The Database Documentary:

The documentary film has seen many remediations since entering the digital era: the i-doc, the webi-doc, the ecocinematic documentary, the multilinear documentary, as we have examined in this and other chapters. In fact, one digital documentary scholar, Atalanti Dionysus, has identified as many as fourteen versions of the documentary remediated by the web

(Dionysus, 2018). What they all have in common is their capacity to be yet another version of the genre, the database documentary.

Many scholars - Manovich (2001), Lovink (2008), Keep (2015) - argue that all digital documentary projects, to some degree, are database documentaries. The digital domain in which they reside can accommodate infinite content provided by filmmaker, audience and even

community participants. As such, database documentaries are often referred to as “living

documentaries” for their capacity to continually grow. As Sandra Gaudenzi so accurately defines it in her book, The Living Documentary: From Representing Reality to Co-creating Reality in Digital Interactive Documentary, a living documentary is “an assemblage composed

by…elements that are linked through modalities of interaction…and can be more or less open to transformation” (Gaudenzi, 84).

A living documentary, simply put, is a film without end and this fits quite comfortably in the multilinear format that affords temporal and spatial analyses. These considerations provide the continually growing database with content that transforms both the explicit and implicit narratives of the story. In the case of a social issue documentary, using a database documentary project as a policy resource, corresponding social reform can take place not just once – as in a linear documentary – but several times as new, updated data become available within the project.

In his article “The Art of Watching Databases”, Geert Lovink, founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, argues that “(w)e no longer watch films or TV; we watch

databases” (Lovink, 9). In it, he explains that our encounters with database projects are preferred to linear projects based on their ability to be searched. “Which search terms will yield the best fragments” (Lovink, 9), he asks. Since we now have the choice Daly called for in 1967, we tend to stay engaged with a database documentary project much longer than the ninety minutes we used to give to a traditional, linear documentary film (Lovink, 12).

Another definition of the database documentary is provided by Anne Burdick et al in the book Digital Humanities:

Database documentaries are multi-linear. They are not watched, but rather performed by a reader/viewer who is provided with a series of guided paths; and, unlike the cinematic documentary, which is free-standing, database documentaries may be built on multiple, overlapping databases. (Burdick et al, 54).

But can these seemingly random collections of images – film fragments – presented in a multilinear space be understood as narratives? Can they tell a story if they are viewed out of

context without any ordered sequence?

Manovich argues that they can by presenting a case using the example of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera – a non-digital project made in 1927. Manovich describes Vertov as the

“major database documentary filmmaker of the twentieth century” (Manovich, 239) and that

“Man with a Movie Camera is perhaps the most important example of a database

imagination in modern media art” (Manovich,

239). The main difference between this analogue film and its digital counterparts is the lack of audience interactivity, but even this is suggested through scenes showing the audience in the film, presumably “interacting” with the film they are seeing, the same one in which they appear.

But how does this film serve as a database documentary and does this structure yield a film that carries a message of social reform and how effective is this technique in delivering this message to its audience? Manovich offers an explanation:

In one of the key shots repeated few times in the film we see an editing room with a number of shelves used to keep and organize the shot material. The shelves are marked “machines,” “club,” “the movement of a city,” “physical exercise,” “an illusionist,” and so on. This is the database of the recorded material. The editor – Vertov’s wife, Elizaveta Svilova (see Fig. 6) – is shown working with this database: retrieving some reels, returning used reels, adding new ones (Manovich, 239-40).

The way the film is cut, Manovich argues, results in the film’s narrative: “Man with a Movie Camera traverses its database in a particular order to construct an argument. Records drawn from a database and arranged in a particular order become a picture of modern life…Its subject is the

Figure 6

Elizaveta Svilova editing “Man with a Movie Camera” (1927) in a scene from

the same film.

filmmaker’s struggle to reveal (social) structure among the multitude of observed phenomena”

(Manovich, 240). Database documentaries, therefore, possess the ability to reveal implicit narratives necessary in presenting arguments for social reform.

One of the scholarly affordances of the digital world is the way multiple elements can be analyzed and investigated spatially. The Spatial Humanities offers us new ways of investigating interdisciplinary scholarship from a perspective of space. In examining the documentary film through this lens, we see relational patterns emerge both spatially and temporally providing data and narratives not necessarily evident in the documentary film itself.