Documentary
Film at the Junction between Art, Politics
and New Technologies
IDFA,
November 2004, Amsterdam: www.idfa.nl
Reviewed by Martha Blassnigg,
University of Newport, Wales
Lichtgestalten@hotmail.com.
The 17th International Documentary
Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA), which
took place in November 2004, has grown
to one of the worlds biggest forums
for documentary film screening more than
300 films, furthermore providing the Forum
as platform for co-financing documentary
projects and the Docs for Sale
market for professionals. Recently it
has also developed a number of platforms
for discussions around the genre of documentary
film, this year treating in particular
the influence and implications of politics,
art and new technologies. In this context,
the developing Idfacademy offered
four master classes on Direct Cinema,
Next Media, Ethics and Aesthetics, and
the IDFA Seminar discussed Identity
and Nova Europa (for a complete overview
see www.idfa.nl).
It may seem strange to talk about a film
festival while hardly mentioning any films,
nevertheless, these platforms will form
the exclusive focus of the following review
in order to lay out some crucial threads
that can contribute to the discourse on
the convergence of art and technology
with regard to the documentary film genre.
It is generally accepted now that whenever
new technologies emerge and artists especially
are able to experiment with new forms
of expression, the convergence of determinants
bearing on such developments soon includes
discussions on ethics and politics next
to economics and related social issues.
One would expect a documentary film festival
to be an optimal forum for such themes,
as they have risen once again in the context
of discourses around the impact of new
media since the digital age. IDFA
has clearly recognized this and even though
it may have neglected artistic features
in the past, more recently it shows a
tendency to come back to its original
attempt to include more experimental and
artistic documentary films in its ambitious
program. The difficulty the festival has
faced is the tendency in the past to focus
on content and a social political agenda,
especially at turbulent times. Very often
this has resulted in documentary film
as an art form being overshadowed by the
latest political topic. [1]
This is not to deny that IDFAs
political focus has generated invigorating
and engaging debates, featuring this year
amongst other its collaboration with NCDO
(Dutch National Committee for International
Co-operation and Sustainable Development),
and the 3rd presentation of
the Amnesty DOEN award. IDFA is
also increasingly showing films from every
part of the world with a focus on ethical
and political discussions.[2] Nonetheless
it seems to have been recognized that
the innovative approach has been overshadowed
and this years edition took initiative
to recover the discourses around art,
technology and film-form.
IDFAs attempt to engage with
artistic aspects of documentary film was
announced with the Paradocs program,
which comprised a selection of films at
the boundaries of art. This appeared to
be a category for either films at the
edge of documentary film form or artists
experimenting with documentary film, which
did not always lead to successful results,
and in some cases left an impression of
"anything goes". In contrast
to Paradocs, a selection of films
of special interest to the critical and
more sophisticated viewer, which did indeed
challenge film-form, could be found in
the Reflecting Images category
that has already gained recognition in
previous years. However Paradocs
offers hope for a place for more experimental
films at the festival in the future, especially
if they are supported by discussion forums
addressing the pivotal relationship between
art and technology, in particular as it
occurred this year in a context of new
media technologies.
Of particular interest in this respect
were the "Next Media Frontiers
in Documentary" masterclass and the
Mediamatic workshop. The Masterclass
preceded the workshop by discussing DVDocs,
DigiDocs, WebDocs or Docs for Cell Phones,
new tendencies in documentary filmmaking
leading away from linear storytelling
and industry bound financing structures.
It was brilliantly led by Canadian documentary
filmmaker Peter Wintonick and Klaas Kuitenbrouwer,
a specialist in interactive new media.
The opening lecture, given by Brent MacGregor,
Professor of Visual Communications at
the Edinburgh College of Art and interactive
documentary filmmaker, introduced the
topic of the Masterclass by looking at
changes, similarities and challenges in
traditional documentary filmmaking through
the influence of new media technologies.
While certain requirements as in the restructuring
of the materials in multi-media contexts,
distribution and production process are
changing, MacGregor emphasized, traditional
skills still form the basis for creating
a sophisticated audio-visual product.
Following MacGregors lecture, five
filmmakers presented their documentaries
extending into the field of new media,
each with a different approach and focus.
Bregtje van der Haak and Florian Thalhofer
presented their interactive documentary
projects with multiple choice and interactive
engagement of the user. Thalhofers
documentary stories The 13th
floor (www.dreizehnterstock.de)
formed without doubt one of the highlights
of the masterclass; interactively performed
on the web, the film clips are linked
via keywords and processed through his
interactive documentary software Korsakov,
which also served as matrix for the following
workshop (for information on the workshop
please visit www.mediamatic.net).
Peter Wintoninck rightly remarked the
blurring roles of the user and the producer
("pro-d-user") and the here
to related political impact of a subversive,
interactive use of new technologies. This
notion led into the following presentations,
emphasizing the mobilization of action
via web-media, with either a political
bias, or directed towards entertainment.
This was epitomized by Sam Gregory, a
member of the 2004 IDFA Amnesty
Jury and program leader of WITNESS
an organization that supports human rights
groups around the world to use video-activism
in their advocacy (www.witness.org).
This organization uses the WorldWideWeb
politically in the distribution, access,
action and response to campaigns directed
towards a highly differentiated spectatorship,
as well as video as medium to document
human rights reports where the public
media coverage does not extend.
In another forum, a historical retrospective
into political filmmaking in the 60ies
formed the starting point for a look into
the future by a roundtable comprising
key figures of Direct Cinema, Albert
Maysles, Richard Leacock, Frederick Wiseman,
Robert Drew and Joan Churchill. In an
easy-going, humorous interaction, the
filmmakers addressed the impact of digital
technology in their present work and related
it respectively to their body of films
in the past.
Richard Leacock highlighted the liberation
of digital technology by introducing a
project where he filmed the Russian Eketarinsburg
Symphony orchestra with every single musician
wired via microphones, edited in his living
room for the costs of a Steenbeck
an impossible project on 35mm, which would
have been hugely expensive and complex.
Digital Video Technology for him signifies
freedom in his work, certainly compared
to his collaboration with Robert Flaherty
shooting two minute sequences on an enormously
noisy 35mm Aeriflex. Albert Maysles, too,
suggested that we forget about film and
praised the quality of DV, gaining fuller
access to the filmed scenes with a tape
running time of over an hour and the freedom
of the cameraman as operator. In a similar
sense, Joan Churchill emphasized the liberation
of the smaller camera format to interact
more flexibly, for example by gaining
eye-contact, feeling more part of the
events and changing the approach and the
interactions with people in front of the
camera. These statements gave an optimistic
view on contemporary developments within
the documentary film genre. The initiators
of a liberated camera style and critical
interrogation of the world in the Direct
Cinema movement of the Sixties showed
that innovation comes forth from a continuous
process of negotiation between artistic
expression, technological developments
and political statement. While obtaining
the link with traditional documentary
filmmaking skills, the discussion in this
panel seemed to epitomize MacGregors
statement: that the technology has changed,
but not the skills in themselves for aesthetic
and narrative expression in media. By
defining new requirements and forms of
expression and exhibition, it appeared
not only inspiring but rather necessary
to revisit some of the most innovative
creative artists of the last century to
invigorate and substantiate not only present
practical work, but also thicken the differentiated
discourses in the public arena and academia.
The invigorating and stimulating ethical
and political discussions provoked by
the impact of new media technologies were
also subject to several documentary screenings
and several smaller discussion panels.
For reasons of limitations in this review,
these can not be included; for a more
complete overview on the program of IDFA
please visit www.idfa.nl.
To conclude, it should be noted that by
showing diversity in the genre documentary
film, IDFA refreshingly does not
set on exclusivity but empowers an inspiring
dialogue and interactions between different
fields and opens an exciting portal for
"Next Media".
(1) In response to the lack of the avant-garde
at IDFA, Stefan Majakovski took
action and founded the Shadow Filmfestival,
this year running in its 5th
edition; a parallel event focussing on
rather unconventional, independent, artistic
documentaries accompanied with well framed
discussions after each screening (www.shadowfestival.nl).
(2) The more the distinctions between
fiction and non-fiction, reality and virtual
hyperreality became blurred during the
last decades, the more the documentary
film community drew on Visual Anthropology
and the theoretical implications of ethnographic
film to sustain its justification to document
life situations. Transparency, self-reflexivity,
interrelationships between filmmaker and
filmed subject, have become some of the
key qualities for credibility and accuracy
even in main stream documentary film to
meet the expectations and sensitivities
of critical contemporary viewers. These
qualities have long been discussed and
developed in the field of Visual Anthropology,
where the subjects ethics and politics
were most crucial and intrinsic to the
work of Cultural Anthropologists in foreign
cultural contexts from the very beginning
of the discipline. Such discourses find
a lively discussion forum at ethnographic
film festivals, see for example http://www.iwf.de/gieff/index.html?=gieff.html,
http://www.beeldvoorbeeld.nl/
or http://www.festivaldeipopoli.org/presentazione_eng.htm