III.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. [14]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. [15]
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.[16]
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.[17]
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.[18]
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. [19]
III.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.[1]
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…[2]
[3]
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.
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 V-VII will
deal with the effects of digital technology on the documentary production
workflow from preproduction through to postproduction.
[1] International Herald Tribune, November
29, 2012. P.1&17
[2]
The June, 2013 protests in Taksim Square offered another good example of
Digital Newsreels: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ1UKAyVqZI
[3]
Or, the June, 2013 Protests in Brazil:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZApBgNQgKPU
[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
[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 VIII, Fair
Use and Copyright Conflict
[13]
Victoria Burnett,(Cuban Filmmakers start
rolling with Technology International Herald Tribune, January 9, 2013, pp
10-11
[14] Unfortunately, in October, 2013, the Cuban
government announced they were shutting down all of these independent cinemas,
since they had not been licensed, and were therefore illegal.
[15] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsreel
[16] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Burmese_anti-government_protests
[18] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Thai_political_protests
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