell It: Dramadoc/Docudrama on Television, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 61–89. Palmer, G. (2003), Discipline and Liberty: Television and Governance, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Prehistoric Park (2006), directed by Sid Bennett, Karen Kelly and Matthew Thompson, Impossible Pictures, UK, television series. Roscoe, J. (2001), ‘Real Entertainment: New Factual Hybrid Television’, Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, 100, pp. 9–20. Roscoe, J. and Hight, C. (2001), Faking It: Mock-documentary and the Subversion of Factuality, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Satava, R. (ed.) (1998), Cybersurgery: Advanced Technologies for Surgical Practice, New York: Wiley-Liss. Scott, K. and White, A. (2003), ‘Unnatural History? Deconstructing the Walking with Dinosaurs phenomenon’, Media, Culture & Society, 25, pp. 315–32. Seven Wonders of the Industrial World (2003), directed by Christopher Spencer, British Broadcasting Corporation, UK, television programme. Strøm, G. (2003), ‘The Animated Documentary’, Animation Journal, 11, pp. 46–63. Superhuman (2001), directed by Judith Bunting, Liesl Evans and David Hickman, British Broadcasting Corporation, UK, television series. Tufte, E.R. (1990), Envisioning Information, Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. —— (1997), Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. —— (2001), The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edn., Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. Virtual History: The Secret Plot to Kill Hitler (2004), directed by David McNab, Discovery Channel, US, television programme. Walking with Cavemen (2003), directed by Richard Dale and Pierre de Lespinois, British Broadcasting Corporation, UK, television series. Walking with Dinosaurs (1999), directed by Tim Haines and Jasper James, British Broadcasting Corporation, UK, television series. War Game, The (1965), directed by Peter Watkins, British Broadcasting Corporation, UK, television programme. Ward, P. (2005), Documentary: The Margins of Reality, London: Wallflower Press. Wells, P. (1997), ‘The Beautiful Village and the True Village: A Consideration of Animation and the Documentary Aesthetic’, Art and Design, 53, pp. 40–45. —— (1998), Understanding Animation, London: Routledge. Why We Fight (1943–45), directed by Frank Capra, US Army Special Service Division and US War Department, US, documentary films. Winston, B. (1995), Claiming the Real: the Griersonian Documentary and its Legitimations, London: British Film Institute.

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Suggested citation Hight, C. (2008), ‘Primetime digital documentary animation: the photographic and graphic within play’, Studies in Documentary Film 2: 1, pp. 9–31, doi: 10.1386/sdf.2.1.9/1.

Contributor details Dr Craig Hight is a senior lecturer with the Screen and Media Studies Department at the University of Waikato. His research interests focus on documentary theory, including aspects of the production, construction and reception of documentary hybrids and the relationship of digital media technologies to documentary practice. With Dr Jane Roscoe he has co-written a book on mockumentary entitled Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality (Manchester University Press, 2001). He is currently writing a book on television mockumentary series. Contact: Screen and Media Studies Department, University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand 3240. E-mail: [email protected]

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Studies in Documentary Film Volume 2 Number 1 © 2008 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sdf.2.1.33/1

In and out of this world: digital video and the aesthetics of realism in the new hybrid documentary Ohad Landesman New York University Abstract

Keywords

Digital technology, often perceived as complicating evidential claims about documentary representations, has been playing a significant role lately in formulating new aesthetic grounds for the long-lasting hybridity formed between fact and fiction in the genre. It has been doing so by cultivating a style of constructed camcorder realism, utilizing the technology’s immediacy and intimacy predicated upon the digital look in its various connotations of authenticity and credibility. This article discusses the ways by which digital cinematography contributes to the challenging interplay between reality and fiction in the new hybrid documentary form. Focusing on several unclassifiable blends of document and story shot on digital video (DV) and other hand-held cameras – Michael Winterbottom’s In This World (2002), Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten (2002), and Hany Abu-Assad’s Ford Transit (2002) – it accounts for how technologically oriented aesthetic variations become signifiers of an artificial generic distinction, and raise questions and concerns about the manufacturing of truth in documentaries.

hybrid documentary digital video realism truth indexicality technology

Some artists turn from documentary to fiction because they feel it lets them come closer to the truth, their truth. Some, it would appear, turn to documentary because it can make deception more plausible. (Erik Barnouw 1993: 349)

When occupation becomes daily life, reality becomes like fiction [. . .] I like to say that my work is 100 percent documentary and 100 percent fiction. (Palestinian film-maker Hany Abu-Assad, on his Ford Transit (2002))

Capturing truth in the world of documentary film-making has always been a complicated task. Traditionally praised in non-fiction scholarship for its impersonal and unbiased capacity to mirror the profilmic with no fictional artifice, the documentary film has been going through significant formal changes since its early naïve days of observation and omniscient narration, gradually abandoning its efforts to emphasize an impression of objectivity. From the modernist phase of the self-reflexive essayistic form to its recent performative structure, the documentary has been constantly renewing interest in the rhetorical tropes of subjectivity and fiction, entertaining arguments based on uncertainties and incompleteness rather than prioritizing disembodied knowledge and facts. As Michael Renov clearly

SDF 2 (1) pp. 33–45 © Intellect Ltd 2008

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1. There are countless examples for documentary’s inclination towards staging reality with fictional inserts, or emphasizing the fact/fiction blur as the centrepiece of the document (e.g. films by Michael Moore, Errol Morris or Andrew Jarecki are only a few very obvious cases). 2. Fiction films that move away from artifice and aspire towards the documentary are not a new phenomenon in any way, but the current renaissance for manufacturing the ‘Real’ cannot simply be overlooked. Worth mentioning are Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s minimalist social documents The Son (2003) or L’Enfant (2006), Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s hyper-naturalist experiments in storytelling Blissfully Yours (2002) and Tropical Malady (2004), or even Chris Kentis’s real-time scare Open Water (2004). 3. The term ‘DV realism’ was first coined, as far as I am aware, by Lev Manovich (2000), referring to a recent aesthetic emphasis put on the authenticity of actors’ performances by independent filmmakers such as Mike Figgis or the Dogme 95 group. These film-makers, according to Manovich, provide an alternative to digital special effects by embracing a documentary style with handheld DV cameras.

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points out, ‘Every documentary representation depends upon its own detour from the real, through the defiles of the audio-visual signifier’ (Renov 1993: 7). Admittedly, contemporary documentaries only keep revisiting their primordial assumptions, pressing harder on the thin line between fiction and fact in an ongoing effort to redefine the genre’s aesthetic and ethical doctrines.1 Surely, the flip side of this interdependency is mirrored in fiction films today. When fast-paced editing in tightly scripted big-budget blockbusters becomes the norm, an alternative nostalgic longing for the real crystallizes the two everlasting aspirations in cinema: the utopia of authenticity against the antidote of falsification. Fiction films wholeheartedly embrace non-fiction aesthetics, and move towards simplifying their film language in order to abandon any illusionistic aspiration and obey a strong documentary impulse.2 This aesthetic convergence is a central synthesis in film history, when most of the idioms of documentary, as Dai Vaughan well reminds us, have been at some point appropriated by the fiction film, in which context becoming ‘an arbitrary signifier of realism’ (Vaughan 1999: 64, original emphasis). Digital technology, often perceived as complicating evidential claims about the representation of the world, has been playing a significant role lately in formulating new aesthetic grounds for the hybridity between fact and fiction in cinema. It has been doing so by cultivating a new aesthetic style of ‘DV realism’,3 utilizing the technology’s immediacy and intimacy predicated upon the digital look in its various connotations of authenticity and credibility. That privilege put on fidelity to the profilmic is conceivably ironic, considering that the dominant scholarly discourse about digitality in film has been focused so far on forming a sensational rhetoric about the visual challenge digital is presenting for indexically based notions of photographic realism. Conceptual and theoretical utopias have been repeatedly proposed regarding digital visual representations, delineating the new age as ‘a historic break in the nature of media and representation’, exclusively emphasizing a referential ‘crisis’ which leads to unprecedented capacities for visual manipulability (Rosen 2001: 302). In fact, the ongoing expansion of film into the digital realm since the late 1980s and the upsurge in popularity of digital video cameras within the last ten years have provoked countless scholarly attempts to situate digital technology in opposition to traditional film, and to warn morosely against its forthcoming obliteration of celluloid. In so far as mechanically reproduced visual images are considered to be indexical, providing some truth-value of their referent, digital technology is characterized as an innovative modification allowing for a radical break with traditional image qualities. William Mitchell, in his seminal account of digital photography, cites 1989 as the dawn of the ‘post-photographic era’ in which traditional film-based photography has been replaced entirely by computerized images, no longer guarantors of visual truths or even signifiers of stable meaning and value. He declares, ‘The referent has come unstuck’ (Mitchell 1992: 31). Similarly, new media theorist Lev Manovich responds to the plasticity of the digital image by arguing that when cinema, the art of the index, enters the digital age, it can no longer be distinguished from animation; ‘it is no longer an indexical media technology but rather a 34

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subgenre of painting’ (Manovich 2001: 295). The digital, it seems, has come to function lately less as a technology ‘than as a “cultural metaphor” of crisis and transition’ (Elsaesser 1998: 202), and it is often discussed within a positivist rhetoric that overemphasizes the importance of defining a digital image on the basis of surpassing its indexical ties. The documentary, which holds a privileged relationship to reality, has often been the site of heated discussions about epistemological distrust and suspicion in the age of digital manipulation. Much of the existing scholarship on digital documentaries puts a similar emphasis on documentary truth and the risk of it being radically challenged by the new ontological status of digital imagery: it seeks to explain the changes that digitization might bring to the already highly problematic status of image as truth, evidence or document. Dai Vaughan, for example, notes that the increased capacities of digital systems create a situation in which ‘for most people, and in most cultural contexts, a kind of fog, a flux, will have intruded between the image and our assumptions about its origins.’ (Vaughan 1999:189). Brian Winston, worrying about a fatal impact of digitality on documentaries, writes: It is not hard to imagine that every documentarist will shortly (that is, in the next fifty years) have to hand, in the form of a desktop personal video-imagemanipulating computer, the wherewithal for complete fakery. What can or will be left of the relationship between image and reality? (Winston 1995: 6)

Similarly, and with a specific focus on the possible implications that new digital technologies might entail on mockumentaries, Roscoe and Hight privilege too the anxiety of visual manipulability in the digital age: ‘. . . these new technologies allow the referent itself to be manipulated – in other words, the basic integrity of the camera as a recording instrument is fundamentally undermined’ (Roscoe and Hight 2001: 39, original emphasis).4 There is no doubt that digital technology is gradually changing the ways in which documentaries are shot, edited and exhibited. What becomes crucial, however, and so far little discussed, is to study how the different ways in which the digital format has been aesthetically realized in documentary can challenge critical prophecies and predictions that somehow fail to account for the complicated and inseparable ties it establishes with old traditions in the genre. Respectively, much less attention today is given to theorizing digital film-making practices, which do not necessarily lose their visual ties to the profilmic, lower-profile DV-shot projects that foreground the current differentiation between digital and analogue in a more nuanced and strategic way. Therefore, when DV is introduced to the contemporary blend of fiction and documentary, it brings with it a baggage of aesthetic and cultural connotations, heavily challenging our ability to negotiate between image and reality. In fact, digital cinematography has long been contributing to the formulation of the challenging interplay in film between representation and artifice. Perhaps the most well-known digital hybrid forerunner is Myrick and Sanchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999), a mockumentary that compiles a pseudo-video footage of three film students who set out into the Black Hills Forest to make a documentary on the legendary Blair Witch. In and out of this world: digital video and the aesthetics of realism .

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4. Essential to Roscoe and Hight’s understanding of mockumentaries is their conviction that ‘parody is an anti-normative convention, a builtin rejection of the referential’ (Roscoe and Hight 2001: 2).

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5. On the unique marketing efforts to present The Blair Witch Project as a document of a real incident, see J.P. Telotte’s ‘The Blair Witch Project Project: Film and the Internet’ (2004). 6. For an illuminating analysis of the ways in which camcorder aesthetics construct and deconstruct the authority of the ‘documentary look’ in André Bonzel’s Man Bites Dog (1992) in order to encourage an audience to enter into a documentary mode of engagement, see Roscoe (2006).

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Foregrounding the amateurish technology utilized for the documenting efforts as an object of study in itself, the film explores how the properties of the DV camcorder can foster a documentary mode of engagement and exploits its aesthetics through carefully calculated marketing strategies.5 The spectator watching The Blair Witch Project is invited to perform an ongoing process of generic indexing that relies heavily on what the aesthetics of the camcorder stand for. The shaky frame, the movement in and out of focus, the inability to keep the subject within the frame borders, and the camera’s portability, all give the viewer the impression that he is watching an amateurish video diary which unfolds in an unmediated way. The Blair Witch Project officially belongs to the non-fiction subgenre of the mockumentary. As such, it appears to the viewer as a formal conundrum placed at the meeting point of fiction and documentary, blurring fact and fabrication with a twist of irony and parody. Any mockumentary, for that matter, ridicules its own fictional efforts to document a nonexisting subject in order to make fun of the very feasibility of delineating clear boundaries for the documentary category; or, as Alisa Lebow suggests, to sneer at the genre’s ‘continued, head-on quest to pass itself off as the forthright gaze onto the Real’ (Lebow 2006: 235). Mockumentaries seek to challenge the ‘sober’ discourse in classic documentaries, and in particular wish to make fun of ‘the beliefs in science (and scientific experts) and in the essential integrity of the referential image’, long associated with an unquestioned evidential status (Roscoe and Hight 2001: 8). These are fictional texts that make concerted efforts to mimic and exhaust documentary codes and conventions, and require us to subsume a mode of engagement in which we disavow momentarily their fictional fakeness. Interestingly, many mockumentaries self-reflexively manifest their artifice, exposing the production process and cinematic apparatus to deconstruct their effect on the viewer. They seek to question our pre-given markers of realism and the ways in which those are mediated through the rapidly changing ‘technologies of truth telling’ (Juhasz and Lerner 2006: 165).6 In what follows, I will show how several recent experimental blends of document and story shot on digital video raise similar questions and concerns about the manufacturing of truth in documentaries. Without surrendering entirely to the mockumentary mode, these films exemplify how technologically oriented aesthetic variations become signifiers of an artificial generic distinction. The spectator watching these recent hybrids is invited to welcome and embrace the aesthetic hybridity as a formal strategy meant not so much to dupe, mislead or mock, but to offer a different documenting tactic. Films such as Michael Winterbottom’s immigrants road trip In This World (2002) or Abbas Kiarostami’s claustrophobic car journey Ten (2002) invite us to question their structure and form, and work hard to obscure the boundaries between fiction and documentary. They make a case for the constructedness and artificiality of this distinction, and for the difficulty in discriminating between the discursive methods or aesthetic conventions in both forms. These hybrids are neither simply fake documentaries, even if they quite similarly embrace a documentary style as a strategy to bestow an impression of authenticity on their controlled fictional content; nor they are a clear case of mockumentaries, having no real expectations that an audience will know how to distinguish between 36

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their fact and fiction tenets.7 They move across a twilight zone of cinematic categories and rigid definitions as they strive to reflect a multifaceted truth rather than engage in a well-concealed lie. Respectively, these films ask viewers to grant them a status of trustworthiness by expanding any previous understanding of what a documentary might be. Shot over five months on back roads, at border crossings and in refugee camps, Winterbottom’s In This World (2002) starts out as a traditional documentary about the plight of Pakistani immigrants who travel by land to London in search of a better life. An authoritative voice-over introduces the social problem of the Pakistani refugee crisis, building directly on our conditioned expectations from the documentary form: ‘it is estimated that 7.9 billion dollars were spent on bombing Afghanistan in 2001’, a sober male voice announces; ‘Spending on refugees is far less generous.’8 Very abruptly, though, the film changes its tone and structure and transforms into what seems to be a fictionalized document, closely following the journey of two characters, teenage refugees Jamal and Enayat, on their escape from poverty to the promised life in London. Re-enacting with painstaking details the treacherous and nightmarish trip from Pakistan to London, In This World is a film that would have never been made with more conventional cumbersome equipment, and could have probably never achieved its smudgy visual look with a different technology. Literally made on the run with a small crew and one digital video camera, In This World cleverly utilizes the technology’s immediacy and portability, shooting its protagonists in unstaged street scenes, crowds and marketplaces. The more we become entangled with the personal human drama of the journey, the further the guerrilla camerawork will remind us, by its free-floating movement from characters to real moments of local scenery, that this is not a fictitious story per se. Circling freely around the wandering refugees without any hope to conceal its operation, it will function as an object of their own gaze, allowing the characters to look at it directly in a gesture often forbidden in the world of fiction. The vérité-like documentary impression that In This World tries to bestow brings us to a closer understanding of the social problem it refers to, encouraging us to disavow momentarily that the plight of our two main characters is only part of what is essentially a fictional narrative. While Winterbottom utilizes the imperfect feel of the DV camcorder to hint at an alternative mode of film-making disguised as an unmediated representation of the ‘Real’, he still chooses to strategically insert a vast range of fictional formal strategies. Animated geographical maps, suspenseful music, title cards and a politicized voice-over might seem, at first, elements of the well-established docudrama form, but their seamless integration into the document makes an implicit argument for the limitedness and insufficiency of the non-fiction model as a cinematic intermediary to reality. Relying on the viewer’s familiarity with the conventions of both fiction and documentary, the hybridity produced signals ‘the unavailability of the real unless filtered through a range of artistic choices’ (RodriguezOrtega 2007: 3).9 The tension maintained between document and fiction here rhymes with the balance between spontaneous extemporization and scripted exactitude that the properties of the DV camera help to achieve. The digital equipment, less intimidating in size and a more efficient tool in In and out of this world: digital video and the aesthetics of realism .

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7. A mockumentary (to be distinguished from ‘hoax’ or ‘fake’ documentary), according to Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, does not only operate through parody, critique and deconstruction; in a ‘contract’ set up between a producer and audience it assumes that the latter participates in the playfulness of the form, and ‘requires the audience to watch it as if at a documentary presentation, but in the full knowledge of an actual fictional status’ (Roscoe and Hight 2001: 17). 8. After all, the film’s subject matter is in itself a generic marker: is there any other cinematic mode of expression we are familiar with today that narrativizes the story of third-world refugee camps? 9. A similar argument in respect to the proximity of the fiction film to reality was made by André Bazin in his famous claim that ‘realism in art can only be achieved in one way – through artifice’ (Bazin 1971: 26).

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10. The contribution of DV to an impromptu acting style with no predetermined inhibitions was accentuated as a case study in formal experiments such as Mike Figgis’s TimeCode (2000) and Kristian Levring’s The King is Alive (2000). 11. Unsurprisingly, Kiarostami would later make Five: Five Long Takes Dedicated to Yasujiro Ozu (2004), another digital experiment that consists of five long shots of nature. For each shot, Kiarostami points his video camera at the ocean or a reflection of the moon in a pond, and holds it for 10 to 15 minutes.

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shooting longer takes than with cumbersome 35mm, allows for a natural and improvisatory performance, which in itself connotes the freedom associated with documentary film-making.10 When the film reaches its end, it falls back on its documentary counterpart, inserting a title card that announces the fate of the actual actor Jamal: after returning to Pakistan, he has been truly granted asylum in London in accordance with the culmination of the fictional narrative. In an ‘art meets life’ anecdote, Winterbottom is making a reference to the life story of a real refugee documented by a camera, wedding a consistent ‘authenticated’ digital look with an aspiration to represent the real plight of refugees. No less a digital campaigner than Winterbottom, Iranian film-maker Abbas Kiarostami, who has always been a quasi-documentarist thriving on improvisation and unstaged realism, had even gone a step further to declare his exclusive devotion to the new format after shooting ABC Africa (2001). Though both directors garnish their unmediated digital film-making with an interest in urgent political matters, the use of non-actors and the merging of fiction with documentary, Kiarostami’s Ten (2002) stands out as a more purist and idealized attempt to materialize the democratic and aesthetic qualities of the new technology into an innovative cinematic form. 10 on Ten (2002), Kiarostami’s prescriptive theoretical lecture on the promises of digital video, is an indispensable authorial confession which reiterates quite pedagogically the obvious issues at stake in Ten. Admittedly, the latter takes pride in its use of two DV cameras, mounted on the car’s dashboard to capture, without any directorial mediation, intimate political dialogues about life in contemporary Tehran. The surveillance and voyeuristic ambience achieved by these two small cameras, along with the unscripted text delivered by the non-actors, make Ten another unclassifiable hybrid which leaves us constantly wondering about its factual veracity. The technical means are of essence here, since Kiarostami wishes to reach a technological utopia with digital video. The technology, he is convinced, can display the ‘absolute truth’ rather than forge one. Shooting with DV is nothing less than a moral decision, taken in order to eliminate any artifice embedded in the cumbersome 35mm filmmaking process, and allow a film-maker to remain faithful to his natural settings. Although the device is obviously a product of the capitalist system (manufactured by Sony!), he claims it can nonetheless free a filmmaker from ideological constraints when censorship becomes less of an issue, and the simplicity and cheapness of shooting with it democratize the film-making experience. Ten is an experiment in minimalism, where aesthetic innovation is achieved through omission rather than excessive abundance of technical possibilities. Without much artistic direction or camera movement, Kiarostami makes use of digital video to bring cinema back to its ‘pointzero’, and fulfil the Bazinian aesthetic responsibility in its full extremity: observing life without judging it or intervening in its natural flow.11 Thus, Kiarostami not only reroutes cinema back to its early days of unpretentious and primitive stasis (recalling early documentaries by Auguste and Louis Lumière), but also renews the dialogue between spectator and screen originally proposed by the Italian neo-realists. Cesare Zavattini’s 38

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post-war theories of a democratized cinema annihilating the distance between art and life are the source of the moral responsibility to reality that is advocated here; ‘the moral, like the artistic, problem lies in being able to observe reality, not to extract fictions from it’ (Zavattini 1953: 43). Respectively, Kiarostami avoids the use of an excessive plot or cinematic action in order to prevent the spectator from locking herself into an illusionary reality, an unnecessary artifice. By abolishing completely a world of representations and placing austere and primitive images in opposition to western cinematic practices, he proves to be an even more radical neorealist than Zavattini. Kiarostami’s enthusiastic vision correlates in its rhetoric with many earlier forecasts to the future of camera technology in film history. Jean Rouch, following up on Dziga Vertov’s early analogy between a camera and a human eye, predicted in 1973 that . . . tomorrow will be the time of completely portable color video, video editing, and instant replay (‘instant feedback’). Which is to say, the time of the joint dream of Vertov and Flaherty, of a mechanical cine-eye-ear and of a camera that can so totally participate that it will automatically pass into the hands of those who, until now, have always been in front of the lens. (Rouch 1973: 46)

Eighteen years later, Francis Ford Coppola’s famous prophecy of cinematic democratization supplied at the end of Hearts of Darkness (1991) saw the future of film in the form of ‘some little girl in Ohio’, and imagined a new apparatus that could enable such a girl to get her vision onto the screen.12 While Kiarostami comes close to surrender again to what Philip Rosen terms as the ‘rhetoric of the forecast’ (Rosen 2001: 316), to fall back on a dominant discourse of digital utopia, his recent experiments comprise a fascinating effort to resurrect old cinematic traditions with the aid of new technologies. If nothing else, Ten is an exemplary case study in how technological modifications can simply help us do what we are already doing, but only easier, faster and better. To be sure, my wish here is not to propose medium-specific arguments privileging the contribution of digital video to the aesthetics of hybridity, or to fall back on a methodology of technological determinism that presupposes an idealized causality between technology and aesthetics. Obviously, there are countless examples of earlier attempts to utilize unobtrusive lightweight equipment for the construction of documentary-like aesthetics within a fictional framework.13 In fact, the prescribed purity or utopian novelty often attributed to digital technology should be reconsidered in this context once we place the aesthetic permutations of DV within historical crossroads and continuities. Therefore, it becomes imperative to discuss hybrid documentaries that use other types of portable technologies for achieving a similar effect of obscured generic boundaries. Such, for example, is the case of Ford Transit (2002). Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad employs a unique conceptual strategy with his use of a 16mm camera that directly confronts several theoretical issues involved in the hybrid documentary. Ford Transit follows Rajai, a Palestinian transit driver who transports locals between Israeli military In and out of this world: digital video and the aesthetics of realism .

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12. ‘To me the great hope is that now these little video recorders are around and people who normally wouldn’t make movies are going to be making them. And suddenly, one day, some little girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart and make a beautiful film with her father’s camcorder and for once, the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed, forever, and it will really become an art form’ (quote taken from Hearts of Darkness). 13. A few scattered cases may include Jean-Luc Godard’s landmark debut Breathless (1959), shot in real locations with 16mm equipment and nonprofessional actors; Woody Allen’s handheld shaky camerawork in Husband and Wives (1992); and many of the mockdocumentaries shot on 16mm as an aesthetic strategy, such as Stefan Avalos’s The Last Broadcast (1998) or André Bonzel’s Man Bites Dog (1992).

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14. About three years ago, Abu-Assad was involved in an international scandal after admitting in an exclusive interview to the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz that Ford Transit was not a documentary, but a staged performance. The story made waves at every documentary film festival in which Abu-Assad participated, and sparked heated discussions about the limits of what is permissible in the genre.

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checkpoints inside the Occupied Territories in his battered Ford minivan. The camera, almost never unhooked from its mount inside the van, documents brief and intense conversations between transient passengers, always keeping tensions at boiling point. The intimate film-making style achieved chronicles the impossible absurdity of the area, a deadlock situation that is occasionally surreal and mostly dangerous and violent. Ford Transit, which won the Best Documentary award at the 2003 Jerusalem Film Festival, has been publicly ‘exposed’ as a fraud document a few months after its release, a film whose central subject is not a Palestinian driver after all, but an actor placed within staged circumstances of humiliation, violence and despair.14 Abu-Assad, harshly criticized for playing with generic categorizations to create a dangerous political deception about the military oppression in the area, responded to the accusations not by admitting to have employed a fake-documentary format, but by surprisingly confessing that his distinctive film-making approach involves ‘100% fiction and 100% documentary’ (Ramsey 2003). Since Ford Transit has never been officially categorized as a documentary, neither by Abu-Assad himself nor by the festival’s committee, it would be reasonable to assume that it was critically perceived as one mainly because it employs familiar documentary-like aesthetics and strategies: a mobile camerawork, an amateurish and intimate visual look and a talkingheads interviewing structure. If so, it is probable that the bone of contention lying at the heart of the categorization issue is the schematically artificial distinction still made today between the forms of documentary and fiction, often applied to films that are too complex for easy classification. Does it really matter what is staged and what is not, when ‘the events we’re watching may be acted out, but they are not fictitious’ (Jones 2005: 33)? After all, everything that happens in the film could have easily happened on any other day in that reality; knowing that, Abu-Assad wishes not to deceive, perhaps, but to contain typical reactions and events without surrendering completely to the formal limitations of either documentary or fiction. No Lies (1974), Mitchell Block’s famous student experiment in generic classification, is another case in point here, where spectatorial response is manipulated and essentially varies according to the tag we are willing to put on the film. No Lies begins by emulating and embracing the aesthetic conventions of the vérité documentary style. We take the point of view of a young man, well hidden behind a handheld 16mm camera, intruding on a woman’s private moment while filming a casual conversation with her in a bedroom space. Suddenly, the innocent and friendly chat turns into a harrowing confession, as the woman claims to have been raped the night before. Is the woman telling the truth to her interviewer, we wonder, and are the vérité methods used morally acceptable means for unravelling details of this painful story? As the woman’s tale culminates, generating further anxiety and confusion about its veracity, we finally discover that the film is not a documentary after all, and that both man and woman are only fictional characters within this fabricated setting. A shaky handheld camera, unmediated proximity to the subject and an intimate confession may indeed connote a documentary mode, but are in no way guarantors of a stable categorization. 40

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It has been argued elsewhere that No Lies suggests an implied criticism of cinéma-vérité by offering an analogy between the style’s obtrusive methods and a physical rape. Vivian Sobchack writes: ‘Block has found an ideal metaphor for the physical act of rape in the methods and effects of cinémavérité, what we now call direct cinema [. . .] Rape becomes interchangeable with the act of cinema’ (Sobchack 1988: 335). It is not only the woman who is raped (both literally, according to her story, and metaphorically by the obtrusive methods of investigation), but we as viewers as well; we are betrayed by the film-maker whom we knowingly trust to provide us with images invested with truth-value, since ‘the very style of the film immediately authenticates its content’ (Sobchack 1988: 339). Surely, we learn that a documentary style is only an artificial construct that can condition us to read a film entirely differently from what it really is. However, we must also remember that the veracity value of No Lies’s non-fiction facet as a fake documentary is not to be dismissed entirely. The indexing process we continually perform and the shattering of expectations that follows prove, if nothing else, how the urgent need to make a sharp distinction between documentary and fiction is only a futile academic exercise that undermines and trivializes the film and its effects. After all, the moral critique that No Lies may be launching on cinéma-vérité filming methods could not have been so powerfully illustrated within a more traditional documentary form. The ending of No Lies resonates in our minds long after the film is over partly because it makes an elusive truth-claim regarding the traumatic events it so cleverly fakes. In the same way that real political tension is contained within a form of fakery and deception in Ford Transit, an ethical standpoint on documentary’s interviewing methods finds its perfect form within this deceitful illusion of authenticity. The documentary facet in the hybrid film, I argue, becomes less of a clear genre indicator and more of an aesthetic strategy by which a filmmaker can choose to indicate familiar notions of authenticity or solicit the viewer to embrace a documentary mode of engagement. This invitation is predicated on the assumption that our relationship to various cinematic objects is never textually determined a priori, but always also dependent on our attitude towards them in respect to how familiar we are with different cinematic codes. Sobchack holds that the term ‘documentary’ ‘designates a particular subjective relation to an objective cinematic or televisual text, and therefore is less a “thing” than an “experience”’ (Sobchack 1999: 241, original emphasis). Fiction films and documentaries, according to Sobchack, are never to be taken as discrete objects or fixed categories; thus, ‘a fiction can be experienced as a home movie or documentary, a documentary as a home movie or a fiction …’ (Sobchack 1999: 253). A similar suggestion to regard a documentary as merely an invitation for trust is Noël Carroll’s analytical outlook on defining documentaries as ‘films of the presumptive assertion’, films in which the filmmaker intends that the audience entertains the propositional content of the films as asserted (Carroll 1997: 186).15 In other words, we may read in both Carroll and Sobchack a need to shift focus from the properties of the text itself (which may very well be of either fictional or real content) towards the viewer’s engagement with it. A stronger version of understanding documentary in this way is an idealist account of non-fiction, In and out of this world: digital video and the aesthetics of realism .

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15. Carroll explains that these films are called ‘films of the presumptive assertion’ because such films may in fact lie: ‘That is, they are presumed to involve assertion even in cases where the film-maker is intentionally dissimulating at the same time that he is signaling an assertoric intention’ (Carroll 1997: 187, original emphasis).

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16. On the idealist stance on documentary, see Casebier (1986). The famous amateurish Rodney Tape, shot by the bystander George Holliday, serves as a fascinating illustration of a how a historical event recorded on tape did not provide a stabilized meaning as a ‘visible evidence’, but actually well depended on ‘the psychological and ideological predispositions of the spectators/jurors’ reading it (see, on this matter, Renov (1993: 8–9)). 17. Several recent examples of these ‘false’ signifiers of reality include Garry Shandling’s The Larry Sanders Show (1992), in which fabricated late-night talk-show parts are shot on video for creating an ‘on-air’ illusion, while film stock is used for ‘off-air’ time; and Steven Soderbergh’s Full Frontal (2002), in which a stylistic strategic distinction is constructed between the film-within-thefilm (shot in 35mm) and the ‘real-life’ behind the scenes footage shot with a DV camera. 18. Famously, Roland Barthes’s analysis of photographic codification relies on the same mode of argumentation. In The Rhetoric of the Image (1977) Barthes attempts to submit the image ‘to a spectral analysis of the messages it may contain’ (Barthes 1977: 33). By focusing on the advertising image, he provides an explanation for how

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according to which the characteristics of documentary are constructed by the spectator, who forms and shapes the text as a piece of discourse.16 It is valuable, I argue, to theorize our engagement with hybrid documentaries with a similar appeal to spectatorial reception, as long as we do not deny the existence of a clear distinction between fiction and documentary in more easily classifiable cases. It may simply be confusing, as Carl Plantinga reminds us, ‘to deny an objective distinction between fiction and nonfiction films, when such a distinction can clearly be made’ (Plantinga 1997: 20, original emphasis). In the hybrid film, respectively, it is the viewer who ultimately determines the mode of engagement with the object at stake, sizing things up and settling the balance between fiction and reality. The DV format, in that respect, operates as a technological refinement to previously existing lightweight equipment (16mm, Hi-8), entering an already developed camcorder aesthetics tradition. It is used strategically to achieve a strong degree of intimacy, immediacy and weightlessness with an associated aesthetic of drabness that grants a criterion of credibility to the image. The overall effect relies on the presumptive state of a receiving subject, ready to interpret an image signifier as a reference to the primary act of alternative filmmaking, the kinetics of amateurish or guerrilla camera operation. As Scott McQuire affirms, ‘because of the extent to which audiences have internalized the camera’s qualities as the hallmark of credibility, contemporary cinema no longer aims to mime “reality”, but “camera reality”’ (McQuire 2000: 50). In other words, the digital video camcorder’s operation style denotes and imitates a recognizable and well-established aesthetic tradition of realism which we have come to learn and accept over the years based on our familiarity with other portable equipment. Digital photographic practices are inseparable, of course, from cultural conventions. Most audiences are tuned to invest a certain real-ness in DV images because the format represents an antidote aesthetic of roughness, a reaction against the perfection and polish of 35mm; or, as film critic Kent Jones put it, ‘as long as DV is measured against the lush, elegant 35mm image, it makes a snug fit with amateur impulses (whether feigned or real) and the casually observed reality of just-plain-folks aesthetics’ (Jones 2005: 31). Digital realism in the hybrid documentary is merely another construct, a simulated special effect achieved by a conceptual strategy. To put it differently, camcorder aesthetics here connote an effect of realism that taps into, and is governed by, our familiarity with different paradigms of representations. The question of realism naturally remains intertwined with a complex set of discourses, conventions and cultural changes, which safeguard or suspend the trust we are willing to invest in a given form of representation.17 The amateurish properties inherently associated nowadays with the DV look rhyme with those attributed to video cameras in the 1980s. In ‘Looking Through Video’ (1996), John Belton explains that over the years the differences between film and video ‘resulted in a kind of codification through which each “look” has come to have a different value’ (Belton 1996: 67). Much alike digital video (though quite different in its ontology and image quality), the look of video could be attributed to a ‘psychology of the video’, which has

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come to signify greater realism, immediacy and presence (Belton 1996: 67).18 But herein lies a certain paradox with both formats. Philip Lopate, discussing the Sony Portapak video camera, argues that ‘the videotape image severely distorts reality’ in its scale, depth of focus, lighting, camera movement, editing and other ways, but we learn to accept it as true to reality only because of ‘highly contrived (if persuasive) conventions’ (Lopate 1974: 21). Quite similarly, digital images are ontologically made of the unreal, but more than often associated with a heightened sense of realism, a duality which is by now quite dominant in our current image culture.19 While video might have connoted a liveness effect associated with television broadcasting, the DV image, I argue, mostly signifies the unmediated realistic scent of amateurish home movies and the recent trend of reality TV shows. We can relate the constructed DV world so easily to our own simply because we do not only consume it in our daily reality but also create it ourselves. Surely, the associations which reality TV invokes share those related with virtual public spheres for home-movies and amateur photography (e.g. YouTube, Flickr), as both reject the professionalist tenet that has been dominating the genre of documentary for so long.20 The hybridity between fact and fiction in reality TV is also often achieved through an aesthetic ‘illusion’, where shaky handheld camera and unmediated spontaneous action create the impression of a privileged representation of authenticity inside a fictional and staged environment. Surely, there are other examples for the contribution of digital video to the formal mixed-breed of documentary and fiction, such as Jia Zhangke’s Unknown Pleasures (2003), an improvisational study of Chinese alienation; Khoa Do’s The Finished People (2003), a painful look at Australian homeless people; Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (1998), a disturbing psychological study of outsiderness; or even Walid Raad’s Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (2001), a faked video testimony of an Arab hostage in Lebanon. In these and many other cases, the elusiveness produced between document and fiction is mediated by technology and its aesthetic associations, forming a critical strategy that puts documentary’s presumption of objectivity to scrutiny. On the one hand, it seeks to engage the spectator in an active process of classification and ‘framing’,21 in which the dominant assumptions and codes behind the documentary project are exposed for revaluation; borrowing Roland Barthes’s famous terminology, documentary becomes not just a text, but a ‘Writerly Text’, whose reader is no longer merely a consumer, but also the text’s own producer (Barthes 1974). On the other hand, the viewer is invited to accept the obscurity of the distinction as an essential documenting strategy that points to a possible failure of the traditional documentary project, and reassures the theoretical assumption many recent documentaries seem to hold; namely, that the genre cannot reveal an a priori self-evident truth, and should therefore assert a more relative veracity by exercising strategies of fiction and exploiting the grey area between story and fact. Hybrid documentaries seek to achieve a higher, more slippery sense of truth, reaching at, but never quite touching, the longed-for Real.

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an image produces signification. 19. Discussing simultaneous contemporary trends of photographic digital manipulation and factual television, Arild Fetveit suggests that ‘ …we are experiencing a strengthening and a weakening of the credibility of photographical discourses at the same time’ (Fetveit 1999: 787). 20. In her seminal study of video home movies, a discussion which could benefit an update in light of the recent proliferation of digital home clips, Patricia Zimmermann (1995) writes: ‘Video lost its high-art aura to become more reproducible and controllable in the private sphere; it moved from the obscurity of the art museum to the solitude of the home’ (Zimmermann 1995: 156). 21. The idea of ‘framing’ is well explained by Dirk Eitzen: ‘the form of a text can cause viewers to “frame” it in a specific way; poor lighting, a shaky camera and bad sound may suggest cinéma-vérité, but it doesn’t have to be!’ (Eitzen 1995: 91).

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References Barnouw, E. (1993), Documentary: A History of the Nonfiction Film, 2nd edn., New York : Oxford University Press. Barthes, R. (1974), S/Z: An Essay, New York: Hill&Wang. —— (1977 [1964]), ‘Rhetoric of the Image’, in S. Heath (trans.), Image, Music, Text, London: Fontana, pp. 32–51. Bazin, A. (1971), What is Cinema? Volume 2, Berkeley: University of California Press. Belton, J. (1996), ‘Looking Through Video: The Psychology of Video and Film’, in Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg (eds), Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 61–72. Carroll, N. (1997), ‘Fiction, Non-fiction, and the Films of Presumptive Assertion: A Conceptual Analysis’, in Richard Allen and Murray Smith (eds), Film Theory and Philosophy, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 173–202. Casebier, A. (1986), ‘Idealist and Realist Theories of the Documentary’, Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities, 6: 1 (Fall), pp. 66–75. Eitzen, D. (1995), ‘When is a Documentary: Documentary as a Mode of Reception’, Cinema Journal, 35: 1, pp. 81–102. Elsaesser, T. (1998), ‘Digital Cinema: Delivery, Event, Time’, in Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffmann (eds), Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 201–22. Fetveit, A. (1999), ‘Reality TV in the digital era: a paradox in visual culture?’, Media, Culture & Society, 21, pp. 787–804. Jones, K. (2005), ‘I Walk the Line: Hybrid Cinema’, Film Comment 41: 1 (January/February), pp. 30–33. Juhasz, Alexandra and Lerner, Jesse (2006), ‘Introduction: Phony Definitions and Troubling Taxonomies of the Fake Documentary’, in Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner (eds), F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1–35. Lebow, A. (2006), ‘Faking What? Making a Mockery of Documentary’, in Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner (eds), F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 223–37. Lopate, P. (1974), ‘Aesthetics of the Portapak’, Radical Software 2: 6, pp. 18–21. Manovich, L. (2000), ‘From DV Realism to a Universal Recording Machine’, http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/reality_media_final.doc. Accessed September 2007. —— (2001), The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. McQuire, S. (2000), ‘Impact Aesthetics: Back to the Future in Digital Cinema? Millennial Fantasies’, Convergence, 6: 2, 41-61. Mitchell, J.W. (1992), The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Plantinga, C. (1997), Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film, New York: Cambridge University Press. Ramsey, N. (2003), ‘Drama Finds a Palestinian Film-maker’, New York Times (12 June). Renov, M. (1993), ‘Introduction: The Truth About Non-Fiction’, in Michael Renov (ed.), Theorizing Documentary, New York: Routledge, pp. 1–11. Rodriguez-Ortega, V. (2007), ‘Transnational Media Imaginaries: Cinema, Digital Technology, and Uneven Globalization’, chapter 4, unpublished dissertation, Department of Cinema Studies: New York University.

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Roscoe, J. (2006), ‘Man Bites Dog: Deconstructing the Documentary Look’, in Gary D. Rhodes and John Parris Springer (eds), Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., pp. 205–15. Roscoe, J. and Hight, C. (2001), Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rosen, P. (2001), ‘Old and New: Image, Indexicality, and Historicity in the Digital Utopia’, in Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 301–49. Rouch, J. (2003), Ciné-Ethnography, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sobchack, V. (1988), ‘No Lies: Direct Cinema as Rape’, in Alan Rosenthal (ed.), New Challenges for Documentary, Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 332–41. —— (1999), ‘Toward a Phenomenology of Non-fictional Film Experience’, in Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (eds), Collecting Visible Evidence, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 241–54. Telotte, J.P. (2004), ‘The Blair Witch Project Project: Film and the Internet’, in Sarah L. Higley and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (eds), Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp. 37–51. Vaughan, D. (1999), For Documentary: Twelve Essays, Berkeley: University of California Press. Winston, B. (1995), Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited, London: BFI Publishing. Zavattini, C. (1953), ‘Some Ideas on the Cinema’ in Philip Simpson, Andrew Utterson, and K.J. Shepherdson (eds) (2004) Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. Vol. IV. London: Routledge, pp. 40–50. Zimmermann, P. (1995), Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Suggested citation Landesman, O. (2008), ‘In and out of this world: digital video and the aesthetics of realism in the new hybrid documentary’, Studies in Documentary Film 2: 1, pp. 33–45, doi: 10.1386/sdf.2.1.33/1

Contributor details Ohad Landesman is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, from which he holds a Master’s degree too. In addition, he has a bachelor degree in Film and Television and a LLB (Bachelor of Laws) from Tel-Aviv University. He is currently working on a dissertation project exploring digital video aesthetics in contemporary documentaries, and his writings have appeared in Film Comment, Cineaste, Reverse Shot, IndieWIRE, and the Israeli daily newspaper Ma’ariv. Contact: Ohad Landesman, New York University, Department of Cinema Studies, 721 Broadway, New York, NY. E-mail: [email protected]

In and out of this world: digital video and the aesthetics of realism .

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Studies in Documentary Film Volume 2 Number 1 © 2008 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sdf.2.1.47/1

Digital video and Alexandre Astruc’s caméra-stylo: the new avant-garde in documentary realized? Bjørn Sørenssen Norwegian University of Science and Technology Abstract

Keywords

In 1948 the French film maker and critic Alexandre Astruc published an essay where he, inspired by the promises of new cinema technology (16mm,) prophesied a breakthrough in patterns of production and distribution of the moving picture. In the end Astruc envisaged the birth of a new cinema aesthetics drawing on the experiences of the avantgarde. This article poses the question of whether the breakthrough of digital production and distribution of documentary films has brought us closer to Astruc´s vision in the field of documentary film. The article poses the question: Does expanded access to digital production means and distribution channels of audiovisual media also imply an enhancement of the democratic potential of these media, traditionally dominated by producers with access to capital? Alternatively, will this development influence and change the dominating media structure, or will it fall victim to a fragmentization into several nonconnected “partial public spaces”? These questions are discussed using an example of how our concept of the documentary is challenged by a video blog from an octogenarian using the pseudonym “Geriatric1927” on YouTube.

Documentary film film history web 2.0 public sphere Habermas digital documentary

In 1948 the French film-maker and critic Alexandre Astruc published an essay in the journal L’Écran français, No. 144 with the title ‘Naissance d’une nouvelle avantgarde: La camera-stylo’ (‘The birth of a new avantgarde: the caméra-stylo’). In this essay he used as his departure point recent progress in cinema aesthetics represented by directors like Orson Welles and Jean Renoir and drew attention to how this connected with two recent technological advances in cinematography: the 16mm film format and television. Astruc envisioned a new breakthrough for film as a medium, no longer only as an entertainment medium, but as a fundamental tool for human communication: . . . with the development of 16mm and television, the day is not far off when everyone will possess a projector, will go to the local bookstore and hire films written on any subject, of any form, from literary criticism and novels to mathematics, history, and general science. From that moment on, it will no longer be possible to speak of the cinema. There will be several cinemas just as today there are several literatures, for the cinema, like literature, is not so much a particular art as a language which can express any sphere of thought. (Astruc in Graham 1968: 19)

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In this article I intend to return to Astruc’s 1948 epiphany, which implicitly makes a statement highly relevant for the contemporary discourse around ‘new’ media: by developing new media technology there is also created a new and changed pattern of production and distribution and, subsequently, a new aesthetics. It also raises significant questions about the role of media in the public space. Does expanded access to the digital production means and distribution channels of audio-visual media also imply an enhancement of the democratic potential of these media, traditionally dominated by producers with access to capital? Alternatively, will this development influence and change the dominating media structure, or will it fall victim to a fragmentation into several nonconnected ‘partial public spaces’? Finally I will discuss an example of how our concept of the documentary is challenged in the form of a video blog by an octogenarian using the pseudonym ‘geriatric1927’ on YouTube. Is this an example of the new and unexpected manifestations of a ‘new’ documentary aesthetics? It is always interesting to review old utopian visions, as they remind us of our part in fulfilling or failing to fulfil the expectations of earlier generations. In the present case one may safely say that the technological vision of Astruc in 1948 managed to give a fairly accurate description of the general access to audio-visual material through DVD players (‘everyone will possess a projector’) and the local bookstore as a source for films ‘written on any subject’ (admittedly supplanted by the present-day supermarkets and drug stores). In addition to this, there are now personal computers with broadband connections in the majority of homes in western Europe and North America, making it possible to fill the virtual shopping bag with a plethora of audio-visual offerings. The vision of ‘literary criticism and novels [ ...] mathematics, history, and general science’ as the main content of the shopping bag is, however, more dubious. One may safely assume that in terms of film aesthetics the offerings of the local supermarkets and video stores are closer to the kind of superficial entertainment the young Astruc polemicized against in 1948, and that the following was just the plain wishful thinking of a French post-war intellectual: a Descartes of today would already have shut himself up in his bedroom with a 16mm camera and some film, and would be writing his philosophy on film: for his Discours de la Methode would today be of such a kind that only the cinema could express it satisfactorily. (Astruc in Graham 1968: 19)

At the time of writing the medium Alexandre Astruc discussed was a little more than a century old and had undergone what for Astruc and his contemporaries appeared to be an astonishingly fast development. And the leap from the images in Edison’s Kinetoscope and the Cinématograph to an entertainment industry, which in the post-war year of 1948 was at its apex, was indeed impressive. Astruc also had the foresight to mention what in the ensuing years would challenge and surpass the cinema as the primary audio-visual medium: television. 48

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Astruc’s main worry for this new medium was primarily of an aesthetic kind. He maintained that the dominating film industry had failed to grasp that the media products distributed every day to an audience of millions were incomplete in that they were barely able to make use of the communication possibilities inherent in the film medium as language and culture. Like other film theoreticians at this time, for example André Bazin and Sergei Eisenstein, Astruc was convinced that the most revolutionizing potential in the film medium was of a linguistic character and that this potential was still unfulfilled. However, the vision presented by Astruc contains three implicit conclusions, in addition to the overarching one, that I shall attempt to apply to the contemporary situation for audio-visual media: 1. New technology provides new means of expression. As a result of this the film medium (i.e. forms of audio-visual expression) develops from being exclusive and privileged to a common and publicly available form of expression. 2. This, in turn, opens space for a more democratic use of the medium. 3. It also opens up new possibilities for modern (contemporary) and different forms and usages (avant-garde).

Moving images: from invention to industry – from industry to common property? At this point it would seem necessary to view these conclusions in a historical context in order to highlight how the relationship between technological innovation, democratization and audio-visual aesthetics has developed over the years since the breakthrough of the pioneers of the moving images at the end of the nineteenth century.1 It may appear paradoxical that when we go to a movie theatre in 2007 we are still at the mercy of George Eastman’s 35mm perforated photographic film for the Edison Kinetoscope from 1892. This format is still dominant in terms of large screen presentation of the products of the motion picture industry for a mass audience, despite the fact that all editing and a substantial part of the recording of image and sound is done in a digital format. The size of the photographically recorded image secures the good image resolution so necessary for theatrical projection, and this has been one of the main hindrances for those, like Astruc, who have envisioned a film technology available for all. The development of the film industry in the years around World War I was based on 35mm technology, and in spite of the fact that the producers of photographic film, like Kodak and Agfa, presented various alternative formats meant for amateur use, these were still too expensive and complicated to become an alternative to amateur still photography. Admittedly, there were smaller and more accessible versions of the 35mm camera, but with the introduction of sound film from 1927 onwards, the price of audio-visual stateof-the-art recording equipment was beyond the means of the individual. As shown by Patricia Zimmermann (1995) a certain niche culture developed around the amateur film formats that were offered by the producers of photographic film. The problems of expensive and bulky Digital video and Alexandre Astruc’s caméra-stylo: the new avant-garde .

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1. B. Ruby Rich has remarked that ‘Documentary history sometimes reads like a patent-office log in terms of its generations of machinery [...], with endlessly renewed promises of enhanced access that occasionally really does follow’ (Rich 2006: 111).

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35mm equipment was met with various forms of narrow gauge film, for example 17.5mm and 9.5mm, before Kodak in 1923 introduced the 16mm safety film on an acetate film base. In addition to the limitations created by bulk and price connected with the 35mm format for those wishing to make movies outside of the industry, the fact that the 35mm film was produced on a highly flammable nitrate base was one of the major hindrances for alternative forms of film production and exhibition. Because of the fire danger, most countries had developed a strict set of rules for the projection of nitrate-based motion pictures, rules that frequently were used to bar films with a perceived ‘inflammatory’ content from public exhibition. In Astruc’s article, we can see how the elimination of some of these limitations gave rise to an almost euphoric hope for a ‘liberation of the cinema’, equal to the liberation Europe had experienced in the wake of the victory over Nazism. As pointed out above, the article was written at the same time as television had its definitive breakthrough as a mass medium in the United States but it anticipated how television was to supplant cinema as the most important audio-visual medium within the next decade. In this development the 16mm film format would play an important role. The better resolution of the 35mm image was not of importance when the image was to be realized on a flickering 17- to 20-inch screen. This in turn led to an upgrading and a professionalization of the 16mm format from an amateur medium to an important production medium for the news and actuality divisions of television companies. The new and largely improved recording systems for 16mm film with synchronous sound became as economically unattainable for amateurs as previously the 35mm had been and as a consequence the photo industry introduced new, cheaper (and in terms of technological aspects such as image resolution – inferior) alternatives in the form of 8mm and, later super-8mm film. This development, where the introduction of new and expensive technology eventually would spawn more consumer-friendly versions, was repeated with the introduction of electronically stored moving pictures. The videotape recorder was introduced during the mid-1950s and after having existed during a decade as a very expensive production and storage facility, the development of more effective and affordable technology led to more accessible versions of this technology. First as half-inch video tape recorders (Portapak) and later, in the 1970s, as video cassettes. The VHSVCR format, and later the Video-8/Hi-8 cassette system, gave users access to mass-produced video cameras that more or less realized the vision about a technology for video production as easily available as amateur still photography. But even after the video camcorder had made its way into millions of homes, the quality gap between ‘real’ film and television products and those of the merry multitudes of video amateurs was formidable. The place of the amateur formats was the intimate family sphere, with family and friends as an audience, while moving images in the public space were still reserved for film and television companies with seemingly unlimited access to capital. The technology for video editing was still directed towards the professional market and thus well beyond the means for amateur use. However, the real needle eye, in terms of opening up the relationship 50

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between the private and public sphere for video amateurs, was the system of distribution. Admittedly, the broadcasters found ways to integrate and use the new, wider accessibility of video-recording equipment through programmes like America’s Funniest Home Movies, but the ideal of open access media was as distant for the video enthusiasts of the 1980s as for the amateur film enthusiasts in the pre-war years. The most recent development in the relationship between amateur and professional relates to the transition from analogue to digital media and the emergence of the World Wide Web (WWW). During the 1990s the film and television industry moved from analogue to digital technology, first in editing, later also in camera technology. Midway into the first decade of the twenty-first century, essentially all that remains of analogue image technology in film and television are the end stations: television and movie-theatre screens. These breakthroughs in digital technology for the professional media were soon taken up by the market for consumer and amateur video, where the analogue Video-8 and Hi-8 formats were supplanted by digital tape formats as Mini-DV cassettes in addition to the possibility of direct recording to DVD or hard disk. Even more important was the fact that digital videoediting technology now appeared as consumer products. An example of this is that Apple’s iMovie editing program was delivered bundled with the OS X operating system, facilitating relatively advanced editing possibilities on a desktop personal computer or a laptop. American film-maker Jonathan Caoutte’s documentary Tarnation, making quite an impact at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004, was in its entirety edited with the help of iMovie. At the same time there has, as a result of the development of the Internet, been a marked change in the distribution situation for film and video producers operating outside of the established media channels. With the development of the World Wide Web combined with expanded access to broadband services in Europe and North America, several alternative possibilities of distribution have emerged. Through various forms of streaming video formats, the personal computer has been turned into an important distribution channel, opening up for the distribution of alternative forms and content compared to traditional television and cable channels. In addition, the recent development in mobile telephony must be mentioned. The mobile telephone has in a very short time gone from being a mobile version of the traditional phone to a digital media centre, able to function as a combined source of music, pocket-sized PC and movie camera as well as functioning as a telephone. The developments described above, where apparently a new situation for user participation within the audio-visual culture has risen, may be summarized in three main points: 1. Economic availability: The gap in costs and quality between production and editing equipment and software for professional and mass consumers has closed up considerably. 2. Miniaturization: Equipment that previously demanded considerable resources in terms of logistics has been replaced with equipment that is lightweight, does not occupy much space and is well adapted for individual operation. Digital video and Alexandre Astruc’s caméra-stylo: the new avant-garde .

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2. In this context it should be noted that the English translation of the German Öffentlichkeit carries over some translation problems that public sphere does not quite cover. In her introduction to Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s Public Sphere and Experience Miriam Hansen expresses it in this way: ‘The German term Öffentlichkeit encompasses a variety of meanings that elude its English rendering as “public sphere”. Like the latter, it implies to a spatial concept, the social sites or arenas where meanings are articulated, distributed, and negotiated, as well as the collective body constituted by and in this process, “the public”. But Öffentlichkeit also denotes an ideational substance or criterion – “glasnost” – or openness (which has the same root in German, “offen”) – that is produced both within these sites and in larger, deterritorialized contexts; the English word “publicity” grasps this sense only in its historically alienated form. In the dialectical tension between these two senses, Negt and Kluge develop their concept of Öffentlichkeit as the “general horizon of social experience”’.

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3. New and alternative forms of distribution: From being forced to circulate in a very restricted public sphere, the establishment of distribution sites on the World Wide Web has opened up possibilities for mass medial distribution for alternative audio-visual products.

On the possibilities for democratic participation in the public sphere – ‘Gegenöffentlichkeit’. This development may, with possible benefit, be described within the paradigm of what is usually referred to as the public sphere in English. This term is again closely connected with the theoretical work of Jürgen Habermas from his 1962 book Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit published in English 27 years later as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. In the decade following the English translation of Habermas’s seminal work, the concept of public sphere has become a central theoretical aspect in describing the development of the relationship between society and the individual in the twentieth century and it has been actualized with the arrival of the Internet as a communication channel. (A recent Google search for ‘Habermas + blogosphere’ yielded 108,000 hits!).2 In addition to having been included in the English-language discourse on public sphere/space, there has been a renewed interest in Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung (1972), (English translation Public Sphere and Experience: Towards an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (1993)) (see Hansen 1981/1982, 1983). In this book, strongly influenced by the 1970s discourse on ideology, the authors emphasize the necessity to take into consideration how the European working class would relate to public space according to the experience of its members. Habermas only referred in passing to this plebeian Öffentlichkeit. They give several examples of how alternative forms of Öffentlichkeit were organized in the interwar years in organized labour movements in Germany and Austria, characterized as Gegenöffentlichkeit – public spheres organized in response and opposition to the dominating public space, or counter publicity as it has been referred to in English (Mark Poster, in fact, uses the expression oppositional public sphere (Poster 2001: 179)). However, as Negt and Kluge point out, these attempts, as represented by the German Communist Party and the Austrian Social Democratic Party, soon ended up in situations where they would merely establish parallel institutions emulating the bourgeois public sphere, thus ending up as isolated social organizations – what the authors refer to as Lageröffentlichkeit, or literally encampment public spheres. In the years following World War II we find similar attempts at using available amateur technology to establish alternative ‘filmic oppositional public spheres’ through the American avant-garde movement and in the independent documentary movement. The main problem was, of course, that since these movements existed well outside the public sphere of the film industry, they would start out and end up as marginalized phenomena. Attempts at establishing alternative distribution and exhibition channels through the 1960s and 1970s usually ended up as interesting although isolated movements that resounded more with cineaste groups than with a general audience. 52

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In the context of film history, however, these marginalized ‘minipublicities’ were to have an impression vastly larger than on their modest audiences in the form that could be referred to as aesthetic counter-publicities. One such case is the British Free Cinema documentary movement in the 1950s, which became influential not only in the field of documentary, but also for British feature-film production in the ensuing years, inspiring a new everyday style dubbed ‘kitchen-sink realism’. The groundbreaking short documentary subjects of Free Cinema, produced as a response to the perceived conservativism of the Griersonian documentary movement, were only shown on six occasions at the National Film Theatre in London, something that hardly may be termed a mass medial context. However, the films became very influential in the ongoing public debate about documentary and feature films in post-war Britain (see Street 1997: 78–80 and Lovell: 1972: 142–156). Similarly, today we can see how amateurs producing digital video within an experimental frame – video blogs, newsgroups, etc. – on the Internet very often represent an impact on commercial and institutional audio-visual forms. In the same vein, the expanded possibilities created by new media technology, in this case lightweight recording equipment for 16mm sound film, revolutionized the field of anthropological film and brought about the concept of cinéma-vérité. This direction, with its ambition to get closer to everyday life than the classic documentary had been able to, originally addressed a specialist audience in the field of ethnology and anthropology, but it is today recognized as the precursor of the mass media phenomenon of reality TV.

Online audio-visual culture – the realization of Astruc’s utopia? In terms of history we have been able to examine how different forms of ‘alternative’ publicities have emerged in a media context, with movements and phenomena suggesting a far wider scope than Habermas’s original use of the concept Öffentlichkeit, but these alternative forms draw on the type of human communicative interaction discussed in Theorie des kommunikativen handelns (Habermas 1981). According to Douglas Kellner there is a considerable widening of the Öffentlichkeit concept in contemporary society due to the application of new media technology. This implies that it is necessary to go beyond the defined historical context of Habermas and view the ‘new’ public sphere as ‘a site of information, discussion, contestation, political struggle, and organization that includes the broadcasting media and new cyberspaces as well as the face-to-face interactions of everyday life’ (Kellner 2000). It is possible to discern this convergence between the ‘great’ publicity and the many ‘part’ and ‘counter’ publicities in what Kellner terms the ‘new cyberspace’, i.e. the World Wide Web and its repercussions on contemporary life. The millions of personal computers in the industrialized world have long ago been changed from one-way communication receivers to potential media production tools, supported by a similar number of mobile telephones with recording possibilities for sound and moving images. The Web has become a rupture in the wall between the private and the public sphere, challenging the dystopia of Habermas in 1962 – where the forces of the mass media industry had more or less Digital video and Alexandre Astruc’s caméra-stylo: the new avant-garde .

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successfully invaded the private sphere – and presenting a more optimistic view, where the single individual can and will contribute to public discourse. However, Habermas still seems to maintain a pessimistic attitude towards the supposed expansion of public discourse that the Web (or what has been termed Web 2.0) may allow. In the acceptance speech for receiving the Bruno Kreisky Prize in Vienna on 9 March 2006 he said: Use of the Internet has both broadened and fragmented the contexts of communication. This is why the Internet can have a subversive effect on intellectual life in authoritarian regimes. But at the same time, the less formal, horizontal cross-linking of communication channels weakens the achievements of traditional media. This focuses the attention of an anonymous and dispersed public on select topics and information, allowing citizens to concentrate on the same critically filtered issues and journalistic pieces at any given time. The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralized access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus. (Habermas 2006: 4)

This double-edged character of online society, vacillating between democratic potentiality and superficial vulgarity, emerges in several of the new fora developing for the new production-empowered net users. An excellent example in the field of moving pictures is the website YouTube.com. YouTube is a very good example how and how fast innovation happens in the world of WWW (a story not unlike that of Napster). The website was established by three young enthusiasts, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, in May 2005 in order to make a website allowing users to upload video files for free use. It opened in November 2005 and by early summer 2006 the net traffic gauge Alexia had already placed the site among the top ten worldwide. When the film industry threatened YouTube with legal action because of copyrighted material made available on the website (an obvious parallel to the Napster case five years earlier), YouTube in February 2006 decided to limit the length of non-registered video uploads to 10 minutes. The media buzz around this gave extended promotion of the website and eventually the media industry signalled another and more accommodating approach than was the case in the Napster debacle. In June 2006 NBC, after having initialized the threat of prosecution decided on a cooperative deal with YouTube, switching to using the website instead as a promotion channel for its film and video products. By October of that year YouTube had made deals with several music producers ensuring free distribution of music videos. At the same time it was announced that Google had purchased the company for 1.6 billion dollars. However, the main reason for the enormous success of YouTube lies in the fact that it operates as an open channel for the teeming millions of prospective content producers who, thanks to the technological and economic development of digital media production equipment, now have the possibilities to exchange meanings, experiences and – perhaps most importantly – ways of expression through the film medium. Every day on 54

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YouTube sees the debut of new pieces of audio-visual expression, from film snippets to entire feature films, and some of these may generate millions of hits attracted by digital word-of-mouth. By registering as a director with the service, there is also the possibility of opening up a new ‘channel’, where visitors can log on and give commentaries in text or in the form of new video material. In this way a network of thousands (the auteurs of the twenty-first century to use a parallel in film history) has been established and these new auteurs have found a mass audience that would have been inconceivable for an earlier amateur without economic and technological access to mass media. The main problem with YouTube as a distribution channel is the signal/ noise ratio: every item has to contend for space with an avalanche of homebrew video snippets of laughing babies, stupid dogs, an unending number of popular film and TV show emulations, in addition to the fact the entertainment industry has belatedly acknowledged the marketing potential of YouTube and is swamping the website with promotional material. Thus, the site fully illustrates Habermas’s worry about the loss of focus in the sea of individual contributions heavily reliant on the various hegemonic forms of expression. An example of this may be found in one of the great ‘rating successes’ on YouTube in Lizzie Palmer’s Remember Me, catapulting a 15-year-old American high school student to national fame with a still photo montage of American soldiers in Iraq accompanied by New Age-style music and ending with the words: ‘Each and every soldier needs our support [. . .] don’t let them down.’ Appealing to a large segment of Americans, this modest production was able to reach a viewership of more the 20 million by October 2007 after having been picked up and shown on Fox News Channel in June the same year. In spite of this, however, there are also numerous examples of innovative formal experiments on YouTube, several of which have been able to benefit from word-of-mouth promotion encouraged, among other factors, by the website’s rating system.

Globalized and intergenerational communication: the case of ‘geriatric1927’ An interesting phenomenon among YouTube ‘auteurs’ is the pseudonym ‘geriatric1927’ appearing on a website usually dominated by a very youthful audience. After a short personal introduction with the title ‘Geriatric Grumbles’, the YouTube audience comes face to face with an elderly British gentleman using a simple web camera to declare his enthusiasm for the YouTube community and declaring his intention to share his life experiences with his audience. As over 4,000 YouTubers quickly sent him positive feedback, ‘geriatric1927’ started a series with the title Telling It All that by early January 2008 had reached 57 ‘episodes’.3 In this autobiographic monologue the audience is informed about growing up in preWorld War II class-dominated England, about the person behind the pseudonym, whose first name is Peter and he was (as his moniker hinted) 79 years old at the first posting, a widower, has an education in the field of mechanical engineering and has been working in the British health sector prior to being self-employed and later having retired. He leads off every new ‘episode’ with a short vignette of text and music – mainly classic Digital video and Alexandre Astruc’s caméra-stylo: the new avant-garde .

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3. The number of video postings by ‘geriatric 1927’ had reached 100 as of January 2008, with less emphasis on ‘Telling it All’ and more on contemporary issues, especially about the conditions for the elderly in the United Kingdom.

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4. With a grandparent generation living in Florida or Arizona (or Spain in the case of northern European youths) is it possible that new living patterns in the middle class have opened up an unexpected deprivation?

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blues – before addressing his audience with: ‘Hello YouTubers!’ From this point the web camera rests on him as he continues his monologue, with an ample amount of digressions, about growing up in another age. The response from his audience, which seems to have stabilized around 20,000–30,000, comes in the form of text and video blogs addressed to him, parodies (most of them good-natured, with a few exceptions) and responses sent to his new website (http://www.askgeriatric.com/). The average viewer seems to be of a very young age, a fact that is interesting and suggests a need with the present ‘Generation Y’ for a kind of grandfather figure.4 With media exposure comes fame, and ‘Peter’ has been awarded considerable attention in the regular media, with coverage on BBC radio and the Washington Post as well as other media. However, he has refused to ‘come out’ on regular television and has managed to maintain his relative anonymity. On several occasions he has broken off his autobiography to comment on the kind of pressure that public media exerts and where he maintains his loyalty to ‘his YouTubers’ and insists on the qualities of the conversation and personal correspondence as preferable to being exposed in the regular mass media – a point of view that undoubtedly appears sensational for an audience led to believe that exposure via the mass media is the meaning of life! In a recent article Dave Harley and Geraldine Fitzpatrick have been looking at geriatric1927 in the context of globalized and intergenerational communication (Harley and Fitzpatrick 2008). In addition to pointing out that the activities of Peter highlights the discrepancy between the increased life length expectancy in present society and the distribution of Internet use in age groups over 60, the authors draw attention to how the YouTube community may serve as a learning tool for the would-be digital video producer: His confidence in his own abilities appears to be faltering at this point, both in terms of his ability to express himself through his videos and in terms of producing and uploading content onto the YouTube website. What begins as an individual effort by Peter soon develops into a collaborative endeavour through the comments he receives from his viewers. They give him feedback in a number of ways which help him to develop his video presence within YouTube. The following are examples of viewers’ comments that critique the technical aspects of his video production and give him technical advice on how to improve it: ‘Try putting music into the video through the program you are using, it would sound much better :)’ [ZS9, 19, US – response to Video 1] ‘You can also change the colors on Windows Movie Maker. When you are typing your text down by where it says animation or what ever to change the display of your text it should be right there. Just click that and you can change the font and then color is right under the font.’ [Gt, 21, US – response to Video 2] Peter is quick to take advantage of the advice given and the changes in production qualities and techniques in subsequent videos show evidence of the results of his learning. (Harley and Fitzpatrick 2008)

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All in all, it is remarkable to what extent the video blog of geriatric1927 appears as a collective enterprise actually enhancing the highly individual character of the project. He has established what seems to be a solid ‘fan base’ of younger people who, in addition to providing a continuous feedback on form and content matters, have also helped him in establishing and maintaining a website. This dual character of collective support and individual presentation presents an interesting contrast to Astruc’s individualized vision of a future Descartes holed up in his room with his camera. Peter is writing his life with his camera pen, but he is not doing it alone. In The Subject of Documentary (2004) Michael Renov points out that over the last decades we have seen a shift in individual self-expression from written media (diaries and other written material) to a culture of audiovisual self-presentation both inside and outside of the documentary institution. Is this tendency to audio-visual self-presentation a ‘turn inwards’, a retreat from the traditional societal role of documentary, a turn from Paul Rotha’s ‘documentary as pulpit’ to the ‘documentary as a confessional’? Renov does not see it that way: . . . video confessions produced and exchanged in nonhegemonic contexts can be powerful tools for self-understanding, as well as for two-way communication. [They] [. . .] afford a glimpse of a more utopian trajectory in which cultural production and consumption mingle and interact, and in which the media facilitate understanding across the gaps of human difference rather than simply capitalizing on these differences in a rush to spectacle. (Renov 2004: 215)

With Telling It All we can also glimpse the contours of an innovation in the relationship with the ‘classic’ documentary, an innovation that to a large extent may be ascribed to the change in forms of distribution represented by digital audio-visual narrative. A recurring problem within documentary theory and practice is the question of representation – or the burden of representation, as documentary film-maker Isaac Julien has put it (Trinh 1992: s.193). The Griersonian project of the 1920s and 1930s was, to a large extent, a pedagogical project. Grierson wanted to use the film medium in order to illustrate the extent to which modern society was a result of a complicated pattern of interaction among its citizens. The problem, as critics of Grierson have pointed out, was that British documentary tended to reduce the subjects of the films to de-individualized, representative figures subjected to a master narrative they had no control over. This problematic has led to several experiments in letting the subjects in the documentary express themselves more directly, as in the Canadian social documentary project Challenge for Change in the 1960s where enthusiastic film-makers passed out cameras and sound equipment and experimented with inclusive editing and distribution formats. The reason this and other similar projects failed was that the distribution link was marginalized and that however democratic the intensions were, the initiative for and control of the film project came from outside and from above.5 In Telling it All we have a case where the subject controls his own narrative from the very first moment. In this way ‘Peter’ and his video autobiography represent a dramatic challenge to a film genre that at Digital video and Alexandre Astruc’s caméra-stylo: the new avant-garde .

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5. About the perceived failure of the Challenge for Change programme, see Marchessault (1995: 131); Kurchak (1972: 120); Svenstedt (1970: 85).

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times may seem at odds with its own proclaimed democratic potentiality. Paula Rabinowitz sums up this problematic in the very title of her book dealing with how social conditions have been described in theatre and television documentaries throughout the twentieth century: They Must be Represented. This title denotes a ‘they’ and a ‘we’, where all good intentions of acting on behalf of others very often leads to a cementation of existing social constellations – the subject of the documentary invariably becomes trapped in the role of victim, as Brian Winston points out (Winston 1995). This brings us back to Alexandre Astruc and his vision of the future author (auteur) who writes, using a camera instead of a pen. A major point for Astruc was that the perceived new media situation would open up alternative ways and means of audio-visual expression, hence his insistence of connecting the new technology with the aesthetics of the avantgarde. For him, the new technological possibilities meant more than just a democratization of the medium, instead he regarded it as a necessary rejuvenation of film form, liberating it from the old. Could it be that parts of this vision are being realized today, in the unlikely figure of an 80-year-old ‘auteur’ using a global digital network to transfer his experiences and narratives to a younger generation? References Astruc, Alexandre (1968), ‘The birth of a new avant-garde: La caméra-stylo’, in Peter Graham (ed.), The New Wave: Critical Landmarks, London: Secker & Warburg in association with the British Film Institute. Calhoun, Craig (1992), Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Corneil, Marit Kathryn (2003), Challenge for Change: An experiment in documentary ethics at the National Film Board of Canada, Master’s thesis, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. Graham, Peter (ed.) (1968), The New Wave: Critical Landmarks, London: Secker & Warburg in association with the British Film Institute. Habermas, Jürgen (1981) Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. —— (1991), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. —— (1992), ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’, in Craig Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. —— (2006), Preisrede [. . .] anlässlich der Verleihung des Bruno-Kreisky-Preises für das politische Buch 2005, Renner-Institut, Vienna. Hansen, Miriam (1981/1982), ‘Cooperative Auteur Cinema and Oppositional Public Sphere: Alexander Kluge’s Contribution to Germany in Autumn’, New German Critique, 24/25 (Autumn 1981–Winter 1982), pp. 36–56. —— (1983), ‘Early Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?’, New German Critique, 29 (Spring–Summer), pp. 147–84. Harley, Dave and Fitzpatrick, Geraldine (2008), ‘YouTube and Intergenerational Communication: The Case of Geriatric1927’, Universal Access in the Information Society, (special issue: ‘HCI and older people’). Kellner, Douglas (2000), ‘Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention’, in Perspectives on Habermas, Lewis Hahn (ed.) (2000) Chicago: Open Court Press, http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/habermas.htm accessed November 2007.

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Kurchak, Marie (1972), ‘What Challenge? What Change’, reprinted from Take One, 4: 1 (September–October), in Seth Feldman and Joyce Nelson (eds) (1977), The Canadian Film Reader, Toronto: Peter Martin Associates. Lovell, Alan (1972), “Free Cinema” in Alan Lovell and Jim Hillier, Studies in Documentary, London: Secker & Warburg in association with the British Film Institute. Marchessault, Janine (1995), ‘Reflections on the Dispossessed: Video and the Challenge for Change experiment’, in Screen, 36: 2 (Summer), p. 131. Negt, Oscar and Kluge, Alexander (1994), Public Sphere and Experience: Towards an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Poster, Mark (2001), What´s the Matter with the Internet?, Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. Renov, Michael (2004), The Subject of Documentary, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rich, B. Ruby (2006), ‘Documentary Disciplines: An Introduction’, Cinema Journal, 46: 1, pp 108–115. Street, Sarah (1997), British National Cinema, London: Routledge. Svenstedt, Carl Henrik (1970), Arbetarna Lamner Fabriken, Stockholm: Pan/ Norstedts. Trinh T. Minh-Ha (1992), Framer Framed, New York: Routledge. Winston, Brian (1995), Claiming the Real, London: British Film Institute. Zimmermann, Patricia R. (1995), Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Suggested citation Sørenssen, B. (2008), ‘Digital video and Alexandre Astruc’s caméra-stylo: the new avant-garde in documentary realized?’, Studies in Documentary Film 2: 1, pp. 47–59, doi: 10.1386/sdf.2.1.47/1

Contributor details Bjørn Sørenssen is Professor of Film and and Media at the Department of Art and Media Studies at the The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. His main research interests are in film history, documentary and new media technology. He has published a considerable number of articles internationally on these themes in addition to articles and books in Norwegian, among these Å fange virkeligheten. Dokumentarfilmens århundre (Catching Reality. The Century of the Documentary) (2001, 2nd edition 2007.) Contact: Bjørn Sørenssen, Department of Art and Media Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, P.A. Munchs gt.17, N-7030 Trondheim, Norway. E-mail: [email protected]

Digital video and Alexandre Astruc’s caméra-stylo: the new avant-garde .

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Studies in Documentary Film Volume 2 Number 1 © 2008 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sdf.2.1.61/1

Documentary expression online: The Wrong Crowd, a history documentary for an ‘electrate’ audience Debra Beattie Griffith University Abstract

Keywords

The Wrong Crowd is a history documentary produced with funding from the Australian Film Commission for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Internet portal in 2003. Key issues encountered in producing within the computermediated parameters of an online screen are contained in the debates around constructing a digitized reality within a non-linear format, the attendant resolution of tension between narration and navigation as well as the enhanced audience experience of interaction in the unfolding of the historical argument.

electrate virtual reality QTVR interactive mise-en-scène verisimilitude bildungsroman Annalistes

In 2001 I was funded to create a history documentary for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Internet portal. As writer, producer and director I worked with computer artist and web designer Scott Bennett to create a seventeen-scene online documentary. This collaboration between filmmaker and web artist working together to create a new form of documentary content was the result of an innovative policy initiative that year from the Australian Film Commission. This article discusses the key issues encountered in creating documentary content within a computer-mediated environment. Constructing a digitized reality in a non-linear format, where the user becomes integral to the flow of the narrative, required challenging creative decisions to be made. Overall there were three key issues that arose in the production of The Wrong Crowd: • • •

The uncharted waters of the audience/user reception within this new delivery platform The competing needs of organizing a non-linear database and scripting a linear narrative ‘Warranting’ of evidence to support a history documentary exacerbated by the verisimilitude of digital media

History documentaries made for television already occupy a contentious space in the public sphere. In claiming to convey the ‘truth’ of the past, the documentary-maker has traditionally taken earlier documents of the media – radio, television, newspapers – and placed them in a linear narrative context thus allowing the audience, under the direction of the filmmaker, to reflect on a sequence of images detailing the unfolding of an

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1. Similar to Paul Watson’s 1974 UK version The Family (BBC) and precursor to the first Australian example in 1992, Sylvannia Waters.

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event or events. In addition to these media ‘documents’, photographs, film and video footage, archival records and primary source documents contribute to the documentary’s evidentiary status. Indeed the documentary form needs to contain this visible evidence to stake its claim as ‘actuality’. Within the documentary toolbox, as well as prima facie evidence and eyewitness accounts, the film-maker also has recourse to re-enactments or re-creations in the unfolding of the documentary argument. So often are re-enactments used as key planks in the production of the history documentary that the genre would be seen to fit comfortably within the hybrid form of drama-documentary, carefully articulated by Derek Paget (1998: 5) as the form in which ‘the drama diverts the documentary element into dramatic structuring’. These documentaries rely heavily on the signifiers of re-creation, and the use of narrative strategies to convey the participants’ point of view within a broader historical context. Some examples of re-enactment have been highly successful in staking their ‘truth-claim’. Ken Burns’s direction of actors shivering on the site of a battlefield describing their experiences as soldiers in The Civil War (1990) for instance, was so skilful that university students in the twenty-first century, uneducated about the history of camera recording, were surprised to be told that these were not ‘real’ interviews with ‘real’ soldiers (Beattie 2006). Bill Nichols (1993: 176) warns of this inherent danger that ‘re-enactments risk implying greater truth-value for the recreated event than it deserves when it is merely an imitation or copy of what has already happened’ [original emphasis]. Representations, re-creations, re-enactments are necessary risks in producing history documentaries. Within the liminal spaces provided by these constructions, perhaps the most striking conundrum in the evidentiary status of the documentary has been the rise of ‘fly on the wall’ film-making whose enthusiasts support this as the purest form of documentary- making. In an opposing view, Baudrillard (1988) has suggested that ‘cinéma vérité’ is a dissolution of the representation of the real into a form of simulation and that this constitutes its disqualification from competing for truthclaims. Using the example of the 1973 documentary series An American Family,1 Baudrillard questioned how much of the behaviour within the family was modified by the presence of the camera crew and how different the participants’ interactions would have been had the camera not been there. Baudrillard argued that what was being observed were ‘simulated’ behaviours constructed for public viewing rather than the more private and therefore ‘real’ interactions that would have occurred without the camera’s presence and concomitant observation/mediation/ intervention (Baudrillard 1988: 79). With the rise of ‘reality television’, Brian Winston addressed this debate (Winston 2003) over the changing nature of the documentary form. Citing the 1943 classic Fires Were Started by Humphrey Jennings, Winston described how the audience for this film accepted the footage as actual/’real’ examples of the London Blitz. Jennings and his crew, however, had started the fires, in a controlled situation, for the purposes of filming the necessary dramatic footage, and therefore the footage had no evidentiary status at all. The question arises here too as to how this intervention on the part of the documentary-maker vitiates the authenticity of the images. 62

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Winston argued convincingly that what differentiated the ‘simulations’ by Jennings from the current crop of ‘fly on the wall’ reality television programmes was the fact that Jennings’s images were manufactured as a result of ‘prior witnessing’. It is the Griersonian description of the documentary as a ‘creative treatment of actuality’ that is most often used to define the form. Grierson first used the term in the early twentieth century to describe the films of Robert Flaherty, citing particularly Nanook of the North in which Flaherty’s ‘creative treatment’ included a re-enactment of the results of a hunt, set up for the camera, in order to show the audience details of the hunters’ return. This set-up however, was scripted from Flaherty’s ‘prior witnessing’ and so fits within Brian Winston’s parameter. The American Errol Morris, known for his documentaries on the reality of modern life, directed The Thin Blue Line (1988) by presenting narrative moments of re-enactments and interviews to camera of the protagonists involved in the shooting murder of a Dallas police officer. Rather than attempting to present authentic re-enactments, Morris’s scenes are directed as iconic representations. The audience, familiar with cinematic techniques, knows that the shadowy figures captured by the camera are meant to represent the protagonists, and there is no pretence that this is who he is actually filming. Moreover, the scene of the policeman being shot is re-enacted a number of times from a number of different perspectives further displacing any ‘actuality’ claims. The film does, however, fit comfortably within the genre of Derek Paget’s docudrama. Within the documentary form, this fragmentary and often ephemeral experience of representation in contemporary culture is on the increase, particularly on the Internet. The question arises as to how the fragmented nature of non-linear narrative and the audience’s requirement to find their own pathway through this narrative might impede their understanding. Without a constructed linear pathway, the audience is left without a self-evident narrative arc. In Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices (1996), Renov argues that despite the fragmentary nature of the presentation, the fundamental structure operating within the audience of the ‘ordering of the real’ remains in our reception of the documentary form. There is a protocol, Renov argues, in our engagement with and prior experience of the language of cinema that operates within us, as an audience, to make sense within this structure. In writing the documentary script for The Wrong Crowd,2 a public history of police corruption as it intersected with a personal coming-of-age story, my objective was to allow for this ‘ordering of the real’ to continue in a documentary work that was to be web-based, where the structure could not be linear. The challenge of working within this change of screen, from television to computer as a reception point for the documentary form, was how to pre-empt the effect on the audience’s ‘ordering of the real’ as they sat, hand at the ready, to point and click to another image. This case study, seen as an innovative intervention in the form in which it was published five years ago, was created within the infrastructure of audience reception of broadband in Australia as it was then,3 at around 30 per cent, with the average modem having only a 56k capacity. The work was designed to be an ‘immersive cinematic experience in Documentary expression online: The Wrong Crowd, a history documentary.

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2. Written, directed and co-produced by Debra Beattie in conjunction with ToadShow; digital artist, Scott Bennett; music, Rick Caskey; sound, Tone Culture; voice, Lisa Jane Stockwell. 3. http://www.aph.gov. au/Library/Pubs/rn/ 2001-02/02rn34.htm

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Figure 1: The page after the cinematic introduction explains the structure.

QuickTime 5’ which dates its creation quite clearly to 2002. In ‘e-docudrama’, terms, this is electronic publishing of a generation ago. A production using this technology in 2008 would have a much greater capacity for creating ‘virtual reality’ in an immersive approach than was available for this case study, restricted as it was by maintaining manageable download times and files sizes (Figure 1). The speaking position, from which the script was written, is declared through the spine of a narrative bildungsroman, a story of character development during the early years of a life. In this instance, from ‘1950s: FJ Holden’, through adolescence in the late 1960s, young adulthood in the early 1970s to an epilogue of ‘1980s: Shredded’. In the late 1980s the police files of many radical citizens were shredded by a government apparatchik, depicted in the final scene as a faceless ‘agent of the apparatus’. I chose this structure of the coming-of-age story set within a police family to link events covering decades of a cultural hegemony of governmentbacked police corruption. The documentary script was framed within this context of a heavily mediated police/government history and begins in the Scenes Menu (Figure 2). The public history recorded in the press and television 64

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Figure 2: The narrative as bildungsroman.

of the times provides for a rich database of audio and visual material to embed within the seventeen scenes. The roadmap for the journey is conveyed as a series of Proustian memorymoments, digitally ‘recorded’ and ‘painted’ and embedded with this detailed metadata and visible evidence in the form of ‘hotspots’. The ‘hotspots’ were created with the intention of providing ‘flickers of authenticity’ (Roscoe 2001: 13) for the audience.4 The ‘truth-claim’ for ‘what really happened’ presents these memorymoments in the style of Errol Morris-inspired ‘iconic representations’. These were moments of character building within a conflicted family and within a community operating from a deeply layered hypocrisy. These moments were recreated by distilling their essence into frozen tableaux – mise-en-scène – revealing the key ingredients of the personal narrative as it intersected with that moment in public history. These scenes as ‘representations’ were shot, Photoshopped within Live Stage Professional® software and then contained within the series of seventeen QTVR® (QuickTime Virtual Reality) scenes. Based on my ‘prior witnessing’ of public events as they unfolded in my young life, the narrative became a sequence of those scenes from childhood to adulthood, a journey constructed from these ‘memory-moments’ (Beattie 2003c: 58). Through the skill of the digital artist, these scenes became ‘animated paintings’ (McQuire 1997). Utilizing LSP® software within a QTVR® authoring environment meant that the frozen mise-en-scène could be transformed into moving images with synchronous sound effects and dialogue. Clicking the ‘auto’ button, the viewer experiences the director’s cut, a version of moving image and soundtrack from the particular ‘point Documentary expression online: The Wrong Crowd, a history documentary.

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4. Jane Roscoe first used this term to describe moments in reality television and docudrama when the performative moment falters and in a ‘flicker’, we think we see the real person. In this, she recalls Barthes’s earlier notion of the ‘punctum’ whereby a photograph can impact on a viewer in a manner unintended by the photographer, where the viewer’s experience, completely subjective, stirs a private emotional response.

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Figure 3: Police corruption inquiry and escalation of domestic abuse. of view’ of the director of the scene. There is then the option to move on to the next scene in a linear sequence devised by the writer or to stay in ‘manual’ mode and ‘hotspot’ through the scene to detailed documents of the day – still photos, newspaper reports, state archive documents, death certificates, and so forth, providing immediate evidentiary status for the contextualization of the recreated ‘memory-moment’. The web designer created still further levels of navigation to be made available for the audience/user to access then or at a later time. Parallel to the spine of the seventeen scenes are ‘Storyboards’ and the ‘Director’s Notes’ for each scene. Designed to represent pages from my notebook, these allow the user to literally go ‘behind the scenes’ providing information that would be unavailable to a broadcast audience. Drilling further into the database from the ‘Notes’ pages, the user can find historical resources significant to the moment in time of the scene by choosing the ‘World Events’ link. With yet another link, the user is invited to ‘Add Your Story’ and many have provided feedback to me through an e-mail link. This was an important aspect of the project because in creating this particular hybrid docudrama on the web form, I had been increasingly drawn to the approach of historians such as the Annalistes (Ludtke 1995) – a 66

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movement that developed around the journal Annales founded in 1929 by Febvre and Bloch as a counter to historical positivism. The Annalistes pioneered an approach to history that privileged the study of long-term evolutions (la longue duree) over singular events or ‘event history’. In large measure, The Wrong Crowd addresses how individual memory intersects with collective memory. The English historian whose work most supports this approach to historical narrative is Eric Hobsbawm. In On History (1997) Hobsbawm argued for the place of ‘remembered history’ or ‘history from below’: ‘what ordinary people remember of big events as distinct from what their betters think they should remember’ (Hobsbawm 1997: 273). The Wrong Crowd sought to maintain a historical argument about police in Queensland during the 1950s and 1960s, modelled on recorded ‘history from below’. Within the context of a cultural climate in which the stories of political activists were buried, the documentary argument of The Wrong Crowd sought to construct the period as an era of police bullying within a pervasive culture of intimidation. This argument is presented through powerful visible evidence in the form of artefacts such as a coroner’s report and police charge sheets as well as the first-person testimony of eyewitnesses. Within the online environment, the uncovering of this history had to be presented in a navigable non-linear form. This provoked some creative tension in that I needed to depart from my experience as a broadcast television producer who was used to creating a rhythm that sustained a coherent linear documentary argument. Unlike a broadcast audience, a broadband audience is proactive and, by nature of the form, can participate in the construction of the pathway to be navigated, and thus the sequence in which the narration will unfold. The fixed temporal montage of the linear television documentary becomes an ad hoc spatial montage, a series of arbitrarily open windows on the computer screen, a sequence of visual, potential non sequiturs of the viewer’s individual choice. As a documentary producer committed to producing a credible history, I needed to ensure that the navigation of the database, the repository of the verifications, was navigable in a way that supported the unfolding of a particular historical argument. The context of the search for the visible and auditory evidence, the foundation for any historical documentary account, had to be negotiated intuitively by the viewer and yet still conform to the requirement that the documentary maintain an overall coherence as a logical argument.

Computer mediated communication – CMC Computer-based media are by definition interactive as they involve clicking icons, choosing links and making decisions about the pathway to be taken through the website. This near ‘random’ access allows the sequence and duration of images to be determined at the time of presentation rather than fixed in the production process. The film-makers’ standard tools of fixed sequence and fixed timing of narrative moments are eliminated. These are the very tools the film-maker uses to create moments of emotional catharsis, timed in the linear format to reach a narrative climax. In a linear format this narration is delivered sequentially, in accord with Paget’s rules of ‘dramatic structuring’. With stand-alone data allowing for every event to be linked with the previous event at any moment, and with Documentary expression online: The Wrong Crowd, a history documentary.

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multiple entry points, the chronology and dramatic structuring of the story is largely left up to the viewer. The Wrong Crowd was created with a recognition that the viewer’s engagement with the mouse was going to be quite different to his/her engagement with a remote control. From qualitative feedback from visitors to The Wrong Crowd site (collated from e-mails sent directly to me) the audience still engages in Renov’s ‘ordering of the real’ even in this allegedly non-narrative environment. Michael Nash has argued that the ‘death of the narrative is a hugely misunderstood notion in the new media discourse’, that ‘jumping from one place in a text, film or song to any other place in any other text, film or song doesn’t actually constitute a “non-narrative experience”’ (Nash 1996: 392). Nash references Julian Jaynes’s Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind in which Jaynes’s research led him to believe that the defining human action of retrospection actually has a ‘large element of [. . .] what we call narratizing’ (Jaynes 1993: 29). This very human inclination on the part of the audience to ‘narratize’, even within the changed and fragmentary reception platform of the computer screen can provide the documentary-maker with a renewed opportunity to engage the empathy of the viewer. It is possible to present a well-researched database of verifiable documents embedded in cinematic images, which sustain in a fragmentary manner the essence of the documentary argument. The viewer, even within the non-linear environment, can build a trajectory based on these evidentiary links that derives the meaning at the heart of the construction of the historical argument, and also at the core of the narrative structure. It is the persuasive practice of the docudrama that allows this meaning to be derived. Steve Lipkin in his discussion of this persuasive practice introduces the notion of ‘warranting’ within the docudrama form. Lipkin argues that a warrant ‘locates the basis (of the dramadoc) in [...] the rules of logic that allow an argument to make the necessary shift from fact to value’ (Lipkin 2002: 5). The audience is given facts and factual documents embedded in the cinematic images of The Wrong Crowd and the scriptwriting challenge was then to ‘warrant’ the audience’s sequencing of these facts to produce the value of statement that is at the heart of the argument that the documentarymaker was seeking to make. Lipkin asks ‘what warrants the choices made in constructing docudramatic performance’. This question goes to the core of the ‘truthclaim’ status of the documentary. Karl Popper (1979) gives the example of how he might go about verifying whether he has a particular coin in his pocket, describing the changes in the strength of verifications required as determined by the context of the question. If the question is asked without consequence, about whether he has a particular coin, he may simply feel the size and shape of the coin without looking at it, and verify its existence. If it is important to the questioner that it is that particular coin, on the increased strength of the need for verification, he may take it out of his pocket and look directly at it. If the need for verification is even more significant, he may take the coin to a bank and request some form of certification that it is the legal tender it appears to be. As John Tosh describes it in The Pursuit of History (1991) for the history documentary-maker, the 68

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context of the historical argument is often ‘a political battleground’, one littered with vehement contentious assertions and warranting a need for robust verification. The selection and arranging of the facts within the narrative from which meaning is derived in turn informs the value judgements of the audience. This discussion of facts and values when it arises in the pursuit of a historical truth becomes increasingly problematic. If we accept that the historian always interprets the past from the point of view of his/her present, as E.H. Carr argues in What is History?, then the selection of facts will change according to the prevailing values of the day. Carr discusses this dual character of the word ‘truth’ as it straddles facts and values. In English it is the truth, in the Latin veritas, the German wahrheit and the Russian pravda: ‘Somewhere between these two poles – the north pole for valueless facts and the south pole of value judgments still struggling to form themselves into facts – lies the realm of historical truth’ (Carr 1964: 126) This search for ‘historical truth’ is often conducted on the battleground of competing narratives.

Narrative of the non-linear kind As theorists have increasingly studied the key elements of narrative, what is often emphasized is the breakdown of the elements of storytelling into a neat dichotomy between ‘narration – that which moves the plot forward – and description – that which doesn’t’ (Bal 1985: 120). In writing the visual plan/interface design for online documentary, there is a need to meld the narration and the description into a navigable form. The narrative has to be constructed by linking the elements of a database in a particular order. The trajectory within the QTVR® ‘Scenes Menu’ of The Wrong Crowd leads the user from childhood through adolescence. The script maintains the cinematic logic of replacement, characteristic of the language understood by an audience in a temporal montage, while utilizing the ‘electracy’ or electronic literacy (Ulmer 2003) currently evolving within an audience increasingly engaged in the spatial montage potentiality of a computer screen. It is in recognizing the added intervention of the audience as an advantage, in building on the audience’s growing sophistication, with their added skill base around electronic computer-mediated communication, that we can perceive documentary online as a set of opportunities to engage with this new ‘electrate’ generation. In an initial attempt to subvert the multiple windows of conventional interface design, each of the seventeen QTVR® scenes of The Wrong Crowd was designed to be played as full screen, with the viewer encouraged to choose ‘auto’ rather than ‘manual’ to take advantage of the ‘cinematic’ experience. In ‘auto’ mode the scene plays according to the documentarymaker’s direction. In ‘manual’ mode, the viewer navigates the scene at will. Within ‘auto’ mode, the viewer can ‘lean back’ and watch. In manual mode, the viewer will ‘lean forward’ to engage with the mouse, exploring the layers contained within each ‘memory-moment’. For an audience to be able to move at will around a visual representation heralds a radical change in documentary reception and presents a real challenge to the documentary-maker in the viewer’s creation of their own ordering of the narrative structure from fragments. The potential for misreading the information can be mitigated by embedding prima facie documentary Documentary expression online: The Wrong Crowd, a history documentary.

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evidence within the QTVR® scenes, which move the audience to a preferred reading, or in Lipkin’s terminology, which ‘warrant’ a reading that moves from facts to values. Within this evolving form of narrative, Lev Manovich calls for a theoretical language to engage with digital media content by constructing terms and concepts, for example, appropriate to multiple windows (Manovich 2001: 104). In The Language of New Media he gives examples of Hollywood films, like Blade Runner (1982) in which Harrison Ford’s character talks with a computer instructing it to zoom in, closer and closer, to one particular photographic image as he searches for the origins of the beautiful, mysterious cyborg. Manovich also cites the frames within frames of Greenaway’s Draughtman’s Contract (1982) arguing that these examples of late twentieth-century cinema can be seen as two early pointers to the converging of the art-form platforms of cinema screen and computer screen. Transforming the conventional documentary-makers’ practice of the temporal montage necessitates a learning curve for digital content creators to explore the possibilities of a language/grammar of spatial montage, a skill traditionally used by visual artists. Long before digitization, with the emergence of an understanding based in film language, as viewers we learnt to read sequences of montage. Our understanding of what constituted reality was modified by our willingness to embrace the new conventions of the cinema. Lev Kuleshov, an early twentieth-century Russian film-maker, was one of the first to explore the possibilities of cinematographic montage. In an interview in Cinema in Revolution Kuleshov described how, as a teaching exercise, he once created a movie of a woman who did not exist. He did this by filming the face, head, hair, hands, legs and feet of different women and editing the images together in a montage. The students accepted that it was a continuous depiction of only one woman, and accepted the ‘truth’ of that woman’s existence, reading the montage as that of a ‘real’ woman (Leyda 1977: 249). This historic point of reference shows how temporal montage coerced cinema enthusiasts to blend their identification with the realism of an individual shot, in order to establish a new relation to film as a text composed of multiple shots, and in so doing, developed a new skill negotiating the transitions between cinematic images. To understand further this dynamic in early cinema, narrative theorists have stressed the importance of the psychoanalytical concept of ‘suture’, the process whereby we make connections between disparate items of information (Altman 1977). Instead of fragmentation and reassemblage of the image over time, which was the crux of classical cinema montage, audiences in the digital realm are engaging in the suture of a new type of montage: a fluid montage of frames within the frame. The split-screen technique was initially a way for the film-maker to offer another shot of the same scene from a different point of view. ABC Online, in one of its early forays into documentary online, used this technique in Long Way to the Top (2001), displaying moving images of the performance on stage and the view from backstage. Within the QTVR® scene Dad Dies, the digital artist Scott Bennett was directed to ‘stitch together’ three different narrative moments, shot in three different locations, juxtaposing these images to carry a number of distinct narrative threads within one temporal space (Figures 4 and 5). 70

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Figure 4: The left-hand side of the triptych.

Figure 5: The third panel of the triptych. Documentary expression online: The Wrong Crowd, a history documentary.

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Figure 6: The pop-up of the World Events link for 1968. The first image was of an actor, in performance as the narrator at the stage of an adolescent studying for matriculation exams; the second image was dominated by the lavender of the jacaranda trees, in blossom in October in a suburban Brisbane street; and the third was another actor, performing as the adolescent girl’s father as he leaned out his bedroom window, trying to catch his dying breath. The idiosyncratic nature of psychoanalytic ‘suture’ meant that some of the audience relayed via feedback that they constructed the three scenes as one continuous image to create a narrative of the father dying at the exact same moment that the student was studying, whereas others constructed the narrative in the vein of a Proustian moment, lost in memory, a fragmented collage of remembrance. Within these ‘enactments’, there was always the question of how this form of documentary expression was relating to the physicality of the object world. The documentary ambition is ‘to use the particular to illuminate the general and to take the world of appearances as a route into more abstract engagement with the conditions of the social and historical’ (Corner 2007). It was my concern for the ‘obdurate real’ (Stern 2003) in creating the visuals and the audio ‘to illuminate’ the more general zeitgeist in which I grew up. In writing for this cross-media platform where the audience would be clicking from moving visuals to text, the ‘World Events’ pages were created to be as easily identifiable as possible to an age group who were 15–20 years of age during the early 1970s. The ‘world events’ chosen are idiosyncratic but also easily recognizable to a large cohort of a specific sociocultural grouping (Figure 6).

Verisimilitude In tandem with the changes in the audience’s relationship to the screen as they take on the role of co-narrator, there are the changes wrought, as flagged by Nichols in 1986, by developments in digitization. The very process of digitization, as Bill Nichols (1993: 56) noted in Renov’s Theorising Documentary, has meant a ‘nuclear explosion’ in the ontological 72

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status of the documentary form, where reality can be altered right down to the minutiae of the pixel. With the emergence of the non-linear format, the ability of the film-maker to unfold a documentary argument in a sequential fashion has also been challenged and the ontology of the documentary is even further under pressure. A major impact of the digital revolution on our notion of documentary evidence has been in this changing nature of ‘digital realism’ and how it differs from our earlier notions of ‘the real’ in cinematic images. In Crossing the Digital Threshold Scott McQuire (1997: 57) takes up this issue querying our fascination with ‘perceptually realistic’ images of dinosaurs or intergalactic spaceships when neither have any point of reference in our own real world. The ‘desire underpinning the documentary impulse’, the classic phrase coined in Bazin’s ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (1967: 14), is potentially lessened by photographic images against which no authentication is possible. As we move into the emerging digital platform of delivering programs over the Internet, Thomas Elsaesser (1998: 21) suggests that the documentary is to be the first casualty. We are entering an era where ‘actuality’, the core of the definition of the documentary genre, inhabits an increasingly fluid space. In the digital world, distinctions between the real and the fake are blurring. The digital domain extends in an unprecedented way the ability of the film-maker to control the image, providing for a level of intervention that includes manipulation of the pixels from which the image is constructed. The role of the digital artist working from an electronic palette is more akin these days to that of the painter in a Renaissance studio. Once the image is digitized, it becomes another form of graphic. Regardless of its origin, it becomes pixels, easily altered, substituted one for another, an atomic rearrangement of the dimension of Bill Nichols’s 1995 ‘nuclear explosion’ as he described the impact of then new technology, ‘to scitex’ or to digitally manipulate an image. ‘Crossing the digital threshold’ can provide for another level in the process of psychoanalytic ‘suture’, creating a new type of mise-en-scène, in the arrangement of pixels rather than people and sets. The first scene of the online history documentary The Wrong Crowd is titled ‘FJ Holden’, in reference to a model of car reminiscent of this optimistic era, and a model of car afforded the status of an icon in Australian graphics culture. This first QTVR® was positioned within the narrative to set the scene for Queensland in the 1950s, ‘a golden circle beach’ and to provide the backstory to the bildungsroman. The mise-en-scène of the FJ Holden car parked near a beach at Greenmount in south-eastern Queensland is an ‘enactment’ of a time and place that my family regularly visited in the late 1950s (Figure 7). Bennett and I drove to the very same spot of my childhood memory and documented as a QTVR® the exact place we visited and the exact model of FJ Holden car that my parents owned. The pixels in this image were manipulated in order to achieve the erasure of the current Gold Coast skyscrapers. Although the digital image was manipulated, the digital artist worked according to the ‘prior witnessing’ of the documentary-maker in order to convey a mise-en-scène of a ‘memory-moment’ that ‘really happened’ at Greenmount in the 1950s. With digitization, the documentary image is increasingly staking a claim Documentary expression online: The Wrong Crowd, a history documentary.

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Figure 7: The ‘first’ scene setting time and place.

Figure 8: Representation of the tin shed in which prisoners were kept in rural Queensland. 74

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to verisimilitude rather than veracity. Nevertheless, as Martin Kemp reminds us, as audience, ‘we are perceptually addicted to the illusion of reality in whatever medium’ (cited in Hockney 2001: 230). Ross Gibson argues that it is important for digital content creators in this new medium to acknowledge this and to recognize that the emerging art forms offer structures and dynamics for testing and strengthening the imagination of both the audience and the film-maker (Gibson 2003). Given that these new forms have not yet been constrained within generic orthodoxies, they need to be understood and interrogated as cultural forms reflecting the way more and more audiences experience ‘reality’ and ‘the illusion of reality’ in cyberspace. This has potential for seious-minded research into both the production and reception of the digital documentary online and with emerging notions of spatialized narrative.

Digital sound To an unprecedented degree, the new digital delivery platform of the Internet for the documentary form has been heavily shaped by recent developments in digital sound technology. Content creators now have an improved ability to ‘spatialize’ discrete sound elements and to utilize sound as a visually contrapuntal element that draws on the cinematic experience. In the construction of the QTVR® scene ‘The Watchhouse’, the image is deliberately lacking in detail, an ‘enactment’ of a black, white and grey interior of a tin shed used to hold prisoners in Mount Isa in the 1950s (Figure 8). The intensity of the violence inflicted on the prisoner by the police officer is conveyed by aural stimuli to stimulate a visceral response in the audience. There is a complex soundtrack of the fists and the boots pounding into the flesh overlaying the cries and gasps of the victim with the exertions and grunts of the aggressor. The track is laid over the empty space of the slowly moving image, of corrugated iron walls and wooden floorboards, thus leaving the viewer with a vicarious experience, akin to standing in that space and listening to the ghosts of the past, with the emotional intensity associated with the injustice of a death in custody. Coming from the tradition of producing both for cinema and for broadcast television, it was important to engage the viewer in an aesthetic transformative moment based on a particular reading of a historical event. When the audience’s hand is ever ready to disengage in the search for further information, the cinematic gaze is potentially on the verge of being broken at any moment by a glance outside the frame to the interface, and with its potential to move the viewer in another direction, to link to another image. The human tendency towards temporal narrative structures, however, is arguably ‘endemic to the structure of consciousness’, and these structures are drawn upon in all storytelling environments, even in this new spatial/navigable environment. Images are moved within, and around, in a new kinaesthetic participation, providing for an openended storyline but all operating within a consciousness that inherently constructs a temporal ‘suture’. In his address of the emergence of the online delivery of creative content, Lev Manovich (2001: 217) has called for a new branch of study, the ‘theoretical analysis of the aesthetics of information access’, his term for this being ‘info-aesthetics’. The Wrong Crowd provides for one of the first Documentary expression online: The Wrong Crowd, a history documentary.

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Internet-based case studies for this kind of theoretical analysis. As one of a group of only four funded (the others: Long Journey, Homeless and Year On The Wing) by the Australian Film Commission in 2001, The Wrong Crowd is unique amongst these four in seeking a ‘cinematic’ approach to the resolution of the often-competing needs within the online environment of organizing the database and constructing the narrative. The Wrong Crowd takes the traditional film-maker’s tool of temporal montage and plays with the audience experience by embracing the web designer’s appreciation of spatial montage. The digital revolution that allowed for the malleability of sound and image files has been explored within the parameters of a 56k modem delivery platform, this being the constraint of the equity provisions by which the national broadcaster was expected to deliver in 2002. In that year The Wrong Crowd launched into the uncharted waters of audience reception within this new delivery platform and, through the qualitative feedback of direct e-mails to the documentary-maker, has provided valuable information regarding the nature of this emerging audience and their response to this new form of ‘documentary expression’ and digital distribution. References ABC Online (2001), Long Way to the Top, http://www.abc.net.au/longway/concert/itv.htm Accessed 30 October 2007. Altman, C. (1977), ‘Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Discourse’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 3 (2 August) pp. 257–72. An American Family (1973), directed by Alan and Susan Raymond, PBS. Australian Broadcasting Authority (2004), Documentary Guidelines Draft: Interpretation of ‘Documentary’ for the Australian Content Standard,Sydney. Baudrillard, Jean (1988), ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, in Mark Poster (ed.), Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bal, Mieke (1985), Narratology – Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bazin, Andre (1967), ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in What is Cinema?, Berkeley: University of California Press. Beattie, Debra (2003a), The Wrong Crowd, Ph.D. thesis,Queensland University of Technology. —— (2003b), ‘Show and Tell’, Desktop, Australian Design: Digital Culture, 180, pp. 38–40. —— (2006) Lecture, New Communication Technologies, Griffith University. Bennett, S. and Beattie, D. (2003), ‘Live Stage Professional 3 Software and its Application in The Wrong Crowd, an online documentary for ABC Online’, Metro, Film Television, Radio Multimedia, 135, pp. 242–243. Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott, Warner Brothers, Warner Home Video, DVD. Carr, E.H. (1964), What is History? London: Macmillan. Corner, John, (2007), ‘Documentary expression and the physicality of the referent: observations on writing, painting and photography’, Studies in Documentary Film, 1: 1, pp. 5–20. Draughtman’s Contract (1982), directed by Peter Greenaway, British Film Institute, DVD.

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Elsaesser, Thomas (1998), ‘Cinema Futures: Convergence, Divergence, Difference’, in T. Elsaesser and K. Hoffman (eds) Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable?: The Screen Arts in the Digital Age, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Fires Were Started (1943), directed by Humphrey Jennings, Crown Film Unit, Image Entertainment, DVD. Gibson, Ross (2003), Memories + The Moving Image, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Flinders Lane, Melbourne. Hill, Brian and Woods, Kate (1992), Sylvania Waters Part 1, TV series, Australian Broadcasting Commission. Hobsbawm, Eric (1997), On History, London: Abacus. Hockney, David (2001), Secret Knowledge, London and New York: Penguin, Putnam. Jaynes, Julian (1993), Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Leyda, J. (ed.) (1977), Voices of Film Experience, 1894 to the Present, New York: Macmillan. Lipkin, Steve (2002), Real Emotional Logic: Docudrama as Persuasive Practice, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Ludtke, Alf (1995), Alltagsgeschichte - History of Everyday Life, Princeton: Princeton University. McQuire, Scott (1997), Crossing the Digital Threshold, Brisbane: Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy. Manovich, Lev (2001), The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Nanook of the North (1922), directed by Robert Flaherty, Les Frères Revillon and Pathé Exchange, Criterion Collection, DVD. Nash, Michael (1996), ‘Vision After Television: Technocultural Convergence, Hypermedia, and the New Media Arts Field’, in M. Renov and E. Suderberg (eds), Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Negroponte, N. (1995), Being Digital: The Road Map For Survival on the Information Superhighway, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Nichols, Bill (1993), ‘Getting To Know You, Knowledge, Power, and the Body’, in M. Renov (ed.), Theorizing Documentary, New York: Routledge. Paget, Derek (1998), No Other Way To Tell It, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Popper, Karl (1979), Truth, Rationality and the Growth of Scientific Knowledge, Frankfurt Am Main: Klostermann. Renov, M. and Suderberg, E. (eds) (1996), Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Roscoe, Jane (2001), ‘Real entertainment: new factual hybrid television’, Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, 100, pp. 9–20. Stern, Lesley (2003), ‘Truth is a Cow’, paper presented at Australian International Documentary Conference, Byron Bay. The Civil War (1990), directed by Ken Burns, PBS, DVD. http://www.pbs.org/ civilwar/war/ Accessed 11 February 2008. The Thin Blue Line (1988), directed by Errol Morris, American Playhouse, DVD. The Wrong Crowd (2003), directed by Debra Beattie, ABC online documentary, http://www.abc.net.au/wrongcrowd. Accessed 11 February 2008.

Documentary expression online: The Wrong Crowd, a history documentary.

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Tosh, John (1991), The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods, and New Directions in the Study of Modern History, 2nd edn., London and New York: Longman. Totally Hip Technologies Inc. Live Stage Professional software, available from http://www.totallyhip.com/livestage.html Accessed 30 October 2007. Ulmer, Greg (2003), Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy, London and New York: Longman. Winston, Brian (2003), ‘Serious Intent’, keynote address, Australian International Documentary Conference, Byron Bay.

Suggested citation Beattie, D. (2008), ‘Documentary expression online: The Wrong Crowd, a history documentary for an ‘electrate’ audience’, Studies in Documentary Film 2: 1, pp. 61–78, doi: 10.1386/sdf.2.1.61/1.

Contributor details Dr Debra Beattie trained at the Victorian College of the Arts and has had a long career as a producer, writer and director of broadcast television documentary, and more recently in the broadband platform. The Wrong Crowd can be found at www.abc.net.au/wrongcrowd. Contact: Debra Beattie, Lecturer and Convenor of Masters Programs in Arts and Media, Multimedia Building, School of Arts, Gold Coast Campus, Griffith University, Parklands Drive, Southport, Queensland 4222. E-mail: [email protected]

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Studies in Documentary Film Volume 2 Number 1 © 2008 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sdf.2.1.79/1

Undisclosed Recipients: documentary in an era of digital convergence Sharon Lin Tay Middlesex University Abstract

Keywords

As part of ‘two essays in dialogue’ with a piece written by Dale Hudson, this article advances critical discussions of the documentary film given the context of, and challenges posed by, digitality. Specifically, it analyses ‘the digital’ in Michael Takeo Magruder’s {transcription} and [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004] and Christina McPhee’s La Conchita mon amour as a means to advance discussion of documentary beyond claims to realism and documentary truth towards what Trinh T. Minh-ha calls ‘boundary events’. Tay argues that digital video, editing and compositing expose the limitations of visual evidence to represent trauma.

digital news media trauma documentary environmentalism festival

Undisclosed Recipients: database documentaries and the Internet Dale Hudson Amherst College

Keywords

Abstract This article argues that new media disrupt the linear structures conventionally ascribed to documentary, emphasizing spatiality and relationality. On the Internet, ‘database documentaries’ facilitate selection and recombination of ‘documents’ (audio-visual evidence) through user acts, hypertext, algorithms and random access memory. Specifically, the article examines two pieces that address the controversial subjects of globalization and war. As database documentaries, Eduardo Navas’s Goobalization and the collaborative Permanent Transit: net.remix by Mariam Ghani, Zohra Saed, Qasim Naqvi and Edward Potter destabilize quests for ‘totalizing meaning’ by emphasizing interactivity, contestation and multiplicities of meanings. The database evokes endless recombinations, so that meaning, Hudson argues in relation to these works, is explicitly polyvocal, unstable and contested.

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Preamble Curated by Dale Hudson and Sharon Lin Tay for the 2007 Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF), the online exhibit ‘Undisclosed Recipients’ situates documentary praxes in relation to the festival’s potent re-imagination of environmentalism. The festival challenges assumptions that environmentalism concerns itself primarily with ecology and preservation, arguing instead that environmentalism demands to be recognized within a broader framework, a ‘complicated nexus of the social, political, aesthetic, technological, economic, physical, and natural’. Sustainability becomes the nodal point at the intersections of nature and culture. ‘An ecological way of thinking, then, demands tracing these complex intersections in order to understand them – and then act on them’, explain FLEFF co-directors Thomas Shevory and Patricia R. Zimmermann; ‘Ecology means understanding how things, people, and ideas are interconnected’ (2007: n.p.). Comparably, the online exhibit complicates assumptions about documentary’s primary concern with ‘truth’ and ‘evidence’, particularly in relation to the theme of sustainability and the environment within a large global conversation that extends across issues of labour, war, health, disease, intellectual property, archives, HIV/AIDS, women’s rights and human rights. ‘Undisclosed Recipients’ brings together artistically innovative, socially engaged and politically urgent work to a larger audience of ‘undisclosed recipients’, exploring the Internet’s potential both as a medium of production and a mode of distribution. The exhibit foregrounds ways that digital video and the Internet can re-imagine and reclaim the documentary praxes that recognize meaning as process, rather than as product. Documentary is reinvigorated as collaborative, interactive and polyvocal – as open to the complexities of debate, rather than closed to the simplicities of certainty. Adopting these strategies, the following two essays explore related arguments about digital images and digital structures in selected works from the ‘Undisclosed Recipients’ exhibit. The essays aim to propose ways of rethinking documentary’s ostensibly contradictory impulses of a desire for immediacy and the necessity for mediation. Tay focuses on the challenge of ‘the digital’ to images as documentary evidence in terms of fidelity of representation and mediation. She analyses Michael Takeo Magruder’s {transcription} and [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004] and Christina McPhee’s La Conchita mon amour as a means to advance discussion of documentary beyond claims to realism and documentary truth towards what Trinh T. Minh-ha calls ‘boundary events’. She argues that digital video, editing and compositing expose the limitations of visual evidence to represent trauma, ‘natural’ disasters and war. Drawing upon these ideas, Hudson turns his analysis to digital structures for documentary on the Internet. He explores ways that Eduardo Navas’s Goobalization and the collaborative Permanent Transit: net.remix by Mariam Ghani, Zohra Saed, Qasim Naqvi and Edward Potter may be understood as database documentaries that destabilize quests for ‘totalizing meaning’ by emphasizing interactivity, contestation and multiplicities of meanings in relation to the controversial issues of globalization and war. Meaning, he argues in relation to these works, is explicitly polyvocal, unstable and mutable. Together,

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these essays trace two possible contours to ways that digital media and the Internet challenge assumptions about documentary in ways much like FLEFF challenges assumptions about environmentalism. Internet documentaries demonstrate ways that digital technologies have applications to documentary practices that extend beyond the faith in the authenticity and immediacy of the audio-visual images that it captures and renders. Acts of witnessing, recording and showing are extended by acts of recombining, filtering and processing.

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Undisclosed Recipients: documentary in an era of digital convergence Sharon Lin Tay Speaking about her digital documentary, The Fourth Dimension (2001), Trinh T. Minh-ha observes that she produces films that she considers to be ‘first and foremost “boundary events”’ through which ‘one can view them as different ways of working with the freedom in experiencing the self and the world’ rather than endorsing categories ‘by which the film world largely abides’ (Trinh 2005: 28). According to Trinh (2005: 28), The Fourth Dimension has less to do with the nonstaged nature of the material shot than with the process of documenting its unfolding: it documents its own time, its creation in megahertz, the different paths and layers of time-light that are involved in the production of images and meanings.

Discursively, the documentary film has had a rich and complex historical trajectory that effectively gave rise to its particular rhetoric and theoretical orientation. The post-war rise of Italian neo-realism that strives towards truth in the uncontrolled event, the technological innovations of the 1950s that provided film-makers with the portable equipment with which to make documentaries that appear to further eliminate artifice, the rise of various film movements such as Direct Cinema in the United States and Canada, Free Cinema in Britain, and cinéma-vérité in France all contribute to the alignment of the documentary film with ideas of realism and truth. The emergence of new media, with the consequent loosening of the indexical relationship between signifier and signified, resulting in doubts about the fidelity of representation to its referent that digital media casts, has significant implications for documentary practice in the digital age. Using Trinh’s point about freedom from the constraints of conventional documentary practice, I would like to explore in this essay the extent to which digital and Internet technologies can enable the move beyond certain limitations that continue to affect conventional documentary practices. As the companion piece to Dale Hudson’s discussion about database aesthetics and the processes of online documentaries, this essay will open up some ideas about the image and representation in documentary film within the context of digital convergence. The documentary tradition’s discursive currency has traded upon several fundamental theoretical premises, of which access to unmediated reality is often simultaneously contentious and prized. The discrepancy between the necessity of mediation and a desire for immediacy is that which pervades much of documentary studies; in another conversation, it is also a central concern in thinking about mediation and the convergence to digital. This seeming conundrum in documentary, however, may be theoretically resolved by seeking recourse to various strategies that circumvent

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the rhetoric of, and discursive construction around, the documentary film. Laura Mulvey, for instance, explains the intricacies of weaving together the fictional and the documentary in the last shots of Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1953). As the fictional couple reconcile and kiss on the crowded street, the camera pans away to follow the spectacle of the street procession. For Mulvey, the [fictional] film simply fades away as the local brass band plays and people drift past. Life goes on. One ending halts, the other flows. One is a concentration focused on the stars’ role in producing the fiction and its coherence, and the other is a distraction, the film’s tendency to wander off in search of another kind of cinema. (Mulvey 2006: 121–22)

Mulvey also uses examples from Abbas Kiarostami’s films to think through this theoretical conundrum about mediation and access to reality. Kiarostami’s tendency to construct the fictional narrative and documentary aspects of his films much in the model of a Möbius strip expresses, for Mulvey (2006: 131), ‘the gap in time, the delay, that separates an event and its representation, its process of translation in thought and creativity’. These examples are myriad in Kiarostami’s films, for instance, in the last shots of A Taste of Cherry (1994) where the fictional story wraps and the character that has apparently committed suicide (or rather, the actor playing the character) is seen smoking and talking with the film crew. The complex construction of Close-Up (1989) calls into question, at each narrative turn, the documentary and/or fictional status of what the viewer sees. These ways of advancing critical discussions of the documentary film beyond claims to realism and documentary truth are useful gestures to the need to critically reassess certain assumptions of documentary studies towards more constructive premises, especially given the context of, and challenges posed by, digitality.

Digital transcriptions: remediation and the news media In The Powers of Nightmare (2004), the three-part documentary series made for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Adam Curtis illustrates the argument about the regime of fear instituted by political leaders that then lends legitimacy to their rule. The end of the Cold War and the absence of a definitive enemy left a political vacuum. As Curtis reiterates in the prologue of each episode, ‘In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power.’ Post-9/11 panic about al-Qaida, terror cells and terrorist attacks establishes psychic and social boundaries between those experiencing panic and paranoia and those generating these feelings. The exploitation of panic serves profit and power, and the role that the media plays in the exploitation of panic and irrational fears for the benefit of the powerful needs consideration. Michael Takeo Magruder, a US-born artist based in the United Kingdom, explores these ethical issues of mediation in his online digital works. Straddling the aesthetics of digital art and the expository impetus of the documentary, Magruder’s works raise questions about the relationship between news reportage and live events. Both Undisclosed Recipients: .

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{transcription} and [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004] examine questionable media coverage of events that confuse real and imagined situations. As its title suggests, {transcription} is a digital project that attempts the creative transcription of 24-hour news coverage, in the process raising questions about the mediation and remediation of real events in our consumption of current affairs. Processed in real time, {transcription} samples live BBC news coverage, effectively severing the relationship between news broadcast and the events that are being reported. Familiar images taken from BBC news footage slowly and arbitrarily appear on screen, layered on by a digital skin that obscures the clarity of the image. These images are accompanied initially by the sound of scratching, and then one gradually hears the news being read. Scratching and voices are then layered on with more voices of different newsreaders, which are then continuously repeated and layered. The disjuncture between image, voice and sound that {transcription} effects produces an uncanny experience for the user, oscillating between familiarity and strangeness; an effect achieved by the use of an algorithm to disrupt the linearity and veracity of news broadcasts. Rendering the meanings generated by the news broadcast confused and multiple, {transcription} becomes a stream-of-consciousness experience, although not an unfamiliar one. In fact, this stream-of-consciousness effect replicates the all too familiar experience of consuming round-the-clock news broadcasts, where the supposed acquisition of information and knowledge through news broadcast instead becomes a form of simulation, alerting us to the often-unquestioning way in which we consume the news. In {transcription}, constant ‘artefacts’ (scratching sounds added to behave like ‘video noise’, like images added to replicate film grain) and the imposition of a ‘digital skin’ (another visual layer on top of the remediated news footage) accentuate the mediation of the news. Causing a radical disjuncture between sound and image, the processes of remediation that these scratching electronic noises and digital skins emphasize alert us to the constant deluge of round-the-clock news coverage, and the perpetual sense of panic and paranoia that the news ultimately engenders. The political implications of such mediation that {transcription} engenders are brought home in [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004]. The latter piece ponders on the relationship between ethical filtering and manipulative remixing of the news, the significance of which increases with technological advances that enable the generation of history in ‘real time’. Similar to {transcription}, [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004] involves the use of digital skins and the disconnection between voice and image to highlight the prevalence and signification of mediation. Made up of two versions, each consisting of several manipulated moving images, [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004] accentuates the extent, and effects, of mediation. In one version, familiar images of the casualties of war such as billowing black smoke, fire, deserted roads, bombed-out cars, and the inevitable clusters of shocked, outraged and/or injured passers-by are at times composited with other similar images. In other instances, large images of the aftermath of an attack, complete with raging fires spewing clouds of black smoke, would be gradually layered on with texts from news reportage, usually filling (and completely obscuring) the image with thick newsprint within a matter 84

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of seconds. The need to evaluate the ethical premises of the digital documentary is especially urgent; such urgency becomes obvious when one considers, for example, the political reasons that may lie behind particular news coverage leading to the massacre in Fallujah, Iraq. That the attack on Fallujah and the US presidential election both took place in the early days of November 2004 is no coincidence for many. As Magruder explains in the notes that accompany the piece, [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004] is set within the context of the news report that Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah killed four US civilians. The bodies were then dragged, paraded and mutilated by the town’s people, footage of which was broadcast around the world. On the basis of these reports, US forces then attacked the city. However, Magruder notes his reservations to the message conveyed by international news coverage: one, the US citizens were not civilians as reported, but mercenaries employed by a private US security firm; two, the entire scene of desecration was filmed by one Associated Press camera crew; three, there was no US or coalition forces intervention in neither the attack nor the subsequent mutilation; and four, coverage was highly censored by international media networks. These reservations question the veracity of the news coverage by raising questions about context. In other words, the media processes involved in representing the events leading up to the US attack on Fallujah, that [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004] interrogates provided no real comprehension of the event that took place. The notion of documentary truth, premised upon the indexical relationship between the event and its representation, is thus destabilized via the algorithmic processes through which [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004] operates. The meanings that one may take away from the news about Fallujah are at best contingent and equivocal. Considered together, {transcription} and [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004] note the perils of mediation without context, the disassociation of the signified from its signifier, a situation made infinitely more possible by digitization. On a more innocuous level, {transcription} considers the ethical questions implicit in the consumption of network news: whether knowledge or currency is that which has priority, and what does one do with this surfeit of (mostly bad) news from the television set, and increasingly, from the computer? How may ethical spectatorial positions for the consumption of network news be constructed? Much in the way that Edward Navas’s Goobalization explores the issue of surveillance in digital media, whether for commercial exploitation or political control, as Hudson discusses below, [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004] reminds us of the political agendas to which such a discrepancy between mediation and actual events may avail itself. The idea of embedding journalists with soldiers in warfare adds a new implication to reportage, suggesting the ethical issues around representation, perspective and the eventual media decontextualization of events that take place at a distance. The ethics of recording, documenting and reporting are raised in terms of the value of different types of images: if images gleaned from the event are more valuable than archival footage, that would raise the question of whether knowledge or currency has priority in our consumption of current affairs. Does the mediation involved in the reporting of violence and unrest render these events mere electronic Undisclosed Recipients: .

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white noise that emanates from the television sets that ultimately depoliticizes current events into byte-sized news packages? Collectively, these works reveal that conventional news media have not only averted their gaze from documentary’s historical preoccupation with truth, but also often collaborated in camouflaging truth for political exigencies. The contingency of meaning is thus heightened within the context of digital convergence, given the non-linear, non-representational, evocative and interactive characteristics of digital media, as the discussion below of Christina McPhee’s La Conchita mon amour furthers.

Documenting unspeakable trauma Ethical questions around documentation and reportage that {transcription} and [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004] raise are also pertinent to the works of the California-based digital artist, Christina McPhee. In particular, her project La Conchita mon amour taps into the states of panic and paranoia that characterize political events post-9/11, albeit in a different way. La Conchita mon amour references in its title the trauma of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima that could not be fully articulated in Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima, mon amour (1960). Studying the struggles of life in the beach community of La Conchita in California that was inundated by debris flow after a devastating mudslide, the panic that La Conchita mon armor highlights refers to the heightened awareness and fear that living with the aftermath of the mudslide, and continuing fears of its recurrence, brings. Caused by increased winter rain that comes as an effect of global warming, this digital video project documents the interface between human response and geological data, when governmental assistance for victims of cyclical recursion of disaster is not forthcoming. As McPhee notes in the statement accompanying the project, the aftermath of this environmental disaster is one from which La Conchita residents cannot escape and are forced to live through, both literally and financially, given that their properties are rendered worthless by the mudslide; it therefore becomes impossible for the residents to re-mortgage their damaged homes and/or move away from the area. As a performative act of witnessing, La Conchita updates the cinematic manifestations of political modernism, as articulated through the documentaries of film-makers such as Resnais, Marguerite Duras, Agnès Varda and Chris Marker; thereby bringing a formal discourse of the expository documentary into the Internet age at the same time that it transcends the expository mode in specific ways. In her search for meaning after the destruction of the landscape, McPhee records the rituals that the community performs to grieve for those who died in the mudslide as well as to survive as a community abandoned by the state. As a digital project, La Conchita imbues documentary realism with subjective evocation to such an extent that the project effectively displaces the importance of the documentary image’s indexicality. Instead of contemplating the impossibility of representing trauma in, for instance Night and Fog (Resnais, 1955) or Hiroshima mon armor, La Conchita attempts the evocation of trauma via the algorithmic processes of selection and combination. The viewer’s experience of La Conchita is contingent and interactive, and not unlike the notion of mining for geological information. Still photographs, composited images 86

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and video clips of the landscape, environment and vernacular shrines allow the viewer to piece together the relationship between geological instability and psychological trauma. In this case, the evidentiary is not dependent on the indexical relationship between signifier and signified. Instead, the viewer arrives at ‘evidence’ of the trauma suffered by the La Conchita residents by looking at the mudslide in terms of its geological impact on the psychological subject. As McPhee notes in the essay accompanying the project, La Conchita stores landscapes of information beyond what the obvious visible evidence discloses. The site is marked by the invisible mathematics of largescale disturbances from seismicity patterns (there is a major fault, called Red Mountain Fault, running through the sea cliff upon which the village rests), to tidal patterns now altered by rising marine temperatures since the seventies. (McPhee 2006: n.p.)

In this sense, the work interrogates the relationship between the visible and the evidentiary, and shows the limits of representation in instances of panic and trauma. The instability and contingency of meaning that La Conchita conveys differs from the notions of unspeakable trauma or the sublime in which many modernist expository documentaries are often invested. Instead, McPhee gestures towards a non-representational strategy, given the limits of representation, via the database aesthetics of her performative documentary that pivots on the algorithmic processes that Hudson observes as being key in the production of the plurality of meanings. Images and field recordings of vernacular shrines, graffiti, chain-mail fencing and barricades in the aftermath of the mudslide, alongside images of the physical landscape make up the La Conchita project. Geological data and human responses to the disaster quantify the impact of the environmental disaster, in the process broadening an understanding of what the environment means and encompasses. By amplifying the leaps and elisions between observed facts culled from geological readings and the community’s trauma as a subjective response to the disaster, evidence is therefore rendered materialist; effectively harnessing the digital and virtual to the material and the political. In some ways similar to how Hudson understands the intersection between various historical legacies and the technologies that they deploy in relation to, for instance, war and race, gender and class oppressions, digitality may be for us the means through which to explore the relationship between the environmental, psychical and political. Whenever visible evidence fails to articulate the situation involved, ethical questions surrounding the act of representation come into play. La Conchita mon amour seeks recourse in the poetic rendering of the trauma that environmental destruction brings. McPhee’s use of field recordings and a particular operatic soundtrack featuring a mournful female voice adds to the subjective evocation of the natural disaster. Her documentation of the landscape and instances of human response to the loss of lives, the aftermath of the mudslide and its continuing threat refuses the creation of spectacle. As McPhee claims in her project essay, ‘disaster images become pornography almost by default’; she also asks ‘how to generate narrative about a place of continuing catastrophe in a Undisclosed Recipients: .

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way that occludes spectacle? Is there a way to escape the anaesthetic of the daily news, and its remains online?’ (McPhee 2006: n.p.).

Conclusions Conceding that the documentary film often exceeds, and is more intricate and complex, than much of the theoretical enterprise that surrounds its practice thus requires some more enabling and constructive bases from which to speak and think about it. Vivian Sobchack, writing about the representation of death in documentary and non-fiction films, delineates an ethical space from which to discuss the limits to, and impossibility of, representing death. She writes, the textual vision inscribed in and as documentary space is never seen as a space alternative or transcendental to the viewer’s lifeworld and its values. That is, this textual vision and its activity reflexively point to a lived body occupying concrete space and shaping it with others in concrete social relations that describe a moral structure. (Sobchack 2004: 248)

The ethical space that Sobchack demarcates derives from cultural norms about death; which, for instance, gives rise to the peculiar situation where death is more often portrayed as being violent and unnatural than ordinary and acceptable, because of our culture’s increasing unfamiliarity with such a state of being. The ethics around various representations of death in the non-fiction film is thus intimately related to the social and the cultural. Short of death, I would argue that this ethical space that Sobchack distinguishes for the documentary is also political and part of the complex media and cultural ecology in which we inhabit. The works that I discuss above thus explore, interrogate and expand on the different and complex ways in which they articulate their relation to the material beyond the issues of representation. While Magruder employs the creative transcription of television news in the process to seek understanding despite media obfuscation, McPhee’s strategy involves delineating the limitations of visible evidence in rendering truth.

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Undisclosed Recipients: database documentaries and the Internet Dale Hudson As Sharon Lin Tay demonstrates in her analysis of three works from the ‘Undisclosed Recipients’ exhibit, digital images provide a means to advance discussion of documentary beyond claims to mediation (‘realism’) and immediacy (‘truth’) and signal the limitations of audio-visual evidence. In this essay, I turn to an analysis of digital structures, looking at two other works from the exhibit. I suggest ways that principles of new media disrupt the linear structures conventionally ascribed to documentary practices and prompt a rethinking of the concept of documentary, not only in terms of spatiality but also in terms of relationality. Adapting Marsha Kinder’s concept of ‘database narratives’, in which a surplus of information emphasizes a ‘dual process of selection and combination’ (Kinder 2002: 6), I argue that database documentaries loosen assumptions about documentary from fixed modes (expository, observational, personal) and towards open modes (collaborative, reflexive, interactive). Documentary, then, moves as a concept from object-based ‘push’ media (celluloid, video, even visual display of a graphical user interface (GUI)) towards act-based ‘pull’ media (user acts, hyperlinks, algorithms). Indeed, the open-source potentiality of the Internet, fuelled by digitization of audio-visual images into code that can be accessed randomly, labelled and sorted, then distributed (relatively) instantaneously, prompts reflection upon the historical and cultural assumptions that determine and manage meaning for many of the key terms (evidence, witnessing, testimony, etc.) associated with documentary. A defining characteristic of new media is its ability to organize information in databases, so that information may be rendered into a theoretically infinite number of discrete sequences via user acts and algorithmic operations. Meaning is not fixed as it is on celluloid; rather, meaning is malleable, destabilizing the certainties of positivist constructions of knowledge and opening meaning for ongoing debate. Digital structures, then, offer a means to address controversial subjects, such as globalization and the displacements of populations by war, in ways that open meaning to debate rather than attempt to circumscribe the contours of meaning. From its etymological roots in the word documentaire, roughly translating into English as ‘travelogue’, documentary film foregrounds its ability to present (or transport) audio-visual images (‘documents’) across time and space. Historically, documentary film constructs meaning through the temporal sequencing of audio-visual images onto reels of celluloid, or onto analogue and magnetic tapes. Since digital images are not recorded as a direct representation of a continuous process, they are produced as a process of encoding information as data that can be searched, selected, combined and converted back into an analogue signal that can be displayed on a screen and played through a speaker (Enticknap 2005: 203). Vivian Sobchack (2005: 132) argues that ‘presence’ in electronic (new) media is

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‘absolute presence’ or ‘being-in-itself ’. Rather than a ‘presence’ confined to the past, as with photographic media, or a ‘presence’ forever constituting itself as ‘presence’, as with cinematic media, the absolute presence of new media is centre-less, a network-like structure of instant simulation and desire, rather than in nostalgia for the past or anticipation for the future, so that qualities of the photographic and the cinematic are schematized into discrete pixels and bits of information, ‘each bit being-in-itself even as it is part of a system’ (Sobchack 2005: 136). Digitality, then, implies an opening to ways of conceiving one’s place in the world that is not constrained to the linearity of most analogue formats and has the potential to challenge the historical legacies that have deployed such technologies as they have intersected with colonialism, racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, class oppression, homophobia, religious fundamentalism and war. Content is reconfigured via RAM (random access memory) that permits immediate access to any part of the ‘new media object’ (Manovich 2001: 20–22, 77). New media emphasizes programmability (Chun 2006: 1–2), so that interactivity operates in ways that exceed the reading strategies offered by reception theory (i.e. interpretation of different meanings from a single text). Users manipulate information, actively exploring hyperlinked web pages and performing other acts. In particular, the database model facilitates selection and recombination of ‘documents’, thereby offering a mode of documentary that more closely resembles an archive which, in Foucault’s terms, ‘defines at the onset the system of its enunciability’ and ‘causes a multiplicity of statements to emerge, as so many things to be dealt with and manipulated’ (Foucault 1972: 129). More than a system of display and distribution, then, the database becomes a mode for Internet-based documentary where meaning is subjected to endless recombinations, operating within a simultaneously constructive and destructive ‘archive fever’ that Derrida (1996: 19) has described. Like analogue video archives, online digital archives are open to receive new documents, suggesting that meaning is a constant process of accumulation; unlike their analogue counterparts, however, online digital archives mobilize the random access of digital code and the remote access of computer networks as a means of facilitating user participation in this process. Polyvocal, unstable and contested meanings, rather than fixed ones, become a means of politicizing online and offline environments in Eduardo Navas’s Goobalization and the collaborative Permanent Transit: net.remix by Mariam Ghani, Zohra Saed, Qasim Naqvi and Edward Potter.

Goobalization Contextualized within the FLEFF exhibit, Goobalization documents ubiquitous corporate logos as one of the most visible markers of globalization that define the environment, both online and offline. Like the terms ‘Coca-Colaization’, ‘McDonaldization’ and ‘Hollywoodization’, the title to Eduardo Navas’s work takes the brand name of the globally dominant corporation – here, the Internet search engine Google – as a prefix to the name of a dominant process of post-Cold War/World Trade Organization (WTO) interdependence: globalization. Google declares its mission as ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’, but it is a publicly traded corporation that specializes in online advertising and generates revenue in the billions of US dollars. In this 90

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sense, the ‘world’s information’ includes the location of the search engine’s users – information that Google uses to target users of its search engines with Geo-ID. Advertisements automatically display in local languages (Goldsmith and Wu 2006: 61), prompting reflection about user complicity with the surveillance and mediation embedded in everyday acts, comparable to the complicity with corporate news media that Tay describes in her analysis of {transcription}. Goobalization is an ongoing series of short Flash animations that recombine images retrieved through Google, downloaded from the Web, and labelled by Navas according to their relationship with the project’s four key terms: surveillance, difference, resistance and globalization. Navas programs the images to appear on the media-player screen in proximity to his key terms – surveillance in the upper left; difference, upper right; resistance, lower left; and globalization, lower right – to prompt contemplation about the algorithms within the Google search engine that appears to execute the task of linking terms with images; that is, the animations question ways that search engines construct meaning. As the images appear on screen, however, their juxtapositions expose the complexities of power struggles and notions of progress at play in the online world. The hierarchy within Google search results is disrupted, so that the production of meaning becomes more apparent. Images fade in and out at different intervals, so that the user experiences the often-uncomfortable proximity between the ostensibly incompatible social, economic, cultural, political and ideological processes of globalization and the mundane and familiar acts of performing a Google search. Goobalization does not hack or modify the Google search engine; rather, it turns the logic of the search engine and its parent corporation somewhat against itself, interrogating expectations for what the search engine will produce when presented with highly contested key terms concerning globalization. Google boasts that its search engine is trusted by users due to its quality of being ‘untainted’ by human involvement or paid advertisements. Its patented ‘hypertext-matching analysis’ and ‘page rank’ algorithms decreases the calculation time for searches by examining page content and page relationships, rather than simply the frequency of word appearance on a particular page, and by pre-selecting web pages that the search engine determines to be more relevant to the user. Google’s image search, however, does rely upon human involvement in the absence of algorithms that can efficiently identify and label visual images, pointing back to the questions posed by Tay in relation to types of mediation that circumscribe the fidelity of visual representation. Google’s image search functions somewhat like an open-content model of the Internet that allows copying and modifying of information by any user. The search engine relies on users to provide indexing via tags (‘image labels’), encouraging users to strive for detail and accuracy through a system of points based upon the amount of detail within label descriptions. In its own example, an image of a large tropical seabird in flight against a blue sky receives successively higher points for the labels ‘sky’ (background image), ‘bird’ (foreground image), ‘soaring’ (action), and ‘frigate bird’ (more detailed description of foreground image). The labels link key words to visual images, so that the latter serve as a visual document or illustration of the former. Undisclosed Recipients: .

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In terms of critical praxis, Goobalization mimics the database logic of Google search engines while adapting the logic of ‘web application mashups’. Such mashups extend the sampling principles of music remixes that emerged during the 1970s but are not merely consumed for entertainment because they serve a practical function. Users customize Internet technologies, so that ‘the purpose of a typical Web 2.0 mashup’, Navas argues, is ‘to subvert applications to perform something they could not do otherwise by themselves’ (Navas 2007: 3). CrimeChicago.org, for example, overlays data from the Chicago Police Department onto Google maps, so that crimes may be mapped according to date, type and location, as readily as directions between home and a holiday or shopping destination can be mapped. Unlike hacks or mods, mashups mobilize and combine existing technologies, leaving the underlying code intact. Web application mashups materially copy data from various sources and constantly update this data, thereby utilizing the open archives, random access and search filters of the Internet. At first glance Goobalization appears to adopt the strategy of a mashup that matches images with words on a separate web site, such as a commercial news organization, based on information in the images’ metadata (‘tags’ such as the equipment and settings used to produce the image, the owner of the equipment, the subject or date). Rejecting Google’s conceits of objectivity and consensus within its text searches and image searches, Goobalization defines globalization, surveillance, resistance and difference in political terms. For Navas, globalization is an expression of transnational corporate control over international activity that facilitates the increasing global inequalities between haves and have-nots. He identifies surveillance as a complementary term that describes a primary mode by which globalization is enacted upon its bodies of the world’s populations, as well as upon their online activities. Corporations, governments, and hackers deploy surveillance for purposes that range from commercial exploitation to political control. As a counterbalance to globalization and surveillance, Navas understands resistance to suggest critical positions that interrogate structures of power, positions that simultaneously mobilize and are enabled by difference. Although the terms would seem to posit simple binaries, Navas’s selection and compositing of images complicate initial suppositions. Goobalization-I, for example, opens with a black-and-white image of ‘surveillance’, depicting a woman tourist taking a photograph of a man, who poses by swinging from a lamp post, above a colour image as ‘resistance’ depicting the Zapatista liberation army (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), known for their mobilization of Internet technologies for cyber-activism and anti-globalization. Differentiations and relations within structures of power come more sharply into focus as the user witnesses the momentary proximity of two very different subject positions under globalization – positions that are intimately connected yet effectively segregated by globalization. As the images fade in and out, composite images are formed momentarily in the overlapping areas between the four key terms. Plants, for example, merge with men holding machine guns. In Goobalization-III, ‘difference’ is represented with a stock advertising image of US multiculturalism (smiling African American, Asian American, European American, Latino/a American – yet, predictably, no Native 92

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American – faces) as ‘globalization’ is represented by an image of a pair of Gap jeans with a label reading ‘made in a sweatshop’. Soon the images shift to a logo for a reforestation movement for ‘difference’ whose text (‘you can make a difference’) is quickly covered by an image of three smiling waitresses wearing the trademark tight singlet for the Hooters chain of fast-food restaurants for ‘globalization’. The animations highlight the imbrications of purportedly oppositional discourses, that is, the works in the series animate ways that anti-globalization discourses are appropriated by agents of globalization, as well as the inverse. The digital structure of the documentary, then, determines meaning more than the actual content of the images, updating the political avant-garde strategies of Soviet montage and Third Cinema for what might be called the post-ideological moment. The overlapping images challenge the conventions of expository documentary where text, whether spoken in voice-over or written as intertitles or subtitles, reigns over images and causality in argument is paramount (Nichols 1991: 35). By mimicking an actual mashup that selects images based upon Google’s own rankings, the Goobalization animations pose questions about ways that information is labelled, tagged, and processed through search engines, ways that documents are interpreted as documentation by search engines, to expose meaning as polyvocal, unstable, and contested around ethically urgent questions concerning corporate control of meaning in the current moment of globalization.

Permanent transit Created by media artist Mariam Ghani in collaboration with programmer Ed Potter, Kabul: Reconstructions was originally launched in 2003 as an interactive documentary and public dialogue project to document reconstruction projects in Kabul at yearly intervals. By adopting both a conventional documentary mode (representing) and a less conventional mode (dialoguing), the Internet documentary seeks to offer multiple perspectives of particular situations, emphasizing movements towards collaborative, open-ended knowledge rather than single perspectives or closed structures of constructing and transmitting knowledge that Goobalization complicates. The first two sections of Kabul: Reconstructions, which were active from March 2003 to March 2006 and are archived on the website, include data about Kabul’s reconstruction gleaned from the official networks of international media coverage, as well as data about the reconstruction transmitted via Afghani diasporic and exilic networks in response to questions posted on the website by users. The third and fourth sections of the project turn their attention to the constitutional assembly and national election, posing questions about the ‘architectures of democracy proposed and promoted through the reconstruction efforts during that window of possibility which now seems to be closing’. The project deploys Internet communications peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies to disrupt the authority of centralized models of distribution. As part of Kabul: Reconstruction, the collaborative project Permanent Transit: net.remix by media artist Mariam Ghani, poet Zohra Saed, composer Qasim Naqvi, and programmer Edward Potter considers the instability of states of being through migration in response to political events. Permanent Transit is a database documentary about the anxieties and Undisclosed Recipients: .

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recoveries, disorientations and reorientations, associated with the continual migrations of expatriates, exiles, refugees, immigrants and itinerants. Shot on DV through the windows of planes, buildings and vehicles on location in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Turkey, Armenia, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, looped video and fragmented sounds of the twelve windows of Permanent Transit result in ‘experimental documentary reconstituted as a documented experiment’ (Ghani 2004). Designed to relocate viewers from state-bound lives to the crossroads that are experienced by the ‘hybrid generation’ of stateless populations that Ghani defines as ‘difficult, absurd, productive zone where locations and cultures blur, intersect, overlap and exchange’, while political borders reify. Experience, memory and identity are not merely fragmented, as articulated by postcolonial theories and echoed by postmodernist ideas. Instead, experience, memory and identity are distanced, blocked and often mediated in self-alienating ways that find description in views through the glass of windows of moving vehicles and temporary lodgings. In this sense the images share less in common with the ideologically ambiguous images in Goobalization than they do with images in La Conchita mon amour, which, as Tay argues, are infused with subjective evocations, thereby displacing indexicality as a primary mode of making meaning from visual representation. To enter Permanent Transit, the user opens a browser that is divided into a dozen windows, manipulating the content by clicking on the ‘mix’ button to download one single-channel video after another from the video subset of the database, as well as the ‘play’ and ‘pause’ buttons of the media player in each window. Sound tracks are selected by algorithm from the audio subset of the database. In this way, the documentary enacts functions of the user interface that Goobalization represents. In ten of the twelve windows, the short videos loop automatically. The audio track plays only once. The seventh and tenth windows contain text that appears and disappears in sections. The only window that does not automatically loop is the first window, which contains the title in white capital lettering against a black screen. The letters rotate through the alphabet faintly behind the words ‘permanent transit’ as images appear and disappear in clusters in a visual representation of the transience of memories and sensory impressions. The audio track of the title window generates anticipation of change that is suggested by the rapid beat of percussion instruments, punctuated by the occasional clanking noise of a metal instrument. Fidelity of visual representation to experience comes into question. Indeed, sound often compensates for the people and places that vision cannot produce. Handshakes and hugs find approximate substitutes in longdistance telephone conversations, so that the sound of voices fills in the gaps left by the absence of faces. The documentary explores substitutions and partial equivalences of being in a state of permanent transit where environments seemingly always shift underfoot. Structured as a database, Permanent Transit would seem to question the very assumptions of database search engines to produce meaningful results. Although the videos document travel through eleven states, images of these disparate places are seen only through the windows of vehicles and locations of transit. Cultural and political constructions of ‘the East’ and ‘the West’ collapse 94

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upon themselves when the visual markers of familiar and foreign are largely obliterated in partial views. Memories of one flight splinter into memories of a thousand flights. ‘What was the order of cities?’, asks Saed’s text; ‘Beirut . . . Baghdad . . . Damascus . . . New York . . . Baghdad again . . . Amman . . . New York. In the ellipses we find only war.’ Memories become sites for contestation between generations. Meaning of images for one generation is produced in relation to the meaning of another generation. As an unreliable structuring narrative for the piece, Rula Ghani recounts her memories of Syrian comedian Doreid Laham’s absurdist tale of a man trapped in a no-man’s land. The gaps in Ghani’s memory of Laham’s tale, originally televised in 1981 but only remembered and recorded decades later, are evocative of the work’s attempts to document what is lost every day. ‘How many windows can we look from? How many rooftops await our return?’, asks the text alongside the images. The clicking and chiming of clocks in the waiting rooms of airports, bus depots, railway stations and checkpoints comes to replace the call to prayers once heard from the local mosque. In another segment, sounds of prayers mix with sounds of traffic as a woman eats a meal by a window. ‘God and radio hold hands in the eternity of no-man zones’, suggests the text at one point. Although ‘bells, work, clock – all cut up the day as neatly as a traffic jam’, little relives the sense of being in a state of ‘permanent waiting’, emphasized by looped video across a multiplicity of screens. Permanent Transit also explores possibilities for recuperation of identity and grounding: ‘There are borders, there are checkpoints, and there are our mother’s stories to undo them all with one twist of a tale and a gentle laugh like glass breaking.’ To break the glass of the windows that stand as barriers between modes and sites of permanent transit suggests a substitute for home, particularly home for families whose individual members may have strikingly different memories of home due to histories of movement across borders. For the hybrid generation, the sound of the mother’s voice is perhaps all that binds identity at times. Perhaps the most sobering feature of Permanent Transit’s documentation of the disorientations of expatriates, exiles, refugees, immigrants and itinerants is its remix feature that causes the images in all of the windows except the seventh and tenth, which contain text, to shuffle. New images appear; old images disappear. The same images may appear more than once within the grid structure of the windows. The user’s ability to remix the videos and audio, paired at random by the project algorithm, suggests that meaning cannot be contained within linear temporality, rather it spills over into circular loops and is mapped onto multiple screens that suggest spatial and experiential relationships. According to Ghani, there is only a one in four chance that audio and video will align as they were recorded. Ultimately, images are interchangeable due to the transience of what they represent. Memories cannot be anchored to fixed locations of home and homeland, so that identity is diffused and subject to atrophy. The absolute presence of the images guarantees nothing, so that ‘we are all in imminent danger of becoming merely ghosts in the machine’ in Sobchack’s terms (2005: 140). The Internet documentary mobilizes the database structure of the Internet and digital video’s ability to loop endlessly to reconfigure documentary via temporal and relational dimensions not possible with analogue technologies that demand a linear structure. Undisclosed Recipients: .

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Conclusions As an interactive documentary, Permanent Transit harkens back to documentary’s etymological origin in ‘travelogue’ (documentaire). The user’s experience mimics the overlapping and easily confused memories of place of the experiences of travel that Permanent Transit documents. Comparably, Goobalization recognizes that the Internet is a part of the everyday landscape of a global environment that defines the frontier of the digital divide. Although some new media scholars dismiss the notion of interactivity as anything possible beyond user ‘reactivity’ within a vast network of choices, David Hogarth (2006: 127–29) argues that ‘interactive technologies could extend and deepen modes of engagement’ and that ‘digital documentaries promise to make sense of the world in less restrictive ways’, such as online productions that ‘may allow new forms of dialogue with documentary form, undermining authoritative (and authoritarian) modes of communication along the way’. In some ways, his ideas extend ones made by Trinh T. Minh-ha before the popularization of digital video through consumer-grade cameras and the Internet through the World Wide Web. Trinh (1993: 90) asserts that there is no such thing as documentary, whether a category of material, a genre, an approach or a set of techniques, and that the old antagonism between names and reality needs to be incessantly restated because truth is produced between regimes of power. She argues that ‘the present situation of critical inquiry seems much less one of attacking the illusion of reality as one of displacing and emptying out the establishment of totality’ (Trinh 1993: 107). Interactive and database formats for Internet documentaries refigure conventions of collaborative and self-conscious documentary. The ‘absolute presence’ of new media suggests a potential for emphasis on relationality that differs from relations based on temporal and spatial coordinates to those based upon a database format of potentially endless recombinations. Transcending observational, expository, self-reflexive and interactive modes of documentary, database documentaries like Goobalization and Permanent Transit reposition audience and events in ways that exceed the discursive spaces that can be contained on a single screen, via conventions of direct sound or voice-over and, more significantly, within the linear progression of projected film or video or within the fixed site of installations. Database documentaries prompt recognition that meaning is always polyvocal, unstable and contested – always in a moment of transition towards movement and contestation. Appendix: Undisclosed Recipients by festival content stream Brief descriptions and links to all works can be found online at http:// www.ithaca.edu/fleff07/selected_works.html

MAPS AND MEMES North-South-East-West 1.0 by Graham Thompson (Metis Nation/Canada). Surreal Scania by Robert Willim and Anders Weberg as Recycled Image Studio (Sweden). Flag Metamorphoses complied by Myriam Thyes (Germany). Entre Deux by Donald Abad and Cyriac Allard (France).

METROPOLI The Kabul Project by Mariam Ghani (USA). Ectropy and The Network of No_des by Jeebesh Bagchi, Mrityunjay Chatterjee, Iram Ghufran, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta as Sarai Media Lab (India). 96

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The Trustfiles by Nadine Hilbert and Gast Bouschet (Belgium). Anima by Jim Grafsgaard and P.J. Tracy (USA).

SOUNDSCAPES thefLuteintheworLdthefLuteistheworLd by Henry Gwiazda (USA). aux2mondes by collaborative of Nicolas Malevé, Pascal Mélédandri, Chantal Dumas and Isabelle Massu (USA/France). SameSameButDifferent v.02 by Thor and Runar Magnusson (Iceland). Untitled (FLEFF) by Catherine Clover (UK/Australia).

PANIC ATTACKS La Conchita mon amour by Christina McPhee (USA). Goobalization by Eduardo Navas (USA). {transcription} and [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004] by Michael Takeo Magruder (USA/UK). Pandemic Rooms by Jason Nelson (USA/Australia). The Samaras Project by Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee (USA).

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Thomas Shevory and Patricia R. Zimmermann for their support and encouragement, as well as Craig Hight and the anonymous readers at Studies in Documentary Film for their insights and suggestions that contributed immensely to this work.

References Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong (2006), ‘Introduction: Did Somebody Say New Media?’, in Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (eds), New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, New York and London: Routledge: pp. 1–10. Derrida, Jacques (1996), Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (trans. Eric Prenowitz), Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Originally published in French in 1995. Enticknap, Leo (2005), Moving Image Technology: From Zoetrope to Digital, London: Wallflower. Foucault, Michel (1972 [1969]), The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith), New York: Pantheon. Ghani, Mariam (2004). ‘Permanent Transit: net.remix’, artwurl, republished on Rhizome, http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/14265/. Accessed 7 March 2008. Goldsmith, Jack and Wu, Tim (2006), Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Hogarth, David (2006), Realer than Reel: Global Dimensions in Documentary, Austin: University of Texas Press. Kinder, Marsha (2002), ‘Hot Spots, Avatars, and Narrative Fields Forever: Buñuel’s Legacy for New Digital Media and Interactive Database Narrative’, Film Quarterly, 55: 4, pp. 2–15. Manovich, Lev (2001), The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. McPhee, Christina (2006), La Conchita mon armor project essay, http://www.christinamcphee.net/la_conchita.html Accessed 9 September 2007. Undisclosed Recipients: .

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Mulvey, Laura (2006), Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, London: Reaktion. Navas, Eduardo (2007), ‘Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture’, Vague Terrain, 7: sample culture, http://www.vagueterrain.net/content/archives/ journal07/navas01.html. Accessed 12 November 2007. Nichols, Bill (1991), Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Shevory, Thomas and Zimmermann, Patricia (2007), ‘Festival Codirectors’ Welcome’, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival catalogue, Ithaca, NY: Ithaca College, n.p. Sobchack, Vivian (2004), Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. —— (2005 [1994]), ‘The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic “Presence”’, in Andrew Utterson (ed.), Technology and Culture, New York and London: Routledge, 2005: pp. 127–42. Trinh T. Minh-ha (1993), ‘The Totalizing Quest for Meaning’, in Michael Renov (ed.), Theorizing Documentary, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 90–107. —— (2005), The Digital Film Event, London and New York: Routledge.

Suggested citation Tay, S. L. (2008), ‘Undisclosed Recipients: documentary in an era of digital convergence’, Studies in Documentary Film 2: 1, pp. 79–98, doi: 10.1386/sdf.2.1.79/1.

Contributor details Sharon Lin Tay is Lecturer in Film Studies at Middlesex University in London, UK, where she teaches world cinema, film theory and digital culture. Her work is sustained by a commitment to feminist politics, and revolves around film theory and film-making practices. She has published articles in the journal Women: A Cultural Review, chapters in the anthologies Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers (Routledge, 2002), Femme Fatalities: Representations of Strong Women in the Media (Nordicom, 2004) and Northern Constellations: New Readings in Nordic Cinema (Norvik Press, 2006). She is preparing a book about feminist ethics and women’s film-making practices. Contact: Sharon Lin Tay, Middlesex University, School of Arts, Cat Hill, London, EN4 8HT England. E-mail: [email protected]

Suggested citation Hudson, D. (2008), ‘Undisclosed Recipients: database documentaries and the Internet’, Studies in Documentary Film 2: 1, pp. 79–98, doi: 10.1386/sdf.2.1.79/1.

Contributor details Dale Hudson is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the Department of English at Amherst College. His work on cinema and new media appears in the journals Screen and Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, the anthology The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (Routledge, 2007), and is forthcoming in the Journal of Film and Video. He contributes reviews to Afterimage. Contact: Dale Hudson, Visiting Assistant Professor of Film Studies, Amherst College, PO Box 5000, Amherst, MA 01002 USA. E-mail: [email protected]

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Volume 2 Number 1 – 2008 3–7

Editorial The field of digital documentary: a challenge to documentary theorists Craig Hight Articles

9–31

Primetime digital documentary animation: the photographic and graphic within play Craig Hight

33–45

In and out of this world: digital video and the aesthetics of realism in the new hybrid documentary Ohad Landesman

47–59

Digital video and Alexandre Astruc’s caméra-stylo: the new avant-garde in documentary realized? Bjorn Sorenssen

61–78

Documentary expression online: The Wrong Crowd, a history documentary for an ‘electrate’ audience Debra Beattie

79–98

Undisclosed Recipients: documentary in an era of digital convergence Sharon Lin Tay

79–98

Undisclosed Recipients: database documentaries and the Internet Dale Hudson

SDF 2.1_cover.indd 1

Studies in Documentary Film gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Monash University Publications Grants Committee

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