studies in documentary film volume 2 issue 1

Studies in

Documentary Film

Studies in Docum

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ISSN 1750-3280

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intellectwww.intellectbooks.com

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intellect Journals | Film

Studies9 771750 328003

ISSN 1750-32802 1

Studies in

Documentary Film Volume 2 Number 1 – 2008

3–7 Editorial

The field of digital documentary: a challenge to documentary theorists Craig HightCraig 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 documentaryfor 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

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

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Studies in Documentary FilmVolume 2 Number 1 2008

The scope of Studies in Documentary Film (SDF )Studies in Documentary Film is a new refereed scholarly journal devotedto the history, theory, criticism and practice of documentary film. Thisjournal will enable a considered approach to international documentaryfilm history, theory, criticism and practice serving a vibrant andgrowing 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 documen-

tary 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.

Editorial BoardIan Aitken – Hong Kong Baptist University Moinak Biswas – Jadavpur University West BengalJohn Corner – University of LiverpoolNick 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, DurbanLee 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 BoardChris Berry Goldsmiths – College University of LondonIb Bondebjerg – University of CopenhagenStella Bruzzi – Royal Holloway University of LondonSteve Lipkin – I Western Michigan UniversitySheila Schvarzman – State University of Campinas BrazilBelinda Smaill – Monash UniversityDiane Waldman – University of DenverCharles Wolf – University of California, Santa Barbara

Journal EditorDeane WilliamsFilm and Television Studies

School of English Communications and

Performance Studies

Monash University

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Associate EditorsDerek PagetReading University UK

Abé Mark NornesUniversity of Michigan

Book Reviews EditorHelen GraceProfessor

Department of Cultural and

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Chung Chi College

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ISSN 1750–3280Studies 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 whereasit is £9 within the EU and £12 elsewhere. Advertising enquiries should beaddressed to: [email protected]

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Aitken, I. (1989), ‘John Grierson,Idealism and the Inter-war Period,Historical Journal of Film, Radio andTelevision, 9.3, pp. 247–258.

Corner, John. (1996), The Art of Record: A Critical Introduction to Documentary,Manchester: Manchester UP.

Youngblood, Denise. (1991a), SovietCinema in the Silent Era, 1918–1935,Austin: University of Texas Press.

— (1991b) “History” on Film: thehistorical Melodrama in Early SovietCinema’, Historical Journal of Film, Radioand Television, 11: 2, pp. 173–184.

Dermody, Susan. (1995), ‘The Pressure of the Unconscious Upon the Image: TheSubjective Voice in Documentary’, inLeslie 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.

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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 theoristsCraig Hight University of Waikato

Documentary has always responded, in an often dynamic fashion, to thepossibilities afforded by new technologies. The adoption of portable cameraand sound equipment, for example, gave documentary film-makers themeans to experiment with innovative approaches to capturing the social-historical world, helped to reinvigorate interest in the genre amongst anew generation of practitioners and reintroduced its potential to audi-ences. The relationship between documentary and digital technologies,however, offers the potential for a far more extensive and permanenttransformation of fundamental aspects of documentary culture. The possiblechanges are many and varied. They involve a transformation of the verymateriality of texts themselves, as their constituent elements are trans-posed into computer files able to be easily accessed, distributed, combinedand manipulated for a variety of ends. Those who we might refer to asfollowing “conventional” documentary forms are increasingly experi-menting with digital-based means of capturing footage and a new paletteof post-production techniques, resulting in the stretching of familiar docu-mentary modes of representation into new directions. The production baseof documentary culture itself is broadening as digital platforms foster farmore direct, if not yet fully democratic, forms of participation, especiallyfrom the ranks of groups we might have previously consigned to the rela-tively ‘passive’ role of audience members. Both professional and amateurfilm-makers are also exploiting the varieties of forms of interactive, cross-platform engagement through DVD and the World Wide Web, as well asusing these media as new avenues for distribution of more conventionaldocumentary texts.

All of these developments can, somewhat clumsily at this stage, begrouped under the label of ‘digital documentary’. Collectively, they offerthe potential to change the nature of documentary practices, aesthetics,forms of political engagement and the wider relationship of documentaryculture as a whole to the social-historical world. Such a shift poses a con-siderable challenge to documentary theory, which has emerged in discus-sion around a canon of cinematic and, to a lesser extent, television textsproduced from a relatively well-understood collection of audio-visual tech-nologies. If we return to Bill Nichols’s well-known three-part definition ofdocumentary (Nichols 1991) – involving a community of practitionerswithin a particular institutional context, familiar modes of documentaryrepresentation and a set of assumptions and expectations of audiences – itis possible to argue that the digital transformation of each part of thisdefinition suggests a radical shift in the basis of documentary culture.

3SDF 2 (1) pp. 3–7 © Intellect Ltd 2008

SDF 2.1_01_edt_Hight 3/14/08 10:20 AM Page 3

It is very easy to fall in line with technological determinists and proclaima ‘digital revolution’, with its suggestion of a collapse of the existingregimes of documentary discourse and practice, which are now to befractured into a myriad of forms that we will struggle to label as ‘docu-mentary’. However, a much more useful approach is to adopt Lister’s sug-gestion that when considering the impact of the digital we make adistinction between the continuities of cultural forms and discourses andtheir divergence across media platforms. Instead of deriving wider specula-tions based simply on shifts in technology, it is necessary to consider suchchanges within a wider framework of ‘continuities and transformations’(Lister 2000: 322), involving a focus on the cultural meanings central toeach. It is also useful here to draw upon Bolter and Grusin’s notion of‘remediation’ as an initial framework for conceptualizing the relationshipsbetween ‘old’ and ‘new’ media – they focus on the tendency toward two-way patterns in the appropriation of cultural forms.

At this early stage it is possible to delineate two broad dynamics at playwithin this emerging field of digital documentary. These overlap andinform each other, collectively transforming the technological basis ofdocumentary practice even as they reinforce and expand the significance ofdocumentary as a cultural form. First there is the integration of digitaltechnologies within conventional documentary practice, a process con-taining the potential to reshape the production, post-production anddistribution of film and television documentary (just as the development ofthe technologies of these media drew upon and reshaped earlier documen-tary photography practices). The second dynamic is the appropriation bydigital 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 waysof conveying meaning and a divergence as ‘splinters’ of documentarymodes familiar from ‘analogue’ media emerge within new digital contexts.

There are multiple opportunities for documentary researchers withinthis wider spectrum of continuities and transformation. The manner inwhich digital technologies are increasingly incorporated into ‘conven-tional’ documentary practice ranges from the increasing use of digitalcamcorders and other mobile devices as the main means of gainingfootage, to the reliance on desktop-based (or mobile, laptop-based) digitalnon-linear editing systems. These developments draw upon wider trendswithin visual culture, not least the continuing spread and domesticationof the means to document and capture aspects of the social-historicalworld. Devices such as webcams, phonecams, amateur camcorders andother means of visual surveillance are all drawn upon within contempo-rary documentary, which has expanded to include not only regimes ofinstitutionalized surveillance but also more personalized forms of expres-sion and surveillance. The emergence of films such as Jonathan Cauoette’soft-cited and celebrated Tarnation (2003), for example, can be used to suggestboth a further democratization of the means of production and an increas-ing emphasis on the autobiographical.

The implications of a reliance on non-linear editing practices is difficultto predict, but here also there are profound possibilities. The full range ofmontage and editing techniques are converted by computer software

4 Craig Hight


programmes such as iMovie into an easy process of the ‘drop-down’ selec-tion of special effects. Cauoette’s extensive play with the built-in functionsof iMovie, for example, are central to Tarnation’s kaleidoscopic aesthetic,including its full exploration of caption presets. Just as the possibilities ofword processing have altered writing practices, and perhaps the craft ofwriting as a conceptual exercise, will such readily available editing softwarelead to similar fundamental changes in the nature of the (documentary)film-making process? For example, what effect on film-making practicewill follow from the inclusion within iMovie of a preset selection for some-thing that is labelled the ‘Ken Burns effect’, which mimics that director’strademark panning of photographic material as a central device for theconstruction of historical narrative? Digital theorists have noted the possi-bilities that derive from the ability of desktop computer software to mergeexisting traditions of photography, information design (especially typo-graphic and graphic design), and the varieties of moving image production(Lister 2000: 305) into an expanded palette for motion graphics. Theresult, argues Manovich, is a distinctive ‘hybrid, intricate, complex andrich visual language’ (Manovich 2006: 11), one that is becoming moreand more accessible to amateur media producers.

A transformation is already complete in the area of documentarydistribution. The emergence of Digital Versatile Disc (or Digital VideoDisk, or DVD) as a medium has allowed for the rise of specialist distributorssuch as docurama.com catering to new domestic markets for conventionaldocumentary texts. DVD is a platform that also has the potential to con-struct a variety of frames for documentary texts, as background, ‘makingof ’ and update materials included as DVD ‘extras’ provide an insight intothe nature of documentary practice employed by film-makers and televi-sion producers (Hight 2005). A documentary is potentially ‘reframed’ bythese new layers of information that might previously have appeared asseparate, extra-textual prompts for audience encounters with a documen-tary. The two-disc DVD release of Capturing the Friedmans (2003) suggeststhe possibilities for reframing, as the discs’ extras problematize the argu-ment of the documentary text itself by including alternative forms of evi-dence and the dissenting responses of participants in the documentary.One wider potential for the DVD medium, then, appears to be the fosteringof reflexive perspectives toward mainstream documentary practice asa whole.

The possibilities for online distribution are also considerable. We canaccess downloads of complete documentary films1 or the institutionalspaces for documentary shorts ranging from the video diary approach ofthe BBC’s Video Nation,2 to the four-minute allowance of Channel 4’sFourDocs3). The World Wide Web creates opportunities for the distributionof independent documentary productions, such as those of RobertGreenwald,4 or the widely-known 9/11 conspiracy film Loose Change,5 notto mention the proliferation of user-created material that often conformquite loosely to the documentary project available on Web 2.06 sites suchas YouTube and MySpace. The explosion of such content reinforces a kindof ‘YouTube’ aesthetic; amateur footage, edited on a desktop, intendedalmost as throwaway pieces of culture, often produced as a direct responseto other online material. This kind of online environment provides for both

5The field of digital documentary: a challenge to documentary theorists

1. Such as http://www.documentary-film.net/

2. Available athttp://www.bbc.co.uk/videonation/

3. Available athttp://www.channel4.com/fourdocs/

4. Available at http://www.robertgreenwald. org/

5. Available athttp://loosechange911.com/

6. O’Reilly offers a definition of Web 2.0at T. O’Reilly (2005),‘What is Web 2.0:Design Patterns andBusiness Models ofthe Next Generationof Software’, availableat http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.htmlAccessed 11November 2006.


the flowering of the work of new documentary auteurs, and also theirswamping within an ocean of more mediocre offerings.

The World Wide Web also fosters new digital forms of media thatincorporate and transform elements of documentary aesthetics, and occa-sionally conform to the documentary project, such as webcams (Hight2001) and forms of websites that operate within a documentary frame.Further afield within digital media are computer games that draw uponarchival material as forms of evidence, focus on the reconstruction of his-torical events or claim to provide a simulation of social-historical experi-ence. Computer games, DVD and online sites all allow for the explorationof spatial metaphors for the presentation of referents to the social-historical,a radical departure from the norms of continuity and evidentiary editingthat are central to an analogue-based ‘commonsense’ appreciation ofdocumentary form. Such developments pose their own challenges to doc-umentary theory. How does the creation of pathways through database-centred content relate to the creation of narrative and argument that areof such central concern to documentary practice?

Ultimately, the encounter with digital documentary texts contains thechallenge for documentary theorists to revisit, reconceptualize and clarifythose things that make ‘documentary’ distinctive from other kinds ofsymbolic forms. The challenge is ultimately to either redefine ‘documen-tary’ itself or abandon a collective term in favour of identifying a numberof distinct practices that overlap the digital and analogue, moving and stillimage, photographic and graphic, two- and three-dimensional, and dis-tinct practices of engagement centred on a clearly-defined continuum ofinteractivity and participation.

The pieces in this special issue offer specific sites within this broad fieldof ‘digital documentary’, with each contributor theorizing the intersectionof documentary and the digital within specific texts across quite differentmedia.

Craig Hight discusses key patterns in the use of digital-based animationwithin primetime television documentary series, identifying three key ani-mation ‘modes’ and the implications they pose to television documentarypractice and aesthetics. Ohad Landesman explores the challenges that theaesthetic of digital video (DV) poses to discourses of documentary realismwhen used in cinematic hybrids such as Michael Winterbottom’s In ThisWorld (2002), Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten (2002) and Hany Abu-Assad’s FordTransit (2002). Bjørn Sørenssen uses the short films of YouTube user‘Geriatric1927’ as a key case study to discuss recent advances in amateurdigital-based audio-visual production. He positions the explosion of onlineamateur videography within a historical perspective informed byAlexandre Astruc’s much earlier observations on the emergence of aconsumer base for portable film technologies. Debra Beattie builds fromher own experience as a digital practitioner, discussing the issues thatarise from the use of Quicktime virtual reality reconstructions and non-linear narrative in the production of her 2003 online documentary TheWrong Crowd. And finally, Dale Hudson and Sharon Lin Tay offer comple-mentary commentaries on digital pieces from the 2007 online exhibit‘Undisclosed Recipients’. Tay explores the implications for documentaryrepresentation of the digital mediations at the heart of Michael Takeo

6 Craig Hight


Magruder’s {transcription} and [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004] andChristina McPhee’s La Conchita mon amour. Hudson, in turn, considers thepossibilities for plural meanings and forms of engagement offered by thedatabase documentaries Eduardo Navas’s Goobalization and the collabora-tive work Permanent Transit: net.remix.

ReferencesBolter, J.D. and Grusin, R. (2000), Remediation: Understanding New Media,

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hight, C. (2001), ‘Webcam sites: the documentary genre moves online?’, MediaInternational 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 FilmJournal, 45/46, pp. 5–19.

Nichols, B. (1991), Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary,

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Suggested citationHight, 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 detailsDr 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.


7The field of digital documentary: a challenge to documentary theorists



Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sdf.2.1.9/1

Primetime digital documentaryanimation: the photographic andgraphic within playCraig Hight University of Waikato

AbstractThe increased use of digital-based animation techniques within primetime televisiondocumentary series needs to be viewed in the context of a number of challenges tothe documentary genre emerging from a more competitive television broadcastingenvironment. Since the 1990s television producers looking for a more cinematicand popular aesthetic have integrated computer-media imaging (CMI) and computer-generated imaging (CGI) into documentary practice, layered into a text eitherin-frame or in-sequence. Patterns in the ways these animation techniques havebeen used can be grouped into three key modes: ‘symbolic expositional’, ‘graphicvérité’ and ‘invasive surveillance’. The development of these modes has expandedthe means of (television) documentary representation, and been closely associatedwith the emergence of more playful and layered mediations of social and historicalknowledge.

Both animation and documentary are notoriously difficult to define. Aworking definition of animation could be ‘the artificial creation of theillusion of movement in inanimate lines and forms’ (Wells 1997: 10). Thisis a definition that, as Wells suggests, is both broad enough to cover themyriad of techniques employed by animators and yet inadequate to preciselyidentify where animation sits within the full spectrum of audio-visualforms. As a set of techniques, animation has long been incorporated intodocumentary culture. The avant-garde and short-film realms have morefrequently been a site for exploration and experimentation in documentaryanimation while mainstream cinema and television have tended to usethese techniques in a number of quite formulaic ways.

A full account of documentary animation within documentary as awhole could begin as early as Eadweard Muybridge’s experiments in ani-mated sequences of photographic stills, and offer a trajectory that includesthe influential avant-garde work of Dziga Vertov’s Chelovek s kinoapparatom(Man with a Movie Camera) (Vertov, 1929), the more formulaic use of ani-mation in examples such as Frank Capra’s Why We Fight (Capra, 1943–45),through to contemporary examples such as the satiric historical narrativecartoon of US gun culture in Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine(Moore, 2002).

The nature of this intersection between animation and documentarysuffers from the relative neglect of both documentary and animation


Keywordsdocumentary

animation

computer-mediated

imaging

computer-generated

imaging

photorealism

evidentiary layering

SDF 2.1_02_art_Hight 3/14/08 2:47 PM Page 9

researchers (Strøm 2003: 47–48; Ward 2005). Given the variety of pro-duction techniques that fall under the category of ‘animation’, analysingthe role and significance of documentary animation has always involvedassessing either the manner in which a specific set of techniques are usedand framed within a given documentary text, or the manner in which afully animated text works to position itself in relation to documentary aes-thetics and discourses. Wells offers a useful typology of four modes ofdocumentary animation – the imitative, the subjective, the fantastic andthe postmodern – positioned in relation to the more familiar schema ofconventional documentary modes of representation (Nichols 1991: 32–56).It is Wells’s modular approach that has informed the discussion of digital-based documentary animation modes outlined below.

This article focuses on some key trends in the use of digital-based ani-mation within mainstream television documentary since the 1990s (theperiod when these techniques have become more prominent within prime-time programming). Although the examples used below are largely fromBritish documentary television, they exhibit patterns that are becomingmanifest across similar examples of the television genre globally. The factthat these trends are so prominent within television documentary is notcoincidental, as they are prompted in large part by a variety of otherfactors that are reshaping both the television documentary genre itselfand the televisual medium as a whole.

‘Post-documentary’ culture?As with any other genre, documentary is continually evolving; it hasnever been fixed into an ideal form, or associated with a limited set ofsocial-political functions, which can be championed as the epitome of thegenre. It has always responded to changes to the broader social-politicalcontexts of documentary production and to developments in media tech-nologies. The development of hand-held film cameras, for example, servedas one significant catalyst for the emergence of cinéma vérité and directcinema, just as digital camcorders, miniature cameras and the like havebeen quickly incorporated into the lexicon of contemporary documentaryfilm-making.

The genre, as with all visual culture, also needs to be understoodwithin the wider social-political contexts that shape its agendas and itsforms. A number of writers have been looking to address the complexity ofthe documentary genre within the contemporary television broadcastingenvironment. John Corner’s speculations on the development of a ‘post-documentary’ culture (Corner 2001, 2002a) attempt to position new factualforms in relation to fundamental changes within the agenda of documen-tary culture as a whole. He uses the term ‘post-documentary’ as a meansto promote debate over the cultural significance of the proliferation of doc-umentary hybrid forms, and the new relationships between film-makersand audiences that they might signify (rather than to suggest an explicitbreak from previous traditions of documentary film-making).

There is not the space here to properly discuss the variety of such fact-fiction forms (which include docu-soaps, video diaries, reality TV, realitygame shows, makeover documentaries and situation documentaries), northe variety of debates that they have attracted.1 They collectively represent

10 Craig Hight

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

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a variety of aesthetic styles, narrative structures, thematics and social-political agendas, but there is little doubt that their impact on the docu-mentary genre itself has been significant. The last two decades havewitnessed the proliferation of fact-fiction texts that often have a tenuousrelationship with documentary concerns, but which explicitly draw upona variety of assumptions and expectations of factual forms (in particularthe indexical quality of photographic images, which has its own complexrelationship with the digital forms discussed below). Critical commentaryon such forms is typically focused both on the nature of their content andthe manner in which this is packaged into readily accessible forms ofentertainment programming, derived from more traditional television gen-res such as soap opera, talk shows, game shows and tabloid journalism.

Corner argues that the variety of presentation styles and the agendasthat these forms reflect should be recognized as the politics and aestheticsof ‘documentary as diversion’. They represent a new function for the genreas a whole, adding to earlier non-fiction traditions that focused more onexposition, inquiry and interrogation. He suggests that their significancelies in their fostering of demands that documentary itself adapts to newforms 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 under-stood in relation to more fundamental changes within social and culturalpatterns of engagement with mediations of the ‘real’. These include anaccelerating interaction between the social-political discourses of surveil-lance, autobiography and creative expression. These are manifest partly inthe increasing and disquieting use of surveillance systems within modernsocieties, and an associated rise in the acceptance of surveillance footagewithin television programming (Palmer 2003). At a more intimate levelthese discourses are exhibited through the emergence of an amateur sur-veillance culture centred on camcorders and, more recently, webcams,video blogs, phonecams and amateur videography submitted to onlinesites such as YouTube and MySpace.

These trends suggest both a transformation of distinctions betweenpublic and private space and an increased realm for personalized forms ofconfession and expression. These are clearly intersecting with more estab-lished traditions of personal media, such as amateur photography andvideography. The aesthetic of amateur video – grainy, hand-held, accidentaland partial perspectives on often spectacular events or emotional outbursts –is increasingly reinforced as the marker of authenticity. These trends are inturn associated with fundamental changes within conventional models ofbroadcasting.

Television is always in a constant state of reinvention, but this is aprocess that has accelerated in response to the challenges and opportunities

11Primetime digital documentary animation: the photographic and graphic within play


afforded by the emergence of the full range of digital media. The interrela-tion between television and digital media is not easily summarized. It isclear that the conditions that gave rise to the dominance of television as amedium within the domestic sphere have been transformed over the lasttwo decades, and the medium has been required to refashion itself in theface of an increasingly ferocious level of competition both between prolif-erating television networks and from other entertainment media. There isa need for television networks to develop innovative forms of programmingto hold their own against alternative entertainment and informationsources, and to reorient themselves to address online forms of broadcast-ing, the appeal of computer games, and other forms of interactive media.

Johnson (2005: 62–115) cites the proliferation of home entertainmentsystems and domestic DVD libraries as factors in encouraging more ‘cine-matic’, complex, nuanced and layered television narratives. The mediumis also more adept at exploring cross-platform possibilities such as wirelessand online accompaniments to programming – online and cellphone-based 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 layer-ing of graphic information, especially within staple forms of programmingsuch as news and current affairs, draws from the convergent aesthetic ofthe World Wide Web. The use of the televisual frame to explore intimateand spatially complicated fictional milieux (with dramatic and comedicvérité series) partly draws inspiration from the dynamic spaces of videogames. Such aesthetic trends have long been observed (Caldwell 1995),and to a large extent the incorporation of computer-based animationwithin documentary is derived from these wider developments.

Within the television environment, documentary is by no means anurtured and protected genre, automatically respected for its social-politicalfunctions, but is required to compete for popular audiences in the samemanner as other forms of television programming. The BBC itself (the pro-ducer of many of the texts discussed below) is perhaps the key example ofan organization looking to renegotiate its legacy as a public service broad-caster within a more fluid, dynamic and competitive media environment.The emergence of digital documentary animation in primetime needs to beseen as symptomatic of such wider changes within television broadcasting,and of an underlying anxiety towards retaining a mass audience forprimetime documentary. The result is an impetus to create a more complex,layered and spectacular aesthetic, one which is easily married with con-ventional modes of documentary representation and the focus on emotion,performance and intimacy that governs documentary hybrids.

Key modes in digital-based documentary animationThe use of digital-based animation within primetime television documentaryoperates within a comparatively limited range of representational styles.As noted above, we tend not to see here the full experimental possibilitieswhich are perhaps more open naturally to animation than other tech-niques. Instead of the exploration of the abstract or the avant-garde thetypical television text is centred on increasingly sophisticated demonstra-tions of the formulaic. The broad parameters of these patterns are partlydetermined by the nature of the technologies employed in production and

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post-production, and partly through the manner in which they are used toappropriate and perform familiar modes of presentation.

An intersection between specific motion graphic techniques and familiardiscourses of representation (outlined in the schematic in Figure 1) sug-gests the current territory of primetime digital documentary animation.At one pole of a continuum of techniques is the computer mediation ofimages (CMI), which position elements of the indexical and photographicwithin animation and morphing sequences during post-production. At theother pole are entirely computer-generated images (CGI), derived from themany advances towards synthetic realism achieved in fictional film-making.2

Each of these poles address the need to produce imagery that can be com-petitive within contemporary television programming.

This continuum of techniques can be usefully seen to intersect with akey discursive continuum within animation more generally, that betweenphotorealism and the exploration of purely symbolic or abstract forms(Wells 1998: 24–28). This is only one pathway through the discoursesshaping the development of animation but a useful one for the purposes ofthis discussion. The term ‘symbolism’ here is intended to suggest afocused set of animation techniques particularly informed by the traditionand principles of information design, and incorporating both iconic andmetaphoric forms of representation. The opposite end of this continuum,the quest for increasingly photorealistic effects, also taps into long-standingtraditions within visual culture but these are more explicitly linked to thesame faith in an indexical link between the photographic and actualitywhich still serves as a key basis for documentary culture.

As Manovich notes, the field of computer graphics ‘defines photorealismas the ability to simulate any object in such a way that its computerimage is indistinguishable from its photograph’ (Manovich 2000: 199), adefinition that emphasizes how this pole of animation is aimed at replicatingcinematography rather than human perception and experience of realityitself. The photorealistic techniques employed in television primetimedocumentaries involve direct referencing to documentary photographyand cinematography, with its inherent tension between obscuring the roleof the camera and its insistence on that camera as a faithful instrument fordocumenting reality. Similarly, there is a paradoxical sense of indexicality


2. See Manovich’sdiscussion onsynthetic realism(Manovich 2000:184–98).

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


generated through the use of CMI and CGI techniques in these series. Asdiscussed below, photorealistic imagery is employed in a typically reflexivemanner, while acoustic indexicality3 in the form of interview sound-bitesand especially expositional voice-over narration, provides the key means ofcontinuity between animation sequences and other, more conventionalmodes of documentary representation.

From this broad schematic of digital documentary animation, the dis-cussions below focus on three key modes in the use of CGI and CMI withinprimetime television documentaries over the last two decades, modes whichtend to operate with distinct intersections between animation techniquesand discourses.

1. Symbolic expositional modeThis mode draws especially from well-established traditions of informationdesign,4 already naturalized and deeply embedded within everyday televi-sion graphic practice. Forms of graphic presentation such as maps andthe conveying of simplified statistical information through graphs andtables are standard practice within news and current affairs reporting, inincreasingly layered and three-dimensional forms. Such forms enable oftencomplex natural and social phenomena to be introduced and explainedin easily digested ways, and are increasingly an immediate option forproducers looking to offer simplistic three-dimensional modular recon-structions of events where there exists no footage (such as plane crashes orbattle 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 ‘informa-tion’ films, for example, makes frequent use of animated maps (producedby the Disney corporation) to convey a sense of geographical movementsin armed forces, underpinned with a distinct propagandist agenda (Figure 2).The use of such graphic means of representation allowed Capra and hiscollaborators to immediately convey a variety of information (in this case,about geography, political and ideological transformation, and an explicitthreat to European security) and to shift easily between iconic and symbolicgraphic forms. The ‘animated map’ has become a convention used to thepoint of cliché within all forms of historical documentary, especially thosefocused on military history.

The use of CGI and CMI animation techniques allows such diagrams toappear to be more convincingly three-dimensional and hence to meshmore easily with the overall trend towards a more cinematic aestheticwithin television. The History Channel’s Line of Fire series is one of anynumber of everyday examples that demonstrate how this existing patternof animation has seamlessly incorporated digital technology (Figure 3).Such constructions draw upon conventions of map representation(updated to simplified three-dimensional rendered landscapes), employsymbols such as national flags to denote various players in the battle, usecoloured arrows that snake over the terrain to suggest their movement,and include iconic features where needed (the sequence in Figure 3includes three-dimensional US forces helicopters that fly ‘into’ and overthe map). As is typical of editing strategies employed in expositional mode(Nichols 1991: 34–38), this sequence is intercut with grainy, hand-held

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3. Ward has noted thesignificance of soundas the basis of indexicality withinthe wider field of animateddocumentary (Ward2005: 98). He quotesRenov’s use of theterm ‘acoustic indexicality’. Soundhas been a neglectedarea of documentarytheory (Corner2002b), and is often forgotten as a remnant of thesocial-historicalworld within digitalmedia.

4. See especially theclassic texts byEdward Tufte (Tufte 1990, 1997,2001), which coverwell-established techniques of graphicrepresentation inboth print and audio-visual media.His books cover conventions forrepresenting ‘picturesof numbers’, ‘picturesof nouns’ and‘pictures of verbs’.


actual battle footage, and talking heads and voice-over narration pro-viding apparent expert testimony. Here the calm and rational experttestimony serves to erase any clash of the juxtaposition of the chaos ofbattlefield video footage with the crisp and definitive lines of the ani-mated map. The digital battle map, in other words, is typically used toreinforce the certainty of the historical narrative that such documen-taries construct.

As such animation techniques have become more commonplace, therehas been the extension of more metaphoric means of conveying informa-tion. The BBC series Superhuman (Bunting, Evans and Hickman, 2001)uses CGI and CMI sequences in the service of presenting medical discourseon the body, drawing especially on spatial and rhetorical forms inherent tocomputer-game design. Presented by Robert Winston, the series employs asymbolic expositional mode as a key part of a wider rhetorical strategy ofusing sequences which offer easily digested metaphors for various physicalprocesses within the body. Some of these metaphors are relatively visuallysophisticated yet still closely integrated within Winston’s rhetoric of theempowering 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 isfighting off chicken pox, which Winston likens to a ‘war game’, we move fromthe girl’s older brother playing a computer game straight into the game itself.


5. Portions of thisanalysis ofSuperhuman havepreviously appearedin Hight andColeborne (2006).

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.


Winston compares the body to a sprawling city, under attack fromviruses, and we see a CGI-generated city represented on-screen, to thesound of fast-paced electronic music. A spiked ball representing a virusspins menacingly towards the city, with the screen showing the cross-hairs 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 enormousmachine guns, deliberately reminiscent of the anti-aircraft systems ofthe Death Star from Star Wars (Lucas, 1977), shooting and destroying theviral 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’sdefences. We are treated to the apocalyptic vision of the city burning asthe ‘killer t-cells’ lie helpless. When the narration turns to the naturalimmunity to the HIV virus of Nairobi prostitutes, we see these defencescome to life and begin hunting down the suddenly vulnerable HIVviruses. This sense of the human body as a landscape in which ‘battles’occur shares an obvious affinity to the examples above, even thoughsuch sequences are used towards different discursive ends in theSuperhuman series.

16 Craig Hight

Figure 3: Still from an animated expositional sequence from the History Channel’s Life of Fire documentaryon the 1991 Gulf War (2002).


Such forms of graphic exposition draw their legitimacy from how theyare used within wider sequences, and particularly through the continuityprovided by voice-over narration. A second mode of digital animation ismore explicitly couched within reference to conventional forms of docu-mentary visual evidence.

2. Graphic vérité modeGraphic vérité texts are typically aligned more closely to the photorealisticend of CGI. Here digital animation techniques are most commonlyemployed for dramatic reconstructions, appearing to extend the reach ofthe documentary lens into history itself through replicating familiar formsof documentary cinematography, particularly the aesthetic of the observa-tional mode of documentary (Nichols 1991: 38–44).

The potential, agenda and ultimate ambition of the graphic vérité modeare suggested by a programme such as Virtual History: The Secret Plot to KillHitler (McNab, 2004), which offers a dramatic reconstruction of the July1944 plot by German generals to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Here actorsresembling the historical figures were filmed using techniques designed toreplicate the projection of archival footage (with apparent scratches onthe aged black-and-white celluloid film strip, and hisses and other noise on thesoundtrack). The sense of authenticity generated by this simulation isenhanced through an additional step in post-production: the actors’ facesare superimposed with CGI masks closely modelled on those of the historicalfigures themselves. An accompanying ‘making of ’ television special andsimilar production information provided on the Discovery Channel’sofficial website for the programme are quite explicit in articulating theprogramme’s overall agenda.

The concept of Virtual History is to recreate an event as convincingly as pos-

sible, using documents, photographs and archive film to produce a histori-

cally 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 programme-makers seek to escape any taint of partiality and manipulation through theprecise application of digital technique. The aim, as with all dramatic recon-struction, is to effectively deny the nature of any debate over the nature andsignificance of a given event and instead offer as popular orthodoxy asingular narrative of that event (Corner 1996; Paget 1998). The paradoxhere is that the authenticity of this version of history is claimed through therevelation and celebration of the technological basis of the illusion itself.

Walking with Dinosaurs (Haines and James, 1999) is the most well-known example of this graphic vérité mode, and has already been exten-sively discussed and debated (Darley 2003; Scott and White 2003;Kilborn 2003: 169–75). The series is an animated drama-documentary thatsuccessfully mimics the form of a nature documentary (Bousé 2000) – an


6. From the VirtualHistory website,introducing themaking of the series:http://www.discoverychannel.co.uk/virtualhistory/_pages/making_of/back_to_life.shtml,accessed August2007.


intersection of three forms of documentary hybridity. Using CGI anima-tion techniques pioneered by entertainment media such as the featurefilm Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993), together with more conventionalfilm-making techniques such as animatronics and background locationfootage, the programme-makers successfully create naturalistic narra-tives of the everyday lives of extinct species. Darley’s succinct critique ofthe agenda of the series targets the confidence of its particular pathwaythrough paeleontological speculation on the appearance and behaviour ofdinosaurs. He expresses an unease with the ultimate effect of such convinc-ing constructions: ‘These near-flawless simulations of the world in thetime of the dinosaurs – meticulous stand-ins for the real that remains for-ever out of reach – are completely closed, omniscient texts, allowing littleor no space for questions or conflicting views’ (Darley 2003).

Countering this closed frame towards the scientific knowledge that theseries partly references, is the series’ deliberately reflexive and playful edge. Thisis revealed clearly in the ‘making of ’ documentary which accompanied theseries (Figure 4)7 but is also evident at key points during the series where waterseems to ‘splash’ the camera lens, or the pseudo-camera operator (i.e. the com-puter-generated frame) appears to hide behind trees to escape the attention ofdinosaurs 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’ distin-guishing this drama-documentary text from pure fiction (Lipkin 2002), yetreveals the techniques of their construction as a key to the series’ promotion.

This sense of the playful in television reconstructions is a significantaspect of digital-based documentary animation. It is a characteristic thatpresenter Robert Winston continues in one of the sequels to Walking with

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7. See Scott and White’sdiscussion of themaking of documen-tary (Scott and White2003: 324) wherethey note especiallythe mockumentaryedge to its openingsequence.

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


Dinosaurs, Walking with Cavemen (Dale and Lespinois, 2003), where heplays an observer dropped into an ancient historical period to assess thenature of early human behaviour. And these tendencies are given full reinin the mockumentary-infused ITV series Prehistoric Park (Bennett, Kellyand Thompson 2006) – one logical successor to the various Walking withseries – where real-life naturalist Nigel Marven travels back in time to captureand bring back to the present day prehistoric animals, in a more explicitreprisal of the science-fiction premise of Jurassic Park itself (Figure 5).

It is important to emphasize that this sense of playful hybridity is not newor necessarily inherent to the graphic vérité mode. Peter Watkins exploredtechniques involving fake interviews and a pastiche of observational andother documentary modes within television drama-documentary as early asCulloden (Watkins, 1964) and The War Game (Watkins, 1965). But the senseof irreverence toward historical inquiry has become more prominent andintegral to television documentary as the genre itself has been reoriented toaddress the emergence of popular television hybrid formats such as docu-soapand reality game show, as noted above. This playful sense has also become afeature 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 crediblesense of historical verisimilitude, without looking to suggest (as doesWalking with Dinosaurs) that such images function as an adequate docu-mentation or replacement of reality itself. Photorealistic CGI is used to providea 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-enhancedreconstructions become a key part of an extended palette of techniquesemployed in the series, as they are intercut with archives from the periodsuch as blueprints of the structures being portrayed, hand-held filmedreconstructions using actors, and (Watkins-derived) fake interviews withactors voicing scripts based on language taken from the historical record.

3. Invasive surveillance modeThis final documentary animation mode could be seen as a logical succes-sor to the practice of using a photographic camera as a scientific instru-ment (Winston 1995), which informed the explorations of photographicmedia by historical figures from Muybridge to Vertov. This mode involvesthe use of CMI and CGI to extend the range and penetration of the docu-mentary lens, typically combining animation techniques with medicalscanning imagery and forms of miniature and endoscopic cameras. Thiscombination of techniques seems particularly suited to the televisualspace, which has naturalized special effects such as time-lapse photogra-phy, time-slice photography and motion-control photography withinprimetime nature documentary, the use of surveillance tools within inves-tigative reporting and contributed to wider cultures of surveillance thatsustain more recent documentary television hybrids.

The invasive surveillance mode continues this agenda of surveillanceinto the interior of the human body, and other spaces not easily open tothe physical presence of the camera, in the process broadening themeans of representing the documentary gaze. A series such as Superhuman



20 Craig Hight

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

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


demonstrates how easily this mode can be incorporated into conventionaltelevision documentary. Presenter Robert Winston uses three-dimensionalcomputer-generated models of various parts of the human body, particu-larly skeletons and key body organs. These models are always viewed inmotion, with each spinning on an axis to give the appearance of the cameratracking around these simplified representations of the body. Often keybody parts are highlighted, with a model momentarily ‘freezing’ and thebody part in question glowing as Winston discusses its significance. Thesetechniques are implicated within the broader aesthetic of medical surveil-lance which Winston presents as an inherent, commonsense aspect of scientific discovery,8 and part of an extended, apparently omnipotent andvisually spectacular perspective on the human body.

In a similar manner to Winston’s earlier, somewhat groundbreakingdocumentary series The Human Body (Spencer, 1998), an often bewilderingarray of medical technologies are presented, including images from scan-ning electron microscopy (SEM), endoscopy, thermal imaging, magneticresonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound. These medical scans becomeCMI animation through placing a series of scans in a sequence to mimic atracking shot or pan along a part of the internal organs of the body (sug-gesting a CMI update of Muybridge’s famous experiments using multiplephotographic stills to capture human and animal motion). These parallelthe series’ CGI sequences which, as noted above, similarly reference ‘track-ing’ shots around the human body.

The effect is to suggest that the camera simply changes scanning modeas it explores the landscape of the human body (in the same way that ama-teur film-makers using digital camcorders can change to a green-tingednight mode). Different modes are enabled for capturing different spatial andtemporal investigations into the biomechanical and chemical processes ofthe body. We move seamlessly from observing the exterior of the humanbody, 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 ismuch more palatable than an actual investigation of the corporeal body.Compare, for example, the aesthetic pleasure of CGI/CMI-dominatedsequences from The Human Body (Figure 7) to those from Dr. Gunter vonHagens’s Anatomy for Beginners (Coleman, 2005), where human flesh isliterally opened, through a brightly-lit postmortem, as a terrain for photo-graphic survey. Superhuman and The Human Body make the human formapparently accessible but in a manner that is also distanced from any ofthe more confronting possibilities of the remnants of the human bodyitself. Winston’s surveillance is based on an intimacy mediated throughthe comforting sterility of digital technologies, perfectly matching the dis-passionate penetration of the gaze of medical science itself.

These series also illustrate the tendency towards the overlap of digitaldocumentary animation modes within a given text. They demonstratethe need to treat the three modes outlined here as reference points foridentifying the use of digital animation techniques within primetimetelevision programming, rather than a fixed topography of digital anima-tion aesthetics. Again, how such techniques are combined with and


8. The naturalization ofthis mode mirrors theincorporation of computer imagingtechniques withinmedical diagnosticproceduresthemselves, althoughnot with the samedegree of fluid anddynamic presentationas they appear withinSuperhuman (Satava1998).


positioned in relation to other forms of representation in a given series isreflective of the overall agenda of the text’s producers. The Human Body, forexample, uses invasive surveillance paired with symbolic exposition inorder to provide a fluid exploration of the exterior and interior of thehuman body, with the human skin serving as no barrier to the visual pre-sentation of body processes. Winston’s voice-over provides the logical con-tinuity between diagrammatic and metaphoric sequences, between thequite distinct sets of aesthetics associated with the agendas of expositionand surveillance. A key point to reiterate here is how easily these are sub-sumed into mainstream television documentary practice. The visual com-plexity of these series is no more challenging for viewers than it is toaccept the movement between distinct forms of representation within con-ventional documentary.

The ultimate effect of this array of animation techniques is toexpand the scope of documentary representation and to make it morevisually seductive, raising the bar in terms of primetime documentaryspectacle. Crucially, the omnipotence of the documentary gaze – thesense that documentary film-makers can traverse across space and timein order to construct arguments and narratives – is reinforced andextended. Series such as Virtual History and Walking with Dinosaurssuggest that even historical events can be accurately ‘captured’ by thedigital-enhanced lens, taking the overlap between documentary anddrama-documentary a step further. Everything, from the interior of thehuman body to the social-historical terrain of the past, is equally opento the documentary gaze.

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Figure 7: A variety of stills taken from the opening of The Making of . . . theRobert Winston presented series The Human Body (1998), including CGI andCMI sequences.


Evidentiary layeringThe fluidity with which such documentaries move between CGI, CMI andother more conventional modes of documentary representation is partly areflection of the nature of digital practices themselves, and especially thoseof post-production. Digital post-production allows for the compositing ofquite 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 ofcontent exists as computer code ready to be reshaped as needed. The effectis to erase, even at the level of the materiality of the image itself, any dis-tinction between the photographic and graphic. Manovich, in discussingthe case of cinematic production, argues that the traditional hierarchybetween 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 cin-ema is a particular case of animation that uses live-action footage as one of its manyelements.

(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 impli-cations for a cultural form such as documentary, which is so reliant on aset of assumptions and expectations centred on an indexical link to thesocial-historical world. A blurring of the line between the photographic(including both visual and acoustic indexicality) and graphic (in terms of avisual continuum between the symbolic and photorealistic), however, isnot necessarily evidence of the complete collapse of indexicality thatpresumably characterizes a post-photographic era. As Lister notes, in theabsence of a sense of certainty about the integrity of the image itself, thebasis of authenticity becomes more centred in discourses of spectatorshipand in this case the modes of reading prompted by (documentary) textsthemselves. In other words, there is a need to explore in specific detail howtechniques and sequences are framed in ways that encourages their read-ing as consistent with the expectations associated with ‘documentary’constructions.

Each of the three modes outlined briefly above work to establish a re-presentational strategy that complements more conventional modes ofdocumentary representation. Symbolic expositional mode typically offersan abstraction from the social-historical, a clear simplification drawingupon the clarity of graphic means of representation. It presents itself as atool for reducing social-historical complexity to something that is aestheti-cally appealing yet still authentic in terms of its referent. Graphic véritémode offers especially the promise of fulfilling the quest for a plausibleverisimilitude in the service of dramatic reconstruction, in the processallowing audiences to apparently witness history itself unfolding. Invasivesurveillance mode involves a reinforcement of the omnipotence of the doc-umentary gaze, drawing especially upon a belief in a mechanically derived



objectivity – even as its aesthetic is obviously mediated through graphictechnologies.

The tensions between the indexical and the graphic are played out indifferent ways within each mode. Each of these modes, in fact, demon-strate the same paradox which helps to define and characterize digitalcinema (Bolter and Grusin 1999; Manovich 2000); the seamless illusionsachieved through digital imaging techniques are invariably revealed inorder to be celebrated as technological achievements. As noted above,often this celebration of digital technique is constructed through extra-textual means, through a ‘making of ’ documentary accompanying thebroadcast of a series and packaged with a DVD release, or through officialwebsites that feature the state-of-the-art technology employed in its pro-duction at the centre of their promotion for a series.

A key issue, however, is the extent to which digital documentary ani-mation modes also generate a degree of reflexivity through their incorpo-ration with other documentary modes. The overall aim with digitalanimation is invariably for there to be a consistent and persuasive integra-tion with other representational styles employed within a television series,whether such techniques are used in-frame or in-sequence. That is, forthere to be an overall ontological coherence to a documentary text that isemploying digital animation at some level. It is useful here to return toand reframe a core aspect of conventional documentary construction, thatof 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, uni-

fied 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 rela-

tively unimportant compared to the sense of the flow of evidence in the ser-

vice of this controlling logic.

(Nichols 1991: 19–20)

As Nichols notes, this form of construction typically places a great deal ofimportance on the use of the spoken word to articulate the logic of theargument, to provide an overriding sense of continuity between oftenquite distinct forms of evidence (this is most obviously the case with theexpositional mode of documentary). The concept of evidentiary layeringcould be used in parallel with evidentiary editing when referring to digital-based documentary texts; to draw attention to both the wider array ofmeans of presenting evidence available to producers, and the possibilitiesof post-production to provide for a more richly layered aesthetic than isnormally the case for documentary. A key part of the analysis of digitaldocumentary animation, then, involves trying to assess the extent towhich in-frame or in-sequence layers (digital and otherwise) work in rela-tion to each other. How are specific animation techniques spliced into themore conventional presentations of evidence that are intimately associatedwith documentary as a cultural form, such as archival footage, documents,vérité footage and interview testimony from social actors and experts?

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How do these graphic layers operate with the more familiar codes andconventions of (photographic) documentary?

Again, it is important to position patterns within television documentaryseries into the wider frame constructed by the emergence of documentaryhybrid forms – including older hybrids such as nature documentary anddrama-documentary (both staples of primetime television programming),and the more recent hybrid formats noted above. Some of the entertain-ment-driven innovations developed through these recent hybrids have alsobeen 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 situationdocumentaries. This programming environment means that the televi-sual space has become more naturally reflexive toward documentaryconstruction than perhaps any time in the past, and this provides asensibility that shapes the forms of address for contemporary documen-tary series.

Superhuman serves as an apt illustration here. It employs a wide range offilm-making techniques in the service of its central arguments and themes,including a number of key representational strategies that are utilized tocommunicate its particular discourse on medical knowledge. These tech-niques clearly reflect the influence of hybrid documentary forms, and serveas a useful demonstration of the continual expansion of such techniquesavailable to contemporary documentary film-makers. The advantage ofusing such techniques within Superhuman is that they allow Winston toimmediately establish a familiar frame for audiences. The ‘Trauma’ episode,for example, features a variety of spectacular archival footage, includingexplosions, violent attacks by animals within the natural world, shots oftraumatic injuries suffered in war zones and violent automobile accidents.These are used together with footage following a car accident, with emergencyservices rushing to rescue its victims, then footage within the emergencyroom of a metropolitan hospital, all of which uses the hand-held aestheticthat saturates hybrid forms. These sequences directly reference one formwithin the spectrum of documentary hybrids, that which can be specificallylabelled ‘reality TV’. As distinct from other hybrids, these are those pro-grammes that focus particularly on institutions such as rescue services,police enforcement agencies, hospital personnel and procedures and thelike, providing personalized narratives of people forced to deal with extremesituations (Dovey 2000; Palmer 2003).

In Superhuman, the emphasis on medical services struggling to dealwith the violent, unpredictable consequences of everyday life in modernsocieties are quite deliberately paired and contrasted with Winston’s rea-sonable, rational discourse of medical science and discovery representedthrough aesthetically sophisticated sequences employing CGI and CMI.Medical science is reinforced as the rational, necessary response to theeveryday traumatic events and chronic diseases that our bodies areinevitably subject to within such societies. Despite the complexity ofrepresentational styles employed within Superhuman, the series achieves alevel of rhetorical coherence that largely obscures the potential for areflexivity toward the means of presentation themselves.



In comparison, the BBC series Battlefield Britain (Cranitch, 2004) is anexample where in-frame and in-sequence representational layers do notattempt to develop a comparable coherence of historical narrative, andwhere there is intentional slippage as changes in mode open up space forreflection on the nature of their construction. Presented by father-and-sonteam Peter and Dan Snow, the series employs both CGI and CMI, in-frameand in-sequence, animation to present accounts of historical battles onBritish soil. The most important characteristic of the series is the mannerin which it draws upon a sense of the presentation of military history as agame, both in terms of the enthusiasm that the presenters display towardthe tools and strategies of war, and the manner in which distinctive ani-mation elements are deployed.

Peter Snow makes frequent use of an animated game board, con-structed through in-frame CGI superimposed over a folded game board,which he carries onto the location of historic battles. Snow opens thegame board to provide access to an animated version of the war gamesplayed by military enthusiasts using miniature soldiers. Derived from theanimated maps discussed above, the board serves as a demonstrationspace for a kind of coaches’ play-book approach to history by showinghow the battle was actually ‘played’. As the camera tracks in, we can dis-cern individual figures moving within the mass of a military force.9 Thehuman figures are simplified, but more detailed than the purely iconic fig-ures usually associated with animated maps. Viewed in long shot, these(and other in-frame CGI battle sequences) are yet another version of dra-matic reconstructions intended to show scale, position and movement.

These game-board sequences are the key means for Snow’s presenta-tion of an overall narrative of each battle, and serve as reference points forhis on-screen and voice-of-god narration. The sequences are intercut withvarious other modes used to present evidence (Figure 8) including sonDan Snow’s demonstration of (and play with) remaining weapons fromthe 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. Othervisual tools briefly employed at the beginning of each episode include CGIreconstructions of the faces of key historical figures, and a Google Earth-like 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 aleading military historian is combined in often jarring juxtaposition withhybrid-informed reconstructions of aspects of historical narrative. As withWalking with Dinosaurs and other examples discussed here, the overall sen-sibility is the playful articulation of a historical narrative. However, theleaping from mode to mode suggests that the series is not looking to pro-vide a singular compelling narrative for each battle. The effect is instead topresent fragmented perspectives that highlight the gaps in this narrative,as the two presenters race around the landscape, breathlessly touringbattle locations and trying to sample something of the experience of eachbattle’s participants.

The overall agenda of the three digital animation modes is as muchentertainment as information and argument, involving an address to a

26 Craig Hight

9. The overallmovement of thesefigures was organizedusing softwaresimilar to thatemployed for the Lord of the Rings: TheFellowship of the Ringbattle sequences.


television audience, which celebrates the possibilities of technology anddelivers a coherent message through often chaotic hybrid-informed meansof presentation. It is difficult to predict the long-term implications of thispattern of television programming. Certainly the juxtaposition betweendistinct modes and layers of representation contains the potential for amore complex and reflexive understanding of the manner in which histor-ical, social and political knowledge itself is constructed; however, none ofthe series discussed deliberately foreground such a possibility. Insteadthere is the naturalization of graphic forms of presenting reality, with CGIand CMI-based spectacle at times overwhelming the use of more conven-tional, and authoritative, techniques for presenting evidence. Some seriesoscillate between the photographic and the graphic, looking especially toavoid any semblance of a traditional ‘talking head’ dominated discussionof the social-historical world.

To some extent, these new digital forms of aesthetic force us as viewersto consider conventional, analogue documentary in terms of the gaps thathave always existed between different forms of presenting evidence fromthe social-historical world. There has always been a degree of ontologicaltension between those modes that centre their authenticity on the pres-ence of the camera to record events, or the testimony of social actors, oron the authoritative rhetoric of a narrator. Within the (often unintentionally)reflexive space generated by hybrid television formats, audiences have


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.


arguably become more accustomed to engaging in more visually sophisti-cated and perhaps more critically literate readings of reality-basedprogramming. Roscoe has suggested the use of the term ‘flickers ofauthenticity’ (Roscoe 2001: 13) to denote opportunities provided for view-ers’ recognition of the centrality of performance within television hybrids,and their need to continually assess the authenticity of forms of expressionfrom participants. What is striking about the integration of digital anima-tion techniques into this television documentary aesthetic is the extent towhich these kinds of textual strategies construct further layers of ontolog-ical complexity that ultimately are not designed to trouble the viewer. Thesense instead is of a more playful approach to social and historical knowl-edge, both in terms of the rapid transitions between the graphic and pho-tographic and in the types of address these television series favour towardstheir primetime audiences.

To judge from the ease with which the full spectrum of documentaryand related modes are combined in short-form examples of user-createdcontent submitted to sites such as YouTube, at least some sections ofthese audiences are familiar and quite comfortable with a more playfulsphere of mediated forms. It seems likely that such emerging patternswithin wider documentary culture will prompt further momentumtowards more playful and diverting examples of television documentaryitself. However, the long-term implications of such trends are difficult topredict. Certainly primetime documentary animation falls easily into theaesthetic and discursive trends encompassed by Corner’s notion of a‘post-documentary’ culture, but it is not yet clear whether these will cul-minate in a permanent, destablizing shift in the basis of more conven-tional documentary programming, or entail a new era of experimentationand innovation in documentary representation with digital-based anima-tion at its centre.

ReferencesAnatomy 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.

28 Craig Hight


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 Filmand 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/chang-

ing.media/publications.htm

—— (2002a), ‘Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions’, Television NewMedia, 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.

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Real Edutainment’, Science as Culture, 12: 2, pp. 227–56.

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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 isActually 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 BigBrother, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Lipkin, S.N. (2002), Real Emotional Logic: Film and Television Docudrama as PersuasivePractice, 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.



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,


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’, MediaInternational Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, 100, pp. 9–20.

Roscoe, J. and Hight, C. (2001), Faking It: Mock-documentary and the Subversion ofFactuality, 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 Walkingwith 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 itsLegitimations, London: British Film Institute.

30 Craig Hight


Suggested citationHight, 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 detailsDr 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.






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

AbstractDigital technology, often perceived as complicating evidential claims about docu-mentary representations, has been playing a significant role lately in formulatingnew aesthetic grounds for the long-lasting hybridity formed between fact and fictionin the genre. It has been doing so by cultivating a style of constructed camcorderrealism, utilizing the technology’s immediacy and intimacy predicated upon thedigital look in its various connotations of authenticity and credibility. This articlediscusses the ways by which digital cinematography contributes to the challenginginterplay between reality and fiction in the new hybrid documentary form.Focusing on several unclassifiable blends of document and story shot on digitalvideo (DV) and other hand-held cameras – Michael Winterbottom’s In ThisWorld (2002), Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten (2002), and Hany Abu-Assad’s FordTransit (2002) – it accounts for how technologically oriented aesthetic variationsbecome signifiers of an artificial generic distinction, and raise questions andconcerns about the manufacturing of truth in documentaries.

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 docu-

mentary 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 alwaysbeen a complicated task. Traditionally praised in non-fiction scholarshipfor its impersonal and unbiased capacity to mirror the profilmic with nofictional artifice, the documentary film has been going through significantformal changes since its early naïve days of observation and omniscientnarration, gradually abandoning its efforts to emphasize an impression ofobjectivity. From the modernist phase of the self-reflexive essayistic form toits recent performative structure, the documentary has been constantlyrenewing interest in the rhetorical tropes of subjectivity and fiction, enter-taining arguments based on uncertainties and incompleteness rather thanprioritizing disembodied knowledge and facts. As Michael Renov clearly


Keywordshybrid documentary

digital video

realism

truth

indexicality

technology

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points out, ‘Every documentary representation depends upon its owndetour from the real, through the defiles of the audio-visual signifier’(Renov 1993: 7). Admittedly, contemporary documentaries only keeprevisiting their primordial assumptions, pressing harder on the thin linebetween fiction and fact in an ongoing effort to redefine the genre’s aestheticand ethical doctrines.1

Surely, the flip side of this interdependency is mirrored in fiction filmstoday. When fast-paced editing in tightly scripted big-budget blockbustersbecomes the norm, an alternative nostalgic longing for the real crystallizesthe two everlasting aspirations in cinema: the utopia of authenticityagainst the antidote of falsification. Fiction films wholeheartedly embracenon-fiction aesthetics, and move towards simplifying their film languagein order to abandon any illusionistic aspiration and obey a strong docu-mentary impulse.2 This aesthetic convergence is a central synthesis in filmhistory, when most of the idioms of documentary, as Dai Vaughan wellreminds us, have been at some point appropriated by the fiction film, inwhich context becoming ‘an arbitrary signifier of realism’ (Vaughan 1999:64, original emphasis).

Digital technology, often perceived as complicating evidential claimsabout the representation of the world, has been playing a significant rolelately in formulating new aesthetic grounds for the hybridity betweenfact and fiction in cinema. It has been doing so by cultivating a newaesthetic style of ‘DV realism’,3 utilizing the technology’s immediacy andintimacy predicated upon the digital look in its various connotations ofauthenticity and credibility. That privilege put on fidelity to the profilmic isconceivably ironic, considering that the dominant scholarly discourseabout digitality in film has been focused so far on forming a sensationalrhetoric about the visual challenge digital is presenting for indexicallybased notions of photographic realism. Conceptual and theoretical utopiashave been repeatedly proposed regarding digital visual representations,delineating the new age as ‘a historic break in the nature of media andrepresentation’, exclusively emphasizing a referential ‘crisis’ which leadsto unprecedented capacities for visual manipulability (Rosen 2001: 302). Infact, the ongoing expansion of film into the digital realm since the late1980s and the upsurge in popularity of digital video cameras within thelast ten years have provoked countless scholarly attempts to situate digitaltechnology in opposition to traditional film, and to warn morosely againstits forthcoming obliteration of celluloid.

In so far as mechanically reproduced visual images are considered to beindexical, providing some truth-value of their referent, digital technology ischaracterized as an innovative modification allowing for a radical breakwith traditional image qualities. William Mitchell, in his seminal account ofdigital photography, cites 1989 as the dawn of the ‘post-photographic era’in which traditional film-based photography has been replaced entirely bycomputerized images, no longer guarantors of visual truths or even signi-fiers of stable meaning and value. He declares, ‘The referent has comeunstuck’ (Mitchell 1992: 31). Similarly, new media theorist Lev Manovichresponds 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 distinguishedfrom animation; ‘it is no longer an indexical media technology but rather a

34 Ohad Landesman

1. There are countlessexamples for documentary’sinclination towardsstaging reality withfictional inserts, oremphasizing thefact/fiction blur as thecentrepiece of the document (e.g. filmsby Michael Moore,Errol Morris orAndrew Jarecki areonly a few veryobvious cases).

2. Fiction films thatmove away from artifice and aspiretowards thedocumentary are nota new phenomenonin any way, but thecurrent renaissancefor manufacturing the‘Real’ cannot simplybe overlooked. Worthmentioning are Jean-Pierre and LucDardenne’s minimalistsocial documents TheSon (2003) orL’Enfant (2006),ApichatpongWeerasethakul’shyper-naturalistexperiments in storytelling BlissfullyYours (2002) andTropical Malady(2004), or even ChrisKentis’s real-timescare Open Water(2004).

3. The term ‘DV realism’was first coined, as faras I am aware, by LevManovich (2000),referring to a recentaesthetic emphasisput on the authenticityof actors’performances by independent film-makers such as MikeFiggis or the Dogme95 group. These film-makers, accordingto Manovich, providean alternative to digital special effectsby embracing a documentary stylewith handheld DVcameras.


subgenre of painting’ (Manovich 2001: 295). The digital, it seems, hascome to function lately less as a technology ‘than as a “cultural metaphor”of crisis and transition’ (Elsaesser 1998: 202), and it is often discussedwithin a positivist rhetoric that overemphasizes the importance of defininga digital image on the basis of surpassing its indexical ties.

The documentary, which holds a privileged relationship to reality, hasoften been the site of heated discussions about epistemological distrust andsuspicion in the age of digital manipulation. Much of the existing scholarship ondigital documentaries puts a similar emphasis on documentary truth and therisk of it being radically challenged by the new ontological status of digitalimagery: it seeks to explain the changes that digitization might bring to thealready highly problematic status of image as truth, evidence or document.Dai Vaughan, for example, notes that the increased capacities of digital sys-tems create a situation in which ‘for most people, and in most cultural con-texts, a kind of fog, a flux, will have intruded between the image and ourassumptions about its origins.’ (Vaughan 1999:189). Brian Winston, worryingabout 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-image-

manipulating 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 newdigital technologies might entail on mockumentaries, Roscoe and Hightprivilege too the anxiety of visual manipulability in the digital age: ‘. . . thesenew technologies allow the referent itself to be manipulated – in otherwords, the basic integrity of the camera as a recording instrument is funda-mentally undermined’ (Roscoe and Hight 2001: 39, original emphasis).4

There is no doubt that digital technology is gradually changing theways in which documentaries are shot, edited and exhibited. Whatbecomes crucial, however, and so far little discussed, is to study how thedifferent ways in which the digital format has been aesthetically realizedin documentary can challenge critical prophecies and predictions thatsomehow fail to account for the complicated and inseparable ties it estab-lishes with old traditions in the genre. Respectively, much less attentiontoday is given to theorizing digital film-making practices, which do notnecessarily lose their visual ties to the profilmic, lower-profile DV-shot projectsthat foreground the current differentiation between digital and analoguein a more nuanced and strategic way. Therefore, when DV is introduced tothe contemporary blend of fiction and documentary, it brings with it abaggage of aesthetic and cultural connotations, heavily challenging ourability to negotiate between image and reality.

In fact, digital cinematography has long been contributing to the for-mulation of the challenging interplay in film between representation andartifice. Perhaps the most well-known digital hybrid forerunner is Myrickand Sanchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999), a mockumentary that com-piles a pseudo-video footage of three film students who set out into theBlack Hills Forest to make a documentary on the legendary Blair Witch.

35In and out of this world: digital video and the aesthetics of realism. . .

4. Essential to Roscoeand Hight’sunderstanding ofmockumentaries istheir conviction that‘parody is an anti-normativeconvention, a built-in rejection of the referential’ (Roscoeand Hight 2001: 2).

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Foregrounding the amateurish technology utilized for the documentingefforts as an object of study in itself, the film explores how the properties ofthe DV camcorder can foster a documentary mode of engagement andexploits its aesthetics through carefully calculated marketing strategies.5

The spectator watching The Blair Witch Project is invited to perform anongoing process of generic indexing that relies heavily on what the aestheticsof the camcorder stand for. The shaky frame, the movement in and out offocus, the inability to keep the subject within the frame borders, and thecamera’s portability, all give the viewer the impression that he is watchingan amateurish video diary which unfolds in an unmediated way.

The Blair Witch Project officially belongs to the non-fiction subgenre ofthe mockumentary. As such, it appears to the viewer as a formal conun-drum placed at the meeting point of fiction and documentary, blurringfact and fabrication with a twist of irony and parody. Any mockumentary,for that matter, ridicules its own fictional efforts to document a non-existing subject in order to make fun of the very feasibility of delineatingclear 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 theforthright gaze onto the Real’ (Lebow 2006: 235). Mockumentaries seekto challenge the ‘sober’ discourse in classic documentaries, and in particularwish to make fun of ‘the beliefs in science (and scientific experts) and in theessential integrity of the referential image’, long associated with anunquestioned evidential status (Roscoe and Hight 2001: 8). These arefictional texts that make concerted efforts to mimic and exhaust docu-mentary codes and conventions, and require us to subsume a mode ofengagement in which we disavow momentarily their fictional fakeness.

Interestingly, many mockumentaries self-reflexively manifest their artifice,exposing the production process and cinematic apparatus to deconstructtheir effect on the viewer. They seek to question our pre-given markers ofrealism and the ways in which those are mediated through the rapidlychanging ‘technologies of truth telling’ (Juhasz and Lerner 2006: 165).6 Inwhat follows, I will show how several recent experimental blends of docu-ment and story shot on digital video raise similar questions and concernsabout the manufacturing of truth in documentaries. Without surrenderingentirely to the mockumentary mode, these films exemplify how technologi-cally oriented aesthetic variations become signifiers of an artificial genericdistinction. The spectator watching these recent hybrids is invited to wel-come and embrace the aesthetic hybridity as a formal strategy meant not somuch to dupe, mislead or mock, but to offer a different documenting tactic.

Films such as Michael Winterbottom’s immigrants road trip In ThisWorld (2002) or Abbas Kiarostami’s claustrophobic car journey Ten(2002) invite us to question their structure and form, and work hard toobscure the boundaries between fiction and documentary. They make acase for the constructedness and artificiality of this distinction, and for thedifficulty in discriminating between the discursive methods or aestheticconventions in both forms. These hybrids are neither simply fake docu-mentaries, even if they quite similarly embrace a documentary style as astrategy to bestow an impression of authenticity on their controlled fic-tional content; nor they are a clear case of mockumentaries, having noreal expectations that an audience will know how to distinguish between

36 Ohad Landesman

5. On the uniquemarketing efforts topresent The BlairWitch Project as a document of a realincident, see J.P.Telotte’s ‘The BlairWitch Project Project:Film and the Internet’(2004).

6. For an illuminatinganalysis of the waysin which camcorderaesthetics constructand deconstruct theauthority of the ‘documentary look’ inAndré Bonzel’s ManBites Dog (1992) inorder to encourage anaudience to enter intoa documentary modeof engagement, seeRoscoe (2006).


their fact and fiction tenets.7 They move across a twilight zone of cinematiccategories and rigid definitions as they strive to reflect a multifaceted truthrather than engage in a well-concealed lie. Respectively, these films askviewers to grant them a status of trustworthiness by expanding anyprevious understanding of what a documentary might be.

Shot over five months on back roads, at border crossings and in refugeecamps, Winterbottom’s In This World (2002) starts out as a traditional doc-umentary about the plight of Pakistani immigrants who travel by land toLondon in search of a better life. An authoritative voice-over introducesthe social problem of the Pakistani refugee crisis, building directly on ourconditioned expectations from the documentary form: ‘it is estimated that7.9 billion dollars were spent on bombing Afghanistan in 2001’, a sobermale voice announces; ‘Spending on refugees is far less generous.’8 Veryabruptly, though, the film changes its tone and structure and transformsinto what seems to be a fictionalized document, closely following the jour-ney of two characters, teenage refugees Jamal and Enayat, on their escapefrom poverty to the promised life in London.

Re-enacting with painstaking details the treacherous and nightmarishtrip from Pakistan to London, In This World is a film that would have neverbeen made with more conventional cumbersome equipment, and couldhave probably never achieved its smudgy visual look with a different tech-nology. Literally made on the run with a small crew and one digital videocamera, In This World cleverly utilizes the technology’s immediacy andportability, shooting its protagonists in unstaged street scenes, crowds andmarketplaces. The more we become entangled with the personal humandrama of the journey, the further the guerrilla camerawork will remind us,by its free-floating movement from characters to real moments of localscenery, that this is not a fictitious story per se. Circling freely around thewandering refugees without any hope to conceal its operation, it will func-tion as an object of their own gaze, allowing the characters to look at itdirectly in a gesture often forbidden in the world of fiction. The vérité-likedocumentary impression that In This World tries to bestow brings us to acloser understanding of the social problem it refers to, encouraging us todisavow momentarily that the plight of our two main characters is onlypart of what is essentially a fictional narrative.

While Winterbottom utilizes the imperfect feel of the DV camcorder tohint at an alternative mode of film-making disguised as an unmediatedrepresentation of the ‘Real’, he still chooses to strategically insert a vastrange of fictional formal strategies. Animated geographical maps, sus-penseful music, title cards and a politicized voice-over might seem, at first,elements of the well-established docudrama form, but their seamless inte-gration into the document makes an implicit argument for the limitednessand insufficiency of the non-fiction model as a cinematic intermediary toreality. Relying on the viewer’s familiarity with the conventions of both fic-tion and documentary, the hybridity produced signals ‘the unavailabilityof the real unless filtered through a range of artistic choices’ (Rodriguez-Ortega 2007: 3).9 The tension maintained between document and fictionhere rhymes with the balance between spontaneous extemporization andscripted exactitude that the properties of the DV camera help to achieve.The digital equipment, less intimidating in size and a more efficient tool in


7. A mockumentary (tobe distinguished from‘hoax’ or ‘fake’ documentary),according to JaneRoscoe and CraigHight, does not onlyoperate through parody, critique anddeconstruction; in a‘contract’ set upbetween a producerand audience itassumes that the latter participates inthe playfulness of theform, and ‘requiresthe audience to watch it as if at adocumentary presentation, but inthe full knowledge ofan actual fictionalstatus’ (Roscoe andHight 2001: 17).

8. After all, the film’ssubject matter is initself a genericmarker: is there anyother cinematic modeof expression we arefamiliar with todaythat narrativizes thestory of third-worldrefugee camps?

9. A similar argument in respect to the proximity of thefiction film to realitywas made by AndréBazin in his famousclaim that ‘realism inart can only beachieved in one way –through artifice’(Bazin 1971: 26).


shooting longer takes than with cumbersome 35mm, allows for a naturaland improvisatory performance, which in itself connotes the freedom asso-ciated with documentary film-making.10

When the film reaches its end, it falls back on its documentary coun-terpart, inserting a title card that announces the fate of the actual actorJamal: after returning to Pakistan, he has been truly granted asylum inLondon in accordance with the culmination of the fictional narrative. Inan ‘art meets life’ anecdote, Winterbottom is making a reference to the lifestory of a real refugee documented by a camera, wedding a consistent‘authenticated’ digital look with an aspiration to represent the real plightof refugees.

No less a digital campaigner than Winterbottom, Iranian film-makerAbbas Kiarostami, who has always been a quasi-documentarist thriving onimprovisation and unstaged realism, had even gone a step further to declarehis exclusive devotion to the new format after shooting ABC Africa (2001).Though both directors garnish their unmediated digital film-making with aninterest in urgent political matters, the use of non-actors and the merging offiction with documentary, Kiarostami’s Ten (2002) stands out as a morepurist and idealized attempt to materialize the democratic and aestheticqualities of the new technology into an innovative cinematic form.

10 on Ten (2002), Kiarostami’s prescriptive theoretical lecture on thepromises of digital video, is an indispensable authorial confession whichreiterates quite pedagogically the obvious issues at stake in Ten.Admittedly, the latter takes pride in its use of two DV cameras, mounted onthe car’s dashboard to capture, without any directorial mediation, inti-mate political dialogues about life in contemporary Tehran. The surveil-lance and voyeuristic ambience achieved by these two small cameras,along with the unscripted text delivered by the non-actors, make Tenanother unclassifiable hybrid which leaves us constantly wondering aboutits factual veracity. The technical means are of essence here, sinceKiarostami wishes to reach a technological utopia with digital video. Thetechnology, he is convinced, can display the ‘absolute truth’ rather thanforge one. Shooting with DV is nothing less than a moral decision, taken inorder to eliminate any artifice embedded in the cumbersome 35mm film-making process, and allow a film-maker to remain faithful to his naturalsettings. Although the device is obviously a product of the capitalist sys-tem (manufactured by Sony!), he claims it can nonetheless free a film-maker from ideological constraints when censorship becomes less of anissue, and the simplicity and cheapness of shooting with it democratize thefilm-making experience.

Ten is an experiment in minimalism, where aesthetic innovation isachieved through omission rather than excessive abundance of technicalpossibilities. Without much artistic direction or camera movement,Kiarostami makes use of digital video to bring cinema back to its ‘point-zero’, 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 unpreten-tious and primitive stasis (recalling early documentaries by Auguste andLouis Lumière), but also renews the dialogue between spectator andscreen originally proposed by the Italian neo-realists. Cesare Zavattini’s

38 Ohad Landesman

10. The contribution ofDV to an impromptuacting style with nopredetermined inhibi-tions was accentuatedas a case study in formal experimentssuch as Mike Figgis’sTimeCode (2000) andKristian Levring’s TheKing is Alive (2000).

11. Unsurprisingly,Kiarostami wouldlater make Five: FiveLong Takes Dedicated toYasujiro Ozu (2004),another digital experiment that consists of five longshots of nature. Foreach shot, Kiarostamipoints his video camera at the oceanor a reflection of themoon in a pond, andholds it for 10 to 15minutes.


post-war theories of a democratized cinema annihilating the distancebetween art and life are the source of the moral responsibility to realitythat is advocated here; ‘the moral, like the artistic, problem lies in beingable to observe reality, not to extract fictions from it’ (Zavattini 1953: 43).Respectively, Kiarostami avoids the use of an excessive plot or cinematicaction in order to prevent the spectator from locking herself into an illu-sionary reality, an unnecessary artifice. By abolishing completely a worldof representations and placing austere and primitive images in oppositionto western cinematic practices, he proves to be an even more radical neo-realist than Zavattini.

Kiarostami’s enthusiastic vision correlates in its rhetoric with manyearlier forecasts to the future of camera technology in film history. JeanRouch, following up on Dziga Vertov’s early analogy between a cameraand a human eye, predicted in 1973 that

. . . tomorrow will be the time of completely portable color video, video edit-

ing, 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 cinematicdemocratization supplied at the end of Hearts of Darkness (1991) saw thefuture of film in the form of ‘some little girl in Ohio’, and imagined a newapparatus that could enable such a girl to get her vision onto the screen.12

While Kiarostami comes close to surrender again to what Philip Rosenterms as the ‘rhetoric of the forecast’ (Rosen 2001: 316), to fall back on adominant discourse of digital utopia, his recent experiments comprise afascinating effort to resurrect old cinematic traditions with the aid of newtechnologies. If nothing else, Ten is an exemplary case study in how tech-nological 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 argumentsprivileging the contribution of digital video to the aesthetics of hybridity, orto fall back on a methodology of technological determinism that presup-poses an idealized causality between technology and aesthetics. Obviously,there are countless examples of earlier attempts to utilize unobtrusivelightweight equipment for the construction of documentary-like aestheticswithin a fictional framework.13 In fact, the prescribed purity or utopiannovelty often attributed to digital technology should be reconsidered inthis context once we place the aesthetic permutations of DV within histor-ical crossroads and continuities. Therefore, it becomes imperative to dis-cuss hybrid documentaries that use other types of portable technologiesfor achieving a similar effect of obscured generic boundaries.

Such, for example, is the case of Ford Transit (2002). Palestinian film-maker Hany Abu-Assad employs a unique conceptual strategy with hisuse of a 16mm camera that directly confronts several theoretical issuesinvolved in the hybrid documentary. Ford Transit follows Rajai, aPalestinian transit driver who transports locals between Israeli military


12. ‘To me the great hopeis that now these littlevideo recorders arearound and peoplewho normally wouldn’t makemovies are going to be making them.And suddenly, oneday, some little girl inOhio is going to bethe new Mozart andmake a beautiful filmwith her father’s camcorder and foronce, the so-calledprofessionalism about movies will bedestroyed, forever, andit will really becomean art form’ (quotetaken from Hearts ofDarkness).

13. A few scattered casesmay include Jean-LucGodard’s landmarkdebut Breathless(1959), shot in reallocations with 16mmequipment and non-professional actors;Woody Allen’s handheld shaky camerawork inHusband and Wives(1992); and many of the mock-documentaries shoton 16mm as anaesthetic strategy,such as StefanAvalos’s The LastBroadcast (1998) orAndré Bonzel’s ManBites Dog (1992).


checkpoints inside the Occupied Territories in his battered Ford minivan.The camera, almost never unhooked from its mount inside the van, docu-ments brief and intense conversations between transient passengers,always keeping tensions at boiling point. The intimate film-making styleachieved chronicles the impossible absurdity of the area, a deadlock situa-tion that is occasionally surreal and mostly dangerous and violent.

Ford Transit, which won the Best Documentary award at the 2003Jerusalem Film Festival, has been publicly ‘exposed’ as a fraud document afew months after its release, a film whose central subject is not aPalestinian driver after all, but an actor placed within staged circum-stances of humiliation, violence and despair.14 Abu-Assad, harshly criti-cized for playing with generic categorizations to create a dangerouspolitical deception about the military oppression in the area, responded tothe accusations not by admitting to have employed a fake-documentaryformat, but by surprisingly confessing that his distinctive film-makingapproach 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 bereasonable to assume that it was critically perceived as one mainlybecause it employs familiar documentary-like aesthetics and strategies: amobile camerawork, an amateurish and intimate visual look and a talking-heads interviewing structure. If so, it is probable that the bone of conten-tion lying at the heart of the categorization issue is the schematicallyartificial distinction still made today between the forms of documentaryand fiction, often applied to films that are too complex for easy classifica-tion. Does it really matter what is staged and what is not, when ‘the eventswe’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 hap-pened on any other day in that reality; knowing that, Abu-Assad wishesnot to deceive, perhaps, but to contain typical reactions and eventswithout surrendering completely to the formal limitations of eitherdocumentary or fiction.

No Lies (1974), Mitchell Block’s famous student experiment in genericclassification, is another case in point here, where spectatorial response ismanipulated and essentially varies according to the tag we are willing toput on the film. No Lies begins by emulating and embracing the aestheticconventions of the vérité documentary style. We take the point of view of ayoung man, well hidden behind a handheld 16mm camera, intruding ona woman’s private moment while filming a casual conversation with herin a bedroom space. Suddenly, the innocent and friendly chat turns into aharrowing confession, as the woman claims to have been raped the nightbefore. Is the woman telling the truth to her interviewer, we wonder, andare the vérité methods used morally acceptable means for unravellingdetails of this painful story? As the woman’s tale culminates, generatingfurther anxiety and confusion about its veracity, we finally discover thatthe film is not a documentary after all, and that both man and woman areonly fictional characters within this fabricated setting. A shaky handheldcamera, unmediated proximity to the subject and an intimate confessionmay indeed connote a documentary mode, but are in no way guarantorsof a stable categorization.

40 Ohad Landesman

14. About three yearsago, Abu-Assad was involved in aninternational scandalafter admitting in anexclusive interview tothe Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretzthat Ford Transit wasnot a documentary,but a stagedperformance. Thestory made waves atevery documentaryfilm festival in which Abu-Assadparticipated, andsparked heateddiscussions about the limits of what ispermissible in thegenre.


It has been argued elsewhere that No Lies suggests an implied criticismof cinéma-vérité by offering an analogy between the style’s obtrusive meth-ods and a physical rape. Vivian Sobchack writes: ‘Block has found an idealmetaphor for the physical act of rape in the methods and effects of cinéma-vérité, what we now call direct cinema [. . .] Rape becomes interchangeablewith the act of cinema’ (Sobchack 1988: 335). It is not only the womanwho is raped (both literally, according to her story, and metaphorically bythe obtrusive methods of investigation), but we as viewers as well; we arebetrayed by the film-maker whom we knowingly trust to provide us withimages invested with truth-value, since ‘the very style of the film immedi-ately authenticates its content’ (Sobchack 1988: 339). Surely, we learnthat a documentary style is only an artificial construct that can conditionus to read a film entirely differently from what it really is. However, wemust also remember that the veracity value of No Lies’s non-fiction facet asa fake documentary is not to be dismissed entirely. The indexing processwe continually perform and the shattering of expectations that followsprove, if nothing else, how the urgent need to make a sharp distinctionbetween documentary and fiction is only a futile academic exercise thatundermines and trivializes the film and its effects. After all, the moral cri-tique that No Lies may be launching on cinéma-vérité filming methodscould not have been so powerfully illustrated within a more traditionaldocumentary form. The ending of No Lies resonates in our minds longafter the film is over partly because it makes an elusive truth-claim regard-ing the traumatic events it so cleverly fakes. In the same way that realpolitical tension is contained within a form of fakery and deception in FordTransit, an ethical standpoint on documentary’s interviewing methodsfinds its perfect form within this deceitful illusion of authenticity.

The documentary facet in the hybrid film, I argue, becomes less of aclear genre indicator and more of an aesthetic strategy by which a film-maker can choose to indicate familiar notions of authenticity or solicit theviewer to embrace a documentary mode of engagement. This invitation ispredicated on the assumption that our relationship to various cinematicobjects is never textually determined a priori, but always also dependenton our attitude towards them in respect to how familiar we are with dif-ferent cinematic codes. Sobchack holds that the term ‘documentary’ ‘des-ignates a particular subjective relation to an objective cinematic ortelevisual text, and therefore is less a “thing” than an “experience”’(Sobchack 1999: 241, original emphasis). Fiction films and documen-taries, according to Sobchack, are never to be taken as discrete objects orfixed categories; thus, ‘a fiction can be experienced as a home movie ordocumentary, a documentary as a home movie or a fiction …’ (Sobchack1999: 253). A similar suggestion to regard a documentary as merely aninvitation for trust is Noël Carroll’s analytical outlook on defining docu-mentaries as ‘films of the presumptive assertion’, films in which the film-maker intends that the audience entertains the propositional content of thefilms as asserted (Carroll 1997: 186).15 In other words, we may read inboth Carroll and Sobchack a need to shift focus from the properties of thetext itself (which may very well be of either fictional or real content)towards the viewer’s engagement with it. A stronger version of under-standing documentary in this way is an idealist account of non-fiction,


15. Carroll explains thatthese films are called ‘films of the presumptive assertion’because such filmsmay in fact lie: ‘Thatis, they are presumedto involve assertioneven in cases wherethe film-maker isintentionally dissimulating at the same time that he is signaling anassertoric intention’(Carroll 1997: 187,original emphasis).


according to which the characteristics of documentary are constructed bythe spectator, who forms and shapes the text as a piece of discourse.16 It isvaluable, I argue, to theorize our engagement with hybrid documentarieswith a similar appeal to spectatorial reception, as long as we do not denythe existence of a clear distinction between fiction and documentary inmore easily classifiable cases. It may simply be confusing, as CarlPlantinga reminds us, ‘to deny an objective distinction between fiction andnonfiction films, when such a distinction can clearly be made’ (Plantinga1997: 20, original emphasis).

In the hybrid film, respectively, it is the viewer who ultimately deter-mines the mode of engagement with the object at stake, sizing things upand settling the balance between fiction and reality. The DV format, in thatrespect, operates as a technological refinement to previously existing light-weight equipment (16mm, Hi-8), entering an already developed cam-corder aesthetics tradition. It is used strategically to achieve a strongdegree of intimacy, immediacy and weightlessness with an associated aes-thetic of drabness that grants a criterion of credibility to the image. The overalleffect relies on the presumptive state of a receiving subject, ready to inter-pret an image signifier as a reference to the primary act of alternative film-making, the kinetics of amateurish or guerrilla camera operation. As ScottMcQuire affirms, ‘because of the extent to which audiences have internal-ized the camera’s qualities as the hallmark of credibility, contemporarycinema no longer aims to mime “reality”, but “camera reality”’ (McQuire2000: 50). In other words, the digital video camcorder’s operation styledenotes and imitates a recognizable and well-established aesthetic tradi-tion of realism which we have come to learn and accept over the yearsbased on our familiarity with other portable equipment.

Digital photographic practices are inseparable, of course, from culturalconventions. Most audiences are tuned to invest a certain real-ness in DVimages because the format represents an antidote aesthetic of roughness,a reaction against the perfection and polish of 35mm; or, as film criticKent Jones put it, ‘as long as DV is measured against the lush, elegant35mm image, it makes a snug fit with amateur impulses (whether feignedor real) and the casually observed reality of just-plain-folks aesthetics’(Jones 2005: 31). Digital realism in the hybrid documentary is merelyanother construct, a simulated special effect achieved by a conceptual strat-egy. To put it differently, camcorder aesthetics here connote an effect ofrealism that taps into, and is governed by, our familiarity with differentparadigms of representations. The question of realism naturally remainsintertwined with a complex set of discourses, conventions and culturalchanges, which safeguard or suspend the trust we are willing to invest ina given form of representation.17

The amateurish properties inherently associated nowadays with the DVlook rhyme with those attributed to video cameras in the 1980s. In ‘LookingThrough Video’ (1996), John Belton explains that over the years the differ-ences between film and video ‘resulted in a kind of codification through whicheach “look” has come to have a different value’ (Belton 1996: 67). Muchalike 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

42 Ohad Landesman

16. On the idealist stanceon documentary, seeCasebier (1986). Thefamous amateurishRodney Tape, shot bythe bystander GeorgeHolliday, serves as a fascinating illustration of a how a historical eventrecorded on tape didnot provide astabilized meaning as a ‘visible evidence’,but actually welldepended on ‘the psychological and ideological predispositions of the spectators/jurors’reading it (see, on thismatter, Renov (1993:8–9)).

17. Several recent exam-ples of these ‘false’signifiers of realityinclude GarryShandling’s The LarrySanders Show (1992),in which fabricatedlate-night talk-showparts are shot onvideo for creating an‘on-air’ illusion, whilefilm stock is used for‘off-air’ time; andSteven Soderbergh’sFull Frontal (2002), inwhich a stylisticstrategic distinction isconstructed betweenthe film-within-the-film (shot in 35mm)and the ‘real-life’behind the scenesfootage shot with aDV camera.

18. Famously, RolandBarthes’s analysis of photographic codification relies onthe same mode ofargumentation. In TheRhetoric of the Image(1977) Barthesattempts to submitthe image ‘to aspectral analysis ofthe messages it maycontain’ (Barthes1977: 33). By focusingon the advertisingimage, he provides anexplanation for how


come to signify greater realism, immediacy and presence (Belton 1996: 67).18

But herein lies a certain paradox with both formats. Philip Lopate, dis-cussing the Sony Portapak video camera, argues that ‘the videotapeimage severely distorts reality’ in its scale, depth of focus, lighting, cameramovement, editing and other ways, but we learn to accept it as true toreality only because of ‘highly contrived (if persuasive) conventions’(Lopate 1974: 21). Quite similarly, digital images are ontologically madeof the unreal, but more than often associated with a heightened sense ofrealism, a duality which is by now quite dominant in our current imageculture.19

While video might have connoted a liveness effect associated withtelevision broadcasting, the DV image, I argue, mostly signifies theunmediated realistic scent of amateurish home movies and the recenttrend of reality TV shows. We can relate the constructed DV world so easilyto our own simply because we do not only consume it in our daily realitybut also create it ourselves. Surely, the associations which reality TVinvokes share those related with virtual public spheres for home-moviesand amateur photography (e.g. YouTube, Flickr), as both reject theprofessionalist tenet that has been dominating the genre of documentaryfor so long.20 The hybridity between fact and fiction in reality TV is alsooften achieved through an aesthetic ‘illusion’, where shaky handheldcamera and unmediated spontaneous action create the impression of aprivileged representation of authenticity inside a fictional and stagedenvironment.

Surely, there are other examples for the contribution of digital video tothe formal mixed-breed of documentary and fiction, such as Jia Zhangke’sUnknown Pleasures (2003), an improvisational study of Chinese alienation;Khoa Do’s The Finished People (2003), a painful look at Australian home-less people; Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (1998), a disturbing psychologicalstudy of outsiderness; or even Walid Raad’s Hostage: The Bachar Tapes(2001), a faked video testimony of an Arab hostage in Lebanon. In theseand many other cases, the elusiveness produced between document andfiction is mediated by technology and its aesthetic associations, forming acritical strategy that puts documentary’s presumption of objectivity toscrutiny. On the one hand, it seeks to engage the spectator in an activeprocess of classification and ‘framing’,21 in which the dominant assump-tions and codes behind the documentary project are exposed for revalua-tion; borrowing Roland Barthes’s famous terminology, documentarybecomes not just a text, but a ‘Writerly Text’, whose reader is no longermerely a consumer, but also the text’s own producer (Barthes 1974). Onthe other hand, the viewer is invited to accept the obscurity of the distinc-tion as an essential documenting strategy that points to a possible failureof the traditional documentary project, and reassures the theoreticalassumption many recent documentaries seem to hold; namely, that thegenre cannot reveal an a priori self-evident truth, and should thereforeassert a more relative veracity by exercising strategies of fiction andexploiting the grey area between story and fact. Hybrid documentariesseek to achieve a higher, more slippery sense of truth, reaching at, butnever quite touching, the longed-for Real.


an image producessignification.

19. Discussing simultaneous contemporary trendsof photographic digital manipulationand factual television,Arild Fetveit suggeststhat ‘ …we are experiencing astrengthening and a weakening of thecredibility ofphotographicaldiscourses at thesame time’ (Fetveit1999: 787).

20. In her seminal studyof video home movies,a discussion whichcould benefit anupdate in light of therecent proliferation ofdigital home clips,Patricia Zimmermann(1995) writes: ‘Videolost its high-art aurato become morereproducible and controllable in the private sphere; itmoved from theobscurity of the artmuseum to thesolitude of the home’(Zimmermann 1995: 156).

21. The idea of ‘framing’is well explained byDirk Eitzen: ‘the formof a text can causeviewers to “frame” itin a specific way; poorlighting, a shaky camera and badsound may suggestcinéma-vérité, but itdoesn’t have to be!’(Eitzen 1995: 91).


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realism in the new hybrid documentary’, Studies in Documentary Film 2: 1,

pp. 33–45, doi: 10.1386/sdf.2.1.33/1

Contributor detailsOhad 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 FilmComment, 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.




ÆÆ




Digital video and Alexandre Astruc’scaméra-stylo: the new avant-garde indocumentary realized?Bjørn Sørenssen Norwegian University of Science and Technology

AbstractIn 1948 the French film maker and critic Alexandre Astruc published an essaywhere he, inspired by the promises of new cinema technology (16mm,) prophe-sied a breakthrough in patterns of production and distribution of the movingpicture. In the end Astruc envisaged the birth of a new cinema aesthetics drawingon the experiences of the avantgarde. This article poses the question of whetherthe breakthrough of digital production and distribution of documentary films hasbrought us closer to Astruc´s vision in the field of documentary film. The articleposes the question: Does expanded access to digital production means and distrib-ution channels of audiovisual media also imply an enhancement of the democraticpotential of these media, traditionally dominated by producers with access tocapital? Alternatively, will this development influence and change the dominatingmedia structure, or will it fall victim to a fragmentization into several non-connected “partial public spaces”? These questions are discussed using an exam-ple of how our concept of the documentary is challenged by a video blog from anoctogenarian using the pseudonym “Geriatric1927” on YouTube.

In 1948 the French film-maker and critic Alexandre Astruc published anessay in the journal L’Écran français, No. 144 with the title ‘Naissanced’une nouvelle avantgarde: La camera-stylo’ (‘The birth of a new avant-garde: the caméra-stylo’). In this essay he used as his departure pointrecent progress in cinema aesthetics represented by directors like OrsonWelles and Jean Renoir and drew attention to how this connected withtwo recent technological advances in cinematography: the 16mm film for-mat and television. Astruc envisioned a new breakthrough for film as amedium, no longer only as an entertainment medium, but as a funda-mental 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 math-

ematics, 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)


KeywordsDocumentary film

film history

web 2.0

public sphere

Habermas

digital documentary

SDF 2.1_04_art_Sorensson.qxd 3/14/08 10:22 AM Page 47

In this article I intend to return to Astruc’s 1948 epiphany, whichimplicitly makes a statement highly relevant for the contemporary dis-course around ‘new’ media: by developing new media technology there isalso created a new and changed pattern of production and distribution and,subsequently, a new aesthetics. It also raises significant questions aboutthe role of media in the public space. Does expanded access to the digitalproduction means and distribution channels of audio-visual media alsoimply an enhancement of the democratic potential of these media, tra-ditionally dominated by producers with access to capital? Alternatively,will this development influence and change the dominating mediastructure, or will it fall victim to a fragmentation into several non-connected ‘partial public spaces’? Finally I will discuss an example ofhow our concept of the documentary is challenged in the form of avideo blog by an octogenarian using the pseudonym ‘geriatric1927’ onYouTube. Is this an example of the new and unexpected manifestationsof a ‘new’ documentary aesthetics?

It is always interesting to review old utopian visions, as theyremind us of our part in fulfilling or failing to fulfil the expectations ofearlier generations. In the present case one may safely say that thetechnological vision of Astruc in 1948 managed to give a fairly accu-rate description of the general access to audio-visual materialthrough DVD players (‘everyone will possess a projector’) and thelocal bookstore as a source for films ‘written on any subject’ (admit-tedly supplanted by the present-day supermarkets and drug stores). Inaddition to this, there are now personal computers with broadbandconnections in the majority of homes in western Europe and NorthAmerica, making it possible to fill the virtual shopping bag with aplethora of audio-visual offerings. The vision of ‘literary criticism andnovels [...] mathematics, history, and general science’ as the maincontent of the shopping bag is, however, more dubious. One maysafely assume that in terms of film aesthetics the offerings of the localsupermarkets and video stores are closer to the kind of superficialentertainment the young Astruc polemicized against in 1948, andthat the following was just the plain wishful thinking of a Frenchpost-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 littlemore than a century old and had undergone what for Astruc and his con-temporaries appeared to be an astonishingly fast development. And theleap from the images in Edison’s Kinetoscope and the Cinématograph toan entertainment industry, which in the post-war year of 1948 was at itsapex, was indeed impressive. Astruc also had the foresight to mentionwhat in the ensuing years would challenge and surpass the cinema as theprimary audio-visual medium: television.

48 Bjørn Sørenssen


Astruc’s main worry for this new medium was primarily of an aes-thetic kind. He maintained that the dominating film industry had failed tograsp that the media products distributed every day to an audience ofmillions were incomplete in that they were barely able to make use of thecommunication possibilities inherent in the film medium as language andculture. Like other film theoreticians at this time, for example André Bazinand Sergei Eisenstein, Astruc was convinced that the most revolutionizingpotential in the film medium was of a linguistic character and that thispotential was still unfulfilled.

However, the vision presented by Astruc contains three implicit con-clusions, in addition to the overarching one, that I shall attempt to applyto the contemporary situation for audio-visual media:

1. New technology provides new means of expression. As a result of thisthe film medium (i.e. forms of audio-visual expression) develops frombeing exclusive and privileged to a common and publicly available formof 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 dif-

ferent 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 his-torical context in order to highlight how the relationship between techno-logical innovation, democratization and audio-visual aesthetics hasdeveloped over the years since the breakthrough of the pioneers of themoving images at the end of the nineteenth century.1

It may appear paradoxical that when we go to a movie theatre in2007 we are still at the mercy of George Eastman’s 35mm perforatedphotographic film for the Edison Kinetoscope from 1892. This format isstill dominant in terms of large screen presentation of the products of themotion picture industry for a mass audience, despite the fact that all edit-ing and a substantial part of the recording of image and sound is done ina digital format. The size of the photographically recorded image securesthe good image resolution so necessary for theatrical projection, and thishas been one of the main hindrances for those, like Astruc, who haveenvisioned a film technology available for all. The development of the filmindustry in the years around World War I was based on 35mm technol-ogy, and in spite of the fact that the producers of photographic film, likeKodak and Agfa, presented various alternative formats meant for ama-teur use, these were still too expensive and complicated to become analternative to amateur still photography. Admittedly, there were smallerand more accessible versions of the 35mm camera, but with the intro-duction of sound film from 1927 onwards, the price of audio-visual state-of-the-art recording equipment was beyond the means of the individual.

As shown by Patricia Zimmermann (1995) a certain niche culturedeveloped around the amateur film formats that were offered by theproducers of photographic film. The problems of expensive and bulky

49Digital video and Alexandre Astruc’s caméra-stylo: the new avant-garde . . .

1. B. Ruby Rich hasremarked that‘Documentary historysometimes reads like apatent-office log interms of itsgenerations ofmachinery [...], withendlessly renewedpromises of enhancedaccess thatoccasionally reallydoes follow’ (Rich 2006: 111).

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35mm equipment was met with various forms of narrow gauge film, forexample 17.5mm and 9.5mm, before Kodak in 1923 introduced the16mm safety film on an acetate film base. In addition to the limitationscreated by bulk and price connected with the 35mm format for thosewishing to make movies outside of the industry, the fact that the 35mmfilm was produced on a highly flammable nitrate base was one of themajor hindrances for alternative forms of film production and exhibition.Because of the fire danger, most countries had developed a strict setof rules for the projection of nitrate-based motion pictures, rules thatfrequently were used to bar films with a perceived ‘inflammatory’ contentfrom public exhibition.

In Astruc’s article, we can see how the elimination of some of these lim-itations 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 victoryover Nazism. As pointed out above, the article was written at the sametime as television had its definitive breakthrough as a mass medium in theUnited States but it anticipated how television was to supplant cinema asthe most important audio-visual medium within the next decade. In thisdevelopment the 16mm film format would play an important role. Thebetter resolution of the 35mm image was not of importance when theimage was to be realized on a flickering 17- to 20-inch screen. This in turnled to an upgrading and a professionalization of the 16mm format from anamateur medium to an important production medium for the news andactuality divisions of television companies. The new and largely improvedrecording systems for 16mm film with synchronous sound became as eco-nomically unattainable for amateurs as previously the 35mm had beenand as a consequence the photo industry introduced new, cheaper (and interms of technological aspects such as image resolution – inferior) alterna-tives in the form of 8mm and, later super-8mm film.

This development, where the introduction of new and expensive tech-nology eventually would spawn more consumer-friendly versions, wasrepeated with the introduction of electronically stored moving pictures.The videotape recorder was introduced during the mid-1950s and afterhaving existed during a decade as a very expensive production and storagefacility, the development of more effective and affordable technology led tomore accessible versions of this technology. First as half-inch video taperecorders (Portapak) and later, in the 1970s, as video cassettes. The VHS-VCR format, and later the Video-8/Hi-8 cassette system, gave users accessto mass-produced video cameras that more or less realized the visionabout a technology for video production as easily available as amateur stillphotography.

But even after the video camcorder had made its way into millions ofhomes, the quality gap between ‘real’ film and television products andthose of the merry multitudes of video amateurs was formidable. The placeof the amateur formats was the intimate family sphere, with family andfriends as an audience, while moving images in the public space were stillreserved for film and television companies with seemingly unlimitedaccess to capital. The technology for video editing was still directedtowards the professional market and thus well beyond the means for amateuruse. However, the real needle eye, in terms of opening up the relationship



between the private and public sphere for video amateurs, was the systemof distribution. Admittedly, the broadcasters found ways to integrate anduse the new, wider accessibility of video-recording equipment throughprogrammes like America’s Funniest Home Movies, but the ideal of openaccess media was as distant for the video enthusiasts of the 1980s as forthe amateur film enthusiasts in the pre-war years.

The most recent development in the relationship between amateur andprofessional relates to the transition from analogue to digital media andthe emergence of the World Wide Web (WWW). During the 1990s thefilm and television industry moved from analogue to digital technology,first in editing, later also in camera technology. Midway into the firstdecade of the twenty-first century, essentially all that remains of analogueimage technology in film and television are the end stations: television andmovie-theatre screens.

These breakthroughs in digital technology for the professional mediawere soon taken up by the market for consumer and amateur video, wherethe analogue Video-8 and Hi-8 formats were supplanted by digital tape for-mats as Mini-DV cassettes in addition to the possibility of direct recording toDVD or hard disk. Even more important was the fact that digital video-editing technology now appeared as consumer products. An example ofthis is that Apple’s iMovie editing program was delivered bundled with theOS X operating system, facilitating relatively advanced editing possibilitieson a desktop personal computer or a laptop. American film-maker JonathanCaoutte’s documentary Tarnation, making quite an impact at the CannesFilm 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 theInternet, been a marked change in the distribution situation for film andvideo producers operating outside of the established media channels. Withthe development of the World Wide Web combined with expanded accessto broadband services in Europe and North America, several alternativepossibilities of distribution have emerged. Through various forms ofstreaming video formats, the personal computer has been turned into animportant distribution channel, opening up for the distribution of alterna-tive forms and content compared to traditional television and cable channels.In addition, the recent development in mobile telephony must be men-tioned. The mobile telephone has in a very short time gone from being amobile version of the traditional phone to a digital media centre, able tofunction as a combined source of music, pocket-sized PC and movie cameraas well as functioning as a telephone.

The developments described above, where apparently a new situationfor user participation within the audio-visual culture has risen, may besummarized in three main points:

1. Economic availability: The gap in costs and quality between productionand editing equipment and software for professional and mass consumershas closed up considerably.

2. Miniaturization: Equipment that previously demanded considerableresources in terms of logistics has been replaced with equipment that islightweight, does not occupy much space and is well adapted for indi-vidual operation.



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

On the possibilities for democratic participation in the publicsphere – ‘Gegenöffentlichkeit’.This development may, with possible benefit, be described within the para-digm of what is usually referred to as the public sphere in English. This termis again closely connected with the theoretical work of Jürgen Habermasfrom his 1962 book Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit published in English27 years later as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: AnInquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. In the decade following theEnglish translation of Habermas’s seminal work, the concept of public spherehas become a central theoretical aspect in describing the development ofthe relationship between society and the individual in the twentieth centuryand it has been actualized with the arrival of the Internet as a commu-nication channel. (A recent Google search for ‘Habermas + blogosphere’yielded 108,000 hits!).2

In addition to having been included in the English-language discourseon public sphere/space, there has been a renewed interest in Oskar Negtand Alexander Kluge’s Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung (1972), (English trans-lation Public Sphere and Experience: Towards an Analysis of the Bourgeois andProletarian Public Sphere (1993)) (see Hansen 1981/1982, 1983). In thisbook, strongly influenced by the 1970s discourse on ideology, the authorsemphasize the necessity to take into consideration how the Europeanworking class would relate to public space according to the experience ofits members. Habermas only referred in passing to this plebeian Öffentlichkeit.They give several examples of how alternative forms of Öffentlichkeit wereorganized in the interwar years in organized labour movements in Germanyand Austria, characterized as Gegenöffentlichkeit – public spheres organizedin response and opposition to the dominating public space, or counter pub-licity as it has been referred to in English (Mark Poster, in fact, uses theexpression oppositional public sphere (Poster 2001: 179)). However, as Negtand Kluge point out, these attempts, as represented by the GermanCommunist Party and the Austrian Social Democratic Party, soon endedup in situations where they would merely establish parallel institutionsemulating the bourgeois public sphere, thus ending up as isolated socialorganizations – what the authors refer to as Lageröffentlichkeit, or literallyencampment public spheres.

In the years following World War II we find similar attempts at usingavailable amateur technology to establish alternative ‘filmic oppositionalpublic spheres’ through the American avant-garde movement and in theindependent documentary movement. The main problem was, of course,that since these movements existed well outside the public sphere of thefilm industry, they would start out and end up as marginalized phenom-ena. Attempts at establishing alternative distribution and exhibition chan-nels through the 1960s and 1970s usually ended up as interestingalthough isolated movements that resounded more with cineaste groupsthan with a general audience.


2. In this context itshould be noted thatthe English translationof the GermanÖffentlichkeit carriesover some translationproblems that publicsphere does not quitecover. In her introduction to OskarNegt and AlexanderKluge’s Public Sphereand Experience MiriamHansen expresses it inthis way:

‘The German termÖffentlichkeitencompasses a varietyof meanings thatelude its English rendering as “publicsphere”. Like the latter, it implies to aspatial concept, thesocial sites or arenaswhere meanings arearticulated,distributed, and negotiated, as well asthe collective bodyconstituted by and inthis process, “the public”. ButÖffentlichkeit alsodenotes an ideationalsubstance or criterion –“glasnost” – or openness (which hasthe same root inGerman, “offen”) –that is produced bothwithin these sites andin larger, deterritorializedcontexts; the Englishword “publicity”grasps this sense onlyin its historicallyalienated form. In thedialectical tensionbetween these twosenses, Negt andKluge develop theirconcept ofÖffentlichkeit as the“general horizon ofsocial experience”’.


In the context of film history, however, these marginalized ‘mini-publicities’ were to have an impression vastly larger than on their modestaudiences in the form that could be referred to as aesthetic counter-publicities.One such case is the British Free Cinema documentary movement in the1950s, which became influential not only in the field of documentary, butalso for British feature-film production in the ensuing years, inspiring anew everyday style dubbed ‘kitchen-sink realism’. The groundbreakingshort documentary subjects of Free Cinema, produced as a response to theperceived 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 docu-mentary and feature films in post-war Britain (see Street 1997: 78–80and Lovell: 1972: 142–156). Similarly, today we can see how amateursproducing digital video within an experimental frame – video blogs, news-groups, etc. – on the Internet very often represent an impact on commer-cial and institutional audio-visual forms.

In the same vein, the expanded possibilities created by new media tech-nology, in this case lightweight recording equipment for 16mm soundfilm, revolutionized the field of anthropological film and brought about theconcept of cinéma-vérité. This direction, with its ambition to get closer toeveryday life than the classic documentary had been able to, originallyaddressed a specialist audience in the field of ethnology and anthropology,but it is today recognized as the precursor of the mass media phenomenonof 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 movementsand phenomena suggesting a far wider scope than Habermas’s originaluse of the concept Öffentlichkeit, but these alternative forms draw on thetype of human communicative interaction discussed in Theorie des kommu-nikativen handelns (Habermas 1981). According to Douglas Kellner there isa considerable widening of the Öffentlichkeit concept in contemporary soci-ety due to the application of new media technology. This implies that it isnecessary to go beyond the defined historical context of Habermas andview the ‘new’ public sphere as ‘a site of information, discussion, contesta-tion, political struggle, and organization that includes the broadcastingmedia and new cyberspaces as well as the face-to-face interactions ofeveryday life’ (Kellner 2000).

It is possible to discern this convergence between the ‘great’ publicityand the many ‘part’ and ‘counter’ publicities in what Kellner terms the‘new cyberspace’, i.e. the World Wide Web and its repercussions oncontemporary life. The millions of personal computers in the industrial-ized world have long ago been changed from one-way communicationreceivers to potential media production tools, supported by a similarnumber of mobile telephones with recording possibilities for sound andmoving images. The Web has become a rupture in the wall between theprivate and the public sphere, challenging the dystopia of Habermas in1962 – where the forces of the mass media industry had more or less



successfully invaded the private sphere – and presenting a more opti-mistic view, where the single individual can and will contribute to publicdiscourse.

However, Habermas still seems to maintain a pessimistic attitudetowards the supposed expansion of public discourse that the Web (or whathas been termed Web 2.0) may allow. In the acceptance speech for receiv-ing 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 for-

mal, horizontal cross-linking of communication channels weakens the

achievements of traditional media. This focuses the attention of an anony-

mous and dispersed public on select topics and information, allowing citi-

zens 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 democ-ratic potentiality and superficial vulgarity, emerges in several of the newfora developing for the new production-empowered net users. An excellentexample in the field of moving pictures is the website YouTube.com.YouTube is a very good example how and how fast innovation happens inthe world of WWW (a story not unlike that of Napster). The website wasestablished by three young enthusiasts, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen andJawed Karim, in May 2005 in order to make a website allowing users toupload video files for free use. It opened in November 2005 and by earlysummer 2006 the net traffic gauge Alexia had already placed the siteamong the top ten worldwide. When the film industry threatenedYouTube with legal action because of copyrighted material made availableon the website (an obvious parallel to the Napster case five years earlier),YouTube in February 2006 decided to limit the length of non-registeredvideo uploads to 10 minutes. The media buzz around this gave extendedpromotion of the website and eventually the media industry signalled anotherand more accommodating approach than was the case in the Napsterdebacle. In June 2006 NBC, after having initialized the threat of prosecu-tion decided on a cooperative deal with YouTube, switching to using thewebsite instead as a promotion channel for its film and video products. ByOctober of that year YouTube had made deals with several music produc-ers ensuring free distribution of music videos. At the same time it wasannounced that Google had purchased the company for 1.6 billion dollars.

However, the main reason for the enormous success of YouTube lies inthe fact that it operates as an open channel for the teeming millions ofprospective content producers who, thanks to the technological andeconomic development of digital media production equipment, now havethe possibilities to exchange meanings, experiences and – perhaps mostimportantly – ways of expression through the film medium. Every day on



YouTube sees the debut of new pieces of audio-visual expression, from filmsnippets to entire feature films, and some of these may generate millions ofhits attracted by digital word-of-mouth. By registering as a director withthe 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 ofnew video material. In this way a network of thousands (the auteurs of thetwenty-first century to use a parallel in film history) has been establishedand these new auteurs have found a mass audience that would have beeninconceivable for an earlier amateur without economic and technologicalaccess 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 ofhomebrew video snippets of laughing babies, stupid dogs, an unendingnumber of popular film and TV show emulations, in addition to the factthe entertainment industry has belatedly acknowledged the marketingpotential of YouTube and is swamping the website with promotional mate-rial. Thus, the site fully illustrates Habermas’s worry about the loss offocus in the sea of individual contributions heavily reliant on the varioushegemonic forms of expression. An example of this may be found in one ofthe great ‘rating successes’ on YouTube in Lizzie Palmer’s Remember Me,catapulting a 15-year-old American high school student to national famewith a still photo montage of American soldiers in Iraq accompanied byNew Age-style music and ending with the words: ‘Each and every soldierneeds our support [. . .] don’t let them down.’ Appealing to a large segmentof Americans, this modest production was able to reach a viewership ofmore the 20 million by October 2007 after having been picked up andshown on Fox News Channel in June the same year.

In spite of this, however, there are also numerous examples of innova-tive formal experiments on YouTube, several of which have been able tobenefit 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 veryyouthful audience. After a short personal introduction with the title‘Geriatric Grumbles’, the YouTube audience comes face to face with anelderly British gentleman using a simple web camera to declare his enthu-siasm for the YouTube community and declaring his intention to share hislife experiences with his audience. As over 4,000 YouTubers quickly senthim positive feedback, ‘geriatric1927’ started a series with the title TellingIt All that by early January 2008 had reached 57 ‘episodes’.3 In this auto-biographic monologue the audience is informed about growing up in pre-World War II class-dominated England, about the person behind thepseudonym, 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 ofmechanical engineering and has been working in the British health sectorprior to being self-employed and later having retired. He leads off everynew ‘episode’ with a short vignette of text and music – mainly classic


3. The number of videopostings by ‘geriatric1927’ had reached100 as of January2008, with lessemphasis on ‘Tellingit All’ and more oncontemporary issues,especially about theconditions for theelderly in the UnitedKingdom.


blues – before addressing his audience with: ‘Hello YouTubers!’ From thispoint the web camera rests on him as he continues his monologue, withan ample amount of digressions, about growing up in another age. Theresponse from his audience, which seems to have stabilized around20,000–30,000, comes in the form of text and video blogs addressed tohim, parodies (most of them good-natured, with a few exceptions) andresponses sent to his new website (http://www.askgeriatric.com/). Theaverage viewer seems to be of a very young age, a fact that is interestingand suggests a need with the present ‘Generation Y’ for a kind of grandfa-ther figure.4

With media exposure comes fame, and ‘Peter’ has been awarded con-siderable attention in the regular media, with coverage on BBC radio andthe Washington Post as well as other media. However, he has refused to‘come out’ on regular television and has managed to maintain his relativeanonymity. On several occasions he has broken off his autobiography tocomment on the kind of pressure that public media exerts and where hemaintains his loyalty to ‘his YouTubers’ and insists on the qualities of theconversation and personal correspondence as preferable to being exposedin the regular mass media – a point of view that undoubtedly appears sen-sational for an audience led to believe that exposure via the mass media isthe meaning of life!

In a recent article Dave Harley and Geraldine Fitzpatrick have been look-ing at geriatric1927 in the context of globalized and intergenerational com-munication (Harley and Fitzpatrick 2008). In addition to pointing out thatthe activities of Peter highlights the discrepancy between the increased lifelength expectancy in present society and the distribution of Internet use inage groups over 60, the authors draw attention to how the YouTube com-munity 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 pro-

ducing 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 num-

ber 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 soundmuch better :)’ [ZS9, 19, US – response to Video 1]

‘You can also change the colors on Windows Movie Maker. When you are typingyour text down by where it says animation or what ever to change the display of yourtext it should be right there. Just click that and you can change the font and thencolor 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 pro-

duction qualities and techniques in subsequent videos show evidence of the

results of his learning.

(Harley and Fitzpatrick 2008)


4. With a grandparentgeneration living inFlorida or Arizona (orSpain in the case ofnorthern Europeanyouths) is it possiblethat new livingpatterns in the middleclass have opened upan unexpected deprivation?


All in all, it is remarkable to what extent the video blog of geriatric1927appears as a collective enterprise actually enhancing the highly individualcharacter of the project. He has established what seems to be a solid ‘fanbase’ of younger people who, in addition to providing a continuous feed-back on form and content matters, have also helped him in establishingand maintaining a website. This dual character of collective support andindividual presentation presents an interesting contrast to Astruc’s individ-ualized 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 thatover the last decades we have seen a shift in individual self-expression fromwritten media (diaries and other written material) to a culture of audio-visual self-presentation both inside and outside of the documentary insti-tution. Is this tendency to audio-visual self-presentation a ‘turn inwards’,a retreat from the traditional societal role of documentary, a turn fromPaul Rotha’s ‘documentary as pulpit’ to the ‘documentary as a confes-sional’? 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 commu-

nication. [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 therelationship with the ‘classic’ documentary, an innovation that to a largeextent may be ascribed to the change in forms of distribution representedby digital audio-visual narrative. A recurring problem within documen-tary theory and practice is the question of representation – or the burden ofrepresentation, as documentary film-maker Isaac Julien has put it (Trinh1992: s.193). The Griersonian project of the 1920s and 1930s was, to alarge extent, a pedagogical project. Grierson wanted to use the filmmedium in order to illustrate the extent to which modern society was aresult of a complicated pattern of interaction among its citizens. The prob-lem, as critics of Grierson have pointed out, was that British documentarytended to reduce the subjects of the films to de-individualized, representa-tive figures subjected to a master narrative they had no control over.

This problematic has led to several experiments in letting the subjectsin the documentary express themselves more directly, as in the Canadiansocial documentary project Challenge for Change in the 1960s whereenthusiastic film-makers passed out cameras and sound equipment andexperimented with inclusive editing and distribution formats. The reasonthis and other similar projects failed was that the distribution link wasmarginalized and that however democratic the intensions were, the initia-tive 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 ownnarrative from the very first moment. In this way ‘Peter’ and his videoautobiography represent a dramatic challenge to a film genre that at


5. About the perceivedfailure of the Challengefor Change programme,see Marchessault(1995: 131);Kurchak (1972:120); Svenstedt(1970: 85).


times may seem at odds with its own proclaimed democratic potentiality.Paula Rabinowitz sums up this problematic in the very title of her bookdealing with how social conditions have been described in theatre andtelevision documentaries throughout the twentieth century: They Must beRepresented. This title denotes a ‘they’ and a ‘we’, where all good intentionsof acting on behalf of others very often leads to a cementation of existingsocial constellations – the subject of the documentary invariably becomestrapped in the role of victim, as Brian Winston points out (Winston 1995).

This brings us back to Alexandre Astruc and his vision of the futureauthor (auteur) who writes, using a camera instead of a pen. A majorpoint for Astruc was that the perceived new media situation would openup alternative ways and means of audio-visual expression, hence his insis-tence of connecting the new technology with the aesthetics of the avant-garde. For him, the new technological possibilities meant more than just ademocratization of the medium, instead he regarded it as a necessary reju-venation of film form, liberating it from the old. Could it be that parts ofthis 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 nar-ratives to a younger generation?

ReferencesAstruc, 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 documentaryethics 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 aCategory 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 fürdas 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’, NewGerman 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 InformationSociety, (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.



Kurchak, Marie (1972), ‘What Challenge? What Change’, reprinted from Take One,

4: 1 (September–October), in Seth Feldman and Joyce Nelson (eds) (1977), TheCanadian Film Reader, Toronto: Peter Martin Associates.

Lovell, Alan (1972), “Free Cinema” in Alan Lovell and Jim Hillier, Studies inDocumentary, 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 anAnalysis 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,


Suggested citationSørenssen, 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 detailsBjørn 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 internation-

ally on these themes in addition to articles and books in Norwegian, among these

Å fange virkeligheten. Dokumentarfilmens århundre (Catching Reality. The Century of theDocumentary) (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.




ÆÆ




Documentary expression online: TheWrong Crowd, a history documentaryfor an ‘electrate’ audienceDebra Beattie Griffith University

AbstractThe Wrong Crowd is a history documentary produced with funding from theAustralian Film Commission for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’sInternet portal in 2003. Key issues encountered in producing within the computer-mediated parameters of an online screen are contained in the debates around con-structing a digitized reality within a non-linear format, the attendant resolutionof tension between narration and navigation as well as the enhanced audienceexperience of interaction in the unfolding of the historical argument.

In 2001 I was funded to create a history documentary for the AustralianBroadcasting Corporation’s Internet portal. As writer, producer and directorI worked with computer artist and web designer Scott Bennett to create aseventeen-scene online documentary. This collaboration between film-maker and web artist working together to create a new form of documentarycontent was the result of an innovative policy initiative that year from theAustralian Film Commission. This article discusses the key issues encoun-tered in creating documentary content within a computer-mediatedenvironment. Constructing a digitized reality in a non-linear format,where the user becomes integral to the flow of the narrative, requiredchallenging creative decisions to be made.

Overall there were three key issues that arose in the production of TheWrong Crowd:

• The uncharted waters of the audience/user reception within this newdelivery platform

• The competing needs of organizing a non-linear database and scriptinga linear narrative

• ‘Warranting’ of evidence to support a history documentary exacer-bated by the verisimilitude of digital media

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


Keywordselectrate

virtual reality

QTVR

interactive

mise-en-scèneverisimilitude

bildungsromanAnnalistes

SDF 2.1_05_art_Beattie 3/14/08 2:46 PM Page 61

event or events. In addition to these media ‘documents’, photographs, filmand video footage, archival records and primary source documents con-tribute to the documentary’s evidentiary status. Indeed the documentaryform needs to contain this visible evidence to stake its claim as ‘actuality’.

Within the documentary toolbox, as well as prima facie evidence andeyewitness accounts, the film-maker also has recourse to re-enactments orre-creations in the unfolding of the documentary argument. So often arere-enactments used as key planks in the production of the history docu-mentary that the genre would be seen to fit comfortably within the hybridform of drama-documentary, carefully articulated by Derek Paget (1998: 5)as the form in which ‘the drama diverts the documentary element intodramatic structuring’. These documentaries rely heavily on the signifiersof re-creation, and the use of narrative strategies to convey the partici-pants’ point of view within a broader historical context.

Some examples of re-enactment have been highly successful in stakingtheir ‘truth-claim’. Ken Burns’s direction of actors shivering on the site ofa battlefield describing their experiences as soldiers in The Civil War (1990)for instance, was so skilful that university students in the twenty-firstcentury, uneducated about the history of camera recording, were sur-prised to be told that these were not ‘real’ interviews with ‘real’ soldiers(Beattie 2006). Bill Nichols (1993: 176) warns of this inherent dangerthat ‘re-enactments risk implying greater truth-value for the recreatedevent than it deserves when it is merely an imitation or copy of what hasalready happened’ [original emphasis].

Representations, re-creations, re-enactments are necessary risks inproducing history documentaries. Within the liminal spaces provided bythese constructions, perhaps the most striking conundrum in the evidentiarystatus of the documentary has been the rise of ‘fly on the wall’ film-makingwhose 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 simulationand that this constitutes its disqualification from competing for truth-claims. Using the example of the 1973 documentary series An AmericanFamily,1 Baudrillard questioned how much of the behaviour within thefamily was modified by the presence of the camera crew and how differentthe participants’ interactions would have been had the camera not beenthere. Baudrillard argued that what was being observed were ‘simulated’behaviours constructed for public viewing rather than the more privateand therefore ‘real’ interactions that would have occurred without thecamera’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, Winstondescribed how the audience for this film accepted the footage asactual/’real’ examples of the London Blitz. Jennings and his crew, however,had started the fires, in a controlled situation, for the purposes of filmingthe necessary dramatic footage, and therefore the footage had no eviden-tiary status at all. The question arises here too as to how this interventionon the part of the documentary-maker vitiates the authenticity of the images.

62 Debra Beattie

1. Similar to PaulWatson’s 1974 UKversion The Family(BBC) and precursorto the first Australianexample in 1992,Sylvannia Waters.

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Winston argued convincingly that what differentiated the ‘simulations’ byJennings from the current crop of ‘fly on the wall’ reality television pro-grammes was the fact that Jennings’s images were manufactured as aresult of ‘prior witnessing’.

It is the Griersonian description of the documentary as a ‘creativetreatment of actuality’ that is most often used to define the form. Griersonfirst used the term in the early twentieth century to describe the films ofRobert Flaherty, citing particularly Nanook of the North in which Flaherty’s‘creative treatment’ included a re-enactment of the results of a hunt, setup for the camera, in order to show the audience details of the hunters’return. This set-up however, was scripted from Flaherty’s ‘prior witness-ing’ and so fits within Brian Winston’s parameter.

The American Errol Morris, known for his documentaries on the realityof modern life, directed The Thin Blue Line (1988) by presenting narrativemoments of re-enactments and interviews to camera of the protagonistsinvolved in the shooting murder of a Dallas police officer. Rather thanattempting to present authentic re-enactments, Morris’s scenes aredirected as iconic representations. The audience, familiar with cinematictechniques, knows that the shadowy figures captured by the camera aremeant to represent the protagonists, and there is no pretence that this iswho he is actually filming. Moreover, the scene of the policeman beingshot is re-enacted a number of times from a number of different perspec-tives further displacing any ‘actuality’ claims. The film does, however, fitcomfortably within the genre of Derek Paget’s docudrama.

Within the documentary form, this fragmentary and often ephemeralexperience of representation in contemporary culture is on the increase,particularly on the Internet. The question arises as to how the fragmentednature of non-linear narrative and the audience’s requirement to findtheir own pathway through this narrative might impede their understand-ing. Without a constructed linear pathway, the audience is left without aself-evident narrative arc. In Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices (1996),Renov argues that despite the fragmentary nature of the presentation, thefundamental structure operating within the audience of the ‘ordering ofthe real’ remains in our reception of the documentary form. There is aprotocol, Renov argues, in our engagement with and prior experience ofthe language of cinema that operates within us, as an audience, to makesense within this structure.

In writing the documentary script for The Wrong Crowd,2 a public his-tory of police corruption as it intersected with a personal coming-of-agestory, my objective was to allow for this ‘ordering of the real’ to continue ina documentary work that was to be web-based, where the structure couldnot be linear. The challenge of working within this change of screen, fromtelevision to computer as a reception point for the documentary form, washow to pre-empt the effect on the audience’s ‘ordering of the real’ as theysat, hand at the ready, to point and click to another image.

This case study, seen as an innovative intervention in the form inwhich it was published five years ago, was created within the infrastruc-ture of audience reception of broadband in Australia as it was then,3 ataround 30 per cent, with the average modem having only a 56k capacity.The work was designed to be an ‘immersive cinematic experience in

63Documentary expression online: The Wrong Crowd, a history documentary. . .

2. Written, directed andco-produced by DebraBeattie in conjunctionwith ToadShow; digital artist, ScottBennett; music, RickCaskey; sound, ToneCulture; voice, LisaJane Stockwell.

3. http://www.aph.gov.au/Library/Pubs/rn/2001-02/02rn34.htm


QuickTime 5’ which dates its creation quite clearly to 2002. In ‘e-docu-drama’, terms, this is electronic publishing of a generation ago. A produc-tion using this technology in 2008 would have a much greater capacityfor creating ‘virtual reality’ in an immersive approach than was availablefor this case study, restricted as it was by maintaining manageable down-load times and files sizes (Figure 1).

The speaking position, from which the script was written, is declaredthrough the spine of a narrative bildungsroman, a story of character devel-opment during the early years of a life. In this instance, from ‘1950s: FJ Holden’, through adolescence in the late 1960s, young adulthood inthe early 1970s to an epilogue of ‘1980s: Shredded’. In the late 1980s thepolice files of many radical citizens were shredded by a government appa-ratchik, 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 policefamily to link events covering decades of a cultural hegemony of government-backed police corruption. The documentary script was framed within thiscontext of a heavily mediated police/government history and begins in theScenes Menu (Figure 2). The public history recorded in the press and television

64 Debra Beattie

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


of the times provides for a rich database of audio and visual material toembed within the seventeen scenes.

The roadmap for the journey is conveyed as a series of Proustian memory-moments, digitally ‘recorded’ and ‘painted’ and embedded with thisdetailed metadata and visible evidence in the form of ‘hotspots’. The‘hotspots’ were created with the intention of providing ‘flickers of authen-ticity’ (Roscoe 2001: 13) for the audience.4

The ‘truth-claim’ for ‘what really happened’ presents these memory-moments in the style of Errol Morris-inspired ‘iconic representations’.These were moments of character building within a conflicted family andwithin a community operating from a deeply layered hypocrisy. Thesemoments were recreated by distilling their essence into frozen tableaux –mise-en-scène – revealing the key ingredients of the personal narrative as itintersected with that moment in public history.

These scenes as ‘representations’ were shot, Photoshopped within LiveStage Professional® software and then contained within the series of sev-enteen QTVR® (QuickTime Virtual Reality) scenes. Based on my ‘priorwitnessing’ of public events as they unfolded in my young life, the narra-tive became a sequence of those scenes from childhood to adulthood, ajourney constructed from these ‘memory-moments’ (Beattie 2003c: 58).Through the skill of the digital artist, these scenes became ‘animatedpaintings’ (McQuire 1997). Utilizing LSP® software within a QTVR®authoring environment meant that the frozen mise-en-scène could betransformed into moving images with synchronous sound effects anddialogue. Clicking the ‘auto’ button, the viewer experiences the director’scut, a version of moving image and soundtrack from the particular ‘point


4. Jane Roscoe first usedthis term to describemoments in realitytelevision and docudrama when theperformative momentfalters and in a‘flicker’, we think wesee the real person. In this, she recallsBarthes’s earliernotion of the‘punctum’ whereby aphotograph canimpact on a viewer ina manner unintendedby the photographer,where the viewer’sexperience,completely subjective,stirs a privateemotional response.

Figure 2: The narrative as bildungsroman.


of view’ of the director of the scene. There is then the option to move on tothe next scene in a linear sequence devised by the writer or to stay in‘manual’ mode and ‘hotspot’ through the scene to detailed documents ofthe day – still photos, newspaper reports, state archive documents, deathcertificates, and so forth, providing immediate evidentiary status for thecontextualization of the recreated ‘memory-moment’.

The web designer created still further levels of navigation to be madeavailable for the audience/user to access then or at a later time. Parallel tothe spine of the seventeen scenes are ‘Storyboards’ and the ‘Director’sNotes’ for each scene. Designed to represent pages from my notebook,these allow the user to literally go ‘behind the scenes’ providing informa-tion that would be unavailable to a broadcast audience. Drilling furtherinto the database from the ‘Notes’ pages, the user can find historicalresources 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 YourStory’ and many have provided feedback to me through an e-mail link.This was an important aspect of the project because in creating this par-ticular hybrid docudrama on the web form, I had been increasingly drawnto the approach of historians such as the Annalistes (Ludtke 1995) – a

66 Debra Beattie

Figure 3: Police corruption inquiry and escalation of domestic abuse.


movement that developed around the journal Annales founded in 1929 byFebvre and Bloch as a counter to historical positivism. The Annalistespioneered an approach to history that privileged the study of long-termevolutions (la longue duree) over singular events or ‘event history’.

In large measure, The Wrong Crowd addresses how individual memoryintersects with collective memory. The English historian whose work mostsupports this approach to historical narrative is Eric Hobsbawm. In On History(1997) Hobsbawm argued for the place of ‘remembered history’ or ‘historyfrom below’: ‘what ordinary people remember of big events as distinct fromwhat their betters think they should remember’ (Hobsbawm 1997: 273).

The Wrong Crowd sought to maintain a historical argument about policein Queensland during the 1950s and 1960s, modelled on recorded ‘historyfrom below’. Within the context of a cultural climate in which the stories ofpolitical activists were buried, the documentary argument of The WrongCrowd sought to construct the period as an era of police bullying within apervasive culture of intimidation. This argument is presented through pow-erful visible evidence in the form of artefacts such as a coroner’s report andpolice charge sheets as well as the first-person testimony of eyewitnesses.

Within the online environment, the uncovering of this history had tobe presented in a navigable non-linear form. This provoked some creativetension in that I needed to depart from my experience as a broadcast tele-vision producer who was used to creating a rhythm that sustained acoherent linear documentary argument. Unlike a broadcast audience, abroadband audience is proactive and, by nature of the form, can partici-pate in the construction of the pathway to be navigated, and thus thesequence in which the narration will unfold. The fixed temporal montageof the linear television documentary becomes an ad hoc spatial montage, aseries of arbitrarily open windows on the computer screen, a sequence ofvisual, 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 ofthe verifications, was navigable in a way that supported the unfolding of aparticular historical argument. The context of the search for the visibleand auditory evidence, the foundation for any historical documentaryaccount, had to be negotiated intuitively by the viewer and yet still conformto the requirement that the documentary maintain an overall coherenceas a logical argument.

Computer mediated communication – CMCComputer-based media are by definition interactive as they involve click-ing icons, choosing links and making decisions about the pathway to betaken through the website. This near ‘random’ access allows the sequenceand duration of images to be determined at the time of presentation ratherthan fixed in the production process. The film-makers’ standard tools offixed sequence and fixed timing of narrative moments are eliminated.These are the very tools the film-maker uses to create moments of emo-tional catharsis, timed in the linear format to reach a narrative climax. Ina linear format this narration is delivered sequentially, in accord withPaget’s rules of ‘dramatic structuring’. With stand-alone data allowing forevery event to be linked with the previous event at any moment, and with



multiple entry points, the chronology and dramatic structuring of thestory is largely left up to the viewer.

The Wrong Crowd was created with a recognition that the viewer’sengagement with the mouse was going to be quite different to his/herengagement with a remote control. From qualitative feedback from visitorsto The Wrong Crowd site (collated from e-mails sent directly to me) theaudience still engages in Renov’s ‘ordering of the real’ even in thisallegedly non-narrative environment. Michael Nash has argued that the‘death of the narrative is a hugely misunderstood notion in the new mediadiscourse’, that ‘jumping from one place in a text, film or song to anyother place in any other text, film or song doesn’t actually constitute a“non-narrative experience”’ (Nash 1996: 392). Nash references JulianJaynes’s Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind inwhich Jaynes’s research led him to believe that the defining human action ofretrospection actually has a ‘large element of [. . .] what we call narratiz-ing’ (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 com-puter screen can provide the documentary-maker with a renewed oppor-tunity to engage the empathy of the viewer. It is possible to present awell-researched database of verifiable documents embedded in cinematicimages, which sustain in a fragmentary manner the essence of the docu-mentary argument. The viewer, even within the non-linear environment,can build a trajectory based on these evidentiary links that derives themeaning at the heart of the construction of the historical argument, andalso at the core of the narrative structure. It is the persuasive practice ofthe docudrama that allows this meaning to be derived.

Steve Lipkin in his discussion of this persuasive practice introduces thenotion of ‘warranting’ within the docudrama form. Lipkin argues that awarrant ‘locates the basis (of the dramadoc) in [...] the rules of logic thatallow an argument to make the necessary shift from fact to value’ (Lipkin2002: 5). The audience is given facts and factual documents embedded inthe cinematic images of The Wrong Crowd and the scriptwriting challengewas then to ‘warrant’ the audience’s sequencing of these facts to produce thevalue of statement that is at the heart of the argument that the documentary-maker was seeking to make.

Lipkin asks ‘what warrants the choices made in constructingdocudramatic performance’. This question goes to the core of the ‘truth-claim’ status of the documentary. Karl Popper (1979) gives the example ofhow he might go about verifying whether he has a particular coin in hispocket, describing the changes in the strength of verifications required asdetermined by the context of the question. If the question is asked withoutconsequence, about whether he has a particular coin, he may simply feel thesize and shape of the coin without looking at it, and verify its existence. Ifit is important to the questioner that it is that particular coin, on theincreased strength of the need for verification, he may take it out of hispocket and look directly at it. If the need for verification is even more sig-nificant, he may take the coin to a bank and request some form of certifi-cation that it is the legal tender it appears to be. As John Tosh describes itin The Pursuit of History (1991) for the history documentary-maker, the

68 Debra Beattie


context of the historical argument is often ‘a political battleground’, onelittered with vehement contentious assertions and warranting a need forrobust verification. The selection and arranging of the facts within thenarrative from which meaning is derived in turn informs the value judge-ments of the audience.

This discussion of facts and values when it arises in the pursuit of a his-torical truth becomes increasingly problematic. If we accept that the historianalways 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 accord-ing to the prevailing values of the day. Carr discusses this dual character ofthe word ‘truth’ as it straddles facts and values. In English it is the truth, inthe Latin veritas, the German wahrheit and the Russian pravda: ‘Somewherebetween these two poles – the north pole for valueless facts and the south poleof value judgments still struggling to form themselves into facts – lies therealm of historical truth’ (Carr 1964: 126) This search for ‘historical truth’ isoften conducted on the battleground of competing narratives.

Narrative of the non-linear kindAs theorists have increasingly studied the key elements of narrative, whatis often emphasized is the breakdown of the elements of storytelling into aneat dichotomy between ‘narration – that which moves the plot forward –and description – that which doesn’t’ (Bal 1985: 120). In writing thevisual plan/interface design for online documentary, there is a need tomeld the narration and the description into a navigable form. The narrativehas to be constructed by linking the elements of a database in a particularorder. The trajectory within the QTVR® ‘Scenes Menu’ of The Wrong Crowdleads the user from childhood through adolescence. The script maintainsthe cinematic logic of replacement, characteristic of the language under-stood by an audience in a temporal montage, while utilizing the ‘electracy’or electronic literacy (Ulmer 2003) currently evolving within an audienceincreasingly engaged in the spatial montage potentiality of a computerscreen. It is in recognizing the added intervention of the audience as anadvantage, in building on the audience’s growing sophistication, withtheir added skill base around electronic computer-mediated communication,that we can perceive documentary online as a set of opportunities to engagewith this new ‘electrate’ generation.

In an initial attempt to subvert the multiple windows of conventionalinterface design, each of the seventeen QTVR® scenes of The Wrong Crowdwas designed to be played as full screen, with the viewer encouraged tochoose ‘auto’ rather than ‘manual’ to take advantage of the ‘cinematic’experience. In ‘auto’ mode the scene plays according to the documentary-maker’s direction. In ‘manual’ mode, the viewer navigates the scene atwill. Within ‘auto’ mode, the viewer can ‘lean back’ and watch. In manualmode, the viewer will ‘lean forward’ to engage with the mouse, exploringthe layers contained within each ‘memory-moment’. For an audience tobe able to move at will around a visual representation heralds a radicalchange in documentary reception and presents a real challenge to thedocumentary-maker in the viewer’s creation of their own ordering ofthe narrative structure from fragments. The potential for misreadingthe information can be mitigated by embedding prima facie documentary



evidence within the QTVR® scenes, which move the audience to a pre-ferred reading, or in Lipkin’s terminology, which ‘warrant’ a reading thatmoves from facts to values.

Within this evolving form of narrative, Lev Manovich calls for a theo-retical language to engage with digital media content by constructingterms and concepts, for example, appropriate to multiple windows(Manovich 2001: 104). In The Language of New Media he gives examples ofHollywood films, like Blade Runner (1982) in which Harrison Ford’s char-acter talks with a computer instructing it to zoom in, closer and closer, toone particular photographic image as he searches for the origins of thebeautiful, mysterious cyborg. Manovich also cites the frames withinframes of Greenaway’s Draughtman’s Contract (1982) arguing that theseexamples of late twentieth-century cinema can be seen as two earlypointers to the converging of the art-form platforms of cinema screen andcomputer screen. Transforming the conventional documentary-makers’practice of the temporal montage necessitates a learning curve for digitalcontent creators to explore the possibilities of a language/grammar ofspatial montage, a skill traditionally used by visual artists.

Long before digitization, with the emergence of an understanding basedin film language, as viewers we learnt to read sequences of montage. Ourunderstanding of what constituted reality was modified by our willingness toembrace the new conventions of the cinema. Lev Kuleshov, an early twenti-eth-century Russian film-maker, was one of the first to explore the possibili-ties of cinematographic montage. In an interview in Cinema in RevolutionKuleshov described how, as a teaching exercise, he once created a movie of awoman 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 mon-tage. The students accepted that it was a continuous depiction of only onewoman, and accepted the ‘truth’ of that woman’s existence, reading themontage as that of a ‘real’ woman (Leyda 1977: 249).

This historic point of reference shows how temporal montage coercedcinema enthusiasts to blend their identification with the realism of anindividual shot, in order to establish a new relation to film as a text com-posed of multiple shots, and in so doing, developed a new skill negotiatingthe transitions between cinematic images. To understand further thisdynamic in early cinema, narrative theorists have stressed the importanceof the psychoanalytical concept of ‘suture’, the process whereby we makeconnections 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 digitalrealm are engaging in the suture of a new type of montage: a fluid mon-tage of frames within the frame. The split-screen technique was initially away for the film-maker to offer another shot of the same scene from a dif-ferent point of view. ABC Online, in one of its early forays into documen-tary online, used this technique in Long Way to the Top (2001), displayingmoving images of the performance on stage and the view from backstage.

Within the QTVR® scene Dad Dies, the digital artist Scott Bennett wasdirected to ‘stitch together’ three different narrative moments, shot inthree different locations, juxtaposing these images to carry a number ofdistinct narrative threads within one temporal space (Figures 4 and 5).

70 Debra Beattie



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

Figure 5: The third panel of the triptych.


The first image was of an actor, in performance as the narrator at thestage of an adolescent studying for matriculation exams; the second imagewas dominated by the lavender of the jacaranda trees, in blossom inOctober in a suburban Brisbane street; and the third was another actor,performing as the adolescent girl’s father as he leaned out his bedroomwindow, trying to catch his dying breath. The idiosyncratic nature of psy-choanalytic ‘suture’ meant that some of the audience relayed via feedbackthat they constructed the three scenes as one continuous image to createa narrative of the father dying at the exact same moment that the studentwas studying, whereas others constructed the narrative in the vein of aProustian moment, lost in memory, a fragmented collage of remembrance.

Within these ‘enactments’, there was always the question of how thisform of documentary expression was relating to the physicality of theobject world. The documentary ambition is ‘to use the particular to illumi-nate the general and to take the world of appearances as a route into moreabstract engagement with the conditions of the social and historical’(Corner 2007). It was my concern for the ‘obdurate real’ (Stern 2003) increating the visuals and the audio ‘to illuminate’ the more general zeitgeistin which I grew up. In writing for this cross-media platform where theaudience would be clicking from moving visuals to text, the ‘World Events’pages were created to be as easily identifiable as possible to an age groupwho 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 aspecific sociocultural grouping (Figure 6).

VerisimilitudeIn tandem with the changes in the audience’s relationship to the screen asthey take on the role of co-narrator, there are the changes wrought, asflagged by Nichols in 1986, by developments in digitization. The veryprocess of digitization, as Bill Nichols (1993: 56) noted in Renov’sTheorising Documentary, has meant a ‘nuclear explosion’ in the ontological

72 Debra Beattie

Figure 6: The pop-up of the World Events link for 1968.


status of the documentary form, where reality can be altered right downto 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 asequential fashion has also been challenged and the ontology of the docu-mentary is even further under pressure.

A major impact of the digital revolution on our notion of documentaryevidence has been in this changing nature of ‘digital realism’ and how itdiffers from our earlier notions of ‘the real’ in cinematic images. InCrossing the Digital Threshold Scott McQuire (1997: 57) takes up this issuequerying our fascination with ‘perceptually realistic’ images of dinosaursor intergalactic spaceships when neither have any point of reference in ourown real world.

The ‘desire underpinning the documentary impulse’, the classic phrasecoined in Bazin’s ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (1967: 14), ispotentially lessened by photographic images against which no authentica-tion is possible. As we move into the emerging digital platform of deliver-ing programs over the Internet, Thomas Elsaesser (1998: 21) suggeststhat the documentary is to be the first casualty. We are entering an erawhere ‘actuality’, the core of the definition of the documentary genre,inhabits an increasingly fluid space. In the digital world, distinctionsbetween the real and the fake are blurring. The digital domain extends inan unprecedented way the ability of the film-maker to control the image,providing for a level of intervention that includes manipulation of the pixelsfrom which the image is constructed. The role of the digital artist workingfrom an electronic palette is more akin these days to that of the painter ina Renaissance studio. Once the image is digitized, it becomes another formof graphic. Regardless of its origin, it becomes pixels, easily altered, substi-tuted one for another, an atomic rearrangement of the dimension of BillNichols’s 1995 ‘nuclear explosion’ as he described the impact of then newtechnology, ‘to scitex’ or to digitally manipulate an image.

‘Crossing the digital threshold’ can provide for another level in theprocess of psychoanalytic ‘suture’, creating a new type of mise-en-scène, inthe arrangement of pixels rather than people and sets. The first scene ofthe online history documentary The Wrong Crowd is titled ‘FJ Holden’, inreference to a model of car reminiscent of this optimistic era, and a modelof car afforded the status of an icon in Australian graphics culture. Thisfirst QTVR® was positioned within the narrative to set the scene forQueensland in the 1950s, ‘a golden circle beach’ and to provide the back-story to the bildungsroman. The mise-en-scène of the FJ Holden car parkednear a beach at Greenmount in south-eastern Queensland is an ‘enact-ment’ 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 childhoodmemory and documented as a QTVR® the exact place we visited and theexact model of FJ Holden car that my parents owned.

The pixels in this image were manipulated in order to achieve theerasure of the current Gold Coast skyscrapers. Although the digital imagewas manipulated, the digital artist worked according to the ‘prior witness-ing’ 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



74 Debra Beattie

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

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


to verisimilitude rather than veracity. Nevertheless, as Martin Kemp remindsus, as audience, ‘we are perceptually addicted to the illusion of reality inwhatever medium’ (cited in Hockney 2001: 230). Ross Gibson argues thatit is important for digital content creators in this new medium to acknowl-edge this and to recognize that the emerging art forms offer structures anddynamics for testing and strengthening the imagination of both the audi-ence and the film-maker (Gibson 2003). Given that these new forms havenot yet been constrained within generic orthodoxies, they need to beunderstood and interrogated as cultural forms reflecting the way more andmore audiences experience ‘reality’ and ‘the illusion of reality’ in cyberspace.This has potential for seious-minded research into both the productionand reception of the digital documentary online and with emergingnotions of spatialized narrative.

Digital soundTo an unprecedented degree, the new digital delivery platform of theInternet for the documentary form has been heavily shaped by recentdevelopments in digital sound technology. Content creators now have animproved ability to ‘spatialize’ discrete sound elements and to utilize soundas a visually contrapuntal element that draws on the cinematic experi-ence. In the construction of the QTVR® scene ‘The Watchhouse’, theimage is deliberately lacking in detail, an ‘enactment’ of a black, white andgrey 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 thepolice officer is conveyed by aural stimuli to stimulate a visceral responsein the audience. There is a complex soundtrack of the fists and the bootspounding into the flesh overlaying the cries and gasps of the victim withthe exertions and grunts of the aggressor. The track is laid over the emptyspace of the slowly moving image, of corrugated iron walls and woodenfloorboards, thus leaving the viewer with a vicarious experience, akin tostanding in that space and listening to the ghosts of the past, with theemotional intensity associated with the injustice of a death in custody.

Coming from the tradition of producing both for cinema and for broad-cast television, it was important to engage the viewer in an aesthetictransformative moment based on a particular reading of a historical event.When the audience’s hand is ever ready to disengage in the search forfurther information, the cinematic gaze is potentially on the verge of beingbroken at any moment by a glance outside the frame to the interface, andwith its potential to move the viewer in another direction, to link toanother image. The human tendency towards temporal narrative struc-tures, 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 open-ended storyline but all operating within a consciousness that inherentlyconstructs a temporal ‘suture’.

In his address of the emergence of the online delivery of creativecontent, Lev Manovich (2001: 217) has called for a new branch of study,the ‘theoretical analysis of the aesthetics of information access’, his termfor this being ‘info-aesthetics’. The Wrong Crowd provides for one of the first



Internet-based case studies for this kind of theoretical analysis. As one of agroup of only four funded (the others: Long Journey, Homeless and Year OnThe Wing) by the Australian Film Commission in 2001, The Wrong Crowd isunique amongst these four in seeking a ‘cinematic’ approach to the reso-lution of the often-competing needs within the online environment oforganizing the database and constructing the narrative.

The Wrong Crowd takes the traditional film-maker’s tool of temporal mon-tage and plays with the audience experience by embracing the web designer’sappreciation of spatial montage. The digital revolution that allowed for themalleability of sound and image files has been explored within the parametersof a 56k modem delivery platform, this being the constraint of the equity pro-visions by which the national broadcaster was expected to deliver in 2002. Inthat year The Wrong Crowd launched into the uncharted waters of audiencereception within this new delivery platform and, through the qualitative feed-back of direct e-mails to the documentary-maker, has provided valuable infor-mation regarding the nature of this emerging audience and their response tothis new form of ‘documentary expression’ and digital distribution.

ReferencesABC Online (2001), Long Way to the Top, http://www.abc.net.au/longway/con-

cert/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.), JeanBaudrillard, 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 isCinema?, 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 DocumentaryFilm, 1: 1, pp. 5–20.

Draughtman’s Contract (1982), directed by Peter Greenaway, British Film Institute,

DVD.

76 Debra Beattie


Elsaesser, Thomas (1998), ‘Cinema Futures: Convergence, Divergence, Difference’,

in T. Elsaesser and K. Hoffman (eds) Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable?: TheScreen 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 InformationSuperhighway, 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’, MediaInternational 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.



Tosh, John (1991), The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods, and New Directions in theStudy 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 citationBeattie, 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 detailsDr 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.


78 Debra Beattie




Undisclosed Recipients: documentary inan era of digital convergenceSharon Lin Tay Middlesex University

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

Undisclosed Recipients: databasedocumentaries and the InternetDale Hudson Amherst College

AbstractThis article argues that new media disrupt the linear structures conventionallyascribed to documentary, emphasizing spatiality and relationality. On theInternet, ‘database documentaries’ facilitate selection and recombination of ‘docu-ments’ (audio-visual evidence) through user acts, hypertext, algorithms and ran-dom access memory. Specifically, the article examines two pieces that address thecontroversial 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 desta-bilize quests for ‘totalizing meaning’ by emphasizing interactivity, contestationand multiplicities of meanings. The database evokes endless recombinations, sothat meaning, Hudson argues in relation to these works, is explicitly polyvocal,unstable and contested.


Keywordsdigital

news media

trauma

documentary

environmentalism

festival

KeywordsInternet

globalization

database

documentary

environmentalism

festival

SDF 2.1_06_art_Tay+Hudson.qxd 3/14/08 10:24 AM Page 79

PreambleCurated by Dale Hudson and Sharon Lin Tay for the 2007 Finger LakesEnvironmental Film Festival (FLEFF), the online exhibit ‘UndisclosedRecipients’ situates documentary praxes in relation to the festival’s potentre-imagination of environmentalism. The festival challenges assumptionsthat environmentalism concerns itself primarily with ecology and preser-vation, arguing instead that environmentalism demands to be recognizedwithin a broader framework, a ‘complicated nexus of the social, political,aesthetic, technological, economic, physical, and natural’. Sustainabilitybecomes the nodal point at the intersections of nature and culture. ‘Anecological way of thinking, then, demands tracing these complex intersec-tions in order to understand them – and then act on them’, explain FLEFFco-directors Thomas Shevory and Patricia R. Zimmermann; ‘Ecologymeans understanding how things, people, and ideas are interconnected’(2007: n.p.). Comparably, the online exhibit complicates assumptionsabout documentary’s primary concern with ‘truth’ and ‘evidence’, partic-ularly in relation to the theme of sustainability and the environmentwithin a large global conversation that extends across issues of labour,war, health, disease, intellectual property, archives, HIV/AIDS, women’srights and human rights. ‘Undisclosed Recipients’ brings together artisti-cally innovative, socially engaged and politically urgent work to a largeraudience of ‘undisclosed recipients’, exploring the Internet’s potential bothas a medium of production and a mode of distribution. The exhibit fore-grounds ways that digital video and the Internet can re-imagine andreclaim 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, ratherthan closed to the simplicities of certainty.

Adopting these strategies, the following two essays explore relatedarguments about digital images and digital structures in selected worksfrom the ‘Undisclosed Recipients’ exhibit. The essays aim to propose waysof rethinking documentary’s ostensibly contradictory impulses of a desirefor immediacy and the necessity for mediation. Tay focuses on the chal-lenge of ‘the digital’ to images as documentary evidence in terms of fidelityof representation and mediation. She analyses Michael Takeo Magruder’s{transcription} and [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004] and ChristinaMcPhee’s La Conchita mon amour as a means to advance discussion of doc-umentary beyond claims to realism and documentary truth towards whatTrinh T. Minh-ha calls ‘boundary events’. She argues that digital video,editing and compositing expose the limitations of visual evidence to repre-sent trauma, ‘natural’ disasters and war. Drawing upon these ideas,Hudson turns his analysis to digital structures for documentary on theInternet. He explores ways that Eduardo Navas’s Goobalization and thecollaborative Permanent Transit: net.remix by Mariam Ghani, Zohra Saed,Qasim Naqvi and Edward Potter may be understood as database documen-taries that destabilize quests for ‘totalizing meaning’ by emphasizing inter-activity, contestation and multiplicities of meanings in relation to thecontroversial issues of globalization and war. Meaning, he argues in rela-tion to these works, is explicitly polyvocal, unstable and mutable. Together,

80 Sharon Lin Tay and Dale Hudson


these essays trace two possible contours to ways that digital media and theInternet challenge assumptions about documentary in ways much likeFLEFF challenges assumptions about environmentalism. Internet docu-mentaries demonstrate ways that digital technologies have applications todocumentary practices that extend beyond the faith in the authenticityand immediacy of the audio-visual images that it captures and renders.Acts of witnessing, recording and showing are extended by acts of recom-bining, filtering and processing.

81Undisclosed Recipients: . . .


Undisclosed Recipients: documentary inan era of digital convergenceSharon 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 themas different ways of working with the freedom in experiencing the self andthe world’ rather than endorsing categories ‘by which the film worldlargely abides’ (Trinh 2005: 28). According to Trinh (2005: 28), TheFourth 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 historicaltrajectory that effectively gave rise to its particular rhetoric and theoreticalorientation. The post-war rise of Italian neo-realism that strives towardstruth in the uncontrolled event, the technological innovations of the1950s that provided film-makers with the portable equipment with whichto make documentaries that appear to further eliminate artifice, the rise ofvarious film movements such as Direct Cinema in the United States andCanada, Free Cinema in Britain, and cinéma-vérité in France all contributeto the alignment of the documentary film with ideas of realism and truth.The emergence of new media, with the consequent loosening of the index-ical relationship between signifier and signified, resulting in doubts aboutthe fidelity of representation to its referent that digital media casts, has sig-nificant implications for documentary practice in the digital age. UsingTrinh’s point about freedom from the constraints of conventional docu-mentary practice, I would like to explore in this essay the extent to whichdigital and Internet technologies can enable the move beyond certain lim-itations that continue to affect conventional documentary practices. Asthe companion piece to Dale Hudson’s discussion about database aesthet-ics and the processes of online documentaries, this essay will open upsome ideas about the image and representation in documentary filmwithin the context of digital convergence.

The documentary tradition’s discursive currency has traded upon sev-eral fundamental theoretical premises, of which access to unmediatedreality is often simultaneously contentious and prized. The discrepancybetween the necessity of mediation and a desire for immediacy is thatwhich pervades much of documentary studies; in another conversation, itis also a central concern in thinking about mediation and the convergenceto digital. This seeming conundrum in documentary, however, may betheoretically resolved by seeking recourse to various strategies that circumvent

82 Sharon Lin Tay


the rhetoric of, and discursive construction around, the documentary film.Laura Mulvey, for instance, explains the intricacies of weaving together thefictional and the documentary in the last shots of Roberto Rossellini’sJourney to Italy (1953). As the fictional couple reconcile and kiss on thecrowded street, the camera pans away to follow the spectacle of the streetprocession. 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 concen-

tration 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 throughthis theoretical conundrum about mediation and access to reality.Kiarostami’s tendency to construct the fictional narrative and documen-tary aspects of his films much in the model of a Möbius strip expresses, forMulvey (2006: 131), ‘the gap in time, the delay, that separates an eventand its representation, its process of translation in thought and creativity’.These examples are myriad in Kiarostami’s films, for instance, in the lastshots of A Taste of Cherry (1994) where the fictional story wraps and thecharacter that has apparently committed suicide (or rather, the actor play-ing the character) is seen smoking and talking with the film crew. Thecomplex construction of Close-Up (1989) calls into question, at each nar-rative turn, the documentary and/or fictional status of what the viewersees. These ways of advancing critical discussions of the documentary filmbeyond claims to realism and documentary truth are useful gestures to theneed to critically reassess certain assumptions of documentary studiestowards more constructive premises, especially given the context of, andchallenges posed by, digitality.

Digital transcriptions: remediation and the news mediaIn The Powers of Nightmare (2004), the three-part documentary seriesmade for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Adam Curtis illus-trates the argument about the regime of fear instituted by political leadersthat then lends legitimacy to their rule. The end of the Cold War and theabsence of a definitive enemy left a political vacuum. As Curtis reiteratesin the prologue of each episode, ‘In an age when all the grand ideas havelost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left tomaintain their power.’ Post-9/11 panic about al-Qaida, terror cells andterrorist attacks establishes psychic and social boundaries between thoseexperiencing panic and paranoia and those generating these feelings. Theexploitation of panic serves profit and power, and the role that the mediaplays in the exploitation of panic and irrational fears for the benefit of thepowerful needs consideration. Michael Takeo Magruder, a US-born artistbased in the United Kingdom, explores these ethical issues of mediation inhis online digital works. Straddling the aesthetics of digital art and theexpository impetus of the documentary, Magruder’s works raise questionsabout the relationship between news reportage and live events. Both



{transcription} and [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004] examine questionablemedia coverage of events that confuse real and imagined situations.

As its title suggests, {transcription} is a digital project that attempts thecreative transcription of 24-hour news coverage, in the process raisingquestions about the mediation and remediation of real events in ourconsumption of current affairs. Processed in real time, {transcription}samples live BBC news coverage, effectively severing the relationshipbetween news broadcast and the events that are being reported. Familiarimages taken from BBC news footage slowly and arbitrarily appear onscreen, layered on by a digital skin that obscures the clarity of the image.These images are accompanied initially by the sound of scratching, andthen one gradually hears the news being read. Scratching and voices arethen layered on with more voices of different newsreaders, which are thencontinuously repeated and layered. The disjuncture between image, voiceand sound that {transcription} effects produces an uncanny experience forthe user, oscillating between familiarity and strangeness; an effectachieved by the use of an algorithm to disrupt the linearity and veracity ofnews broadcasts. Rendering the meanings generated by the news broadcastconfused and multiple, {transcription} becomes a stream-of-consciousnessexperience, although not an unfamiliar one. In fact, this stream-of-con-sciousness effect replicates the all too familiar experience of consuminground-the-clock news broadcasts, where the supposed acquisition of infor-mation and knowledge through news broadcast instead becomes a form ofsimulation, alerting us to the often-unquestioning way in which weconsume the news. In {transcription}, constant ‘artefacts’ (scratchingsounds added to behave like ‘video noise’, like images added to replicatefilm grain) and the imposition of a ‘digital skin’ (another visual layer ontop of the remediated news footage) accentuate the mediation of the news.Causing a radical disjuncture between sound and image, the processes ofremediation that these scratching electronic noises and digital skinsemphasize alert us to the constant deluge of round-the-clock news coverage,and the perpetual sense of panic and paranoia that the news ultimatelyengenders.

The political implications of such mediation that {transcription} engendersare brought home in [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004]. The latter pieceponders on the relationship between ethical filtering and manipulativeremixing of the news, the significance of which increases with technologicaladvances that enable the generation of history in ‘real time’. Similar to{transcription}, [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004] involves the use of digitalskins and the disconnection between voice and image to highlight theprevalence and signification of mediation. Made up of two versions, eachconsisting of several manipulated moving images, [FALLUJAH. IRAQ.31/03/2004] accentuates the extent, and effects, of mediation. In one ver-sion, familiar images of the casualties of war such as billowing blacksmoke, fire, deserted roads, bombed-out cars, and the inevitable clusters ofshocked, outraged and/or injured passers-by are at times composited withother similar images. In other instances, large images of the aftermath ofan 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 Sharon Lin Tay


of seconds. The need to evaluate the ethical premises of the digital docu-mentary is especially urgent; such urgency becomes obvious when oneconsiders, for example, the political reasons that may lie behind particularnews coverage leading to the massacre in Fallujah, Iraq. That the attackon Fallujah and the US presidential election both took place in the earlydays of November 2004 is no coincidence for many. As Magruder explainsin the notes that accompany the piece, [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004] isset within the context of the news report that Iraqi insurgents in Fallujahkilled four US civilians. The bodies were then dragged, paraded and muti-lated by the town’s people, footage of which was broadcast around theworld. On the basis of these reports, US forces then attacked the city.However, Magruder notes his reservations to the message conveyed byinternational news coverage: one, the US citizens were not civilians asreported, but mercenaries employed by a private US security firm; two, theentire scene of desecration was filmed by one Associated Press cameracrew; three, there was no US or coalition forces intervention in neither theattack nor the subsequent mutilation; and four, coverage was highlycensored by international media networks. These reservations questionthe veracity of the news coverage by raising questions about context. Inother words, the media processes involved in representing the events lead-ing 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 relation-ship between the event and its representation, is thus destabilized via thealgorithmic processes through which [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004]operates. The meanings that one may take away from the news aboutFallujah 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 signi-fied from its signifier, a situation made infinitely more possible by digitiza-tion. On a more innocuous level, {transcription} considers the ethicalquestions implicit in the consumption of network news: whether knowl-edge or currency is that which has priority, and what does one do withthis surfeit of (mostly bad) news from the television set, and increasingly,from the computer? How may ethical spectatorial positions for the con-sumption of network news be constructed? Much in the way that EdwardNavas’s Goobalization explores the issue of surveillance in digital media,whether for commercial exploitation or political control, as Hudson dis-cusses below, [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004] reminds us of the politicalagendas to which such a discrepancy between mediation and actualevents may avail itself.

The idea of embedding journalists with soldiers in warfare adds a newimplication to reportage, suggesting the ethical issues around representa-tion, perspective and the eventual media decontextualization of eventsthat take place at a distance. The ethics of recording, documenting andreporting are raised in terms of the value of different types of images: ifimages gleaned from the event are more valuable than archival footage,that would raise the question of whether knowledge or currency has pri-ority in our consumption of current affairs. Does the mediation involved inthe reporting of violence and unrest render these events mere electronic



white noise that emanates from the television sets that ultimately depoliti-cizes current events into byte-sized news packages? Collectively, theseworks reveal that conventional news media have not only averted theirgaze from documentary’s historical preoccupation with truth, but alsooften collaborated in camouflaging truth for political exigencies. The con-tingency of meaning is thus heightened within the context of digitalconvergence, given the non-linear, non-representational, evocative andinteractive characteristics of digital media, as the discussion below ofChristina McPhee’s La Conchita mon amour furthers.

Documenting unspeakable traumaEthical questions around documentation and reportage that {transcrip-tion} and [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004] raise are also pertinent to theworks of the California-based digital artist, Christina McPhee. In particular,her project La Conchita mon amour taps into the states of panic and paranoiathat characterize political events post-9/11, albeit in a different way. LaConchita mon amour references in its title the trauma of the atomic bombingof Hiroshima that could not be fully articulated in Alain Resnais andMarguerite Duras’s Hiroshima, mon amour (1960). Studying the strugglesof life in the beach community of La Conchita in California that was inun-dated by debris flow after a devastating mudslide, the panic that LaConchita mon armor highlights refers to the heightened awareness and fearthat living with the aftermath of the mudslide, and continuing fears of itsrecurrence, brings. Caused by increased winter rain that comes as aneffect of global warming, this digital video project documents the interfacebetween human response and geological data, when governmental assis-tance for victims of cyclical recursion of disaster is not forthcoming. AsMcPhee notes in the statement accompanying the project, the aftermathof this environmental disaster is one from which La Conchita residentscannot escape and are forced to live through, both literally and financially,given that their properties are rendered worthless by the mudslide; ittherefore becomes impossible for the residents to re-mortgage their damagedhomes and/or move away from the area.

As a performative act of witnessing, La Conchita updates the cinematicmanifestations of political modernism, as articulated through the documen-taries of film-makers such as Resnais, Marguerite Duras, Agnès Varda andChris Marker; thereby bringing a formal discourse of the expository docu-mentary into the Internet age at the same time that it transcends theexpository mode in specific ways. In her search for meaning after thedestruction of the landscape, McPhee records the rituals that the commu-nity performs to grieve for those who died in the mudslide as well as to sur-vive as a community abandoned by the state. As a digital project, LaConchita imbues documentary realism with subjective evocation to suchan extent that the project effectively displaces the importance of the docu-mentary image’s indexicality. Instead of contemplating the impossibility ofrepresenting trauma in, for instance Night and Fog (Resnais, 1955) orHiroshima mon armor, La Conchita attempts the evocation of trauma via thealgorithmic processes of selection and combination. The viewer’s experienceof La Conchita is contingent and interactive, and not unlike the notion ofmining for geological information. Still photographs, composited images

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and video clips of the landscape, environment and vernacular shrinesallow the viewer to piece together the relationship between geologicalinstability and psychological trauma. In this case, the evidentiary is notdependent on the indexical relationship between signifier and signified.Instead, the viewer arrives at ‘evidence’ of the trauma suffered by the LaConchita residents by looking at the mudslide in terms of its geologicalimpact on the psychological subject. As McPhee notes in the essay accom-panying the project,

La Conchita stores landscapes of information beyond what the obvious visible

evidence discloses. The site is marked by the invisible mathematics of large-

scale 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 visibleand the evidentiary, and shows the limits of representation in instances ofpanic and trauma. The instability and contingency of meaning that LaConchita conveys differs from the notions of unspeakable trauma or thesublime in which many modernist expository documentaries are ofteninvested. Instead, McPhee gestures towards a non-representational strat-egy, given the limits of representation, via the database aesthetics of herperformative documentary that pivots on the algorithmic processes thatHudson observes as being key in the production of the plurality of meanings.

Images and field recordings of vernacular shrines, graffiti, chain-mailfencing and barricades in the aftermath of the mudslide, alongside imagesof the physical landscape make up the La Conchita project. Geological dataand human responses to the disaster quantify the impact of the environ-mental disaster, in the process broadening an understanding of what theenvironment means and encompasses. By amplifying the leaps and eli-sions between observed facts culled from geological readings and the com-munity’s trauma as a subjective response to the disaster, evidence istherefore rendered materialist; effectively harnessing the digital and vir-tual to the material and the political. In some ways similar to how Hudsonunderstands the intersection between various historical legacies and thetechnologies that they deploy in relation to, for instance, war and race,gender and class oppressions, digitality may be for us the means throughwhich to explore the relationship between the environmental, psychicaland political. Whenever visible evidence fails to articulate the situationinvolved, ethical questions surrounding the act of representation comeinto play. La Conchita mon amour seeks recourse in the poetic rendering ofthe trauma that environmental destruction brings. McPhee’s use of fieldrecordings and a particular operatic soundtrack featuring a mournfulfemale voice adds to the subjective evocation of the natural disaster. Herdocumentation of the landscape and instances of human response to theloss of lives, the aftermath of the mudslide and its continuing threatrefuses 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



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

ConclusionsConceding that the documentary film often exceeds, and is more intricateand complex, than much of the theoretical enterprise that surrounds itspractice thus requires some more enabling and constructive bases fromwhich to speak and think about it. Vivian Sobchack, writing about therepresentation of death in documentary and non-fiction films, delineatesan 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 rela-

tions that describe a moral structure.

(Sobchack 2004: 248)

The ethical space that Sobchack demarcates derives from cultural normsabout death; which, for instance, gives rise to the peculiar situation wheredeath is more often portrayed as being violent and unnatural than ordi-nary and acceptable, because of our culture’s increasing unfamiliaritywith such a state of being. The ethics around various representations ofdeath in the non-fiction film is thus intimately related to the social and thecultural. Short of death, I would argue that this ethical space thatSobchack distinguishes for the documentary is also political and part ofthe complex media and cultural ecology in which we inhabit. The worksthat I discuss above thus explore, interrogate and expand on the differentand complex ways in which they articulate their relation to the materialbeyond the issues of representation. While Magruder employs the creativetranscription of television news in the process to seek understandingdespite media obfuscation, McPhee’s strategy involves delineating the lim-itations of visible evidence in rendering truth.

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Undisclosed Recipients: databasedocumentaries and the InternetDale Hudson

As Sharon Lin Tay demonstrates in her analysis of three works from the‘Undisclosed Recipients’ exhibit, digital images provide a means to advancediscussion of documentary beyond claims to mediation (‘realism’) andimmediacy (‘truth’) and signal the limitations of audio-visual evidence. Inthis essay, I turn to an analysis of digital structures, looking at two otherworks from the exhibit. I suggest ways that principles of new media disruptthe linear structures conventionally ascribed to documentary practicesand prompt a rethinking of the concept of documentary, not only interms of spatiality but also in terms of relationality. Adapting MarshaKinder’s concept of ‘database narratives’, in which a surplus of informa-tion emphasizes a ‘dual process of selection and combination’ (Kinder2002: 6), I argue that database documentaries loosen assumptions aboutdocumentary from fixed modes (expository, observational, personal) andtowards 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-sourcepotentiality of the Internet, fuelled by digitization of audio-visual imagesinto code that can be accessed randomly, labelled and sorted, then distrib-uted (relatively) instantaneously, prompts reflection upon the historicaland cultural assumptions that determine and manage meaning for manyof the key terms (evidence, witnessing, testimony, etc.) associated withdocumentary. A defining characteristic of new media is its ability to orga-nize information in databases, so that information may be rendered into atheoretically infinite number of discrete sequences via user acts and algo-rithmic operations. Meaning is not fixed as it is on celluloid; rather, mean-ing is malleable, destabilizing the certainties of positivist constructions ofknowledge and opening meaning for ongoing debate. Digital structures,then, offer a means to address controversial subjects, such as globalizationand the displacements of populations by war, in ways that open meaningto debate rather than attempt to circumscribe the contours of meaning.

From its etymological roots in the word documentaire, roughly translat-ing into English as ‘travelogue’, documentary film foregrounds its ability topresent (or transport) audio-visual images (‘documents’) across time andspace. Historically, documentary film constructs meaning through the tem-poral sequencing of audio-visual images onto reels of celluloid, or onto ana-logue and magnetic tapes. Since digital images are not recorded as a directrepresentation of a continuous process, they are produced as a process ofencoding information as data that can be searched, selected, combinedand converted back into an analogue signal that can be displayed on ascreen and played through a speaker (Enticknap 2005: 203). VivianSobchack (2005: 132) argues that ‘presence’ in electronic (new) media is



‘absolute presence’ or ‘being-in-itself ’. Rather than a ‘presence’ confined tothe past, as with photographic media, or a ‘presence’ forever constitutingitself as ‘presence’, as with cinematic media, the absolute presence of newmedia is centre-less, a network-like structure of instant simulation anddesire, rather than in nostalgia for the past or anticipation for the future, sothat qualities of the photographic and the cinematic are schematized intodiscrete pixels and bits of information, ‘each bit being-in-itself even as it ispart of a system’ (Sobchack 2005: 136). Digitality, then, implies an openingto ways of conceiving one’s place in the world that is not constrained to thelinearity of most analogue formats and has the potential to challenge thehistorical legacies that have deployed such technologies as they have inter-sected with colonialism, racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, class oppression,homophobia, religious fundamentalism and war. Content is reconfiguredvia RAM (random access memory) that permits immediate access to anypart of the ‘new media object’ (Manovich 2001: 20–22, 77). New mediaemphasizes programmability (Chun 2006: 1–2), so that interactivity operatesin ways that exceed the reading strategies offered by reception theory (i.e.interpretation of different meanings from a single text). Users manipulateinformation, actively exploring hyperlinked web pages and performingother acts. In particular, the database model facilitates selection and recom-bination of ‘documents’, thereby offering a mode of documentary that moreclosely resembles an archive which, in Foucault’s terms, ‘defines at theonset the system of its enunciability’ and ‘causes a multiplicity of statementsto emerge, as so many things to be dealt with and manipulated’ (Foucault1972: 129). More than a system of display and distribution, then, the data-base becomes a mode for Internet-based documentary where meaning issubjected to endless recombinations, operating within a simultaneouslyconstructive and destructive ‘archive fever’ that Derrida (1996: 19) hasdescribed. Like analogue video archives, online digital archives are open toreceive new documents, suggesting that meaning is a constant process ofaccumulation; unlike their analogue counterparts, however, online digitalarchives mobilize the random access of digital code and the remote access ofcomputer networks as a means of facilitating user participation in thisprocess. Polyvocal, unstable and contested meanings, rather than fixedones, become a means of politicizing online and offline environments inEduardo Navas’s Goobalization and the collaborative Permanent Transit:net.remix by Mariam Ghani, Zohra Saed, Qasim Naqvi and Edward Potter.

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

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sense, the ‘world’s information’ includes the location of the searchengine’s users – information that Google uses to target users of its searchengines with Geo-ID. Advertisements automatically display in local lan-guages (Goldsmith and Wu 2006: 61), prompting reflection about usercomplicity with the surveillance and mediation embedded in everydayacts, comparable to the complicity with corporate news media that Taydescribes in her analysis of {transcription}.

Goobalization is an ongoing series of short Flash animations that recom-bine images retrieved through Google, downloaded from the Web, andlabelled by Navas according to their relationship with the project’s fourkey terms: surveillance, difference, resistance and globalization. Navasprograms the images to appear on the media-player screen in proximity tohis key terms – surveillance in the upper left; difference, upper right; resis-tance, lower left; and globalization, lower right – to prompt contemplationabout the algorithms within the Google search engine that appears to exe-cute the task of linking terms with images; that is, the animations ques-tion ways that search engines construct meaning. As the images appearon screen, however, their juxtapositions expose the complexities of powerstruggles and notions of progress at play in the online world. The hierar-chy within Google search results is disrupted, so that the production ofmeaning becomes more apparent. Images fade in and out at differentintervals, so that the user experiences the often-uncomfortable proximitybetween the ostensibly incompatible social, economic, cultural, politicaland ideological processes of globalization and the mundane and familiaracts 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 somewhatagainst itself, interrogating expectations for what the search engine willproduce when presented with highly contested key terms concerning glob-alization. Google boasts that its search engine is trusted by users due to itsquality of being ‘untainted’ by human involvement or paid advertisements.Its patented ‘hypertext-matching analysis’ and ‘page rank’ algorithmsdecreases the calculation time for searches by examining page content andpage relationships, rather than simply the frequency of word appearance ona particular page, and by pre-selecting web pages that the search enginedetermines to be more relevant to the user. Google’s image search, however,does rely upon human involvement in the absence of algorithms that canefficiently identify and label visual images, pointing back to the questionsposed by Tay in relation to types of mediation that circumscribe the fidelityof visual representation. Google’s image search functions somewhat like anopen-content model of the Internet that allows copying and modifying ofinformation by any user. The search engine relies on users to provide index-ing via tags (‘image labels’), encouraging users to strive for detail and accu-racy through a system of points based upon the amount of detail withinlabel descriptions. In its own example, an image of a large tropical seabirdin 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 labelslink key words to visual images, so that the latter serve as a visual docu-ment or illustration of the former.



In terms of critical praxis, Goobalization mimics the database logic ofGoogle search engines while adapting the logic of ‘web applicationmashups’. Such mashups extend the sampling principles of music remixesthat emerged during the 1970s but are not merely consumed for enter-tainment because they serve a practical function. Users customizeInternet technologies, so that ‘the purpose of a typical Web 2.0 mashup’,Navas argues, is ‘to subvert applications to perform something they couldnot do otherwise by themselves’ (Navas 2007: 3). CrimeChicago.org, forexample, overlays data from the Chicago Police Department onto Googlemaps, so that crimes may be mapped according to date, type and location,as readily as directions between home and a holiday or shopping destinationcan be mapped. Unlike hacks or mods, mashups mobilize and combineexisting technologies, leaving the underlying code intact. Web applicationmashups materially copy data from various sources and constantly updatethis data, thereby utilizing the open archives, random access and searchfilters of the Internet. At first glance Goobalization appears to adopt thestrategy of a mashup that matches images with words on a separate website, such as a commercial news organization, based on information in theimages’ metadata (‘tags’ such as the equipment and settings used to pro-duce the image, the owner of the equipment, the subject or date).

Rejecting Google’s conceits of objectivity and consensus within its textsearches and image searches, Goobalization defines globalization, surveil-lance, resistance and difference in political terms. For Navas, globalizationis an expression of transnational corporate control over internationalactivity that facilitates the increasing global inequalities between havesand have-nots. He identifies surveillance as a complementary term thatdescribes a primary mode by which globalization is enacted upon its bod-ies of the world’s populations, as well as upon their online activities.Corporations, governments, and hackers deploy surveillance for purposesthat range from commercial exploitation to political control. As a counter-balance to globalization and surveillance, Navas understands resistance tosuggest critical positions that interrogate structures of power, positionsthat simultaneously mobilize and are enabled by difference. Although theterms would seem to posit simple binaries, Navas’s selection and composit-ing 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 ‘resis-tance’ depicting the Zapatista liberation army (Ejército Zapatista deLiberación Nacional), known for their mobilization of Internet technolo-gies for cyber-activism and anti-globalization. Differentiations and rela-tions within structures of power come more sharply into focus as the userwitnesses the momentary proximity of two very different subject positionsunder globalization – positions that are intimately connected yet effectivelysegregated by globalization. As the images fade in and out, compositeimages are formed momentarily in the overlapping areas between the fourkey terms. Plants, for example, merge with men holding machine guns. InGoobalization-III, ‘difference’ is represented with a stock advertising imageof US multiculturalism (smiling African American, Asian American,European American, Latino/a American – yet, predictably, no Native

92 Dale Hudson


American – faces) as ‘globalization’ is represented by an image of a pair ofGap jeans with a label reading ‘made in a sweatshop’. Soon the imagesshift to a logo for a reforestation movement for ‘difference’ whose text(‘you can make a difference’) is quickly covered by an image of three smil-ing waitresses wearing the trademark tight singlet for the Hooters chain offast-food restaurants for ‘globalization’. The animations highlight theimbrications of purportedly oppositional discourses, that is, the works inthe series animate ways that anti-globalization discourses are appropriatedby agents of globalization, as well as the inverse. The digital structure ofthe documentary, then, determines meaning more than the actual contentof the images, updating the political avant-garde strategies of Soviet mon-tage and Third Cinema for what might be called the post-ideologicalmoment. The overlapping images challenge the conventions of expositorydocumentary where text, whether spoken in voice-over or written as inter-titles or subtitles, reigns over images and causality in argument is para-mount (Nichols 1991: 35). By mimicking an actual mashup that selectsimages based upon Google’s own rankings, the Goobalization animationspose questions about ways that information is labelled, tagged, andprocessed through search engines, ways that documents are interpreted asdocumentation by search engines, to expose meaning as polyvocal, unstable,and contested around ethically urgent questions concerning corporatecontrol of meaning in the current moment of globalization.

Permanent transitCreated by media artist Mariam Ghani in collaboration with programmerEd Potter, Kabul: Reconstructions was originally launched in 2003 as aninteractive documentary and public dialogue project to document recon-struction projects in Kabul at yearly intervals. By adopting both a conven-tional documentary mode (representing) and a less conventional mode(dialoguing), the Internet documentary seeks to offer multiple perspectivesof particular situations, emphasizing movements towards collaborative,open-ended knowledge rather than single perspectives or closed structuresof constructing and transmitting knowledge that Goobalization compli-cates. The first two sections of Kabul: Reconstructions, which were activefrom March 2003 to March 2006 and are archived on the website,include data about Kabul’s reconstruction gleaned from the official net-works of international media coverage, as well as data about the recon-struction transmitted via Afghani diasporic and exilic networks inresponse to questions posted on the website by users. The third and fourthsections of the project turn their attention to the constitutional assemblyand national election, posing questions about the ‘architectures of democ-racy proposed and promoted through the reconstruction efforts duringthat window of possibility which now seems to be closing’. The projectdeploys Internet communications peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies to dis-rupt the authority of centralized models of distribution.

As part of Kabul: Reconstruction, the collaborative project PermanentTransit: net.remix by media artist Mariam Ghani, poet Zohra Saed, com-poser Qasim Naqvi, and programmer Edward Potter considers the instabil-ity of states of being through migration in response to political events.Permanent Transit is a database documentary about the anxieties and


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recoveries, disorientations and reorientations, associated with the contin-ual migrations of expatriates, exiles, refugees, immigrants and itinerants.Shot on DV through the windows of planes, buildings and vehicles onlocation in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Turkey, Armenia, Italy, theNetherlands, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, loopedvideo and fragmented sounds of the twelve windows of Permanent Transitresult in ‘experimental documentary reconstituted as a documentedexperiment’ (Ghani 2004). Designed to relocate viewers from state-boundlives to the crossroads that are experienced by the ‘hybrid generation’ ofstateless populations that Ghani defines as ‘difficult, absurd, productivezone where locations and cultures blur, intersect, overlap and exchange’,while political borders reify. Experience, memory and identity are notmerely fragmented, as articulated by postcolonial theories and echoed bypostmodernist ideas. Instead, experience, memory and identity are dis-tanced, blocked and often mediated in self-alienating ways that finddescription in views through the glass of windows of moving vehicles andtemporary lodgings. In this sense the images share less in common withthe ideologically ambiguous images in Goobalization than they do withimages in La Conchita mon amour, which, as Tay argues, are infused withsubjective evocations, thereby displacing indexicality as a primary mode ofmaking meaning from visual representation.

To enter Permanent Transit, the user opens a browser that is divided intoa dozen windows, manipulating the content by clicking on the ‘mix’ buttonto download one single-channel video after another from the video subsetof the database, as well as the ‘play’ and ‘pause’ buttons of the media playerin each window. Sound tracks are selected by algorithm from the audiosubset of the database. In this way, the documentary enacts functions of theuser interface that Goobalization represents. In ten of the twelve windows,the short videos loop automatically. The audio track plays only once. Theseventh and tenth windows contain text that appears and disappears insections. The only window that does not automatically loop is the first win-dow, which contains the title in white capital lettering against a blackscreen. The letters rotate through the alphabet faintly behind the words‘permanent transit’ as images appear and disappear in clusters in a visualrepresentation of the transience of memories and sensory impressions. Theaudio track of the title window generates anticipation of change that is sug-gested by the rapid beat of percussion instruments, punctuated by the occa-sional 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 can-not produce. Handshakes and hugs find approximate substitutes in long-distance telephone conversations, so that the sound of voices fills in thegaps left by the absence of faces. The documentary explores substitutionsand partial equivalences of being in a state of permanent transit whereenvironments seemingly always shift underfoot. Structured as a database,Permanent Transit would seem to question the very assumptions of data-base search engines to produce meaningful results. Although the videosdocument travel through eleven states, images of these disparate placesare seen only through the windows of vehicles and locations of transit.Cultural and political constructions of ‘the East’ and ‘the West’ collapse

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upon themselves when the visual markers of familiar and foreign arelargely obliterated in partial views. Memories of one flight splinter intomemories of a thousand flights. ‘What was the order of cities?’, asks Saed’stext; ‘Beirut . . . Baghdad. . . Damascus . . . New York. . . Baghdad again. . .

Amman. . . New York. In the ellipses we find only war.’ Memories becomesites for contestation between generations. Meaning of images for one gen-eration is produced in relation to the meaning of another generation.

As an unreliable structuring narrative for the piece, Rula Ghanirecounts her memories of Syrian comedian Doreid Laham’s absurdist tale ofa man trapped in a no-man’s land. The gaps in Ghani’s memory of Laham’stale, originally televised in 1981 but only remembered and recordeddecades later, are evocative of the work’s attempts to document what is lostevery day. ‘How many windows can we look from? How many rooftopsawait our return?’, asks the text alongside the images. The clicking andchiming of clocks in the waiting rooms of airports, bus depots, railway sta-tions and checkpoints comes to replace the call to prayers once heard fromthe local mosque. In another segment, sounds of prayers mix with soundsof traffic as a woman eats a meal by a window. ‘God and radio hold handsin 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 relivesthe sense of being in a state of ‘permanent waiting’, emphasized by loopedvideo across a multiplicity of screens. Permanent Transit also explores possi-bilities for recuperation of identity and grounding: ‘There are borders, thereare checkpoints, and there are our mother’s stories to undo them all withone twist of a tale and a gentle laugh like glass breaking.’ To break the glassof the windows that stand as barriers between modes and sites of perma-nent transit suggests a substitute for home, particularly home for familieswhose individual members may have strikingly different memories of homedue to histories of movement across borders. For the hybrid generation, thesound of the mother’s voice is perhaps all that binds identity at times.

Perhaps the most sobering feature of Permanent Transit’s documenta-tion of the disorientations of expatriates, exiles, refugees, immigrants anditinerants is its remix feature that causes the images in all of the windowsexcept the seventh and tenth, which contain text, to shuffle. New imagesappear; old images disappear. The same images may appear more thanonce within the grid structure of the windows. The user’s ability to remixthe videos and audio, paired at random by the project algorithm, suggeststhat meaning cannot be contained within linear temporality, rather itspills over into circular loops and is mapped onto multiple screens thatsuggest spatial and experiential relationships. According to Ghani, there isonly a one in four chance that audio and video will align as they wererecorded. Ultimately, images are interchangeable due to the transience ofwhat they represent. Memories cannot be anchored to fixed locations ofhome and homeland, so that identity is diffused and subject to atrophy.The absolute presence of the images guarantees nothing, so that ‘we areall in imminent danger of becoming merely ghosts in the machine’ inSobchack’s terms (2005: 140). The Internet documentary mobilizes thedatabase structure of the Internet and digital video’s ability to loop end-lessly to reconfigure documentary via temporal and relational dimensionsnot possible with analogue technologies that demand a linear structure.



ConclusionsAs an interactive documentary, Permanent Transit harkens back to documen-tary’s etymological origin in ‘travelogue’ (documentaire). The user’s experiencemimics the overlapping and easily confused memories of place of the experi-ences of travel that Permanent Transit documents. Comparably, Goobalizationrecognizes that the Internet is a part of the everyday landscape of a globalenvironment that defines the frontier of the digital divide. Although somenew media scholars dismiss the notion of interactivity as anything possiblebeyond user ‘reactivity’ within a vast network of choices, David Hogarth(2006: 127–29) argues that ‘interactive technologies could extend anddeepen modes of engagement’ and that ‘digital documentaries promise tomake sense of the world in less restrictive ways’, such as online productionsthat ‘may allow new forms of dialogue with documentary form, underminingauthoritative (and authoritarian) modes of communication along the way’.In some ways, his ideas extend ones made by Trinh T. Minh-ha before thepopularization of digital video through consumer-grade cameras and theInternet through the World Wide Web. Trinh (1993: 90) asserts that there isno such thing as documentary, whether a category of material, a genre, anapproach or a set of techniques, and that the old antagonism between namesand reality needs to be incessantly restated because truth is producedbetween regimes of power. She argues that ‘the present situation of criticalinquiry seems much less one of attacking the illusion of reality as one of dis-placing and emptying out the establishment of totality’ (Trinh 1993: 107).Interactive and database formats for Internet documentaries refigure conven-tions of collaborative and self-conscious documentary. The ‘absolute presence’of new media suggests a potential for emphasis on relationality that differsfrom relations based on temporal and spatial coordinates to those based upona database format of potentially endless recombinations. Transcending obser-vational, expository, self-reflexive and interactive modes of documentary,database documentaries like Goobalization and Permanent Transit repositionaudience and events in ways that exceed the discursive spaces that can becontained on a single screen, via conventions of direct sound or voice-overand, more significantly, within the linear progression of projected film orvideo or within the fixed site of installations. Database documentaries promptrecognition that meaning is always polyvocal, unstable and contested –always in a moment of transition towards movement and contestation.

Appendix: Undisclosed Recipients by festival content streamBrief 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 Dale Hudson


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).

AcknowledgementsThe authors would like to thank Thomas Shevory and Patricia R. Zimmermann for

their support and encouragement, as well as Craig Hight and the anonymous read-

ers at Studies in Documentary Film for their insights and suggestions that con-

tributed immensely to this work.

ReferencesChun, 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 onLanguage (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 aBorderless 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’, FilmQuarterly, 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.christi-

namcphee.net/la_conchita.html

Accessed 9 September 2007.



Mulvey, Laura (2006), Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, London:

Reaktion.

Navas, Eduardo (2007), ‘Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture’, VagueTerrain, 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 citationTay, S. L. (2008), ‘Undisclosed Recipients: documentary in an era of digital conver-

gence’, 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 sus-

tained by a commitment to feminist politics, and revolves around film theory and

film-making practices. She has published articles in the journal Women: A CulturalReview, 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.


Suggested citationHudson, 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 ofWhiteness: 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.


98 Dale Hudson


Studies in

Documentary Film

Studies in Docum

entary Film | Volum

e Two N

umber O

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ISSN 1750-3280

2.1

intellectwww.intellectbooks.com

Volume Tw

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intellect Journals | Film

Studies9 771750 328003

ISSN 1750-32802 1

Studies in

Documentary Film Volume 2 Number 1 – 2008

3–7 Editorial

The field of digital documentary: a challenge to documentary theorists Craig HightCraig 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 documentaryfor 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

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

SDF 2.1_cover.indd 1SDF 2.1_cover.indd 1 3/26/08 9:48:33 PM3/26/08 9:48:33 PM

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