In week 2, we will discuss expanded documentary forms.
Expanded Documentary: An Overview
Technological advancements have often been connected to how documentary practices have evolved to allow new ways to tell stories and share experiences. Technology, and what we can do with it, can challenge traditional ways of thinking about documentary participation, representation, ethics and power. These concepts are the cornerstone of documentary making.
In the 1960s, lightweight cameras and portable sound recording devices made it possible for people to take to the streets and follow documentary participants to record them. This began the Direct Cinema movement in the USA and Cinema Verité in France. It was thought that these styles of filmmaking allowed a more “truthful” version of reality for different reasons.
In the 1980s, camcorders allowed people to start filming themselves and their private and personal lives. This access to affordable equipment enabled stories to be told that previously had not been heard. These were often voices of minorities and the disenfranchised who were able to tell their own stories without being reliant on an outsider always coming in to document their lives. This challenged the dominant paradigm of documentary making and opened up more spaces for alternative forms and approaches.
Digital equipment, iPhones and easy-to-use editing software has further increased the ability for people to make media, share experiences and tell stories. Web 2.0 allowed for more projects that included sharing of material, User Generated Content, participatory practices and interactive and immersive spaces.
As the field of documentary has come to include so many different platforms, the term expanded documentary can be thought of as anything that goes beyond the traditional linear form of documentary. It may make use of affordances of the online space in allowing participation and interaction. It may be a site-specific installation or use locative (GPS) technology. It might be Virtual Reality (VR) or Augmented Reality.
Another term for emergent documentary forms and practices is ‘Open Space Documentary’. De Michiel and Zimmermann present these forms of documentary as ways of challenging systems of power and re-engaging in community and collaborative practices as a way to address urgent social and environmental issues.
These emerging documentary forms are developing beyond the status quo of long-form feature-length documentary – with their characters, narrative arcs and resolutions – designed for festivals and public television. These open space documentary projects move in more mobile, flexible, public spaces characterised by indeterminancy, community and risk. New possibilities for combinatory story-telling are proliferating in spaces now enabled by disruptive broadband, new media and mobile technologies. Community needs to map specific histories and stories into spaces colonised by the state; corporate interests or environmental destruction also propel these new forms of documentary.
(Helen de Michiel & Patricia Zimmermann 2013, 355)
What to do:
Have a look at at least two of the following readings to discuss in class and browse the other links for examples of interactive documentaries. We will also look at and analyse examples in class on Wednesday.
- For a lively discussion about why we might think about what kinds of documentary practices we engage in and how and why we make documentary – read Helen de Michiel and Patricia Zimmermann’s “Documentary as an Open Space”.
- This reading, “Setting the Field” by Judith Aston and Sandra Gaudenzii gives a thorough overview of interactive documentaries.
- Kate Nash’s “Modes of interactivity: analysing the webdoc” discusses interactive documentaries.
- For a survey of some of the concepts discussed in this module, “Moments of Innovation” provides examples of interactive, participatory, immersive and other projects.
Webdoc collections:
The 6 Most Innovative Interactive Web Documentaries
Top 5: Interactive Documentaries at RIDM and IDFA DocLab
References
Aston, J., & Gaudenzi, S. 2012, Interactive documentary: setting the field, Studies in Documentary Film, 6(2), 125–139. http://doi.org/10.1386/sdf.6.2.125_1
De Michiel, Helen, and Patricia Zimmerman.“Documentary as an Open Space”. The Documentary Film Book. Ed. Winston, Brian. British Film Institute, 2013. Palgrave Macmillan (2013): 356-65.
Nash, K. 2012, Modes of interactivity: Nash Nash , Media, Culture & Society, 34(2), 195–210. http://doi.org/10.1177/0163443711430758