- TED'S DIGITAL JUNGLE- DIGITAL DOCUMENTARY

After two months of work on my thesis DIGITAL DOCUMENTARY- THE REVOLUTION THAT IS NOT BEING TELEVISED, have taken a slight break to catch up with what is going on in multimedia in the outside world. For the past month, I have been trying to refute some very arcane theories from postmodern American and British academics who suggest that all documentaries are failures because they cannot accurately duplicate reality.  Fortunately, I received a shipment of books on the great Russian documentarian Dziga Vertov, who was not only a brilliant artist, but also a prolific writer and theoretician who was a Futurist who believed in a world of constant change - much like some of the advocates of the digital revolution today, like Jeff Jarvis. This belief put Vertov on a collision course with Josef Stalin, who detested both change as well as documentary. Stalin preferred well-scripted Soviet fiction featuring handsome leading men with mustaches and smoked pipes like he did; he was clever enough to see the power of Hollywood as a propaganda vehicle. Much to his credit, Vertov refused to compromise; he was promptly accused of being a "bourgeois formalist" and a" documentarist", and was demoted to a position editing newsreels. He never made another film again.

Thanks to the end of the Cold War, there has been a revival of interest in Russia in pre-Stalinist culture and the Futurist movement, and Vertov has been restored to his proper position as the inventor of what we now call documentary film". Any doubters should see Vertov's masterpiece THE MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA , a silent tour de force that has inspired filmmakers from Jean-Luc Godard to Martin Scorsese. Now the younger generation of digital documentarians have re- discovered the works and writings of Vertov. Particularly recommended is an excellent, concise volume by a Russian scholar from the UK named Jeremy Hicks titled DZIGA VERTOV - DEFINING THE DOCUMENTARY.

In keeping with my theme of digital revolution, I was pleased to see an article in the January 9, 2013 issue of the International Herald Tribune with the title " Cuban Filmmakers start rolling with technology." Written by Victoria Burnett,  the article describes how young Cubans are producing and showing their own digital films outside of sanctioned state control in what might be called an underground network. Inexpensive but high quality digital technology is making this possible,
and the article notes this phenomenon is worldwide. When filmmakers cannot get their work shown through official channels, they can make DVDs and distribute on the underground network in impromptu theatres. All one needs is a laptop and an LCD Projector, along with some decent speakers. ( when I was in the Congo, we also brought portable generators to show films in the bush where there was no electricity.Short films ( up to 10 minutes) of course, can also be shown on www.YouTube.com ; there are also Internet sites, which show long form productions for free, such as www.vimeo.com. 

Artists around the world generally prefer to work outside state control, and this holds true for documentarians who, more often than not, are social critics. Conversely, officially sanctioned documentaries are invariably propaganda for the state and the status quo. This was the case with the documentaries produced by John Grierson, founder of the British documentary movement, and widely recognized as the father of traditional institutional documentary, with its trademark "voice of God" narration. While Grierson professed social concerns, a quick look at his work reveals he was never interested in undermining the established order, including the British Empire, and the didactic form of his films is now considered by many critics to  be authoritarian. The dilemma for film artists in the United Kingdom was always that film was so expensive a medium that it was all but impossible to produce work of any quality without a patron or a sponsor. Today, however, digital artists anywhere in the world can not only produce work of quality outside of any government or commercial oversight, but they can share their work both locally and with colleagues around the world.

In addition, thanks to sites like www.kickstarter.com, digital artists can now raise money for their projects on the internet, which is another revolutionary development. If a project can interest a few hundred people willing to contribute, say, $100 each, the digital artist may have enough to finish the film. One such project on kickstarted is the feature documentary THIS IS CONGO , by American documentarian Daniel McCabe. McCabe has spent most of the last two years in the DRC, shooting hundreds of hours of material, and now has a feature documentary in progress, Clips from this film can be seen on www.vimeo.com

These are very positive developments, because mainstream media is providing less and less international coverage, to save travel money;  now that CNN has made cutbacks ,the only major television networks who still send out their own reporters to cover international stories are BBC and AL JAZEERA ( which does very high quality work, but which is still unfortunately unavailable in nearly all the United States). As American television grows to rely almost increasingly on the talking heads of pundits and celebrities, it will become increasingly irrelevant, and media consumers will be forced to seek alternative sources of information on the internet, as they are already doing. Indeed, if Apple CEO Tim Cook is to be believed, some form of i-television is coming down the road soon, and that will effectively mean the end of broadcast television as we know it  - in an echo of the rapid disappearance of many of the print magazines and newspapers we used to take for granted as part of the media environment.

In retrospect, it seems that Dziga Vertov's main mistake was to have been born a century too early;in this era of exponential change , he would be right at home in the vanguard of the Digital Revolution.