I heard about the One Day on Earth project on the radio while staying at the apartment of new friends in Seattle: the idea is that people around the world would film on October 10, 2010 and submit their footage to the initiative’s website. The footage can be seen on the site via individual users profiles and will also be edited into a film (submit at least 1 min of video and you will get online access to the film). I am interested to see what that will be.
What will the archive of footage look like? Who will have submitted? Will this in itself be a portrait of the world? Who has access to video technology & the internet and what do they care about?
I spent most of 10/10/10 on an airplane.
I found the perfect detail to film while waiting for my bags to arrive on the baggage carousel: a 24-hour vending machine for fresh flowers. What an odd and lonely commentary on nature and culture! Unfortunately I couldn’t get my camera settings set correctly and had to give up to catch the train into the city.
Filed under: Interface, Production Models | Tags: activism, Documentary, participatory
My first contact with documentary-as-a-tool-for-change was at a Washington, DC anti-globalization protest in the spring of 2000, where I hung out with an Indymedia crew (and, as a documentary student admired their camera). The event was not much covered by mainstream TV – except by a few rather frightened looking local newscasters in suits – but there were lots of cameras operated by small video crews and various photographers.
I think that a lot of documentary media makers make media that we hope will change things – to bring a problem to light, to help people see an issue in a different way, etc. It’s always been tricky for me to reconcile what the relationship actually is between media and social change – have I ever seen a film that has truly changed the way I look at things? I think that much more than watching films themselves, it is the process of making media – talking to storage unit owners, wrangling through an idea, visiting abandoned factories – that has changed me.
I have been thinking lately that some methods of media making put process first, while others prioritize product, and that this is a very important distinction. For example, participatory video (see this book), power mapping, and issue mapping put process first – the point of these activities is to participate in the process itself. These methods can be used as co-inquiry tools, and may help to surface people’s ideas of what the issues at hand are and how to solve them. They also may surface people’s assumptions and theories of change. The final product of such exercises in raw form (post-it notes on a wall, DIY videos, etc.) may not be particularly meaningful to those outside the group that produced them, though they could be translated into documents designed for an outside audience.
Alternatively, documentary films and research-based articles typically put product first. The audience is expected to learn by consuming the product instead of learning by participating in its creation (the creation process is left to the “expert”). Recently, a number of documentary films have attempted to bridge this gap by providing study or discussion guides to accompany the film. For example, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Though this may help audiences to engage more deeply with the issues presented, this strategy is probably not a substitution for participation in the making-process itself.
Filed under: Infinity, Production Models | Tags: collaborative, curator, flickr, open, youtube
I recently saw William Eggelston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video 1961-2008 at the Whitney Museum in New York. The lush photographs were spread out over one floor: a teenage boy herding shopping carts in a grocery store parking lot, the empty surreal rooms of Graceland, the old-fashioned white china and mashed potatoes of a southern U.S. Thanksgiving dinner, a woman’s hairspray-perfect beehive in a small town diner. Eggelston’s famous photographs of the 1960s and 1970s still look fresh, revealing something of the the simple/dirty/strong soul of America.
What does it take to represent the U.S. today?
A friend was telling me recently that there is a sort of crisis in documentary photography – that the images that professional photographers are taking now don’t necessarily represent the USA any better than the images that “amateurs” are taking and posting online. For example, the photos of a 15-year old punk girl in Alabama of herself and her friends could be quite revealing about teen life, more so than images that a 50-year old National Geographic type might snap of teenagers.
We began talking about the (emerging?) role of the curator in new media and online media. e.g. People and/or websites that build a reputation for sorting through content produced by others and presenting it an interesting way – either as is, or in an re-edited form. This is possible with news stories, photos, and also with video. For example, the experimental filmmaker Bruce Elder’s “Crack, Brutal Grief” (2001) is made entirely from images pulled from the internet. His film is sometimes categorized as “open source filmmaking”.
Could the professional photographer/filmmaker/journalist be replaced by curators of ‘amateur’ media? Is the new media maker a curator? New content aggregation tools like Yahoo Pipes, photo sharing sites like Flickr, and open video sites and standards like Kaltura and The Open Video Alliance may be enablers of this kind of curatorial media-making.
Filed under: Distribution, Production Models | Tags: art, experimental film, gallery
Michele Pierson’s article on challenges to experimental film funding and distribution since film-making began is a smart piece:
“Public Image” By Michele Pierson. In Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film. Edited by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel. P. 168-175.
I read the essay this morning after muscling the beautiful and heavy silver book to a Brooklyn cafe; Celyon tea, apricot jam, tattooed young man at the bar, two businessmen eating an early lunch of bratwurst and red wine.
The book proceeds from a description of the solidification of the Hollywood system and its mass audience in the 1920s through various forms of amateur film societies and experimetnal film distribution collectives, to a few words on how the Internet promises change. Like the idea that that reading is not becoming less popular, but that only a very small group of people have ever really liked to read, M. Pierson suggests that experimental film-making has always been personal, ‘amateur’, and funding and distribution tricky – though the ways that filmmakers have tackled these things has shifted through time and place.
M. Pierson points to a striking idea for film funding by experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek:
“In the early 1960s, Stan VanDerBeek gave voice to the hope, perhaps even then only faintly imagined, that private art galleries might become places where films could not only be screened, but where prints would be available for sale. The idea that, like etchings or lithographs, films could become “‘objects’ to own and appreciate,” was one that failed to fully appreciate the vast differences between public and private forms of exhibition,” (p. 171).
Stan VanDerBeek’s idea about films as ‘objects’ is not so far off as suggested. It is true that although films have come more and more into the gallery space over the past decades that funds are not generated for the gallery/filmmaker in general by film print sales (this is besides the point that video technology has since arisen). Though I could be somewhat mistaken .. the economics of films-in-galleries is rather mysterious. Unlike theaters or museums, gallery admission is usually free to the ‘public’, so where does the money come from to host these films, to pay the filmmakers & the hot Chelsea rent?
I think that S. VanDerBeek’s idea of films-as-objects has yet to be explored in these sense that he may have meant it. And, that, further, internet/digital media technology open up new possibilities for what films-as-objects might be – how films as objects, frames, fragments might be sold and ‘owned’ as a way to support experimental and independent film-making.
Filed under: Distribution, Documentary, Production Models | Tags: activism
There is a quiet but fascinating synergy emerging between documentary filmmakers and social change organizations. Groups like Media Rights have emerged with the purpose of tying documentaries together with organizations or educational endeavors that are roused & galvanized by the same issues as the films talk about.
The idea is that educators and social change organizations gain new ways – beyond dull texts, e-mail calls to action – to show people how the system of mass food production works or why vinyl house siding is scary. On the other hand, documentary filmmakers get a new way of distributing their films – reaching, through educators and organizations, the audiences that want to see their work and for whom their work might make a difference.
We were encouraged by Working Films (‘linking non-fiction film with cutting edge activism’) via a kind & free phone consultation to pursue an unconventional distribution strategy by striking up relationships with organizations that work on the issues that our film touches – skipping the traditional film distributor world altogether. It’s a good idea. There’s also no road map for this:
- What do these partnerships between filmmakers and organizations look like? How do they get formed?
- Is this the death of film distributors? (e.g. cutting out the middle man between films and audiences)
- Or, will distributors adapt to this new sphere, perhaps creating relationships with social change organizations and targeted online spaces rather than festivals and TV stations?
- Are non-profit groups like Media Rights and Working Films the new ‘distributors’?
Interestingly, and not surprisingly, there are plenty of others out there thinking the same thing. And from this has sprung a chaotic, sometimes wildly successful fundraising strategy: crowd funding. The notion is basically this: you are making a documentary but are fresh in the industry (RE: totally unknown and no one even notices that you’re playing in the doc sandbox) and reason would dictate that no grant-giving organization would even consider your application. Thing is, you’re convinced that your idea is brilliant, that you can pull the thing off, and most importantly, that people are going to LOVE it. From this, you realize that if hundreds of your potential new fans could just donate a couple bucks, then you would be well on your way to fulfilling your dreams. And your fans would have something to look forward to, none the broker for it.
While this is a fantastic story, and even though their debt is still being paid off, the model still seems on shaky ground. Just take IndieGoGo for example, a new web-venture that seeks to put aspiring doc makers in touch with….some ill-defined “lovers of documentary film” population who can contribute funds directly at the site, often with certain perks associated with the contribution, like a signed DVD or an invite to the opening party in some dive bar in Hoboken. A quick overview of the site indicates that there are lots of documentary film people signed up and looking for that elusive crowd-funding phenomena to happen to them. And practically none of them – because the viewer gets to see how much has been contributed – have raised a dime on the site.
The power and influence of the Internet is staggering, and can and should be an outlet for a new generation of filmmakers, but some fine tuning is in order, otherwise, all of these sites and all of these efforts start looking a bit too much like those sad little fundraising jars for the Jimmy Fund left at liquor stores, gas stations and libraries. The dusty ones hosting a smattering of pennies and nickles.
I heard a fun and inspiring talk at the New York Photo Festival in DUMBO.
I went to the talk partly because the auditorium was an oasis from the sun outside and also because WassinkLungren’s photos on display at the festival are of people on the streets of Beijing and Shanghai (not the shiny new buildings or historical places, but the huge, plain sidewalks and dry parks of those cities). The photos were made by planting empty water bottles in public spaces, and waiting for passersby to pick them up to recycle: snapshots of these moments.
To my surprise the “photographer” turned out to not be one, but two people, Thijs groot Wassink (1981) and Ruben Lundgren (1983). The two young men met at the Utrecht School of the Arts and have worked together since under the name of WassinkLundgren. Though they are currently living in different places – London and Beijing – and have their individual photo work – the two spoke of themselves as a fluid unit: “we thought this .. we tried that .. !”
There’s a wonderful lightness in their work, both in the images themselves, and in the way they together take on the photo-world: self-publishing books, cutting up photos to fit exhibition spaces, getting audacious access in their editorial work, and winning big prizes.
On the experience of now living on two different continents the two report new growth in their collaboration: “We are both learning so many new things. Now when we have hours long Skype conversations it is as though we are filling each other up, he is telling me what he knows, and I am telling him what I know …”
We recently attended the Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival in Toronto, which is also a big documentary industry event. As befits an industry conference there were a number of panels on the future of the documentary, largely focusing on the changing financial structure of how films are made and distributed.
One of the most striking comments by a panelist was that the documentary industry has a lot to learn from the changes that are happening in the music industry – for which recent transitions online have been more visibly contentious (Napster and the aftermath), including issues also relevant to film, like:
-copyright, see Lawrence Lessig
-media sharing
-how artists can get paid for their work
-producers and distributors in the era of Myspace
-new mass distribution platforms, like iTunes
-physical media (CDs, DVDs) versus electronic media (computers, ipods)
Strikingly the panelist noted that, “Musicians don’t make money from music .. they share their music on Myspace, e.g. for free. Instead, musicians make money from the things that surround the music itself, like concerts, where ticket prices have risen.” For example, see the Rolling Stone article “Rock’s New Economy: Making Money When Music Doesn’t Sell.”
The question is, what can the documentary industry learn from the music industry?
What parallel changes is the documentary industry undergoing, and how are its challenges and opportunities different? How do the traditional structures of each industry relate to emerging structures?
And, where does all this leave the artists – the filmmakers and musicians? What can filmmakers learn from musicians? If filmmakers don’t make money from films (have they ever made much?), how will their work be supported? If Youtube or Vimeo are the Myspaces of the film world, what is the “concert” of the documentary industry?
