An interesting phenomenon among YouTube ‘auteurs’ is the pseudonym
‘geriatric1927’ appearing on a website usually dominated by a very youthful audience. After a short personal introduction with the title
‘Geriatric Grumbles’, the YouTube audience comes face to face with an elderly British gentleman using a simple web camera to declare his enthu-siasm for the YouTube community and declaring his intention to share his life experiences with his audience. As over 4,000 YouTubers quickly sent him positive feedback, ‘geriatric1927’ started a series with the title Telling It All that by early January 2008 had reached 57 ‘episodes’.3In this auto-biographic monologue the audience is informed about growing up in pre-World War II class-dominated England, about the person behind the pseudonym, whose first name is Peter and he was (as his moniker hinted) 79 years old at the first posting, a widower, has an education in the field of mechanical engineering and has been working in the British health sector prior to being self-employed and later having retired. He leads off every new ‘episode’ with a short vignette of text and music – mainly classic
3. The number of video postings by ‘geriatric 1927’ had reached 100 as of January 2008, with less emphasis on ‘Telling it All’ and more on contemporary issues, especially about the conditions for the elderly in the United Kingdom.
blues – before addressing his audience with: ‘Hello YouTubers!’ From this point the web camera rests on him as he continues his monologue, with an ample amount of digressions, about growing up in another age. The response from his audience, which seems to have stabilized around 20,000–30,000, comes in the form of text and video blogs addressed to him, parodies (most of them good-natured, with a few exceptions) and responses sent to his new website (http://www.askgeriatric.com/). The average viewer seems to be of a very young age, a fact that is interesting and suggests a need with the present ‘Generation Y’ for a kind of grandfa-ther figure.4
With media exposure comes fame, and ‘Peter’ has been awarded con-siderable attention in the regular media, with coverage on BBC radio and the Washington Post as well as other media. However, he has refused to
‘come out’ on regular television and has managed to maintain his relative anonymity. On several occasions he has broken off his autobiography to comment on the kind of pressure that public media exerts and where he maintains his loyalty to ‘his YouTubers’ and insists on the qualities of the conversation and personal correspondence as preferable to being exposed in the regular mass media – a point of view that undoubtedly appears sen-sational for an audience led to believe that exposure via the mass media is the meaning of life!
In a recent article Dave Harley and Geraldine Fitzpatrick have been look-ing at geriatric1927 in the context of globalized and intergenerational com-munication (Harley and Fitzpatrick 2008). In addition to pointing out that the activities of Peter highlights the discrepancy between the increased life length expectancy in present society and the distribution of Internet use in age groups over 60, the authors draw attention to how the YouTube com-munity may serve as a learning tool for the would-be digital video producer:
His confidence in his own abilities appears to be faltering at this point, both in terms of his ability to express himself through his videos and in terms of pro-ducing and uploading content onto the YouTube website. What begins as an individual effort by Peter soon develops into a collaborative endeavour through the comments he receives from his viewers. They give him feedback in a num-ber of ways which help him to develop his video presence within YouTube. The following are examples of viewers’ comments that critique the technical aspects of his video production and give him technical advice on how to improve it:
‘Try putting music into the video through the program you are using, it would sound much better :)’ [ZS9, 19, US – response to Video 1]
‘You can also change the colors on Windows Movie Maker. When you are typing your text down by where it says animation or what ever to change the display of your text it should be right there. Just click that and you can change the font and then color is right under the font.’ [Gt, 21, US – response to Video 2]
Peter is quick to take advantage of the advice given and the changes in pro-duction qualities and techniques in subsequent videos show evidence of the results of his learning.
(Harley and Fitzpatrick 2008) 4. With a grandparent
generation living in Florida or Arizona (or Spain in the case of northern European youths) is it possible that new living patterns in the middle class have opened up an unexpected deprivation?
All in all, it is remarkable to what extent the video blog of geriatric1927 appears as a collective enterprise actually enhancing the highly individual character of the project. He has established what seems to be a solid ‘fan base’ of younger people who, in addition to providing a continuous feed-back on form and content matters, have also helped him in establishing and maintaining a website. This dual character of collective support and individual presentation presents an interesting contrast to Astruc’s individ-ualized vision of a future Descartes holed up in his room with his camera.
Peter is writing his life with his camera pen, but he is not doing it alone.
In The Subject of Documentary (2004) Michael Renov points out that over the last decades we have seen a shift in individual self-expression from written media (diaries and other written material) to a culture of audio-visual self-presentation both inside and outside of the documentary insti-tution. Is this tendency to audio-visual self-presentation a ‘turn inwards’, a retreat from the traditional societal role of documentary, a turn from Paul Rotha’s ‘documentary as pulpit’ to the ‘documentary as a confes-sional’? Renov does not see it that way:
. . . video confessions produced and exchanged in nonhegemonic contexts can be powerful tools for self-understanding, as well as for two-way commu-nication. [They] [. . .] afford a glimpse of a more utopian trajectory in which cultural production and consumption mingle and interact, and in which the media facilitate understanding across the gaps of human difference rather than simply capitalizing on these differences in a rush to spectacle.
(Renov 2004: 215)
With Telling It All we can also glimpse the contours of an innovation in the relationship with the ‘classic’ documentary, an innovation that to a large extent may be ascribed to the change in forms of distribution represented by digital audio-visual narrative. A recurring problem within documen-tary theory and practice is the question of representation – or the burden of representation, as documentary film-maker Isaac Julien has put it (Trinh 1992: s.193). The Griersonian project of the 1920s and 1930s was, to a large extent, a pedagogical project. Grierson wanted to use the film medium in order to illustrate the extent to which modern society was a result of a complicated pattern of interaction among its citizens. The prob-lem, as critics of Grierson have pointed out, was that British documentary tended to reduce the subjects of the films to de-individualized, representa-tive figures subjected to a master narrarepresenta-tive they had no control over.
This problematic has led to several experiments in letting the subjects in the documentary express themselves more directly, as in the Canadian social documentary project Challenge for Change in the 1960s where enthusiastic film-makers passed out cameras and sound equipment and experimented with inclusive editing and distribution formats. The reason this and other similar projects failed was that the distribution link was marginalized and that however democratic the intensions were, the initia-tive for and control of the film project came from outside and from above.5 In Telling it All we have a case where the subject controls his own narrative from the very first moment. In this way ‘Peter’ and his video autobiography represent a dramatic challenge to a film genre that at
5. About the perceived failure of the Challenge for Change programme, see Marchessault (1995: 131);
Kurchak (1972:
120); Svenstedt (1970: 85).
times may seem at odds with its own proclaimed democratic potentiality.
Paula Rabinowitz sums up this problematic in the very title of her book dealing with how social conditions have been described in theatre and television documentaries throughout the twentieth century: They Must be Represented. This title denotes a ‘they’ and a ‘we’, where all good intentions of acting on behalf of others very often leads to a cementation of existing social constellations – the subject of the documentary invariably becomes trapped in the role of victim, as Brian Winston points out (Winston 1995).
This brings us back to Alexandre Astruc and his vision of the future author (auteur) who writes, using a camera instead of a pen. A major point for Astruc was that the perceived new media situation would open up alternative ways and means of audio-visual expression, hence his insis-tence of connecting the new technology with the aesthetics of the avant-garde. For him, the new technological possibilities meant more than just a democratization of the medium, instead he regarded it as a necessary reju-venation of film form, liberating it from the old. Could it be that parts of this vision are being realized today, in the unlikely figure of an 80-year-old
‘auteur’ using a global digital network to transfer his experiences and nar-ratives to a younger generation?
References
Astruc, Alexandre (1968), ‘The birth of a new avant-garde: La caméra-stylo’, in Peter Graham (ed.), The New Wave: Critical Landmarks, London: Secker &
Warburg in association with the British Film Institute.
Calhoun, Craig (1992), Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Corneil, Marit Kathryn (2003), Challenge for Change: An experiment in documentary ethics at the National Film Board of Canada, Master’s thesis, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim.
Graham, Peter (ed.) (1968), The New Wave: Critical Landmarks, London: Secker &
Warburg in association with the British Film Institute.
Habermas, Jürgen (1981) Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag.
—— (1991), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
—— (1992), ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’, in Craig Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
—— (2006), Preisrede [. . .] anlässlich der Verleihung des Bruno-Kreisky-Preises für das politische Buch 2005, Renner-Institut, Vienna.
Hansen, Miriam (1981/1982), ‘Cooperative Auteur Cinema and Oppositional Public Sphere: Alexander Kluge’s Contribution to Germany in Autumn’, New German Critique, 24/25 (Autumn 1981–Winter 1982), pp. 36–56.
—— (1983), ‘Early Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?’, New German Critique, 29 (Spring–Summer), pp. 147–84.
Harley, Dave and Fitzpatrick, Geraldine (2008), ‘YouTube and Intergenerational Communication: The Case of Geriatric1927’, Universal Access in the Information Society, (special issue: ‘HCI and older people’).
Kellner, Douglas (2000), ‘Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention’, in Perspectives on Habermas, Lewis Hahn (ed.) (2000) Chicago: Open Court Press, http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/habermas.htm accessed November 2007.
Kurchak, Marie (1972), ‘What Challenge? What Change’, reprinted from Take One, 4: 1 (September–October), in Seth Feldman and Joyce Nelson (eds) (1977), The Canadian Film Reader, Toronto: Peter Martin Associates.
Lovell, Alan (1972), “Free Cinema” in Alan Lovell and Jim Hillier, Studies in Documentary, London: Secker & Warburg in association with the British Film Institute.
Marchessault, Janine (1995), ‘Reflections on the Dispossessed: Video and the Challenge for Change experiment’, in Screen, 36: 2 (Summer), p. 131.
Negt, Oscar and Kluge, Alexander (1994), Public Sphere and Experience: Towards an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Poster, Mark (2001), What´s the Matter with the Internet?, Minneapolis/London:
University of Minnesota Press.
Renov, Michael (2004), The Subject of Documentary, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rich, B. Ruby (2006), ‘Documentary Disciplines: An Introduction’, Cinema Journal, 46: 1, pp 108–115.
Street, Sarah (1997), British National Cinema, London: Routledge.
Svenstedt, Carl Henrik (1970), Arbetarna Lamner Fabriken, Stockholm: Pan/
Norstedts.
Trinh T. Minh-Ha (1992), Framer Framed, New York: Routledge.
Winston, Brian (1995), Claiming the Real, London: British Film Institute.
Zimmermann, Patricia R. (1995), Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Suggested citation
Sørenssen, B. (2008), ‘Digital video and Alexandre Astruc’s caméra-stylo: the new avant-garde in documentary realized?’, Studies in Documentary Film 2: 1, pp. 47–59, doi: 10.1386/sdf.2.1.47/1
Contributor details
Bjørn Sørenssen is Professor of Film and and Media at the Department of Art and Media Studies at the The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. His main research interests are in film history, documentary and new media technology. He has published a considerable number of articles internation-ally on these themes in addition to articles and books in Norwegian, among these Å fange virkeligheten. Dokumentarfilmens århundre (Catching Reality. The Century of the Documentary) (2001, 2nd edition 2007.) Contact: Bjørn Sørenssen, Department of Art and Media Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, P.A.
Munchs gt.17, N-7030 Trondheim, Norway.
E-mail: [email protected]
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Studies in Documentary Film Volume 2 Number 1 © 2008 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sdf.2.1.61/1