Monday, July 29, 2013

TED'S DIGITAL JUNGLE - DIGITAL NEWSREEL #7



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
[18] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_journalism ( more on WikiLeaks in Chapter IV)
[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.

TED'S DIGITAL JUNGLE - DIGITAL NEWSREEL #6


II.9 The Motion Picture Industry:

For the American motion picture industry, digital technology has been a mixed blessing. While production techniques have been streamlined and made more efficient, production costs for commercial features have actually increased as producers aim for bigger blockbuster, hoping to cash in on ancillary markets and spin-offs when the blockbuster becomes a hit.

This strategy necessitates determining the lowest commercial common denominator to reach the mass market, which means minimizing variables like creative expression. In his essay “Conglomerate Aesthetics- Notes on the Disintegration of Film Language”, American film critic David Denby describes the aesthetic results:” Constant and incoherent movement: rushed editing strategies; feeble characterization; pastiche and hapless collage – these are the elements of conglomerate aesthetics and there’s something more going on here than bad filmmaking in such a collection of attention-getting swindles…What we have now is not just a raft of routine bad pictures but the first massively successful nihilistic cinema.”[1]

Denby is cautiously optimistic about the impact of digital technology on production, noting that cheaper production costs might well result in the birth of new cinema movements around the world, though he cannot name one.

Meanwhile, the clock would seem to be running out on the analog motion picture industry. In January, 2012, Nick James wrote in the British cinema periodical Sight and Sound that: “ January 2012 will apparently mark the point at which there will be more digital screens in the world industry than analog, and by the end of 2012 it is estimated that 35mm production’s share of the global market will decline to 37 per cent. What’s more, mainstream usage of 35mm will have vanished from the USA by the end of 2013, with Western Europe set to be all digital in the mainstream one year later.”[2]

 As was the case with the American music industry, the American motion picture industry has made the war on file sharing a top priority, and has embarked upon international crusades to shut down file sharing sites such as Limewire, Megaupload, Demonoid and Pirate Bay. Owners of these websites have been tracked down and arrested under international warrants in countries like New Zealand and Cambodia.
Meanwhile, ISP providers in Europe have begun to police the downloading habits of their customers, punishing those who download from file sharing sites with fines and removal of access to internet.[3] Nonetheless, sales of DVDs are still falling every year, and soon the video store will be as obsolete as the music store, not to mention the bookstore.

 Meanwhile, cinema attendance figures continue to decline around the world, as the increased availability of increasingly inexpensive widescreen HD digital televisions make staying at home to watch movies with family and friends a more convenient and, in the long run, a more economical option than going to the movie theatre.

The decline of the international motion picture industry began over two decades ago, according to the late American intellectual and film critic Susan Sontag , who wrote in 1995 :”Cinema’s 100 years seem to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline.. Cinema, once heralded as the art of the 20th century, seems now, as the century closes numerically, to be a decadent art. Perhaps it is not cinema that has ended but only cinephilia – the name of the very specific kind of love that cinema inspired…” [4]

Like Denby, Sontag attributed the decline of the medium primarily to the astronomical rise in production costs of Hollywood productions and the concurrent reliance on the huge blockbuster loaded with special effects and stars. She concludes her essay on a pessimistic note:” … if cinephilia is dead, then movies are dead too..”[5]

Nonetheless, today, a bit over a decade and a half later, cinema is still very much with us, albeit permeated by a digital technology which is changing the medium profoundly and dramatically. Among other things, digital effects have created the potential for entirely new dimensions of artifice of a kind the early French cinema pioneer George Melies could have only dreamt of. Indeed, some critics have gone so far as to predict that:“ all movies will be animated or computer-generated within fifteen years.”[6]


In addition, the entire viewing experience has been radically transformed from a group endeavor in a movie theatre to a very private one -  on a cellphone or a laptop. Some, like the legendary French cineaste Jean-Luc Godard, also see a profound difference between the rhythmic flicker of analog film 24 frames per second, and the unbroken stream of digital light even when moving digital images are projected on a screen.

Regardless, there appears to be a general consensus that, although Hollywood studios are still finding inventive ways to make money, the Twentieth Century art form known as cinema no longer exists. [7]In the words of James Monaco,” After ninety years of dominating the way we view our world – a long, tempestuous and rewarding life- cinema has quietly passed on.”[8]


[1] David Denby (Do the Movies Have a Future?) Simon and Schuster, 2012, p.32
[2] Nick James ( Editorial in Sight and Sound, January, 2012) as quoted in David Thompson’s THE BIG SCREEN, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. P. 509
[3] The many copyright issues raised by the Digital Revolution will be dealt with in greater details in Chapter VIII, Fair Use and Copyright Conflict
[4] Susan Sontag  (Frankfurter Rundschau, 1995) southerncrossreview.org/43/sontag-cinema.htm
[5] Susan Sontag ( ibid)
[6] Bruce Goldstein(“Flashback; The Year in Movies”)   Village Voice, December 28, 1999
[7] Even in 1987, the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman was quoted by Lasse Svanberg as saying that he did not think the film medium would survive.( ibid)p.74
[8] Monaco ( ibid) p. 421