Making Public(s): Web 2.0 documentaries and social activism

2007

Documentary cinema has emerged as an important focus for research into popular culture, marginalized narratives, and democratic media. However, academic work on the genre has been narrowly focused on audience consumption habits, aesthetic or textual analyses of individual works, and cultural analyses of the intersection of documentary and mainstream commercial cinema sites and practices. This thesis is an attempt to bridge a research gap by interrogating extra-textual elements around the grassroots distribution and exhibition of documentary cinema in Canada. By linking the concepts of cultural hegemony, counterpublics and agonostic pluralism with community-oriented practices around documentary distribution and exhibition, this thesis urges a closer look at the spaces between box office numbers, high profile documentaries, and megaplexes. Springboarding from disparate literature, the thesis builds a conceptual framework around power and community, and uses firsthand interviews with f...

About fifteen years ago, the emergence of the use of digital imaging led most cinema theoreticians to chant the requiem for documentary cinema's truth-telling claims. At that same time, rebel voices rising up straight from Southern Mexican rainforest heralded a new kind of communicative political action. There is no better time than now to sum up the outcomes of the forecasts by both post-modern theories and by the prefigurative politics outlined in the anti-corporate globalisation “movement of movements”. The scrutiny of the new conditions for public enunciation, mainly through video publication on world wide web platforms, points out to unexpected results for the skeptical post- modern academic forecasts and for the “Seattle” cyberactivists’ proposals alike: never before have so many people produced so many documentary movies. A few kernel questions remain as yet unanswered: for whom are these movies addressed? What kind of intersubjective relations do they aim to create? And what kind of public spaces are thus built? This paper is built from the analysis of the enunciation processes by independent documentary films made about the 1999 Seattle protests. We argue that the impact of telematic dissemination of the video shots and narratives stemming from that event are far more significant than the supposed loss of indexical content resulting from the use of digital imaging, as opposed to the use of photochemical imaging. We argue that the distinctive effects of documentary cinema have never depended on either the supposed ontology of the photographic image or on large audience reception, but instead on rendering the addresees as members of a public. In the context of the so-called “late cinema”, an ethics of autonomous public prefiguration is being consolidated through the stylistics of web documentary filmmaking. This leads, on the one hand, to a new cross-media method defining both cinema and documentary; on the other, it points out to the acknowledgement of an emergent documentary rhetoric, the prefigurative documentary, by which the subjective documentary rhetoric becomes the catalyst of collective subjectivation processes.

Cinema Journal, 2006

Rethinking Documentary In the Digital Age by Faye Ginsburg In March 2005 the United Nations inaugurAted a long-awaited program. the Digital SoUdarity Fund. meant to underwrite initiatives that address "the uneven distribution and use of new infonnation and communication technologies' and "enable excluded people and countries to enter the new era of the infonnation society: What this might mean in practice-which digital technologies might make a Significant difference and for whom and with what resources-is still an open and contentious question. Debates about the fund at the first meeting of the World Summit on the Infonnation Society (WSIS) In December 2003 are symptomatic of the complexity of "digital divide" issues that have also been central to the second phase of the infonnation summit held in November 2005 in Tunisia. In this essay I consider the relationship of indigenous people to new media technologies that people in these communities have started to take up-with both ambivalence and enthusiasm-<>ver the last decade. Why are their concerns barely audible in discussions of new media? I would Uke to suggest that part of the problem has to do with the rise of the tenn the "Digital Age" over the last decade and the assumptions that support it. While it initially had the shock of the new. it now 128 Cinema Joumal46. No.1. FaY 2006 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 7. http://www.usmob.(..Om.llu. Uct'essed August 22. 2006. 8. Ibid. Wu Wenguang: An Introduction by Chris Berry "DV: Individual Filmmaking" was written at a watershed moment in the history of recent Chinese documentary. Its author, Wu Wenguang. is one of the most prominent and proUfic independents in the country.' It gives inSights not only into some

This article examines video activism in a context where ubiquitous camera technologies and online video sharing platforms are radically changing the media landscape in which demonstrations and political activism operates. The author discusses a number of YouTube videos documenting and narrating the recurring, anti capitalist demonstrations in Europe in the past decade. With the death of Ian Tomlinson in London during the 2009 G20 protests as an empirical starting point, the author raises questions of how video documentation of this event links up with previous protest events by juxtaposing representations of ‘the moment of death’ (Zelizer, 2004, 2010) of protesters in the past. This article suggests that these videos work as (1) an archive of action and activist memory, (2) a site of commemoration in a online shrine for grieving, and (3) a space to provide and negotiate visual evidence of police violence and state repression. The author offers a re-articulation of the longstanding debate on visual evidence, action, and testimony in video activism. The results are suggestive of how vernacular commemorative genres of mourning and paying tribute to victims of police violence are fused with the online practices of bearing witness and producing visual evidence in new creative modes of using video for change.

The interpretation that nowadays dominates analysis of the relationship between film, television and the Internet is the idea that the Network transforms the relationship between audiences and media by strengthening the capacity of action of the public through the development of a " participatory culture ". This thesis is mainly based on the idea that the Internet provides a new space for " interpretive communities ", mostly visible through the activities of fans' groups, which weaken the traditional boundaries between production and reception. I try to challenge this by pointing out that the idea of an agency of spectators could be interpreted, in a fruitful way, in terms of pragmatic discussion and conflict of interpretations, as opposed to the theory of "semiotic democracy " (where each community makes its own meaning for itself but doesn't share much with others), to provide a more dynamic view of the reception process, considering that the " public sphere " is not only at stake after the reading but during the making of the meaning. The public sphere determines how we " deliberate " with possible interpretations of a movie or a TV show, within ourselves and with other viewers. It allows us to understand that the Internet functions as a conflictual forum and not a juxtaposition of communities and separate meanings. A case study on the online discussion about a documentary on family planning, les bureaux de dieu, (God's Offices; Claire Simon, 2008) helped therefore to substitute the notion of " deliberative aggregates " to " interpretive communities " to show how Internet makes visible (and archivable) how this articulation between interpretation and public sphere may occur, thus enlarging the public sphere beyond possible predictable boundaries. I shall develop this point here in relation to the question of " inter-activity " when considering " interactive documentaries ". Are these interactive documentaries still " documentaries " ? How might these online platforms reveal the usual interactions between documentary materials and viewers, either off-line or online? What I shall argue here is that interactivity is not a way to balance the power between production and reception allowing the user to take control of the documentary, but rather an interesting way for the viewer to develop reflexivity, allowing him/her to become aware of its own deliberations and of the situation of a particular issue in a given social space.