DOCUMENTARY
IN THE AGE OF
NEW MEDIA
FOUR CASE STUDIES
Doctoral Dissertation by Theodore Folke
Supervisor: Professor Lars Gustaf Andersson
Centre for Languages and Literature
Lund University
Lund, Sweden
For my father, Ellis I. Folke, who always believed in me;
for my dear wife Bua, who has always been there for me;
and for grassroots documentarians around the world.
“All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.”
Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage1
“…just as the printing press in the fourteenth century and photography in the nineteenth century had a revolutionary impact on the development of modern media and culture, today we are in the middle of a new media revolution- the shift of all culture to computer-mediated forms of production, distribution, and communication…”
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media2
Table of Contents:
i. Acknowledgements
I. Introduction
II. Defining Documentary
III. The Age of New Media
IV. Case Study #1: United Nations Television
V. Case Study #2: The MONUSCO Video Unit
VI. Case Study #3: East Timor: Betrayal and Resurrection
VII. Case Study #4: Citizen Boilesen
VIII. Conclusions
1. Preproduction
2. Production
3. Postproduction
4. Distribution
5. Final Thoughts
IX. Appendix A: Notes
X. Appendix B: Bibliography
XI. Ex Cursus: Interviews with Documentarians
I. Introduction
“In this age of computerized information and satellite systems, we must work for the growth of what might be called a “communicatarian” democracy, giving everybody access to the technical resources of the mass media both at the national and the international level.”3
Sven Hamrell, The Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation
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. I loved my work, but after 4 decades working in film and television production on 5 continents, I now finally would have the time to study the extraordinary evolution of media technology in my lifetime – the evolution popularly known as The Digital Revolution.
If there were any naysayers who doubted that we were in the midst of a profound information revolution, I think the cataclysmic 2016 American presidential elections should have removed any remaining doubts. The bottom line is that the vertical integration of international media production and distribution is no longer monolithic and omnipotent. Thanks to digital technology, both media consumers and producers have other options – options which they are now vigorously exploiting. Manufactured consent can no longer be taken for granted.
Until recently, the critical study of what we shall call New Media has been hampered by the lack of a language adequate to describe the new phenomena. Now, thanks to pioneers like Lev Manovich and Henry Jenkins, an adequate language is available. The goal of this dissertation is to use that new language to explore through three case studies how the rapid development of New Media has changed the cinematic genre of documentary in terms of production, post-production and, distribution.3
In the spirit of full disclosure, I shall begin with a chronology of my professional and personal journey from analog to digital media.
I.2. 1950-1980
Born in New York in 1950 to a Swedish father and an American mother, I have been a dual national since birth. However, even when we lived in Sweden, my father insisted we speak English at home and sent me to English schools in Stockholm. As a result, English became my first language. In 1960, my father became head of The American-Swedish News Exchange with the Swedish Foreign Ministry. He then decided I was old enough to be introduced to cinema as an art form; under his tutelage, I began to learn to distinguish between European cinema art and Hollywood entertainment
In 1963, we moved to New York and, at age 13, I was sent to Phillips Exeter Academy, a prestigious American boarding school in New Hampshire. In my senior year, I took an experimental film course with Sergei Eisenstein’s Film Form & The Film Sense4 as a textbook; we also screened cinema classics in 16 millimeter while making our own 8 mm productions inspired by our favorite directors (who, in my case, was Luis Bunuel). While I had no idea what I was doing, I loved the entire production process and quickly became a complete cinephile.
In 1968, I became a student of humanities at the University of Lund in Sweden and began to look for summer jobs in the film industry in New York. Since Hollywood could never figure out a commercial formula for the exploitation of documentary films, most documentaries in those days were produced in New York, and I was able to find work as an assistant to some of the legends of the cinema verite movement - Ricky Leacock, Shirley Clarke, Bill Jersey, and Robert Elfström. Their creative integrity and dedication made a lasting impression.
In 1972, I got my Filosofie Kandidat in Drama, Theatre and Film from the University of Lund’s Department of Literary Science, which was kind enough to publish my thesis The Theatrical Theory of Antonin Artaud.5 I found Artaud’s search for a universal theatrical language fascinating, and I wanted to create a cinematic version of that language while applying for the Directors’ Line, Film and Television, of Dramatiska Institutet, the Swedish state film school in Stockholm. The competition for admission was intense, and I was understandably rejected as a novice. Nonetheless, Janos Hersko, then the Directing Instructor, was kind enough to see me, and he suggested I reapply when I had more work to show.
That was all I needed to hear, and I decided It was time to make a film of my own. My father found something called The Orson Welles Film School6 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and made me an offer I could not refuse. The school apparently owned a movie theatre and a restaurant, and students could work in their restaurant in exchange for access to 16 mm equipment and an editing room. In two years, I completed my first film - a 40-minute, 16 mm. color science fiction thriller titled Mato Grosso Bye-Bye (1974).
As is often the case with first films, Mato Grosso Bye-By was a mix of both personal triumphs as well as many humbling cinematic lessons learned. Public reactions to screenings in Europe and New York indicated that, while the film had respectable production value, my scriptwriting skills needed a lot of work.
Fortunately, a few of my cultural heroes in New York, like the author William S. Burroughs and the cartoonist Neal Adams, liked the film, and the production quality was good enough to land me a freelance assignment with United Nations Television in New York writing and directing the official UN Thirtieth Anniversary film To Be Thirty (1975) with my colleagues Steve Whitehouse and David Sherman serving as co-writer and editor, respectively.
It was a great opportunity. With North American youth as the target audience. our assignment was to create a short film (c. 13 minutes) on how the United Nations had changed along with the rest of the world since the end of World War II. Stylistically, the film was to be a compilation film in the style created by the great Soviet filmmaker Esther Shub, using the UN Film Library for stock material. While the UN Film Library turned out to a treasure trove of rare historic footage from around the world, Steve and I soon discovered that thanks to Cold War politics, the film was a political minefield. Major events like the Korean and Vietnam Wars were completely off-limits, which made it all but impossible to deliver a linear historical narrative with any credibility.
Our solution was to abandon the standard UN Griersonian Direct Address narration (derided in-house as The Voice of God) and instead create an impressionistic, stream-of-conscious narration that dealt with emotional realities in no particular chronological order. Thanks to creative support from our boss Marcel Martin, former head of the Canadian Film Board, as well as a spectacular soundtrack by the popular English group Pink Floyd, To Be Thirty7 was a dramatic departure from conventional UNTV institutional fare.
To Be Thirty proceeded to win many prizes and, eventually become the most popular UN film ever, being shown around the world in over 15 different languages. My euphoria was short-lived, however; it soon became clear to me there were no permanent openings at the UN Secretariat for anyone without political connections, and I was forced to confront some harsh realities.
For example, while UNTV was well positioned to produce high-quality documentaries about important issues ranging from climate change to refugee resettlement, the strong emphasis on avoiding controversy made it difficult to tell any stories with dramatic interest. Furthermore, in the dynamic era of Cinema Verite, the institutional UN films were stylistic dinosaurs. In fact, UNTV films had almost no distribution at all in the United States.
There was also a basic ethical issue that troubled me and some of my colleagues; since we were promoting what was then called The New World Order, shouldn’t that New World Order include stories told by the people of those countries themselves? The idea of white Westerners like us making films about the serious issues of the developing world seemed more than a bit neo-colonial, and we had many discussions about how to change that.10
My dream was to get out into what UN veterans call the field – where the real work was being done, far from the bureaucratic intrigues of the UN Secretariat - so I was thrilled when I was offered a post on the first UN Mission to Namibia in 1978. I had been preparing for the trip for a few weeks when the South Africans suddenly invaded Angola, and the Namibia mission had to be aborted.11
I decided it was time to return to Sweden to take up Professor Ingvar Holm’s 1972 invitation to become a member of his Doctoral Program in Drama, Theatre and Film at the University of Lund. After completing my 55 credits of course work in Lund, I proposed a dissertation on the Indian film industry as a template for film industries in the developing world. I then received a grant from the Swedish International Development Agency to do doctoral research for my project. 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.
I left for India in 1979 and quickly understood that India was far more complex than I ever could have imagined. For example, in my travels around the Indian subcontinent, I learned that the Indian film industry was highly decentralized, with films produced in different states in the local languages; much to my surprise, there was apparently no dubbing at all. I also discovered that it was difficult to get reliable metric data of any kind, and, frankly, not being Indian, I was hesitant to make any aesthetic assessment of the films I was seeing.
Eventually, I discovered what appeared to be a thriving film industry in the southern Indian state of Kerala, which produced over 100 feature films a year in the local language of Malayalam. I was impressed and was even more impressed by the quality of the best Malayalam films, which had more in common with gritty Italian neorealism than with the Bombay masala formula melodramas which were the standard cinema fare in the rest of the country. However, I then learned from a Keralan film producer that the local film industry was notorious for laundering money earned by the many Keralans working in the Persian Gulf states, and I was forced to reconsider my plan to make the Malayalam industry a model for the developing world.
If this money laundering was as pervasive as I began to suspect, how could I present Kerala as a model for sustainable film production? Certainly not, at any rate, to my Swedish sponsors in SIDA. I found myself in an ethical cul-de-sac. Ultimately, I concluded that if there was a viable template for an alternative to the Western-dominated global media, it was probably not Kerala.12
One good thing happened in India that made the trip personally worthwhile; I got to know the great Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist, who was shooting scenes in India for American director Paul Mazursky, whom I knew from New York. Sven was looking for a screenwriter to adapt a story by Swedish author Sigfried Södergren about colonial life in the French Congo called The Man on the Island. When Paul recommended me, I had a job. I started work for Sven in Sweden and returned what was left of my grant to SIDA.
Sven was wonderful to work for. He was full of stories, and he taught me a great deal about the film industry and Congo, where Sven’s parents had been missionaries. When Sven told me, he would be working with Ingmar Bergman on Ingmar’s Fanny and Alexander in Filmhuset, I decided this would be a good time to reapply to Dramatiska Institutet and further my professional development with Janos Hersko, who was now the head of the school.
I. 3. 1980-2000
This time I was accepted, and I graduated from the Film and TV Directors’ Line of Dramatiska Institutet in Stockholm in 1983. It was the best educational experience I have ever had. Janos kept me and my two directing classmates13 constantly busy with production exercises of increasing complexity and intensity with our respective teams, and he was always a tough critic. In those days, film stock was a big out-of-pocket expense for DI, so we were forced to carefully plan every shot, which was excellent training.14
There was also a big emphasis on developing teamwork skills. We directors were also writers and editors, we had to learn to persuade our teammates to do what we wanted them to do, and that was also excellent training. In addition, the school helped us get paying jobs on our vacations, so I had the opportunity to edit 16 mm newscasts for Swedish Television, and 35 mm features for Europa Film. Perhaps the piece de resistance was the opportunity to work as interns on Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander.
We also had a television course in which we could shoot analog video with both studio cameras and ¾ inch portable cameras, and then edit both off-line and on-line. I quickly appreciated the limits of analog video at that time; the studio cameras were big and cumbersome, the portable cameras were very expensive, and the online editing required a lot of expensive hardware. The entire workflow of the analog video was so expensive that it was a production option available only the wealthiest countries. In addition, there was the problem of substantial loss of quality in both picture and sound in any duplication from the original.
It was clear that analog video was still unsuitable for most documentaries, and, as a result, the professional medium for documentaries remained celluloid. This usually meant larger crews in the field15 and substantial costs for air freight transportation and refrigeration for heat sensitive film stock both on location and for shipping to one of the few reliable film laboratories in the world for processing and prints. Given the normally high shooting ratio of documentaries – anywhere from 20:1 to 60:1 – this meant documentaries were an expensive proposition, and rarely ever commercially lucrative. As a result, there were few documentaries made about issues of concern to the developing world, and some Third World countries responded by calling for a New World Information Order.16
My distrust for the new electronic technology was only heightened by a disastrous introduction to digital sound. I had planned a big screening of my examination film Supernova, starring the late Monica Zetterlund, and my sound engineer wanted to use a new digital mixing system to make a soundtrack in 17.5 millimeters. The results proved to be catastrophic – the film went way out of synch, and, try as we might for two days and nights, we could not correct the problem. When we showed the film to the invited guests, the film was still out of synch. I had to interrupt the screening and show the double-system rough cut I had edited and pray that all my splices would hold and that the film would not start to burn in the projector.
While my splices miraculously held, I aged a few years during that screening, and became an arch-Luddite and avoided all things digital for almost a decade.17
Fortunately, thanks in large part to my work for Sven Nykvist, I had a job as soon as I graduated from DI - an offer to write a screenplay for a major Swedish producer – Christer Abrahamsen and Europa Film. The project was a feature comedy with the late Swedish comedy star Janne Carlsson and his friend Gösta Wälivaara. They already had an idea for the film; my task was to provide a dramatic structure for their ideas and gags. While Janne had a reputation for being difficult, we got along, and I was even invited to join the team on a research trip to the co-producing country of Cuba.
After two years, the result was the satirical comedy Svindlande Affärer, which somehow survived a mid-production change of directors and the Svensk Filmindustri take-over of Europa Film, minimal promotion and universally negative reviews to become the most popular Swedish film of 1985. Indeed. the Swedish Minister of Culture surprised many with his kind words for the film at the yearly Guldbagge awards. Unlike the Swedish critics, who had attacked the conservative personal politics of the star, Janne Carlsson, perhaps the minister understood that the subtext of the film was a merciless satire on Nobel laureate Milton Friedman and American supply-side economics. Perhaps he had even talked with our Cuban co-producers; their representative invited me to return to Cuba to develop a script on the American mafia during the Batista Era.18 19
Producer Christer Abrahamsen was also happy with my work; after the tragic assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme, Christer asked me if I wanted to write a screenplay about the murder. I was interested, but when I learned that a director I respected named Kjell Sundvall was planning his own film on the assassination and that his theory regarding the guilty parties was similar to mine, I told Christer that I had to pass.
I returned to New York and worked as a film editor and writer for various producers while trying to sell feature screenplays, but with little success. In 1986, I had what I thought might be a breakthrough with a feature comedy written with my Ethiopian friend Elisabeth Atnafu for Paramount Pictures titled Ambassador at Large about a fictitious African UN Ambassador in New York. However, after expressing interest, Paramount suddenly changed their minds. When the film Coming to America had its premiere, both Elisabeth and I saw substantial similarities to our submitted screenplay. So did Writers Guild, East, President Mona Mangan, who told us that such disputes were not uncommon.
We could not afford a lawyer, and it took us a few years to find one who would take for a percentage of the eventual settlement. In 1993, we sued Paramount for $100 million, and the case even got some publicity.20 Our lawyer, Carl Person, was a specialist in copyright cases, and he thought we had a strong case because of the obvious similarities and the fact that we had written proof that Paramount had had access to our screenplay. Ultimately, however, the case was adjudicated by an 80-year-old judge who failed to see the same similarities we saw, and the case was closed.
I decided to avoid dealing with the major studios for a while and began to focus on working with people through the Independent Feature Project, an organization which held a yearly market to help independent filmmakers find international buyers.21
At the time, New York independents were experimenting with new production technology, and in 1994, I had my second encounter with digital sound This time the experience was positive. I was supervising the re-shoot of low budget feature for a friend, and I had to meet with the composer to record the soundtrack. The composer turned out to be the producer of rap music named Floyd F. (Fucking) Fisher. I discovered Mr. Fisher had a portable Sony DAT digital recorder of the kind that the Recording Industry of America had unsuccessfully tried to ban in the United States, and I decided to test it for all our sound work – including music and voice-overs.
The results were a revelation. With his humble $500 DAT recorder, Mr. Fisher was able to make sound recordings in a quiet room of better quality than I had been making for $500 an hour for the UN at big New York sound studio like Magno Sound. I suddenly understood why the RIA wanted to stop these recorders; we proceeded to do the final sound mix in a low budget digital production house, and all went well.22
We were less fortunate with the images. We had shot on a new Sony analog video format called Hi-8, with mixed results. The camera was small and easy to work with, but, while the first-generation images looked excellent, as soon as we made a copy, the picture deteriorated significantly. Clearly, Hi-8 was not the answer. I went back to the drawing board and continued to try to develop projects until the end of the Millennium.
To pay the rent, I got a job in 1997 as an Adjunct Professor of English and Speech at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, a division of the State University of New York and one of the world’s largest design schools, with a highly diverse student body from around the world. I enjoyed teaching at FIT; I was able to teach courses in English Composition, Short Fiction, Film History, and Screenwriting, and both my students and colleagues were supportive and creative.
I.4. 2000-2012
In 1999, I was unexpectedly offered a position as a video producer with UNTAET, the new UN Administration in the tiny Southeast Asian island nation of East Timor. While I was flattered, I confess I suspected that I had been offered the job with UNTAET because no one else wanted to do it. After all, East Timor was a remote, impoverished and mosquito infested island with a violent history, as well as tropical diseases like encephalitis, malaria, and dengue.However, after meeting the charismatic Nobel Peace Prize-winning East Timorese leader Jose Ramos Horta in New York , I also realized that the story of East Timor was one of the political miracles of the late 20th century, so I decided it was a perfect way to start the new Millennium.
However, as soon as I arrived in the UNTAET Video Unit office in the East Timorese capital of Dili on a sweltering day in January of 2000, I discovered that, while we had sturdy Sony TRV 900 cameras, our rented Indonesian computer hardware had seen much better days in Jakarta and that our editing software was a user-unfriendly clone of Adobe Premiere called Speed Razor, which I would not have wished on my worst enemy. The clincher was the fact that the island had no electricity at all making any local broadcast impossible.
The 2000 UNTAET Video Unit team consisted of myself, a talented Danish colleague who was an experienced videographer, two capable East Timorese cameramen, who had been working with Indonesian television, and an Australian who was on vacation. The UNTAET mandate emphasized capacity building, so there was one East Timorese for every international. We started to prepare to cover the official opening of UNTAET, and the arrivals of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and newly elected Indonesian President Abdur Rahman Wahid.
At the time of my arrival, an Australian led intervention force called INTERFET was winding down operations to pacify East Timor and hunt down the remnants of Indonesian backed militias still terrorizing the population. East Timor itself was in ruins, thanks to the Indonesian army’s scorched earth policy; an estimated 80% of all structures had been burned when the TNI left after the UN-run popular referendum had decisively voted 78.5% for East Timorese self-determination in late 1999.
The UN mission which had been running the referendum, UNAMET, had then been chased off the island, and the many mutilated bodies we saw in the Dili morgue were clear evidence of massacres. Confronted with this massive devastation left behind due to the scorched earth policy, I decided to document as much as possible, both for the legal record as well to be able to tell the story to future generations of East Timorese and international audiences.
My Timorese colleagues showed me reported massacre sites around Dili and helped me set up interviews with eyewitnesses.24 As the story began to take shape, our Australian colleague returned from this vacation. As soon as I met him, I knew I had a problem. While I outranked him in the UN hierarchy, he seemed to think he was the boss. He was also threatening and physically aggressive and was more than ready to sabotage my work in any way he could.
A month later, some furious East Timorese colleagues told me this same Australian colleague had physically assaulted one of our female Timorese presenters. To calm things down, I organized a staff meeting, fully expecting that this assault of a female staff member would be punished – only to be shocked when I failed to get any support from the administration. The Australian got off without even a slap on the wrist. Clearly, he had friends in high places.
It was a difficult situation. UNTAET was in start-up mode, and there were internal power conflicts in many departments. Did I want to commit to a long internal struggle with a possible physical confrontation? I was not sure. While I have a black belt in Aikido, my job description was to be a video producer, and my training teaches me to seek a peaceful conflict resolution whenever possible. I could see, however, that this conflict might be long and unpleasant, with an uncertain outcome.
Thanks to digital duplication, however, there was another option. I had discovered digital dupes were as good as originals, and I knew from my friends at UNTV in New York I would have their support if I made an independent feature documentary about UNTAET. Over the course of a few weeks, I quietly duped all the mini-DV tapes in the office. When it was time to renew my contract, I left the mission with some 70 hours of mini-DV tapes in my backpack.
Back in New York, with the help of user-friendly (non-Apple!) service centers like Tek-Serve, I was able to buy a Final Cut Pro 3 editing suite for about $10,000. Some of my students at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology were even kind enough to serve as unpaid interns on the production. One – Jade Ann Benetatos – knew Final Cut Pro. I soon learned that many of my instincts from years of film editing did not work in the digital environment, but Jade Ann, as a true digital native, patiently taught me how to fundamentally change my approach to digital media.
Since we were making a compilation documentary, we were constantly searching for archival material to compliment the original material I brought back from East Timor. UNTV had given me the rights to all UN material free of charge, but otherwise, I had to digitize whatever material I could find and hope to find money to pay for the rights when the project was completed. Thanks to John Miller of The East Timor Action Network, I was able to find some excellent material in various formats which my friends at New York’s Rafik Video would then digitize for a moderate fee. Thanks to Jade Ann, the editing went smoothly, and, in August 2002, I was invited to screen a rough cut of the documentary to help celebrate Timor Leste’s Independence Day at the United Nations in New York. The initial working title was East Timor: Betrayal and Resurrection, and the audience included many veterans of the 1999 siege of the UNAMET mission compound in Dili.
Their response was positive and gratifying. I was also personally thrilled by the quality of the projected sound and image in the theatre; it was hard to believe that these images had come from the innocuous Mini-DV tapes I had brought back from East Timor in my backpack.25
In December 2003, the final cut of East Timor: Betrayal and Resurrection won the UN Correspondents’ Association’s Ricardo Ortega Memorial Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism. I shared the dais with fellow UNCA Award recipients Hans Blix, Lakhdar Brahimi, and Nicole Kidman, and the late UN Secretary General Kofi Annan presented the award, - a black Waterford crystal vase - along with a check for $10,000. That was a proud moment since my competition had included the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and other global networks.26
In 2005, I was invited to return to Timor Leste by Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao and President Jose Ramos Horta to do a documentary sequel. I decided this was a unique opportunity, so my wife and I sold our house outside of New York, and I bought equipment I thought I would need to work on location in Timor Leste - a Sony Z-1 camera and a customized Apple PowerBook for editing on location.
In 2006, we set up a production office with an editing suite in Thailand, only to learn that President Ramos Horta had been shot and seriously wounded in post-electoral violence. With the situation in Timor Leste uncertain, I had to put the second Timor Leste project on hold.I thought it might be a good time to resume work on my dissertation with a new focus on the Digital Revolution, so I flew to Sweden to visit Professor Erik Hedling, the new Chair of Film Studies in Lund, to see if this would be possible. Professor Hedling was kind enough to give me a green light for a new dissertation with the working title Digital Documentary – The Revolution That Will Not Be Televised.
On my return to Thailand, I found a job as a Lecturer in Multimedia at an English language school called Asian University in Thailand and was ready to start writing when I received an unexpected offer from the United Nations Mission to the Democratic Republic in the Congo (MONUC) to become Chief, Video Unit. I already knew a bit about Congo from my work with Sven Nykvist, and I also knew that MONUC was the biggest and most important UN Peacekeeping mission in the world – a giant step up from UNTAET. In short, becoming Chief of the MONUC Video Unit seemed like my dream job. Aside from being a gratifying vindication of all of my previous efforts with the UN, I also realized I only had a few years of professional life left within the UN system, so I put my dissertation on hold a second time. My new MONUC employers said they wanted me in Kinshasa as soon as possible, so I prepared to leave for Central Africa.
After going through induction and training at the UN Base in Brindisi, Italy, I finally arrived in Kinshasa on December 7, 2007, and found an exceptionally talented Video Unit team consisting of 10 professionals recruited by my predecessors Yasmina Bouziane and Isabelle Abric. When it comes to updating technology and procurement of new equipment, the UN, like most bureaucracies, can move at a glacial pace, but in Congo, I discovered that thanks to the heroic efforts of my technically gifted colleagues Carlo Ontal and Simon Davies, the MONUC Video Unit was equipped with the latest Sony cameras and state-of-art editing suites. I could soon see that the MONUC Video Unit was a unique professional opportunity to do work of the highest quality, and I became determined to make the most of it.
Our primary mandate was winning Congolese hearts and minds, and, over the next 5 years, we produced over 200 weekly video magazines broadcast on all major television stations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.27 We also produced some memorable long-form documentaries to show our global audience what we were doing. In the process, I managed to survive 6 different senior managers, ultimately becoming OIC/PID myself before I left.
In retrospect, I am proud of the work we did. Much of our success was due to our ability to focus on our work and to stay relatively free of the internal intrigues and conflict that seem to plague UN Peacekeeping missions. Our creative core remained intact until UN rules forced me to retire at age 62 in July 2012.28
I.5. 2012-Present
Before I retired from MONUSCO, my wife and I discussed our future plans. She wanted to return to New York, so we put our house in Thailand on the market and set about planning our move. In New York, I found out from my old colleagues at SUNY/FIT that I would be able to return as an Adjunct Professor of English and Communications, as well as create film courses for the brand-new Department of Film, Media Studies and Performing Arts. While I was officially now an educator again, I also had two major projects in mind and I knew both projects would have the blessing of my superiors at FIT; even though FIT is a design school, they had been very supportive of my East Timor film, and had even helped me arrange a gala screening at FIT in 2006 for East Timor’s newly elected President Xanana Gusmao and his then Foreign Minister, my old friend Jose Ramos Horta.29
I.6. Congo Rising
First of all, as a television producer, I wanted to make an independent feature documentary to tell the story of MONUSCO and Congo to the world - just as I tried to do for UNTAET and East Timor. I knew I had a number of advantages I had lacked with UNTAET. Aside from 5 years of original material, I also had the official blessing of the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations and the UN Department of Public Information, both of which had liked my work in the DRC.
The UN has no funds for such long-form productions, so I resurrected my old American production company, The Samba Project, LLC, with two colleagues from MONUSCO – editor Meriton Ahmeti from Kosovo and cinematographer Albert Liesegang from Germany – and produced a demo reel to show to prospective backers.30
For backers with short attention spans, we created a 5-minute demo with the working title of Congo Rising.31Finally, to present the best material in the sequence I also assembled a Video Portfolio.32 As was the case with my East Timor film, my goal was to give a voice to the host nation, so I made Horeb Bulambo Shindano, the star Congolese reporter for our weekly video magazine MONUSCO REALITIES, director of Congo Rising.
In 2017, I was forced to put Congo Rising on hold for a lack of funding. Today, even though the country has been declared a humanitarian disaster. Congo does not seem to be considered worthy of Western news coverage at all- unless there is an Ebola epidemic. Nonetheless, it remains my belief that, like books, feature documentaries such as Congo Rising are essential to the understanding of important historical or cultural phenomena.
In 2018, Horeb enjoyed the international success as the field producer of the award-winning feature documentary – This is Congo33, directed by American documentarian Dan McCabe.34
I.7. Documentary in the Age of New Media
As a result, since 2017, my primary focus has been on writing this dissertation under the capable and supportive supervision of Professor Lars Gustaf Andersson of the Centre for Languages and Literature of Lund University, with generous support from the Holger and Thyra Lauritzen Foundation in Sweden.
Since I retired from MONUSCO in 2012, I have seen my views on the Digital Revolution evolve along with my professional status. When I was working in East Timor and Congo with a focus on production, I was an unabashed Digital Utopian. The rapid development of digital production methods had made my work easier, and sometimes even made what had seemed impossible possible.
Now, however, as an educator at FIT in New York since 2014, I find I have become more reserved in my enthusiasm and might now be described as a Digital Agnostic. There are several reasons for this change.
The first reason is that my students in my EN 321 Strategies for Business Communications classes seem concerned with the way social media is taking over lives an early age in the United States. They worry that social media has become all-pervasive –if not dominant – among young people in New York.35
My students’ concerns are echoed by some social scientists and media critics who believe that the impact of New 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.”36
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 the internet, goes even farther, asserting that a physiological brain gap has been created by use of digital technology and that this gap is increasing day by day.37The results of this transformation are still under study; however, most pundits agree that Digital Natives have shorter 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 and reflection, therefore, becomes impossible.38 Digital Natives are therefore frequently in a state of continuous partial attention, or what Dr. Gary Small terms a digital fog.39
In terms of cinema and cinema studies, there also seems to be a major disconnect in progress among Digital Nativeswith the traditions 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.
As an educator, I confess I find the lack of cinematic literacy of American Millennials distressing. Even otherwise well-educated students who are film majors have seen few of the films universally regarded as classics – including films by Fellini, Kurosawa, Wilder and others. It seems that the entire culture of art cinemas in New York has vanished and has not been replaced. Seeing La Dolce Vita or Seven Samurai streamed on an I-Phone cannot be compared to seeing these films as they were intended to be seen – on a big screen in a theatre with other cineastes. It has been my experience that audiences everywhere in the world 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. Be that as it may, the current consensus appears to be that the future for motion picture theatres in the United States is bleak.40 While digital technology has made everything easier, it has also facilitated short cuts in the creative process and, in some cases, led to a complete rejection of analog production methods.41
However, some feel that the documentary genre is bucking the negative trend and is actually in the midst of something of a renaissance. A recent article in The Ringer Podcast Network waxed euphoric about the current documentary boom:
“It’s documentary—six to be exact, all of which have been released to theaters this year, and all of which have earned at least $1.5 million at the box office. RBG, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Three Identical Strangers, Whitney, Pope Francis: A Man of His Word, and Pandas represent, if not a major moment, then at least a meaningful boomlet for theatrical documentary filmmaking, perhaps the culmination of almost 50 years of evolution and exposure for the form, stretching back to the Maysles brothers’ Salesman…”42
These numbers are impressive and, according to The Wall Street Journal they have even gotten the attention of Hollywood producers:
“Their success this summer has surprised many in Hollywood, especially people who worried that streaming services would keep viewers at home on their couches and not in theaters…Documentaries offer complex storytelling that some filmmakers say big studios have forsaken in their pursuit of superhero franchises and thrillers…”43
With this kind of industry buzz, it is no surprise that there has been a corresponding increase in documentary production. According to The Wall Street Journal:
“Michael Donaldson, an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, said that a decade ago, his firm provided legal services for 20 to 25 documentaries a year. Today, it’s at least 275…”44
This is a significant change from the day when the American entertainment industry branded documentaries as “tough sells,” and documentarians themselves as “starving artists.”. However, I believe it would be premature to conclude that the “documentary boomlet for theatrical documentary” described in The Ringer Podcast is indicative of any general audience preference for viewing documentaries in theatres rather than on streaming devices. Indeed, the rapidly growing dominance of the streaming service Netflix as both producer, distributor and exhibitor has been the subject of controversy in recent years as some major artists such as Steven Spielberg fear that personal streaming on devices will eclipse the communal experience of cinema completely. This ambivalence was succinctly expressed by Dame Helen Mirren in a recent speech in Las Vegas: “I love Netflix- Fuck Netflix!”45
Be that as it may, it does seem safe to say that digital technology, is significantly less expensive and easier to use than analog predecessors, is making documentary far more democratic and international than it ever was during the analog era. After all, 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 production to all but the wealthiest, the medium has been subject to strict control.”46
In the spirit of full disclosure, let me say here that it is my personal hope that the proliferation of New Mediaaround the world will allow people to visually document and share stories about their realities with their peers virtually everywhere. As has been recognized by New Media scholar Lev Manovich, this would enable a true fulfillment of the Soviet documentarian Dziga Vertov’s dream of Kino-Pravda., and the creation of database cinema.47
In short, as pundits like Manovich and others have noted, 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.
In this context, my own views closely mirror those of my fellow New York documentarians and educator Kelly Anderson and Martin Lucas of Hunter College when they write,
“There is a flourishing of interest in the documentary form, as evidenced by the explosion of documentary film festivals, collectives, online communities and more. A key reason for this explosion, we believe, is the rise of new digital citizenship in the age of the internet and a healthy belief in questioning the authority of traditional sources of information…”48
While most of my professional life has been devoted to manufacturing mass consent for the United Nations and its affiliates around the world, I strongly endorse the concept of digital citizenship. If this dissertation can contribute to the development of digital citizenship in any way around the world, I will be happy.
I.8. A Few Notes on Terminology
While the phenomenon of New Media is ubiquitous today, I believe it is worthwhile putting this phenomenon in a historical context. It is easy to forget that the concept of digital technology was first mentioned in a paper written in 1936 by a brilliant British mathematician named Alan Turing, perhaps best known for cracking the German Enigma Code in World War II. Working with a theoretical computer model, Turing proved that a digital computer could be “programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device.”49
In this context, it is important to bear in mind that the subject of this dissertation is a 20th century cinematic genre in a 21st century technological environment, and that traditional distinctions between analog media forms such as print, film, and even television can become invalid when transferred to New Media.50 For example, in film studies, a documentary has generally been categorized as a genre of the film medium. What, then, is the relationship between documentary film and digital documentary?
The answer is that they may be aesthetic cousins employing the same general aesthetic conventions and genre rules but are fundamentally different media forms. A digital copy of a documentary such as Robert Flaherty’s classic Nanook of the North might appear to be identical to the celluloid original. but, reality, a digital documentary is as radically different from a documentary film as an internet blog is from a traditional newspaper.
As shall be seen, the entire process of documentary production from financing, research through to distribution has been dramatically changed. In the process, new creative paradigms are rapidly evolving, as are new business models. What with the speed of this change, the author has noticed confusion in terminology in both professional and academic circles. To minimize confusion between the term’s analog and digital documentary, in this dissertation I shall, therefore, refer to both analog and documentary simply as a documentary.51
Otherwise, for general purposes, this dissertation shall employ the terminology used by American film critic and cinema scholar J. Hoberman, who makes the following distinctions:
“Cinema means a form of recorded and hence repeatable moving image and, for the most part, synchronized recorded sound. Television kinescopes and TV since videotape are cinematic; so is YouTube. The terms motion pictures or movies imply a projected image; film refers to movies that are produced on or projected as celluloid (or its derivatives) and hence have some basis in photography.”52
I.9. New Media Theory
Fortunately, there are some academicians who have been trying to create a method and terminology to help us understand how this new technology works. Professor Henry Jenkins of the University of Southern California is one, and his theory of Convergence Culture is a fascinating effort in this direction.53
However, Associate Professor Lev Manovich of the Visual Arts Department of the University of California, San Diego, is my personal favorite. His book The Language of New Media has been invaluable in helping me understand how to place the genre of documentary in the context of what he calls New Media.54 While Jenkins focuses on the forms of Distribution of New Media, Manovich places an equal emphasis on Production and Post Production, which seems more useful for my study of Documentary in The Age of New Media.
I confess I also firmly agree with Manovich’s use of Dziga Vertov’s work as a template for what he calls Database Cinema.55 As a result, I have employed Manovich’s terminology where appropriate.
Manovich also complains about a lack of research into the rapid evolution of New Media:
“Today we are witnessing the emergence of a new medium – the meta- medium of the digital computer. In contrast to a hundred years ago, when cinema was coming into being, we are fully aware of the significance of this new media revolution. Yet I afraid that future theorists and historians of computer media will be left with not much more than the equivalents of the newspaper reports and film programs from cinema’s first decades..."56
This dissertation will be an attempt to help correct that dearth of research in the genre of documentary. However, I am all too aware that my humble efforts here are also a bit like trying to catch lightning in a bottle; as the American cultural critic Neil Postman warned us back in 1992,“A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.”57
I.10. Thesis Statement
In a prescient 1996 essay published in The New York Times titled The Decay of Cinema, the noted American film critic and intellectual Susan Sontag presented the provocative argument that cinema was a dying art form after only a century of existence.58 At the time, New Media was in its infancy, but Sontag could read the writing on the wall; in her view, New Media was already changing habits of media consumption, and if cinema was not yet dying, it was certainly in a state of decay, thanks to the death of cinephilia – or the love of the medium.
Today, more than three decades later, Sontag’s essay seems more prescient than ever. New Media is now dominant, and that dominance is increasing every second. If cinema as a medium requires a projected image, in both creative and economic terms, it is indeed arguably dead today – at least among the younger generation. In this context, the purpose of this dissertation is to explore the impact of New Media on the cinematic genre of documentary through five case studies. These five case studies have been chosen with the goal of exploring the diversity in approaches to producing and distributing documentary through New Media.
These five case studies are divided into two groups:
1. Institutional Documentary
a. United Nations Television59
b. The MONUSCO Video Unit60
2. Independent Documentary
a. East Timor: Betrayal and Resurrection61
b. Citizen Boilesen62
While New Media methods of production and post-production have greatly facilitated the making of long form documentaries, New Media methods of distribution such as streaming, along with an apparently dwindling demographic among younger spectators, seem to be making monetization of independent long form documentary increasingly difficult. This apparent conundrum raises a fundamental question: Will long form independent documentaries be sustainable in the future, and, if so, how?
In an attempt to find answers, this dissertation will examine the case studies using the following thesis statement as a premise:
Thesis Statement:
Given the rapid evolution of cinematic language in the age of new media, if a documentary is to communicate successfully, it must not only possess powerful narrative content , but also a cinematic form in harmony with both the tastes of the intended audience and the strengths and limits of the new media form being used as a delivery system
I.11.Appendix A: Notes
[1] Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore (The Medium is the Massage) Bantam Books, 1967. p.26
2 Lev Manovich (The Language of New Media) Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press,2001. P.19
3 Andreas Fuglesang, (Filmmaking in Developing Countries I: The Uppsala Workshop) The Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, 1975, p.9
4 Lev Manovich/Andreas Kratky (Soft Cinema- Navigating the Database) The MIT Press, 2005, p. 5
5 Sergei Eisenstein, (Film Form and The Film Sense) Meridian, New York. 1959.
6 https://www.amazon.com/theatrical-theory-Antonin-Artaud-categorization/dp/B0007C8DTQ
7 I later discovered Orson Welles had never heard of the school – they had used his name without even asking. Mr. Welles was kind and said nothing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Welles_Cinema
8 To Be Thirty: https://vimeo.com/69173621
9 As the late Steve Whitehouse, my collaborator on To Be Thirty, quipped, “They want us to make the worst films in the world – because then nobody will want to watch them, and then there won’t be any problems…”
10 More on this in Chapter 3
11 https://peacemaker.un.org/namibia-resolution435
12 When I first arrived in New Delhi in 1979, I met with Bo Karre, who was then the local SIDA representative. He listened to my plans, and then advised me to write whatever I was going to write immediately, because, after six months I would be too confused to write anything. When he said this, I was a bit insulted, but he was subsequently proven right.
13 Jonas Frick and Fredrick Becklen
14 My short films at Dramatiska Institutet 1981-83: https://vimeo.com/69233308
15 Popularly called Schleppers in New York.
16 The New World Information Order, please see Chapter 3
17 Supernova: https://vimeo.com/151430783
18 Svindlande Affarer, Part 1 https://youtu.be/Ed6CNCk8cyY
19 A tempting invitation, to be sure. but Francis Ford Coppola had already produced the definitive depiction of that era in The Godfather, Part II – and the Cubans had no money
21 https://variety.com/1993/biz/news/america-tries-on-another-suit-115453/
22 http://www.obsoletemedia.org/digital-audio-tape/
23 Shelter for the Homeless Part 1: https://vimeo.com/272049550
24 This material was to prove invaluable when I testified as an expert witness in 2001 on behalf of six East Timorese plaintiffs in a Human Rights case –brought against Indonesia General Johnny Lumintang in US Federal Court. General Lumintang never showed up, and the East Timorese were initially awarded $66 million. They would never see the money, but for the proud East Timorese, the legal victory was an important vindication. https://ccrjustice.org/home/what-we-do/our-cases/doe-v-lumintang
25 East Timor: Betrayal and Resurrection will be examined in more detail as Case Study #1 in Chapter 6.
26 Links to East Timor: Betrayal and Resurrection,
https://youtu.be/j_s46-5R4OE
https://vimeo.com/69258997 https://vimeo.com/69272262 https://vimeo.com/72096853 https://vimeo.com/72080093https://vimeo.com/72137587 https://vimeo.com/72137909
27 All our MONUC programs can be found on the YouTube channel we created: www.YouTube.com/MONUCVIDEO,
28 In 2010, in gesture apparently designed to give the mission a veneer of progress, the UN Security Council officially changed the name of MONUC to MONUSCO. Otherwise, all else remained the same, and, as they say in UN Secretariat slang,’ “The status remained quo…”
29 Please see attachment from FIT’s in-house newspaper here:
30 Please find a link here to The Samba Project, LLC Demo reel: https://vimeo.com/140320502
No password needed
31 Please find link to Congo Rising short demo here:
https://vimeo.com/263738160
32 Please find link to Congo Rising Video Portfolio here: https://vimeopro.com/usertedfolke/congo-calling
33 Please find link to trailer for This is Congo here: https://youtu.be/4WfWODjDYAk
34 For more, please see www.thisiscongo.com
35 For more, please see http://socialcapital.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/twitter-facebook-and-youtubes-role-in-tunisia-uprising
36 Mark Prensky (Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants) in The Digital Divide, (ibid), P.3
37 Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan (Your Brain is Evolving Right Now) in The Digital Divide, (ibid) p. 79
38 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_overload
39 Small and Vorgan (ibid.) p.82
40 https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/hollywood-has-a-huge-millennial-problem/486209/
41 A classic example is the book by Michael Rosenblum (I-Phone Millionaire- How to Shoot and Sell Cutting Edge Video) Basic Books, 2013
42 https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/7/24/17607044/documentaries-box-office-three-identical-strangers-rbg-wont-you-be-my-neighbor-mister-rogers-cnn
43 The Wall Street Journal, ibid
44 The Wall Street Journal, ibid.
45 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2019-04-03/helen-mirren-joins-the-war-on-netflix-video
46 James Monaco (How to Read a Film-Movies, Media and Beyond) Oxford University Press, Fourth Edition, 2009. pp.578-637
47 Lev Manovich, (The Language of New Media) The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England 2002. P.xxiv
48 Kelly Anderson and Martin Lucas, with Mick Hurbis-Cherrier (Documentary Voice &Vision – A Creative Approach to Non-Fiction Media Production) Focal Press, New York and London, 2016.pxxii
49 Nicholas Carr (Is Google Making Us Stupid?) in The Digital Divide, Edited by Mark Bauerlein. Jeremy P.Tarcher/Penguin, 2011. P.69
50 It is important to bear in mind prior to 2000, there were also analog video documentaries, mostly shot on Betacam videotape, along with other short-lived formats.
51 J.Hoberman ( Film After Film – Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?) Verso, 2012, p.3
52 Henry Jenkins (Convergence Culture – Where Old and New Media Collide), New York and London, New York University Press,2006
53 Lev Manovich, (The Language of New Media) The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England 2002. P.xxiv
54 Manovich, ibid p. xxiv
55 Manovich, ibid, p. 6
56 Neil Postman (Technopoly- The Surrender of Culture to Technology) Vintage Books, 1993, p.18
57 http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/00/03/12/specials/sontag-cinema.html
58 https://www.youtube.com/unitednations
59 https://www.youtube.com/user/MONUSCO
60 https://youtu.be/j_s46-5R4OE
61 https://youtu.be/3bNvrCmeyec
62 https://youtu.be/4WfWODjDYAk
63 https://youtu.be/0NvrxUucNfg
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