The Real Deal
You may be able to thank the internet for the success of the big-screen doc, but don’t be too grateful. The rise of the real has a dangerous side.
BY Katerina Cizek
Illustration by Marc Ngui
Sure, there was the Michael Moore phenomenon. Then the media proclaimed 2004 The Year of the Documentary. Now, it’s clear the once-neglected documentary film has feature staying power: on our televisions, in our cinemas and on DVDs. But so what? Aren’t docs just the next popcorn flavour for our fickle culture to devour? Real is in; documentaries are riding that wave. The end.
Or is there more to it? Maybe the new high-powered docs (The Corporation, Super Size Me, Control Room, Born into Brothels, Winged Migration, to name a few) are the tip of a huge non-fiction iceberg, chock full of all kinds of ways to record and convey “the real”—from text to audio to digital photography. If so, the rise of the documentary is as much about cultural and political disillusionment and the potential for empowerment brought by new technologies as it is about the latest film fad. After all, documentary sets out to record “truths” and to tell our stories, however tenuous a proposition that is; they are the “creative treatment of actuality,” in the words of John Grierson, the grandfather of docs and founder of the National Film Board (NFB).
The documentary—not simply as film, but as a whole form—is moving into the core of our cultural Zeitgeist. Arguably, it is the documentary that shapes our storytelling on the internet, over video cell phones, through podcasts (a kind of internet radio) and amateur video cameras, as more and more ordinary people join celebrities, artists and journalists to participate in the making of culture, staking claim to their own interpretation of actuality. In that sense, documentary really is everywhere—casting the success of these high-powered docs in a whole new light.
With the phenomenal technological capacity to tell stories comes increased interest in “real-life” tales that centre around “real people.” Yet, somewhere under the sensationalism of reality TV, for example, there’s a deeper source to our current fascination with the real, one that has broader implications. And that source seems to have to do with our yearning for deeper democracy.
Whatever’s behind the collective crush on documentary film, studio movers and shakers are scrambling to discover the next splashy theatrical offering. Big-screen documentary has become a tantalizing commercial venture. The feature documentary box office in this country went up a phenomenal 428 percent in 2004 from the previous year, according to Telefilm Canada. All the more incredible a figure when you consider that only five years ago, documentaries were considered almost medicinal (good for you, but awful tasting). Hardly entertainment for a Saturday night.
Today, for the theatre-going public, documentary film is a cinematic antidote to million-dollar special effects, to the tyranny of Hollywood endings and the limitations of television news.
The American election-year bumper crop of political films has given way to a wave of well-made feel-good docs about children, animals, sports and arty biopics. The clear frontrunner this year is about penguins mating in minus 80-degree Antarctic conditions. March of the Penguins has already raked in a cool $70 million US in box-office sales in the United States alone. And each week, another new doc is let out of the gate: tales of wild parrots, a dance phenom called krumping, gay hip-hop culture and rock-star cultural theorists. A current rage has celebrities making docs on celebrities: Martin Scorsese on Bob Dylan, even Brad Pitt on the architect Frank Gehry. All facts stranger than fiction.
Meanwhile, the documentary film community in Canada as elsewhere is in a frenzy to find, and fund, the next feature doc box-office success. (In Canada’s case, to follow in The Corporation’s footsteps.) Here at home, CBC is partnering with Telefilm to dip their toes into the theatrical doc potential with a modest fund of $2 million. Not to be left out of the game, the NFB and the Documentary Channel have created their own star search with $800,000.
Around the world, an American Idol-style pursuit of the next great documentary is underway. A coalition of public broadcasters (including the BBC, CBC and others) have rounded up a fund of 4.85 million Euros. Armed with the hot-button theme “democracy,” the Democracy Project’s commissioning editors have travelled the world in their own global talent search. After receiving over 400 submissions, they have now chosen 10 winners to support, including super-talented Arab-American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim (of Control Room and Startup.com) in her latest verité adventure, as she follows a former Thatcher-government minister in his venture to “export democracy” to Syria.
But even highbrow BBC commissioning editors admit that the contemporary documentary trend is propelled not just by a sudden appreciation for the craft of documentary so long overshadowed by fictional film, but by a much larger socio-technological revolution, fuelled by the proliferation of cheap, relatively accessible technology. Low-budget and no-budget productions, made possible by discount video cameras, easy-to-use computer editing multi-media software and internet inventions such as the blog, are making (almost) everyone a potential documentarian.
Peer through the right lens and you can see people making documentaries everywhere. We are documenting, journaling and telling stories—approximating the real—especially in visual ways, like never before. Of course, the great digital divide certainly restricts who gets access to technology and digital literacy. But, more and more, the little video camera is becoming the pen of our times and the internet the revolutionary printing press.
This is documentary as democratic experiment, in which we can potentially all participate in the non-fiction genre, retelling and reinventing our own stories of the human condition.
“A country without documentaries is like a family without a photo album,” Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzman has said. While family photo albums and home movies have been around for a century (and journals and diaries for far longer than that) what’s new, and changing everything, is distribution. And, yes, it’s the internet we have to thank. The potential for unlimited audiences are just an upload and click away. The World Wide Web itself could be considered its own large, collective documentary project.
The wickedly popular Wikipedia website provides a perfect example. Wikipedia is an open-source site—a live, organic encyclopedia to which everyone can contribute and which anyone can edit. The portal publishes in over 60 languages and has more than 700,000 articles in the English site alone and nearly 300,000 images. The idea is to provide neutral, informed and useful info and analysis on any subject, with entries ranging from “the letter A,” to “a definition of the English idiom ‘Elephant in the Room, ’” to the latest current events, including entries such as “the war in Iraq.” Incredibly, Wikipedia’s daily hit average exceeds that of the New York Times site—and is still growing.
While vandalism is frequent on the site, and false information often pops up, it’s a massive exercise in peer review. An entry may not be factually perfect, but the site functions on the democratic principle that the masses will (eventually) clear up the errors. It inspires critical reading and participation: You don’t like what you read? Change it. Participation in this kind of documentary signals an optimism in democracy that you’d be hard pressed to find in, say, electoral politics.
What’s happening on the web—in text, audio, photo and video—is often thought of as citizen journalism, but it’s more than that: it’s the documentation of our lives from our own perspectives. With the abandonment of the cool (and false) objectivity of traditional journalism, citizen journalism becomes less about pure news reporting and more about telling stories. Voices resonate with the depth and poetry of the personal; the styles and forms are free, hybrid, oftentimes fierce, creating their own rules. And the critical engagement evident in the Wikipedia scenario becomes a built-in way to engage as a consumer (and producer) of these stories.
The endless space of the internet and its immediacy—post it in Ramallah and receive it in Red River seconds later—undermines the gatekeeping of traditional media.
Take the blogosphere. It’s a massive real-time documentary on the net that’s emerging as a new organizing principle for raw, first-hand reporting. The famous Baghdad Blogger, renowned for his blog postings during the early bombings of the lastest Iraq war, took a whirl as a journalist for the Guardian, but is now back to blogging at: justzipit.blogspot.com. His inside-Iraq blogging torch has been picked up by the eloquent and anonymous Riverbend (riverbendblog.blogspot.com). Her tagline? Girl Blog from Iraq... let’s talk war, politics and occupation. She gives vivid accounts of how her family deals with power outages, beating sand out of rugs after sandstorms—all as a backdrop to the reality of the occupation happening outside her living room. She is widely considered the most important source for understanding “real” life on the streets of Baghdad as it unfolds. Not to mention blogging US soldiers circumventing army “messaging.” What could be more real-time documentary than that?
There are tens of millions of blogs online now, up from 100,000 just two years ago. Many are ranting rambles, but many have a deeper purpose and a social conscience. The tsunami relief efforts in the blogosphere of early 2005 signalled a new era of blogging for a better world. During the recent elections in Iran, a 75,000-strong blog universe sprouted overnight. New blogging collectives herald grassroots efforts to share good news: for example, the Worldchanging.org blog is a phenomenally successful group blog that documents greening projects and positive news around the world, with dispatches from Stockholm, San Francisco, Mumbai, Trinidad and others.
Internet documentary is, of course, not just about text. With free photo upload and storage now available at sites like Flickr.com, digital photos have brought still photography onto the net in force. Thousands of photobloggers are documenting the world around them from high-end Nikons down to photo functions on cell phones. Toronto’s Daily Dose of Imagery photoblogger is firmly on global top 10 charts. His abstract, gorgeous depictions of everyday life in Toronto, all taken from the perspective of a recent immigrant, have put the city on a whole new visual and aesthetic map.
And, to connect the last dot, bringing us back to the doc as moving picture, video on the net is fast becoming a viable format. Video-blogging hit the big time during the tsunami fallout, quickly followed by the July 2005 London bombings and the disaster in New Orleans this fall. Amateur video footage of the destruction was rapidly dispatched by bloggers, then picked up by the major networks.
New collective sites for sharing grassroots media are sprouting up. Since their launch just over a year ago, the breakout site, Ourmedia.org, has accumulated 41,000 members who share text, photos, podcasts and videos all stored for free on the site. By no means is this trend limited to news. “Right now our lead video is a blind banjo player in Tibet someone had filmed,” an Ourmedia.org founder, J.D. Lasica, told BBC this summer. The connection to people in other parts of the world is what’s key. “This is what we were hoping for; to bring us all into one media village,” he said.
The convergence of audio/video with internet technologies—invigorated by the latest podcasting software—is key to transforming self-publishing into a massive highway: a way to bypass the editorial control of traditional broadcast media especially mainstream television. “Real” democracy in the making.
New onramps are under construction. The Canadian Independent World Television (IWT) aims to circumvent mainstream television and its corporate and government funding. IWT hopes to create a new channel to air on digital television and the internet, paid for entirely by a worldwide subscription base. IWT promises news, current affairs, citizen journalism and documentaries that get beyond the drivel of mainstream coverage. The lefty celebrity endorsement list is long. Critics have labelled the project a mere left-wing CNN. The editors insist it’s not lefty; they call it uncompromising journalism.
The criticism stings though because it does point to a much larger problem: an increasingly polarized media landscape. While the explosion of alternative media is exciting, it also brings with it an unprecedented fragmentation of views and audiences. More and more, on all sides of the political, cultural spectrum, people tend to seek out stories, news and information to fit into their already fixed belief paradigms. And here’s the rub. Even as new technologies forge connections, they can deepen cultural and political divides, eroding our common, public arena for discussion instead of broadening it.
A few years ago, I co-directed a documentary film about the proliferation of cheap, easy-to-use video technology (we dubbed it the “handicam revolution”) as we followed people using communications technology to document human rights abuses. We called the film Seeing Is Believing. A commissioning editor asked us to consider renaming the film Is Seeing Believing? She wondered whether or not the videotape of an incident really served as the perfect witness we might long for in human rights cases. It was a good point, one that documentary giant Errol Morris (Thin Blue Line, Fog of War) sums up this way: Believing is seeing.
Morris made the case in a recent New York Times editorial reflecting on the power of video images. He was considering, in particular, the many, disparate interpretations of the videotape of a US marine shooting an Iraqi insurgent point-blank during the invasion of Fallujah. “Unhappily, an unerring fact of human nature is that we habitually reject the evidence of our own senses,” he writes. “If we want to believe something, then we often find a way to do so regardless of evidence to the contrary. Believing is seeing and not the other way around.”
In this respect, the documentary confounds and confuses the public good as much as it clarifies and illuminates. And the documentary genre—from big screens to blogs—continues its long, complicated relationship with politics, with participatory democracy, and with the truth. As the documentary gathers nuclear strength at the core of our culture, so too it converges, modifies and transforms into myriad cultural hybrids and transmutations. Banging up against journalism, music, animation and fiction, the documentary is in our collective central mosh pit, with its poetry and its flaws, mashing with the best of them, and, certainly these days, holding its own. What happens next will be up to us all.
