Digital Documentary and Social Change:

Historically, the documentary film has experienced much use and success in informing the public and influencing public opinion. In their essay, “Documentary Film: Towards a Research Agenda on Forms, Functions, and Impacts”, Michael C. Nisbet and Patricia Aufderheide identify the documentary’s newly-evolved purpose of social activism in the digital domain:

Documentaries are no longer conventionally perceived as a passive experience intended solely for informal learning or entertainment. Instead, with ever increasing frequency, these films are considered part of a larger effort to spark debate, mould public opinion, shape policy, and build activist networks (Nisbet, Aufderheide, 450).

Figure 2

Movie poster for Blackfish (2013).

Social issue documentaries released online have the capacity and the ability to influence the masses and mobilize them to effect social change and, indeed, there are some recent examples of success in this area – such as the movie Blackfish (see Fig. 2) that resulted in plunging Seaworld, a marine theme park, into crisis mode, forcing them to reconceptualise their exhibits and entire corporate philosophy – but what happens when you remove the masses and the need for emotional engagement? How do policymakers interact directly with the digital documentary film?

Scholars (Waugh, Nichols, Marchessault) agree that the documentary film has developed into a relatively influential tool for social change and one that is growing in power with technical

advancements being made on a regular basis in the digital domain. Ezra Winton and Svetla Turnin, co-founders of Cinema Politica, a non-profit media arts organization specializing in showcasing activist documentaries, have found a reciprocal arrangement flourishing between the documentary and its reformative ambitions: “Just as a social movement could inspire the making of a documentary, a documentary in turn could activate a social movement” (Winton, Turnin, 21). This illustrates how activation is now being provoked, thanks to, most evidently, social media campaigns involving documentary films. The contemporary documentary often involves activists in the production’s fund-raising process before the film is made and continue with momentum long after the film is released.

The philosophy of Nichols’ participatory mode of documentary filmmaking has now extended to audience engagement before and after the documentary viewing experience, and with such digital measurement programs as Harvis, sometimes even during. With a greater potential audience reach in the digital domain, there is the possibility of many more people rallying behind a documentary film’s social issue by participating in these activist movements to contribute directly to the film’s social change agenda.

This recognized ability to influence policy and cause social change, especially in the digital domain, is now involving traditional filmmaking industry partners. Conventional buyers of

documentary films – television networks – have recognized the importance and value of digital distribution not just in terms of making direct sales of the titles they present, but also as a promotional tool to build audiences by supporting online activist campaigns related to the films. PBS, for

example, provides a comprehensive list of “Engagement Strategists” ¹ on its website encouraging independent filmmakers to work with these activist organizations not only to achieve their project’s social issue goals, but also to raise public awareness of their “product”.

But while these strategies and tactics may be effective for the traditional, linear documentary film in its online existence, does this apply as well to the contemporary, multilinear, interactive, database, and digital documentaries? In his book, The Language of New Media, digital media theorist Lev Manovich indicates an inherent flaw intrinsically attached to contemporary documentary

production and related specifically to the constantly evolving new media technologies and the digital domain in which they exist:

Creating a stable new language (in digital film) is…subverted by the constant introduction of new techniques over time…Every year, every month, new effects find their way into new media works, displacing previously prominent ones and destabilizing any stable expectations that viewers have begun to form (Manovich, 243).

While the art form continues to evolve, the audience struggles in trying to keep up with an ever-changing set of parameters of engagement. It is simultaneously constructive and destructive. In the second edition of New Challenges for Documentary, Alan Rosenthal and John Corner address this struggle in their introduction:

The non-linear, interactive properties of the web create possibilities for documentary work at the same time as they are an obstacle to the kind of public ‘confrontation’ of

1 “Engagement Strategists”, pbs.org. Accessed: September 2, 2015.

Link: http://www.pbs.org/pov/filmmakers/engagement-strategists.php#.VedcF_lViko

viewer with topic that many documentarists have sought. In this confrontation, it is often quite important that viewers do not have too many options immediately available for negotiating their route through the material, that they just have to ‘look and listen’, so to speak (Rosenthal, Corner, 5).

The concept of “too many options” is at the heart of the digital documentary. Supporting media, often referred to as “meta data”, such as additional video, hypertext, weblinks, and pictures, may provide an enhanced presentation of data related to the documentary’s subject matter, but engaging in them interrupts the traditional experience of simply “looking at and listening to” a linear documentary. While the concept of too many options seems to be a hindrance to the documentary viewing experience in the digital domain, some scholars believe these options are carefully created additions that actually enhance the viewing experience. Florian Thalhoffer, one of the creators of Korsakow, a computer program that makes video fragments of a documentary story available for the viewer to interact with (to be examined in detail in Chapter 5), said in an interview with Kate Nash that “(t)he viewer has this option or that option, but these options are really pathways that have been pre-thought and planned by the author” (Nash, “An Interview”, 193). He goes on to acknowledge that while this method of documentary storytelling provides more information in a different way, there is still resistance to it as we struggle to learn and become comfortable with this new approach.

The beauty of computers is that they can free you from this linear way of thinking (traditional documentary films). But it is difficult; we don’t really understand how to do it. We have a lot of knowledge about how to tell linear stories, more than 120 years of film history in fact. We’re still learning how to tell stories in a non-linear way…” (Nash, “An Interview”, 193-194).

Nevertheless, the digital documentary has benefited in areas such as extended audience reach and engagement, despite these technical obstacles of user interface. By making, exhibiting and disseminating documentaries in this new medium, the genre’s ability to influence audiences is magnified thereby increasing its potential for causing social change. Audience engagement, in

particular, is one of the most significant affordances provided by the digital domain for the documentary film, so much so, that a new kind of documentary film has emerged: the i-doc.