I.
Introduction and
Statement of Purpose:
“ In a just and open society, every group or motivated
individual should be able to represent themselves rather than hiring an “
expert”. Once the frontier was literacy ( and still is, in too many places).
The next frontier is truly democratic representation on screen. We – whoever “
we” are – have to become our own expert.”
Michael Rabiger, “ Directing
The Documentary”
I.1 Introduction:
On July 1, 2012, after almost 5 years
as Chief of the Video Unit of MONUSCO,
the United Nations Stabilization
Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, I reached the compulsory UN
retirement age of 62, and was forced to separate from the organization. The
break was not unwelcome; the DRC is a difficult working environment under the
best of circumstances. However, after 4 decades working in film and television
production on 5 continents, I
now finally had the time to study the extraordinary
evolution of communications technology in my lifetime popularly known as “ The Digital Revolution”.
Thanks to the kind indulgence of Professor
Erik Hedling of the University of Lund, and the support of Docent Mats Jonsson,
I have been able to systematize my thoughts and findings, and this thesis is
the result. On that note, I would also like to extend a special appreciation to
the reader for understanding that we are entering uncharted academic waters,
and that the Digital Revolution presents a challenge to all us - particularly
to those of us working in the constantly changing field of multimedia.
Attempting to describe and define contemporary multimedia phenomena is a bit
like trying to catch the proverbial lightning in a bottle.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I
must confess the elitist nature of the film medium has always troubled me; aesthetically,
I always felt more affinity for the works of Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman,
Luis Bunuel and Federico Fellini than I ever did for anything produced in
Hollywood. I was also an enthusiastic advocate of what might be called American Underground Cinema, examples of
which can still be seen today at Jonas Mekas’ Anthology Film Archives.
Hollywood could never figure out a
commercial formula for exploitation of documentary films, so, almost by
default, documentary films were almost always independents,
or films produced outside the
Hollywood system. My first job in film was working as an assistant cameraman on
cinema verite films in New York in
the late 1960’s and early 1970’s; I had
the opportunity to work with many of the legends of that movement - Ricky Leacock, Shirley Clarke, Bill Jersey
and Robert Elfstrom - and the experience has stayed with me; I will never
forget the passion and dedication of those film artists.
After making my own first experimental
feature, a science fiction thriller titled “Mato
Grosso Bye-Bye”, I subsequently began work as writer/director for United
Nations Television in New York, and had the opportunity to make a number of
documentaries dealing with global issues. These were fascinating assignments,
but some of us at UNTV began to wonder if it would not be better if the people
in the developing world were empowered to tell their own stories.
In 1978, I was invited to join
Professor Ingvar Holm’s Doctoral Program in Drama, Theatre and Film at the
University of Lund in Sweden; after completing my course work, I received a
grant from the Swedish International
Development Agency to do doctoral research for a thesis on the Indian film
industry as a potential model for production in the developing world. At that
time, little was known in the Western world regarding the Indian film industry,
except that it had competed successfully with Hollywood in some parts of the
world, and was supposedly the world’s largest film industry.
After six months in India in 1979, I
discovered that the Indian film industry was far more complex than I had
realized; it was extremely difficult to get reliable data of any kind, and, not
being Indian, I did not feel qualified to make any aesthetic assessment of the
films I was seeing. I was forced to conclude that the Indian film industry and
a uniquely Indian phenomenon which could
not be exported as a role model for Third World film production. Film production, even 16 millimeter, was
simply far too expensive a medium to become universally available as a means of
expression around the world. I had
reached a philosophical dead end; it seemed there simply was no viable alternative
to the Western-dominated media world, as exemplified by Hollywood and
television network news broadcasts.
I then returned to Sweden to further my
own professional development as a film director, graduating from the Directors’
Line of Dramatiska Institutet in
Stockholm in 1983, and have worked in the industry ever since in projects
around the world, the bulk of which has revolved around United Nations
Peacekeeping
Missions in countries like Timor Leste
and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In the process, I have had to learn
digital production techniques, and have seen first hand how what at first
seemed like an irritating excuse for a tyranny of button pushers and
malfunctioning machines has evolved in less than a decade into a liberating new
medium with enormous potential to finally make production of visual media
accessible to most of the world. This is a profound change, with massive
socio-economic implications which extend far beyond the world of communications
media – implications which are now being felt around the world in phenomena
like the Arab Spring. Indeed, many observers have suggested that social media played an important role as
communications tools in the revolt.
Meanwhile, other social scientists and
media critics have asserted that the impact of digital media transcends even cognitive
functions; these social scientists today are asserting that the first
generation which has grown up with access to digital technology seems to be
significantly different than preceding generations, and that their brains
actually function differently than those of preceding generations. As American
educator Mark Prensky puts it, “Our
students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our
educational system was designed to teach.”
In other words, there is a major
generation gap in the works that educators and other professionals are now
striving to define. Prensky calls those who have grown up with digital
technology Digital Natives, and those
of us born earlier Digital Immigrants. Dr.
Gary Small, who has been conducting research into the neurological effects of
internet , goes even farther, asserting
that a phsyiological brain gap has been created by use of
digital technology, and that this gap is increasing day by day. The
results of this transformation are still under study; however, most pundits
seem to agree that Digital Natives have
short attention spans, read fewer books and newspapers, and have a tendency to
ignore historical precedents. These tendencies they attribute to what some have
called information overload, or information glut; there is simply too
much information to process which is
assaulting our senses in the present, and reflection therefore becomes
impossible.
Digital Natives are frequently in a state of continuous partial attention, or what Dr. Gary Small terms a digital fog.
In terms of documentary, this means
there is a major disconnect in progress among Digital Natives with the
tradition of analog cinema, in general; just as it is difficult for today’s
educators to get students to read books, it is difficult to get today’s
students to watch old films – particularly black and white, not to mention
silent films. However, speaking as a Digital Immigrant, it has been my happy
experience as an educator that all is not yet lost; once the initial threshold
of resistance is passed, contemporary students can appreciate cinematic quality
of all kinds, no matter how old it is.
It has also been my experience that the
same is true of supposedly less sophisticated audiences in the developing
world; audiences everywhere still respond to quality, and, contrary to the view of some communicators, it is not
necessary to “dumb down” communications
products for anyone – be they Digital
Natives or citizens of the developing world.
As shall be seen, documentarians, with
few vested interests to protect, and being generally radical by nature, have
enthusiastically embraced digital technology, and – unlike many of their
corporate and political sponsors - are now in the vanguard of exploring the
possibilities of this new age of human development. Indeed, the documentary
genre is in the midst of something of a renaissance. We should all try to profit
from their combined experience and their examples.
As shall also be seen, digital
documentary, being
significantly less expensive and easier to use than its analog predecessor, is
making documentary far more democratic and international than it ever was
during the analog era. While this might seem a utopian ideal, the potential
implications of this change are profound.
As noted previously, analog cinema was
never a particularly democratic form of communication. As American cinema historian James Monaco
writes:” Film has changed the way we
perceive the world, and therefore how we operate in it. Yet, while the
existence of film may be revolutionary, the practice of it most often has not
been. Because the channels of distribution have been limited, because costs
have prohibited access to film production to all but the wealthiest, the medium
has been subject to strict control.
One of the buzzwords in developmental
planning circles in the past decade has been capacity building; this means passing on technological skills to
developing countries so they can become self-reliant and independent. In the world of communications media, as noted
previously, the cost of using analog film, audio and television technology has
been a major stumbling block.
Now, thanks to digital technology, this
stumbling block has disappeared – a development I witnessed first hand in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, where I saw the phenomenon of Radio Okapi,
which is easily the most successful example of developmental communications
capacity building in the world.
The result of a joint effort by the
United Nations and the Swiss foundation Fondation
Hirondelle, Radio Okapi was created in 2002 to provide a reliable source of
national information in a country devastated by war. Today, a little over 10
years later, with a staff of 200 reporting from around the DRC, Radio Okapi
reaches over 50% of the population, and is the most popular and trusted radio
station in the country. To say that Radio Okapi is a remarkable success story
in digital media would be an understatement; personally, I would have liked to
emulate the Okapi capacity building model in digital video production, but this
activity lay outside our mission mandate, and probably would have been blocked
by our partners in the Congolese government, who already had periodic conflicts
with Radio Okapi reporting on sensitive issues. Freedom of expression comes at
a price in the DRC; three different Radio Okapi journalists have been murdered
under very suspicious circumstances.
I
am convinced that Radio Okapi is only the beginning, and that developing
countries around the world will soon develop their own brands of digital media
for domestic consumption. The bottom line is that the advent of Digital Documentary means that people around the world can, for the
first time, visually document and
share stories about their realities with their peers virtually everywhere. This
is a radical change.
In this respect, the state of digital
documentary is but a microcosm of the larger world of multimedia; to echo the
words of many a pundit, we find ourselves at a watershed moment in human
development, a moment at which we suddenly have access to tools and capacities
we could only have dreamt of a few years ago. Our ability to harness these tools in a
positive way will be greatly dependent upon our grasp of the many implications
of their use. As the American cultural
critic Neil Postman warned us in 1992,“A
new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.”
