Documentary & the Digital Domain
Brian Winston – ‘Truth films are just beginning’: Documentary Integrity in the Age of the Digital
David I. Tafler – Documentary in the Digital Domain: the end of criticality
‘Truth films are just beginning’: Documentary Integrity in the Age of the Digital
Exactly 50 years ago, the documentary filmmaker D.A.Pennebaker left a screening of a new
documentary at the 57th Street Cinema in New York. David Holtzman’s Diary was an
autobiographical work of personal intimacy which, before the technical innovations of the
1960s, would have been impossible. Hand-held, fly-on-the-wall footage promised to give the
viewer (in Ricky Leacock’s words) ‘the feeling of being there’. But the ‘there’ (as it were) of
David Holtzman was faked, a fiction clothed in surface verisimilitude. As he left the cinema,
Pennebaker complained to one of the filmmakers, Kit Carson (aka ‘David Holtzman’): ‘You
killed cinéma vérité’: some charge as it had just, rapidily, established hegemony over
mainstream documentary production as, finally, conveying unmediated truths. Carson,
though, felt that Pennebaker was wrong:.‘Truthmovies are just beginning’, he said. He was
right — they were.
The development of documentary techniques at that time restated with renewed force the
old naïf belief that the camera could not lie — that it produced, on its face, evidence of
referents in the external world. Just as a thermometer’s gauge reveals the temperature, so
the camera offers truths about the world (or that was the way to bet). The power of this
mistaken belief had been increasingly battered but it took on a renewed life at this time.
And, today, we confront the digital. Megalodon: The Great Shark Lives — The New Evidence
(2014) achieved what was probably one of documentary’s largest single audiences in history
– 4.5 million on its first US transmission. Only problem was that the footage of it swimming
about required the merest touch of digital manipulation to add appropriate fins to a living
little (comparatively speaking) shark. The megalodon has actually been extinct for 2.7 million
years. Nevertheless, 71% of the audience, apparently, believed the film and think a shark as
big as a submarine lurks in the Southern Ocean.
In this paper, I want to suggest that the whole business of fakery is a moral panic. We are no
worse off when it comes to judging the integrity of the documentary image than we have
ever been. The image was never (and can never be) evidence ‘on its face’. We always have
to interrogate it. But, paradoxically, because of the panic, people can only become more
aware that nothing can be trusted. And that, given the state of the world, can be no bad
thing.
Documentary in the Digital Domain: the end of criticality
This paper explores open domain documentary film distribution. The paper examines the dearth of critical filtering and plethora of unmitigated (eye)sight, sans insight.
Digital domains allow for distribution and promotion outside editorial channels. A harbinger for freedom and self-expression, and a conduit for the free flow of information with its social justice implications, open domains increase the number of channels distributed to that many more communities. A public domain ensures the participatory rights of all individuals. Increased access to a broader array of documentary media does not, however, necessarily ensure an exchange of important and innovative work.
Aside from copyright issues and other legal concerns,
(1) access does not substitute for jurying. A surfeit of information does not complement a paucity of
critical review. “Likes” should not become the measure of credibility.
(2) Digital environments automate design. According to Cahiers du Cinema, structure mitigates the
representation of ideas. Transmission affects textual epistemologies.
Across YouTube, Vimeo, PBS, Documentary Heaven, SNAG Films, and a multitude of personal sites,
certain imperatives inform and guide the audience to content.
(3) New marketing systems that shape
distribution follow the same commercial imperatives subject to the same capital forces as older
distribution models. The older distribution models offered a crucial avenue for socially driven filmmakers
to reach civically motivated audiences. Alternative spaces, efforts to build new bottom-up systems of
expression and meaning, yield to a social media universe that lies at the epicenter of difference with the
values of the academy.
(4) Collaborative space does not become public space. Private space masquerades as public space, for a
fee. Then, it disappears.
(5) Not the Library of Congress, media space comes and goes with no guarantees of preservation. Nobody affirms a work’s ongoing existence. The new space opens up a maelstrom of contention regarding authenticity, ownership, reproduction.
(6) Digital networks continue to evolve. More contemporary expensive highways and gateways threaten
access with more pervasive systems of exclusion.
Many of these challenges face(d) the analog film world. Distributors emerged and disappeared.
Screening venues opened and closed. Important work remained unrecognized, unregistered or not
cataloged. In both worlds, critical filtering lends authority to the text and mobilize the expectations of
viewers.
When viewers become producers, the open system does not legitimize their efforts or resolve skewed
power relations. Behind its ontological façade, the open domain maintains a constrained architecture
bound to advertising and institutional funding, which all together privileges certain themes, approaches,
and designs.