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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 world’s 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 IDFA’s 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.

IDFA’s 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 MacGregor’s 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. Thalhofer’s 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 MacGregor’s 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

 

 

 

 

 




Updated 1st February 2005


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