Documentary As an Open Space
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6.1 Documentary as an Open Space HELEN DE MICHIEL AND PATRICIA R. ZIMMERMANN By the first decade of the twenty-first century documentary, it migrated into documentary.3 The emergence of new media can be argued, was undergoing a profound change in its direc- and new platforms, such as Web 2.0, social media, Wikis, tion of travel. The rhetoric surrounding the use of moving images remix technologies and amateurisation of media tools as a tool of social action was acquiring a fresh lease of life. The have contributed partially and incrementally to these notion of the socially engaged documentary was not, of itself, changes and recalibrations of the documentary project.4 new, but now, in the post-Griersonian era, the very idea of the But technology can account for only part of these quite ‘documentarist’ as a species of professional communicator was significant shifts – and does not sustain sufficient explana- being called into question more comprehensively than ever tory models. In the current era, a perfect storm of social, before. cultural, aesthetic and economic recalibrations has also mobilised the emergence of new forms of open space NEXT documentary. Resources to support long-form documen- The coordinates and practices of documentary have shifted taries across the globe have either been expunged or dramatically in the last decade – and now require our criti- diminished.5 Interrogations into documentary ethics in cal attention to rethink how we consider and reframe the relation to the active agency of subjects have accelerated in documentary project for the twenty-first century. the context of social media virality in Iran and Eqypt, China This chapter provides some initial theorisations and and Indonesia.6 Documentary forms that foreclose space case studies mapping an approach to emergent documen- for community engagement and collaboration have been tary forms across the analogue, the digital and the embod- critiqued as remnants of one-way communication and ied we call ‘open space’ documentary. To open more control not only by international activist organisations and dialogue and debate, this chapter threads through specula- non-governmental social media organisations, but also by tions on open space documentary, invoking and continuing communications scholars seeking to remap the connection the legacy of Dziga Vertov, an early theorist and practi- between technologies, representation and politics.7 tioner who also probed the nexus of new technologies, new Transnational political restructurings insist on the import- political configurations and new ways of considering the ance and urgency of the micro-local and its multiple map- audience and spectatorship.1 In homage to Vertov, our pings.8 All have functioned as key drivers – beyond new exploration and argument for open space documentary is technologies – of this shift to a more open and fluid form organised in sections, mixing theory, case studies and that holds the possibilities of opening space for convenings speculations. and dialogue. From the static, fixed objects of analogue film and These emerging documentary forms are developing video, documentary is now redefining itself as a fluid, col- beyond the status quo of long-form feature-length docu- laborative, shape-shifting, responsive environment for mentary – with their characters, narrative arcs and resol- encounters we call open space documentary.2 The spaces utions – designed for festivals and public television. These invoked in these works are open to many iterations, com- open space documentary projects move in more mobile, munities and engagements, rather than closed deductive flexible, public spaces characterised by indeterminancy, arguments. These significant changes in the documentary community and risk. New possibilities for combinatory ecology require a reconsideration of documentary theory story-telling are proliferating in spaces now enabled by dis- and practice, a shift from a text-centred criticality towards ruptive broadband, new media and mobile technologies.9 a nexus of technology, form, histories, community, politics, Community needs to map specific histories and stories convenings, collaborations, mobilities, movements and into spaces colonised by the state; corporate interests or strategies that have developed in performance art and environmental destruction also propel these new forms of community arts practices of the last decade and have documentary. 356 THE DOCUMENTARY FILM BOOK The range of works this chapter groups as open space binaries through polyphonies and which creates mosaics documentaries include analogue short form, digital inter- of multiple lenses on issues.12 Open space documentary is faces for mosaic projects, user-generated projects, web where technologies meet places meet people. archives and locative media. Open space documentaries Documentary now assumes many forms and occupies deploy combinatory story-telling strategies embracing the many locations in the transnational media landscape. It local through community engagement, participatory moves across many platforms. It engages and builds media and user-produced histories across multiple plat- publics in myriad ways. It operates in fixed analogue forms forms that intermingle the digital and analogue with lived as well as in open, fluid, endlessly transforming digital social relations and places.10 Open space conceptions and forms and social-media iterations. If the documentary tri- mobilisations of community, collaboration, place and angle of subject, film-maker and audience formed a central migration across digital interfaces undergird the projects image for documentary studies, open space documentary described in the case studies below. These works – whether conceptualisations shift towards the documentary circle, video projects, websites, performances, or social media – where vectors are no longer straight lines of contact but open up with participation by people, places, ideas, endless circular engagements that change and open up change.11 The social is as important as the technological – discourse and spaces for action.13 a key distinction of open space documentaries that sepa- Although many open space projects work within the rates these works from the euphoria encircling many participatory promises of Web 2.0 interfaces, the works discussions of the relationships between the social/ discussed in this chapter reject the idea that these differ- political and new technologies. ent platforms are simply ways to trap the user/spectator Open space documentaries move among analogue and within a story-world conceived by the director or a cor- digital platforms, constantly adapting to engagement with porate media entity. Web 2.0 social media and networked participants and locales while migrating across transme- technologies such as Wikis, blogs, user-generated con- dia formations – from videos, to websites, to media events, tent, gaming, viral media, Facebook, Twitter, Second Life to dialogues, to archives, to performance. These open space have, of course, been effectively deployed for increasing documentaries extend documentary’s legacy of collabora- awareness of social justice issues, advocacy campaigns tive models into the present and the future. Although and critique.14 much of documentary history and theory heroicises indi- In these virtual worlds of utopian democratic fan- vidual authorship, an equally long tradition of collabora- tasies, images and ideas are easily captured, easily con- tive work exists, starting from Flaherty’s Nanook of the North sumed, easily circulated, easily erased in endless loops of (1922) and moving through the Workers Film and Photo record, process, delete. As Douglas Rushkoff has argued in Leagues of the 1930s, to George Stoney’s All My Babies (1953) Life Inc, social-media production is the new camouflaged and his Canadian Film Board work on You Are On Indian face of consumption, with this quasi-participatory mode Land (1969), to community media operations that started in part of the corporate chain creating marketing webs to the 70s and early 80s like Appalshop, Kartemquin, Third advance global capital.15 However, all of these more corpo- World Newsreel, Paper Tiger Television and the entire cable ratised, commodity-chain modalities function within a access movement in the USA since the late 70s. similar structural model of pushing out an idea and con- Open space documentary forms extend these legacies trolling its usage and circulation through the institution of and then explore these newly emerging spaces where tech- hierarchies of control, either in the form of argumentation, nologies are meeting places and people in new and unpre- positionality, or campaigns with predetermined actions dictable ways. Not simply one form or mode, open space and outcomes.16 Story-worlds, then, function as a form of documentaries chart a new, highly diverse, ecologically enclosure and linearity that is highly problematic politi- complex documentary space and landscape. Open space cally: they propel consumption and colonisation. documentary practice is reciprocal, human-scaled and We propose another form of documentary practice localised, reflective and multi-voiced: it is structured not as that we argue is equally significant, salient and powerful. a deductive, expository argument but as a shifting mosaic We have identified this form as the open space model of of ways to consider a concept or a place. documentary, where ideas of collaboration, micro- The coordinates of documentary have shifted from