II.10
Documentary – Odd Man Out:
Regardless of how one might define documentary, there are a few universally
accepted distinctions between documentary
and traditional motion picture entertainment. In the words of documentary
historian Erik Barnouw:
” The assumptions and myths of a society are so constantly recycled
in its formula fiction (as well as in other media including political speeches
and advertising) that its audience ceases to notice the assumptions. Other
people’s fiction we can recognize as propaganda – and they ours. One’s own is
entertainment. A reason for its seductiveness is that it pictures a world that
makes sense, in terms of cause and effect. It is internally consistent, in
contrast to the world shown in many documentaries – a world that may be full of
contradictions and loose ends, and that seldom offers neat endings…. A
politician who lives by mythologies may well look on the documentarist’s work
as subversive. And indeed it is a kind of subversion- an essential one. And a
difficult one.” [1]
As
a result, the genre of documentary has always been viewed as a notoriously bad
business proposition by mainstream Hollywood. In the words of the legendary
mogul Sam Goldwyn: “If you want to send a
message, try Western Union!”[2]
Prior
to the advent of digital technology, Mr. Goldwyn’s words made good sense.
Thanks to their unavoidably high shooting ratio, it was extremely difficult to
make a low-budget documentary film. Film stock itself was expensive, as were
the unavoidable costs of film processing and prints. As a result, documentaries, even without the
cost of stars, were always an expensive genre, and could only be made with
institutional support or the patronage of wealthy individuals who could afford
to lose their investment.
Documentary
icons from Robert Flaherty to Dziga Vertov to John Grierson and Leni Riefenstahl
were all only able to produce their films thanks to substantial institutional
or corporate patronage. Documentary films were more often than not
institutional or corporate prestige pieces; if the filmmaker was lucky, he or had
a benign institutional or corporate benefactor supporting his or her work. No
one expected a documentary to turn a profit. As a result, documentarians either
had to compromise or, shut down production altogether.
As
British documentary historian Brian Winston has pointed out, even supposedly socially
progressive documentarians such as Grierson actually had much more in common
with propagandists such as Dziga Vertov and Germany’s Leni Riefenstahl than is
often recognized. Indeed, one might reasonably argue that rather than being
subversive, Grierson’s productions were propaganda for the British Empire and
the preservation of the status quo.[3]
Even
during the height of the cinema verite boom
in America in the 1960’s, few documentaries turned a profit; the only
exceptions were music-based epics of the 1960’s like Mike Wadleigh’s “Woodstock”(1970) and Leacock/Pennebaker’s “Don’t
Look Back”(1967), chronicling a
historic tour of England by Bob Dylan.
Meanwhile, an otherwise excellent Academy Award
winning documentary about the Vietnam War like Peter Davis’ “Hearts and Minds “ enjoyed very limited
distribution, and was not widely seen. As American documentary historian Jane M.
Gaines notes,” Few of the classic
documentaries have ever had mass audiences.”[4]
At
that time, the average budget for a cinema
verite documentary feature was about $300,000 – or about $3,000,000 today. This was quite a bit of money, since it was
only for production, and did not include money for prints and advertising,
which generally meant an additional doubling the production costs for any
chance of commercial success. The odds of finding a commercial producer willing
to do that were small indeed.
The
bottom line remained the bottom line; the Goldwyn dictum ruled supreme, and the
conventional wisdom was that documentaries did not make money.
Self-financed
documentaries were always an option, of course – but only for those few
fortunate individuals with unlimited access to discretionary income, as well as
with financially self-destructive inclinations.
Meanwhile,
few countries in the developing world possessed the resources to afford the
luxury of documentary production; they had other, more-pressing priorities,
such as feeding their populations and developing their societies.
In
the Western world, the only hope for documentary filmmakers was either a grant
or financing from publically funded television networks like the BBC in
England, Antenne 2 in France and PBS and affiliates in the US. (or Sveriges
Television or Svenska Filminstitutet in Sweden) .If filmmaker were well
connected and persistent enough, they might get some funding – but never as a
business proposition.
As a result, documentarians interested in
promoting social change with their work often found themselves in the awkward
position of seeking financial support from the very institutions they wished to
change.
This
equation began to change with the emergence of high quality, but low cost digital
cameras and tape in the late 20th century. The cost of film and film
processing was suddenly no longer a factor; one could purchase one hour of
mini-dv tape for a one-time cost of less than $10. virtually anywhere in the
world, and a documentarian could literally carry hundreds of hours of tape in a
carry-on bag.
As
digital production technology continued to rapidly evolve in the early 21st
century, suddenly, new digital documentaries of all kinds began to proliferate;
as Michael Moore’s box office hit “Farenheit
9/11 ” (2004) demonstrated, not
only was a potentially lucrative commercial American market for documentaries,
but that there was even a substantial commercial
market for highly politicized documentaries with controversial content. As has
happened throughout the history of the cinema, conventional wisdom had been
proven wrong by the commercial feedback of box office success.
With
the cost of production radically diminished by digital technology, an
additional obstacle to the production of socially critical documentary has been
the issue of copyright. Previously, the
cost of stock footage was becoming so exorbitant that it was becoming virtually
financially impossible to make a historical documentary using archival footage.
As a result, documentarians in the United
States wanting to make historical compilations organized and confronted the
copyright issue head on;, unlike their colleagues in the music industry, they managed
to create a Fair Use protocol establishing guidelines by which they could use
copyrighted material without charge, a major victory.[5]
On
January 19, 2012, the following item appeared in The New York Times:
“Eastman
Kodak, the 131-year-old film pioneer that has been struggling for years to
adapt to an increasingly digital world, filed for bankruptcy protection early
on Thursday.”[6]
Whether
or not one had agreed with Susan Sontag’s 1995 assertion that movies were dead,
the demise of Eastman Kodak in January, 2012, was the nail in the coffin. Film,
as previously defined, was literally dead. For most documentarians , as well as
anyone else interested in making low-budget productions, the transition from
analog film to digital cinema has been a liberation.
In
the last decades of the 20th century, many documentarians had had
hopes that analog video would provide such a liberation, but they soon grew disillusioned.
The analog cameras and editing equipment required to create images of broadcast
quality were prohibitively expensive, and cost much more than corresponding
film cameras and editing tables.
In
addition, there was the issue of filmic image quality. Even the best analog video
had a flat, two-dimensional look that was anathema to cineastes, and there was
significant generational quality loss whenever the material was duplicated. As
a result, many documentarians continued to shoot with film until the end of the
millennium.
With
the introduction of digital technology in the early 21st century, there
was some resistance from those who still felt that filmic quality was unique,
and that quality was lost with digital images, just as it had been with analog
video. However, while this might initially been the case, digital technology
has improved in leaps and bounds; as usual, there are vested interests who find
all change and innovation threatening, but the remarkable ability of the
digital image to simulate the film image, scratches and all, has all but ended
the aesthetic debate.
on
image quality.
Today,
in 2013 that resistance has all but vanished, with only a few pockets remaining
in bastions of tradition like commercials and Hollywood, where cost is less of
an issue than it is for documentarians. The fact that high quality digital
production equipment is significantly cheaper than either film or analog video
equipment has been equally important. For as little as $20,000 in equipment, a
documentarian can now shoot and edit work of high technical quality.
The
implications for both the documentarian and for society at large are significant.
In a traditional Marxist sense, thanks to digital technology, the documentarian
now has the means of production at his or
her disposal. However, distribution remains a bit more complicated. As James Monaco puts it: “ Today anyone can produce a book, film, record,
magazine, newspaper…But can these newly empowered producers of media get their
work read, seen or heard by large numbers of people?”[7]
The
answer is to distribute either by DVD and internet websites; if government
authorities block a given website, there is also the option of direct
projection to intended audiences – a technique known as narrowcasting. With a laptop, an LCD projector costing less than
$2000, a sound system and a portable generator, digital cinema can be projected
to audiences lacking both internet and electricity virtually anywhere in the
world- in the tradition of the Soviet Agit-Prop trains during the Russian
Revolution.[8]
Cheap and easy DVD duplication makes this possible.
For
the commercial entertainment industry, however, cheap and easy DVD duplication
remains an evil to be eliminated, particularly now that more and more countries
are gaining access to the high bandwidth needed to download movies and television
programs. We are now in the midst of a
giant international legal war being fought between the traditional commercial
entertainment industries and some governments, on the one hand, and the new
digital information industry, on the other – popularly known as Hollywood vs.
Silicon Valley.
There
is an intriguing Marxist perspective on issue of digital duplication; writing
in 1935-36, Walter Benjamin, the noted German art critic, distinguished between
an original art work and a technologically reproduced work as follows: “The technological reproducibility of the
art work changes the relation of the masses to art. The extremely backward
attitude towards a Picasso painting changes into a highly progressive reaction
to a Chaplin film.”[9]
In
Benjamin’s eyes, the traditional bourgeois art world, with its premium on authenticity, was a ritualistic and very
exclusive endeavor doomed to irrelevance by technological reproduction of art
works:” Technological reproducibility
emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual… As soon
as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production,
the whole social function of art is revolutionized. Instead of being founded on
ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics.”[10]
Given
Benjamin’s views in this now famous essay, which was published after his death
in World War II, it seems reasonable to conclude he would have considered
digital technology very revolutionary indeed, had he lived to see it. However,
there is no way he could have foreseen the impact of the Digital Revolution on
19th century ideologies like Marxism. In the words of cinema
historian James Monaco:” As the
Information Age became a reality and knowledge joined labor and capital in the
social equation, ideology couldn’t keep up. It is more than coincidental that
the rise of the microchip accompanied the end of the Cold War, a conjunction
that Mikhail Gorbachev himself once pointed out.”[11]
In
short, the realities of the constantly expanding Digital Revolution defy analysis
with our traditional ideological tools, which were conceived in another, bygone
era, and are no longer relevant. The same would apply to Digital Documentary,
which
cuts through ideological and geographical borders alike. [12]
An
article in the International Herald
Tribune of January 9, 2013, describes how the new digital technology has
created new opportunities for artists in Cuban cinema: “ The global boom in digital filmmaking has rippled across Cuba over the
past decade, letting filmmakers create their own work beyond the oversight of
state-financed institutions. Independent movies have become a new means of
expression in a country where, despite freedoms and economic reforms introduced
by President Raul Castro since 2006, the state still carefully controls
national press, television and radio, and access to the internet is very
limited.[13]
It
appears that, in spite of official government disapproval, what used to be
called underground cinema in the
United States half a century ago is now alive and well in Cuba.
As
the article notes, this boom in Cuban digital cinema is symptomatic of a
general international phenomenon. In recent years, there have been a number of
examples from different parts of the world where people, confronted by
oppressive regimes, have created their own parallel, independent news networks,
free from government censorship and control; given the Wikipedia definition of Newsreel
as “ a form of short documentary film prevalent in the first half of the twentieth century,
regularly released in a public presentation place and containing filmed news stories
and items of topical interest” , these programs might be called the first Digital
Newsreels. [14]
These
examples include:
The
Saffron Revolt in Burma in 2007: Individual Burmese, often at great risk to
life and limb, recorded demonstrations by Burmese monks and others against the
Burmese dictatorship, frequently just using
cellphone cameras. The material was then uploaded onto an internet website
based in Norway, and edited and redistributed in Burma on-line on The Democratic Voice of Burma website. Since
the Democratic Voice of Burma frequently
contradicted the official government version of events with visual evidence, the
military government grew increasingly frustrated with this circumvention of
their authority. Finally, in September, 2007, the Burmese junta took the
drastic action of completely shutting down the internet in Burma. Since the
complete shut down of the internet would have serious repercussions for any country,
many anti-government protesters saw this as a classic case of cutting off one’s
nose to spite one’s face, and therefore a victory of sorts.[15]
The 2010
Red Shirt protests in Thailand: After the Thai Army overthrew the democratically
elected Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and installed a government of their
own choosing, there were periodic demonstrations by Thaksin’s supporters who
were known as Red Shirts.
These
demonstrations came to a head in April, 2010, with the occupation of a business
district in downtown Bangkok. The army sent in armored vehicles, but failed to
disperse the demonstrators after a pitched battle. Instead, the soldiers fled
and demonstrators managed to take over several armored vehicles.
Red
Shirt sympathizers taped the action, and produced DVDs with their version of
the event which were then distributed and shown around the countryside with LCD
projectors during Thai New Year celebrations on April 13 using the technique of
narrow casting.[16]
The
defeat of the mighty army was a major propaganda victory for the Red Shirts ; in
2011, after 5 years of military rule, democratic elections were finally held
and the Red Shirt candidate, Yingluck Shinawatra,the sister of Thaksin, won in
a landslide.[17]
The Arab
Spring: One of the more
intriguing aspects of the political phenomenon popularly known as The Arab Spring has been the role played
by digital media in these events. While the relative importance of this role
has been the subject of great debate, there is a general consensus that
so-called citizen journalists have
been a factor, providing information to the public outside of official
government channels through individual written and visual records of events on
websites, blogs and other media forms. The regime of Egyptian dictator Hosni
Mubarak reportedly considered this phenomenon to be such a serious problem that
it considered emulating the example of their Burmese colleagues in shutting
down the internet in Egypt altogether, but ultimately relented for economic
reasons.
The
phenomenon of citizen journalists who
can provide a visual record of events is now a reality in many countries around
the world; a visual record which contradicts an official version of an event can have a
devastating effect on the credibility of the authorities, and there have been
many recent examples. One of the most notorious was the videotape from an
American Apache attack helicopter killing unarmed Iraqi civilians which brought
Wikileaks into the public eye. [18]
II.11.
CONCLUSION:
Thanks to the Digital
Revolution, The New World Information Order is becoming a reality in the realm
of Digital Documentary, though in a far more anarchic form than the government
representatives at the UNESCO conference in 1980 had envisioned.
Their
successors are seeking to restore governmental controls at the World Conference
on International Telecommunications held in Dubai in December, 2012. Their goal
is to update a treaty created under very different conditions in 1988;critics
ranging from Google to Greenpeace warn that the conference could “encourage
governments to censor the internet. “This
is a very important moment in the history of the internet, because this
conference may introduce practices that are inimical to its continued growth
and openness, ”said Vinton G. Cerf, vice president and chief internet
advocate of Google.[19]
The
struggle between those authorities who seek to impose government control and
those who envision an unfettered digital media sphere remains far from
resolved. Stay tuned…[20]
[21]
Let
us now turn our attention to what might be called the Documentary Tradition , and see what relevance the aesthetic conventions of documentary film
might have for Digital Documentary. As shall be seen, the question of what
constitutes, and what does not constitute, a documentary has long been a bone
of contention in both the creative and academic factions of the international
community of cineastes.[22]
While
this dispute, however heated, has generally been limited to academic circles, a
potentially more serious related issue for the future of documentary has been
the tendency of media institutions such as newspapers and television stations
to use digital technology as a cost-saving device for consolidating previously
distinct professional functions. Since such changes directly affect production,
Chapters IV-VI will deal with the effects of digital technology on the
documentary production workflow from preproduction through to postproduction.
[1] Erik Barnouw,( Documentary: A History of the Non-fiction Film)
Second Revised Edition, Oxford University
Press, 1993. pp.345-346
[2]
The origins of this legendary Goldwynism are murky, like many others.
[3]
Michael Renov ( The Subject of
Documentary) University of Minnesota Press, 2004.p.135
[4]
Jane M. Gaines ( Collecting Visible
Evidence) University of Minnesota Press,1999, p. 85
[5]
Patricia Aufderhiede and Peter Jaszi ( Reclaiming Fair Use –How to Put the Balance
Back in Copright) University of
Chicago Press, 2011
[6] The New York Times, January 19, 2012
[7]
Monaco ( ibid) p.479
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrowcasting
[9] Walter Benjamin, (The Work of Art in the Age of tis Technological Reproduction and other
Writings on Media) Belknap, Harvard University Press, 2008, p36
[10] Benjamin, (ibid), p.25
[11]
Monaco ( ibid) p. 585
[12]
As previously noted, the issue of the Digital Revolution and copyright will be
dealt with in more detail in Chapter VII, Fair
Use and Copyright Conflict
[13]
Victoria Burnett,(Cuban Filmmakers start
rolling with Technology International Herald Tribune, January 9, 2013, pp
10-11
[14] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsreel
[15] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Burmese_anti-government_protests
[16] More on Narrow Casting in Chapter 7
[17] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Thai_political_protests
[19] International Herald Tribune, November
29, 2012. P.1&17
[20]
The June, 2013 protests in Taksim Square offered another good example of
Digital Newsreels: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ1UKAyVqZI
[21]
Or, the June, 2013 Protests in Brazil:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZApBgNQgKPU
[22] In this context, it
should be noted that British documentary historian Brian Winston, writing in
1995, once feared that the digital capacity for special effects and image
enhancement would somehow compromise the integrity of documentary itself.
Digital technology will ”have a profound
and perhaps fatal impact on the documentary film. It is not hard to imagine
that every documentarist will shortly (that is to say in the next 50 years)
have to hand, in the form of a desk-top personal video-image manipulating
computer, the wherewithal for complete fakery. What can or will be left of the
relationship between image and reality?[22]
Stella
Bruzzi ( New Documentary)Second
Edition, Routledge,2006,p. 6
Today,
almost 20 years later, there are few others sharing Winston’s concerns,
including Winston himself. People seem to have more pressing concerns.
