Four categories of collaborative documentary

I’ve just been in Barcelona, at the ECREA (European Communication Research & Education Association) Digital Culture Workshop which looked at innovative practices and critical theories.  It was a terrific gathering – small enough to get to know people, focussed enough to be productive – a great mix of conviviality and critical dialogue. (Thanks to the convenors, Caroline Basset and Elisenda Ardevol.)

I presented in the Creative Practices strand which was concerned with, “concepts of participation, co-creativity, co-design or co-innovation in creative processes involving audiences and independent creators in a wide spectrum of activities including art, photography, video, and videogames.”  My paper offered a draft categorisation of the projects I write about here, according to the type of contribution made by the participants. I’ll give a brief summary of the four categories.

In “The Creative Crowd” model which covers work including Mad V’s The Message, and perry bard’s Man with a Movie Camera; the Global Remix, multiple participants contribute fragments to a highly templated whole, analogous to the separate panels within a quilt. The units of content may not make much sense on their own but value and meaning accrue as they come together producing a distinctive aesthetic that’s about energy and repetition. (Though not a documentary, The Johnny Cash Project is a prime example of this mode.)

In the second model, “The Participant Observers” are distributed filmmakers who each contribute to a work that’s concerned with contrasting experiences of place. The participants decide when and what they shoot and what story they want to tell, but their role in the final contextualisation of that content can vary dramatically. Participants may contribute rushes towards a linear whole that someone else edits, as in Life in a Day, or produce a stand-alone film, a considered narrative, for an interactive framework as in Mapping Main Street. Though filmed observation is as old as documentary I see the prevalence of these situated observers now as significant. What they bring is the potential for documentary “knowledge” that is grounded in experience – situated, embodied, affective. This mode is all about multiplicity, and when content is organised in a database the output can also be open-ended, produced through the interactive experience of the viewer / user.

The third mode I call “The Community of Purpose”. Here, a group of participants take part in a production with a shared objective around social change. They may be involved in making content but may have another role in the process, as the resident experts do in the Highrise project. These projects tend to be iterative rather than having a fixed trajectory. Global Lives and One Day on Earth are examples here. What’s fascinating in this category is that collaborative process – the dialogue and experiences involved in production - begin to be as important as product. There is a definite turn in this direction right now, though this way of working is not new in itself. Kat Cizek’s work at the National Film Board, in particular, is a deliberate re-working of Challenge for Change – the 1960s project which initiated Community Media. ( See earlier post on Cizek as Filmmaker in Residence.) For more on this group do take a look at my interviews with David Evan Harris (Global Lives) and Kat Cizek (Highrise). An open rights framework such as Global Lives has can then add another dimension of emergence as uses for the content can grow in a unrestricted way, driven by collaborators.

After I submitted the abstract for Barcelona I added a fourth category, which I call, The Traces of the Multitude. (Thanks to Jon Dovey for introducing me to Negri’s concept, here used somewhat ambiguously.) This category relates to “Semantic Documentary” -  work that’s just emerging like the Highrise spin-off, One Millionth Tower, and 18DaysinEgypt. These projects introduce a new aspect to collaboration by drawing on social media content – linking to a multitude of, potentially anonymous, contributors. Here we can start to see documentary that is continually live and updating, with static video linked to live web data. (I’ve been working on an article with Jon Dovey about this work and the wider implications of the “Sea of Data” for documentary, in which I ponder my own experiments on the The Are you Happy? Project. I’ll write more about that here soon.)

It was lovely at ECREA to meet and hear from a number of scholars doing theoretical work on areas close to mine. I presented alongside Isis Hjorth, from the Oxford Internet Institute, whose PhD examines peer-production in the Wreckamovie community. Isis is asking whether accounts of peer-production have been over optimistic, and if these modes aren’t in fact closer to the managerial and bureaucratic modes of conventional production than has been suggested. The other panelist, Antoni Roig, is, with co-researchers Talia Leibovitz and Jordi Sanchez Navarro of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, examining the concepts and practices of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. Again, their interest is in getting behind assumptions about democratisation to understand the complexities of these practices.

The discussion after the panel circled around what is going on in the dynamics of participation. As Trish Morgan asked in a Tweet, “Who has final editorial say in a collaborative, crowdsourced, peer-produced work?” The answer varies, and the discussion made me realise that I need to tease this out and make some of my working assumptions more explicit. When I speak about collaboration I assume that the types of contributions people make, and the control they have, will be uneven; that not everyone will have the same stake or involvement, though the terms certainly need to be clear at the start. I think of collaboration as a relationship that can be productive even if it’s asymmetrical. This perspective comes from experiences in production going back to Video Nation, where the BBC provided production expertise, cameras, training, editing, and the BBC platform, and the participants brought their everyday life experiences, community contexts, their time, thought and their recordings. The co-creative relationship that existed in the first stage of the VN project (94-2000) – which was founded on participants right of veto over what was broadcast – produced documentary insights that were valuable to the audience – based on reviews and audience feedback – and, by various accounts, to the participants – see Nancy Thumim‘s research at the time. Though it is worth saying that Nancy produced a more critical commentary on institutional mediation in her later research which looked at Digital Storytelling including the Capture Wales project I was part of at that time, which will be reflected in her forthcoming book, Self-Representation and Digital Culture. (I do apologise for referring to the VN example so often, but it’s so relevant here. For another take on VN, and a substantial overview of this field, see Nico Carpentier’s Media & Participation, published earlier this year.)

Video Nation, and many of the projects I describe on this blog, are initiated and structured by professional producers. This is not to say that participants don’t make substantial contributions to meaning. But that’s another discussion… The producers are “context providers” but only sometimes “content providers”. They can be seen as “benevolent dictators” as Eric Raymond has described it, referring to the dominant mode of organisation in Open-Source Software development. Even the exceptional Global Lives, which as David Evan Harris describes in his recent interview is now run as a collective, is still substantially influenced by Harris’ orginal vision.

Isis Hjorth mentioned the idea that there is often a charismatic individual behind crowd-sourced projects. It’s an interesting suggestion and isn’t at odds with the producer model I’m describing. You need to be motivated to take part as a volunteer in a collaborative project, and Cizek and Harris, for example, are certainly inspirational figures. The idea makes sense in a particular way in the projects described in the Creative Crowd model above. Those examples come close to Fandom. They are not necessarily led by, but they each involve an iconic figure  – Mad V, Johnny Cash – or an iconic work – Man with a Movie Camera. [If anyone isn't sure of the iconic status of Mad V- pictured above - I can assure you that the interview with him on this blog has consistently been the most viewed page - years after he bowed out of You Tube.] These are works of homage. Thinking of them in this way underlines how the dynamics of participation inter-relate with structures of feeling that are not new, and not necessarily egalitarian. (For a nice catalogue of organisational models see the slide below – from a session I recently attended at the Mozilla Festival – where structures for open working were under discussion.)

So the Barcelona workshop raised some important and engaging questions for me. Being there made me realise that I need to unpack some of my starting points, and consider my assumptions. Those four categories may prove productive in that thinking, and they may not. I suspect now that they try and capture too much, conflating production, participation and aspects of form which need disentangling. Another outcome from the workshop for me was that I want to think more about how value is distributed in these projects – about money and surplus value, yes, but also reputational value, the value of taking part, audience value, public value. Some ethnographic work on particular projects is really needed right now.  So the ECREA workshop was productive, as well as fun. And there was lots of interesting work under discussion that I haven’t mentioned here. Do take a look at the abstracts, which are all available on the website.

Britain in a Day

Saturday was filming day for Britain in a Day, the UK version of Life in a Day which is being produced for the BBC by Ridley Scott’s Scott Free company, and directed by Morgan Matthews. Like Life in a Day the project will be made from content shot by the public drawn in through You Tube. The idea is to create, “the definitive self-portrait of Britain today, filmed by you”, which will be broadcast just prior to the 2012 Olympics. According to commissioner Charlotte Moore, all the content uploaded to You Tube will be kept as an archive, a time capsule of Britain 2012.

The BBC has worked with the public in a number of content collaborations designed to capture everyday life over the years. In 1986 over a million volunteers contributed to a snapshot of Britain for the Domesday project, recently revisited as Domesday Reloaded. As Charlotte Moore explains on the BBC blog Britain in a Day has a direct precedent in the BBC’s Video Nation,(the project I co-founded and produced for BBC 2 with Chris Mohr between 1993-2000, and which then continued on BBC online in various guises until March this year.) Looking further back both Video Nation and Life in a Day / Britain in a Day owe a debt to a much earlier British collaborative self-portrait, the remarkable Mass Observation, which began in 1937, and, among many other activities, undertook a number of day surveys,.

With digital tools and the web the early 2000s saw a variety of participatory initiatives at the BBC, projects like Blast, Audio Diaries and the Capture Wales/Cipolwg ar Gymru Digital Storytelling project that I oversaw. Then the mood changed and questions arose about why the BBC should get involved in these initiatives. The projects might be powerful for participants but how did they serve the wider audience? What was the BBC’s role in quality and editorial control in so-called “user-generated content”? More pragmatically, why should the BBC invest in what You Tube seemed to be taking care of?

In the face of these issues, and with commercial criticism that the BBC was doing too much across too many spheres, there was a retreat in the later 2000′s from investment in participatory work. BBC programme makers have gradually become fluent at drawing on social media for audience input and comment, but apart from as witnesses to news events, the BBC seemed to lose sight of its audience as content creators.

So I welcome Britain in a Day as a sign of a renewed curiosity about what might be possible when the BBC and the public work together in documentary. Saturday Nov 12th was an interesting day in an interesting year – the Remembrance commemorations coinciding with the leak about Armed Forces redundancies, with ex-soldiers at Occupy London, a gloomy economic picture contrasting with sublime Autumn weather. Having shown in making The Fallen how he can build a powerful whole from multiple stories, Matthews is just the director to work with the video material that people will have generated.

Putting audience created content into the hands of a professional director is one response to the possibilities of participatory culture for documentary. Projects like Highrise, Man with a Movie Camera; the Global Remix and Global Lives offer alternative approaches and show how collaborative and participatory modes can lead to new forms of documentary experience. I look forward to seeing Britain in a Day. Meanwhile I hope that this commission heralds more experimentation with participatory documentary by the BBC, including non-linear work which can compare with what the National Film Board has been doing in Canada, or Arte in France.

A Filmmaker-in-Residence

Good news this week from Cannes, where  Katerina Cizek / Gerry Flahive‘s ‘Out my Window’ was the deserving winner of a Digital Emmy for non-fiction at MIP-TV. I’ve enthused about this National Film Board of Canada interactive documentary project here a number of times. (Nov ’10, Jan ’11). It’s the first output from Highrise, “a multi-year, multimedia project” exploring “vertical living in the global suburbs”, which brings the stories of people in highrise communities vividly to life in a web based interactive format.

We had hoped the project director Kat Cizek might be able to present her work at the recent DCRC iDocs Symposium. In the end she couldn’t be there, but Sandra Gaudenzi talked to her a few weeks ago on Skype for the iDocs blog. (Also see the substantial consideration of “Out my Window” that Sandra wrote on her Interactive Documentary blog.)

Watching Kat Cizek  you get a feel for some of the factors that contribute to the success of ‘Out my Window’.  The iterative process – where research leads the thinking about approach – is key to the great fit between form and content. It’s clear that Cizek is an impressive digital producer with a fluency across platforms and technologies, but interactive production is very much about team work and she’s evidently also part of a great creative team.

The commissioning context is really important here too, though. It’s pretty unusual for a commissioner to make a substantial investment in an experimental project with undefined outputs (though that was, it’s worth mentioning, just what happened on BBC 2′s Video Nation project, and was, without doubt, key to why it worked. But that’s another story…) In the case of Highrise, it demonstrates the National Film Board of Canada’s faith in Cizek, and their grasp of non-linear production. For Highrise is one project in an extraordinary body of interactive documentary work that the National Film Board has commissioned. (The NFB were marketing 14 interactive projects at this year’s MIP-TV.) Have a look on their portal. Explore Pine Point or Holy Mountain. These are intelligent works that take advantage of what the web can do to explore the complexities of life now.

More than that, the NFB have invested in the development of digital documentary as a social practice, and Katerina Cizek is crucial to this story. Back in 2002, Cizek, who has described herself as a “social-justice documentarian”, had explored the democratising potential of the camcorder in ”Seeing is Believing”, a film made with Peter Wintonick . So, when the the NFB had the idea to revisit their Challenge for Change project in the digital age by appointing a Filmmaker-in-Residence, it was Cizek they approached.

Challenge for Change was a pioneering NFB participatory media project that started in 1967, in which filmmakers worked in partnership with marginalised communities, not just to reflect their situations, but to change them. 145 films were made within the project which was the inspiration for Public Access TV projects including the BBC’s Community Programmes Unit.

In 2004 the NFB recruited Katerina Cizek, who embedded herself with the health care community at St Michaels, an inner-city hospital in Toronto, and set about reinventing the Challenge for Change model as a digital project – as what she called “Interventionist Media.” You can see what happened in “The Seven Interventions of Filmmaker-in-Residence“, a film charting the five year process. Watch it. It’s inspiring. There’s also a DVD box set that came out of the project, that I haven’t seen yet. In the words of Jacqueline Wallace, who interviewed Cizek in 2010 for CINER (the Concordia Interactive Narrative & Research Group),  ”The resulting work is nothing short of a multimedia juggernaut and includes several films, a photo exhibit, a filmmaker’s blog, and a web documentary that exemplifies non-linear narrative and the possibilities it represents to tell the stories of real people and create real change.”

Out my Window is, then, very much a continuation of Cizek’s energetic engagement with the possibilities of non-linear, with documentary for social change and with participatory and collaborative processes. It’s also a triumph in terms of its realisation – with evocative soundscapes, rich 360 photography, and flashes of animation brought together through apt, engaging visual navigation. [Do we yet have a good term for that 'bringing together', that process of montage in interactive production?]

So, congratulations to Cizek and the team. Do check out the latest, Participate section of Out my Window, which artfully presents photo contributions gathered through a Flickr group. It includes a stunning sequence of images that witness the Egyptian Revolution as seen from a window in Alexandria in February.

I’m going to be really interested to see how the Highrise project will evolve from here. Right now, I’ll leave you with the Manifesto for Interventionist Media that Cizek wrote while working with the community at St Michael’s. (It comes from the Filmmaker in Residence blog - Cizek talks about it in the video above.) It’s a great document – a blueprint for a socially engaged documentary practice.

Filmmaker-in-Residence Manifesto

• The original project idea and goals come from the community partner.
• The filmmaker’s role is to experiment and adapt documentary forms to the original idea. Break stereotypes. Push the boundaries of what documentary means.
• Use documentary and media to “participate” rather than just to observe and to record. Filmmaker-in-Residence is not an A/V or a PR department.
• Work closely with the community partner, but respect each other’s expertise and independence.
• Use whatever medium suits – video, photography, world wide web, cell phones, ipods or just pen and paper. It can all be documentary.
• Work through the ethics, privacy and consent process with your partners before you begin, and adapt your project accordingly. Sometimes it means changing your whole approach – or even dropping it. That’s the cost of being ethical.
• The social and political goals – and the process itself — are paramount. Ask yourself every day: why are you doing this project?
• Always tell a good story.
• Track the process, the results and spend time disseminating what you’ve learned with multiple communities: professionals, academics, filmmakers, media, general public, advocates, critics and students.
• Support the community partner in distribution and outreach. Spend 10% of the time making it and 90% of the time getting it out into the world.

 

An Evening at UnionDocs

It was good to revisit UnionDocs in Brooklyn, last Sunday, to take part in a panel on Global Perspectives in Digital Media . I was talking about Video Nation‘s work abroad during the 1990s, and the fruitful results which came from putting camcorders into the hands of participants, even briefly, or setting the camera up and inviting people to reflect on everyday life, as in this recording of a ferryman during the Bangladesh floods of 1998.

My co-panelists included producers Rahul V Chittella and Khairani Barokka (see Flickr stream below) from the remarkable collaborative documentary project, Global Lives (which I mentioned back in the Summer). Hearing them speak really brought home what a sign of the times that project is. Khairani explained how it all started in 2004 when David Evan Harris, now project director, was involved in making a film following a day in the life of a cable car driver in San Francisco. It gradually grew from there, until over six hundred volunteers – film-makers, photographers, translators, sub-titlers  - have now collectively produced 10 x 24 hour films following ten people – a representative sample of the global population – through one day. David Evan Harris talks through the project’s evolution in this TED video.

It would have been impossible to imagine creating and co-ordinating such a volunteer effort only a decade ago – without what Clay Shirky has called the “ridiculously easy group formation” made possible by social media and the expanding connectivity of the web. Global Lives is crowd-sourcing with a purpose, a community of volunteer producers with a common vision to redress a Western skew in representation, in particular a paucity of global coverage in the US.

There are extracts from Global Lives online, but the full work is an installation which needs a physical space. It’s been in shown in galleries, museums, schools and public spaces around the world. There’s an open archive too – with the footage available to anyone who wants to create their own show. According to Chittella and Khairani the ten films are just the beginning, and more will follow.

In the Q & A my friend Andrew Tyndall asked something that was on everyone’s mind about the twenty four hour idea; what happens when the subjects are sleeping? [surely that's not great content?] Khairani explained how rather than being boring this was in fact a very revealing section of the day. The sleeping quarters and arrangements – alone, with others, quiet or noisy, interrupted or private –  all contribute vivid detail to the picture of each person’s circumstances and culture. It made sense of their approach, and I could imagine how in an installation these quiet phases of the recordings would play well alongside the busy-ness of the other subject’s day-times.

In the face of what Global Lives is doing it felt rather like missing the point when someone in the Q & A asked whether it was ethical for people to be producing content without being paid. Don’t get me wrong –  documentary is fraught with ethical questions, and, whether in conventional documentary or in participatory work, transparency about the terms is vital when media professionals engage with the public. (Though in the case of Global Lives many of the film-makers are professionals anyway, though doing this project for personal rather than financial reasons.) I don’t think there’s one answer on the payment front, but whether payment is available or not needs to be made clear right at the start so that people can make an informed decision.

But production technology is out there now. It’s becoming ever more accessible and affordable. People are going to do stuff with it – sometimes paid, sometimes not, sometimes co-ordinated by professionals, more often on their own terms. We’re looking at the emergence of a literacy in video which is analogous to written literacy, and an arena that – when cameras, tape and editing were expensive and scarce –  was wholly a professional one is just not any more. This disrupts business models, raises questions about how creativity gets rewarded, and confronts us with a new problem of digital exclusion – what Henry Jenkins call the “participation gap”. But it allows for more and different perspectives, and (as “Global Lives” does) provides opportunities to counter representation by ‘Big Media’, which has to be good.

Before the evening panel I did a presentation for the UnionDocs Collaborative – a unique Masters-equivalent programme for early career media producers, theorists, and curators – now in its fourth year. As UnionDocs describe this independent educational initiative; ”It is both a rigorous platform for exploring contemporary approaches to the documentary arts and a process for developing an innovative group project.” Last year’s group made work inspired by Roland Barthes ground-breaking collection of essays,”Mythologies”. This year they’re focussing on the Williamsburg neighbourhood where UnionDocs is located, and have just completed a fast turnaround remake of an archive documentary about the area. I sat in on a seminar and was interested to see the programme in action. They were knocking around issues of authenticity and performance in the director’s position in first-person documentary, having watched Sherman’s March. My memories of my media studies MA are hazy, but I don’t think there was the kind of open, inquiring, critical discussion that I saw here, grounded in Kara Oehler‘s extensive experience as a media practitioner. If you’re interested in documentary and looking for a Masters programme in the US I’d recommend you check it out.

Mass Observation

On Wednesday I was in Brighton for “Engaging Mass Observation”, a conference looking at the post-1981 holdings of the Mass Observation Archive. Mass Observation is an ancestor of today’s participatory culture – started in 1937 by painter, poet and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, journalist Charles Madge and anthropologist Tom Harrisson to gain an understanding of British society as seen from within – an “anthropology of ourselves” as they called it. They set about the study of everyday life in a unique new way – along with a team of observers they recruited a panel of volunteers who wrote diaries and responded to thematic briefings with descriptions of their own lives.

The first phase of the project carried on until the Fifties, providing the beginnings of market research along the way, and resulted in a wealth of material which is held in the Sussex archive. What’s less well known is that the project was re-started in 1981 and still continues. MO materials are a fascinating resource, and in being first person accounts – subjective writing by a self-selected group – they challenge traditional social science and trouble research categories. While Humphrey Jennings was only briefly involved compared to Madge and Harrisson he was influential in giving MO a Surrealist impulse, an interest in dream, imagination and the unconscious which is one of the special features of MO within English social research.  In the opening session of Wednesday’s event -”Intimate Archives/Uncanny Records” – Everyday Life and Cultural theorist Ben Highmore reflected on the strange, rich particularity of contributions to an Autumn 1983 household survey. Discussing the character of MO content he cited a favourite quote of his from the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “Both dreams and rocks are things of this world”.

One of the first publications that came out of the original MO project was “May the Twelfth”, a reflection of the day of the Coronation of George VI in 1937, compiled from the individual reports of hundreds of Mass Observers. In a review at the time novelist Evelyn Waugh was full of praise,’… it would be hard to find any recent work of the same length which had so little that was dull and so much that was highly amusing…It provides a real documentary survey of the event as seen by the crowds.’  BBC 2′s Video Nation project was inspired by and explicitly modelled on Mass Observation. One of the things we did within that project was to ask the fifty or so contributors to make video recordings in response to significant national events and these collective portraits included recordings around the General Election and New Labour landslide in May 1997 and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales a few months later.

When we were setting Video Nation up in 1993 co-producer Chris Mohr and I went to Sussex, looked at the archive and talked to the archivist Dorothy Sheridan. It was good to see Dorothy, now retired from her role as Head of Special Collections at the University of Sussex and busier than ever with MO as Development Director, at this week’s conference. The safe-keeping of the archive owes so much to her. She’s been its guardian, studied MO with a special interest in gender and World war 2, produced anthologies, supported innumerable research projects and spin-offs, knows the collection inside and out. And, having started there while Tom Harrisson was still involved, she also provides a precious link to the MO founders and to some of the original observers.

MO still occasionally conduct day surveys and they decided to undertake one this May 12th, the day of the conference. A call was put out via the MO website, bulletin and mailing list and this time on Twitter -@MassObsArchive. With the country gripped by the high drama in government following the inconclusive election result, May 12th 2010, the last day of Gordon’s Brown’s premiership, turned out to be an extraordinary day to survey the nation. Mass Observation’s unique work continues…

Documentary Now!

Last week I was at a gathering of around 200 academics and practitioners (quite a few of whom these days span both worlds) for the annual Documentary Now! Conference at Birkbeck College, London. There was an entertaining keynote from Florian Thalhofer - the Berlin-based inventor of the Korsakow System – who described the development of his “easy-to-use computer program for the creation of database films” from its beginnings a decade ago.  In his open source system, now in version 5, “the author decides on the rules by which the scenes relate to each other, but s/he does not create fixed paths”. Thalhofer is on a mission to promote nonlinearity as a superior structure for documentary reflection, and the work he’s created in the Korsakow System makes a persuasive case. Take a look at Forgotten Flags, or 7 Sons. The quality is lovely, you want to explore the subjects he chooses, and Thalhofer has a distinctive, engaging authorial voice. Over a thousand people have made films in Korsakow – many in group workshops. Those making use of it to date are often media artists – Korsakow describes his works as “art pieces” – but the system is open to anyone to use. I’m certainly planning to experiment with it.

Among the presentations at Birkbeck were a couple which explored issues of authorship and collaboration relevant to participatory media. In the session dedicated to Interactive, Susan Aasman from the University of Groningen pointed to the practice of “passing the camera” between director and subject adopted by Jennifer Fox during the making of her first person film “Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman“. For this epic documentary of six hour-long episodes that was released in 2006, Fox travelled to over seventeen countries – her project, provoked by questions about the direction of her own life, to understand “how diverse women define their lives when there is no map”. As she explains on the “Flying” website (and illustrates in a video that’s worth taking a look at), Fox found that passing the camcorder between herself and those she was in conversation with focused the attention of her subjects and facilitated the kind of disclosure she was looking for. “Many people say that the camera used in this way makes them “wake up” and become more attentive to the moment. If done properly and with the right intention, “Passing the Camera” creates a space that often gives people the courage to ask questions they maybe normally wouldn’t ask and reveal things about themselves that they normally wouldn’t reveal.”

Aasman was interested in passing the camera as a form of interactivity which throws the roles of the observer and the observed into question, and in its potential to turn first person cinema into “collective self-portrait” – a theme at the heart of my research. She made connections with Jean Rouch and Sol Worth’s experiments in “shared anthropology”, with home movie, and with the Guerilla TV and Radical Software movements. “Passing the camera” also demonstrated that, in Fox’s words, “everybody can shoot”, and Fox invited the audience to submit video contributions for a seventh episode, a user generated postscript to the film. Aasman asked what it might mean for documentary now that consumers are becoming producers in this way.

Fox sees passing the camera as particularly appropriate to capturing conversations between women. According to the “Flying” website, “Fox creates a documentary language that mirrors the special way women communicate.” Among those who’d seen “Flying” in the audience at Birkbeck there was a strong suggestion that this idea of the universality of female experience in fact played out in the film as Fox harnessing the experience of diverse women to her own agenda. Given Fox’s control over the editing process, “passing the camera” was then dismissed as not being a significant departure from the norm of directorial control.

I haven’t seen “Flying” and don’t imagine (from the clips available online) that I’d want to defend the film from this critique. But this discussion made me reflect on how my experience co-producing BBC2’s Video Nation project leads me to think that the idea of “passing the camera” is interesting and that someone holding a camera in her hands can be an actor in a filming process in a way that is different from someone who is the object of filming. For the original Video Nation project for BBC2, which I’ve written about before, we established a cohort of around 50 people who we trained and who then filmed their lives during the course of a year or so. They filmed what and when they wanted to, the BBC team viewed and edited the material, and the participants had a contractual right of veto over what was shown on TV. I’d call the production arrangement one of co-creation. It’s been studied and discussed, and commentators have taken different views of the approach to editorial control. It certainly brought those individuals to TV in a way that presented them as subjects of their own lives.

On occasions – just before the return of Hong Kong to Chinese control in ’97, in the aftermath of the severe floods in Bangladesh in ’98 – we were commissioned to produce content for BBC seasons. For these we “passed the camera” to people for a few hours or a day, and I was struck by how even that brief arrangement would lead to content which presented a strong sense of an individual’s perspective, and felt different to me from the likely observations of an outsider. A ferry man in Bangladesh rowed as he talked to camera about the ferry crossing as a metaphor for life’s journey. A teenage girl in Hong Kong showed her high rise block, (on what seemed to me a pretty grim housing project), and talked about how beautiful it was, and how much she loved it there, because of the sense of community.

Why “passing the camera” seems to me to matter is that, despite the impression that You Tube can give, that “everyone” is now creating media, there are still many people who aren’t. As Jenny Kidd noted in her study of the BBC’s Capture Wales digital storytelling project, and which struck us forcibly as we worked on that project, the majority of those taking part were certainly not otherwise digital creators. These days in the UK this will tend to be less to do with access to equipment – the so-called “digital divide” -  and more to do with what Henry Jenkins calls the “convergence gap” – a lack of access to the skills and/or understanding of the protocols of participation. So I think a variety of co-creative strategies are worthwhile, in giving people an experience of content creation, extending the perspectives that make it to the screen (TV or computer), and presenting people as subjects rather than objects of representation.

It’s noteworthy how, in the interactive, participatory environment of the web, specific, variegated structures of engagement and control around content creation and sharing are ubiquitous, from calls for UGC where the offer is simply presence on a platform or credit, to user options re membership and rights like you get on Flickr, to collaborative editing as on Wikipedia, and there are lots of terms for shared authorship – co-creation, co-collaboration, “Collab”. What’s considered important is the transparency of the “house rules”, so that someone getting involved knows upfront exactly what the deal is, and is able to make an informed decision about taking part. In contrast, in documentary, on TV, radio and elsewhere, there has generally been one model of engagement – with editorial control and rights resting with the director/broadcaster – and any other arrangement continues to be regarded warily and with scepticism.

So I was very interested in one of the conference presentations that explored a discourse around shared authorship that has been developed in the context of first person film. Paul Kerr (who introduced his work in a comment on this blog back in the Autumn) focused on “Marilyn on Marilyn”, which he made for the BBC in 2001, The programme was built around two in-depth audio interviews with Marilyn Monroe and archive footage – Kerr deliberately chose anything but movie clips of Monroe – to create a film which eschewed the usual gaze at the film star and instead invited the viewer to imagine her life as seen from her point of view. Kerr explored how the concept of “shared textual authority” might work as a way of thinking about his programme. This idea was originally proposed by Michael Renov as a way of describing authorship in the context of home video – where different family members may share a camera. The idea was then developed by Berber Hagedoorn to provide a conceptual framework for the “Found Footage Documentary” – recent films like Grizzly Man and Capturing the Friedmans – where a substantial proportion of the content has been generated not by the director of the finished piece but by the subjects of the story. Kerr showed how his moving documentary made sense within this framework – and it’s an idea that I find helpful,  both in looking back on on Video Nation, and at the web based Collabs I’m getting involved in now.

The Jean Rouch Project

On Wednesday I was lucky to be at a Paris screening of the seminal documentary – “Chronique d’un Ete” (“Chronicle of a Summer”) which was being shown, almost fifty years after it was made in 1960, to a gathering including the co-producer Edgar Morin and two of the original participants – Marceline Loridan-Ivens and Nadine Ballot.

I was in Paris for a conference, Le Projet Jean Rouch? (The Jean Rouch Project?) which looked at the legacy of the pioneering French anthropological film maker Jean Rouch, who died in 2004. (The conference papers I refer to later in this piece are available as pdfs on the conference website).  Rouch is a figure I’ve been interested in since the ’80s when I was alerted to his work by Michael Eaton who wrote the first English language Rouch study . I interviewed Rouch in ’91 for a BBC Late Show special about documentary, and his ideas have influenced the way I’ve thought about work I’ve produced since – in particular BBC 2′s Video Nation.

Rouch started making anthropological films in West Africa in the 1940s, having gone there as an engineer, and embarked on a body of work which, while it drew on the past – Rouch sited film makers Vertov and Flaherty in particular as influences – was highly innovative and still feels fresh today. Imagine a film in which two young men from rural Niger enact their own story of trying to survive in the unfamiliar modern urban surroundings of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, narrated by one of them – in the persona of Edward G Robinson. That’s “Moi un Noir” – 1958. Or picture an African on the streets of Paris conducting an anthropological study –  persuading passers-by to let him measure their heads and inspect their mouths. Not “Meet the Natives” – 2007, but Rouch’s “Petit a Petit” – 1969, featuring Rouch’s long-time friend and collaborator Damoure Zika.

Rouch is interesting for a number of reasons. In terms of content, he took anthropology into the African city, pointed to the contemporary content of ritual, and to the growing influence of American culture in everyday life and fantasy in post-war West Africa. But he saw filming not as some kind of documentation but as a form of engagement in which the camera is a catalyst, a player. He wanted to get right inside the world he was filming – “to get rid of one’s own systems of thought, to better understand other peoples’ thoughts” – and this is expressed in his films through first person, subjective narration. Film-making for Rouch was a collaborative process in which film-maker and participants jointly create meaning, a project he called ‘shared anthropology’. I was in Paris because I’m interested in how this idea of shared anthropology might be deployed in the development of collaborative documentary practice today. I was also there because I’m taking Jean Rouch’s 1960 film “Chronicle of a Summer” as the starting point for a collaborative piece I’m going to be producing half a century later in 2010.

At the screening on Wednesday, Edgar Morin described how “Chronicle of a Summer” came about after a conversation in which he proposed that Rouch turn his anthropological eye on the people of Paris. (Morin’s account brought to mind the genesis of the British Mass Observation project which similarly arose out of a dialogue about ‘bringing anthropology home’ – in that case between anthropologist Tom Harrisson, filmmaker Humphrey Jennings and journalist Charles Madge. This parallel was explored in a conference presentation by Elena von Kassel Siambani the morning after the screening.)

The film that emerged from Rouch and Morin’s discussion involved one of the first uses of 16mm handheld camera and sync sound. This technology was by no means off-the-shelf. The filming was very experimental technically and it took a development process across the shooting period to achieve reliable sync, as Vincent Bouchard and Severine Graff explained in their conference papers. Rouch’s ’50s films were shot silent with narration added afterwards. What he was striving for was a handheld set-up flexible enough to film spontaneous speech in real-life settings. As subject matter Rouch and Morin settled on the everyday life of “the tribe of people living in Paris”, their brief; “What is your life? Are you happy?” Their film unfolds as a disparate group of people consider those questions from different perspectives during the course of the summer of 1960. The film reveals French society in a process of change – divided over the repression of the independence movement in Algeria, living with the legacy of the Occupation, with class, race and identity in debate. At the same time the film is an investigation into this new spontaneous filming method, a reflection on the ethics and aesthetics of documentary still  relevant today.

I didn’t understand much of the Q & A at the Paris screening as my French is rudimentary, and there wasn’t any translation, but I did make out Edgar Morin relating that a young man who’d recently seen “Chronicle of a Summer” had summarised it as;“…a reality show, with a critical dimension.” It was an apt observation. The unfolding of events and feelings on camera, the “pro-filmic event” as Rouch called it, that was key to his film-making, is these days a crucial ingredient  in reality TV, with Big Brother acting as the catalyst to ensure that something does happen. You can see Rouch as the provocateur in this clip from “Chronicle of a Summer”. It’s not my favourite sequence – Rouch’s interventions seem heavy-handed out of context and without the “critical dimension” that is crucial to the film. But the sequence does give a flavour of “Chronicle of a Summer”, and it’s the only clip available on You Tube. So here it is.

In 2010, on the fiftieth anniversary of  ”Chronicle of a Summer”, I’m planning to revisit the questions that Rouch and Morin posed in their film, to try and start a conversation about contemporary life and values. I’ll use the web as the platform, and want to involve diverse participants from around the world, bringing together distributed responses – in video and stills, combined perhaps with some form of data visualisation. While Rouch and Morin’s 1960 film investigated the potential of the new handheld sync sound filming, “The Happiness Project” (working title) will investigate the potential for participatory online documentary. There are lots of challenges, and issues to work through regarding how to go about. At the heart of my investigation is the question of how to combine peoples’ recordings to tell a larger story – in a form that works on the web, and is editorially satisfying.

I’m not the first person to be experimenting with collaborative documentary by any means – there have been some really interesting creative responses already in this space – including work by Kutiman and MadV on You Tube, and Brett Gaylor’s “RiP! A Remix Manifesto” - an important, entertaining feature documentary that’s currently winning lots of prizes at Film Festivals (and will be the subject of my next post). In producing “The Happiness Project” as practice-based research, I get to build on what others have done, experiment, and share my findings. I’ll be posting here about the project as it develops, inviting people to get involved, and and reflecting on what works and what doesn’t.

Rouch didn’t see the explosion of non-professional video content that has happened on You Tube – he died just a few months before the service launched. But he did anticipate the age of participatory media. Back in 1973 he wrote; “Tomorrow will be the time of completely portable colour video, video editing, and instant replay… and of a camera that can so totally participate that it will automatically pass into the hands of those who, until now, have always been in front of the lens.” I hope that “The Happiness Project” might contribute a new dimension to shared anthropology, by developing ways for those who have “always been in front of the lens” to tell their collective stories.

Postscript ~ Rouch is a contested, at times contradictory figure and if you’re curious about him I’d urge you to read beyond this brief introduction. As a brief overview Michael Eaton’s terrific obituary piece is a must. The diverse perspectives of “Building Bridges” open up the complexity of Rouch’s work.  Rouch’s relationship to Africa has been subject to critique by, among others, Manthia Diawara in  “Rouch in Reverse” . Steven Feld’s  “Cine-Ethnography” which I’ve drawn on here, is a rich resource of Rouch’s own writing.  A new book - “The Adventure of the Real; Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema” by Paul Henley sounds promising.

One & Other

Photos of “Plinthers” taking part in One & Other by Garry Knight (Flckr)

“It is a spyhole on the nation’s secret mind, incidental fragments of humanity that weave together into a rich and  glowing mosaic…What puzzles me is why this great swathe of humanity – some weird, some dull, ordinary or  mundane, some with strange views, others kindly – all leave us with a feeling of warmth and empathy.” It wasn’t  written as a description of Antony Gormley’s mega collaborative public art project One & Other - which finished  yesterday, when the last of the 2,400 volunteers, Emma Burns, came down from the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square  after her Hillsborough Memorial piece – but it could have been.

The quote is in fact from a ten year old Radio Times review by Polly Toynbee of  Video Nation, which I was co-producing at  the time (having set the project up – with Chris Mohr – back in 1993.) It came back to me as I was pondering why One & Other and Video Nation (during its BBC 2 heyday) feel like they have something in common – despite their fundamental differences.

One & Other: Art, 2,000 participants, Random selection, Brief Participation, Public Space, Spectacle, Live, 24/7, Digital.

Video Nation: Documentary, 50 participants (at any time), Selection, Long-term participation, Domestic Space, Speech, Recorded, Broadcast schedule, Analogue.

One & Other has been much discussed – is it art? is it good art? etc etc. It’s certainly a stand-out piece that’s put art right at the heart of UK culture for the 100 days it’s been running – this blog offers a photographic record. I’ve been enthralled by the parade of inventive, thoughtful, stoical, earnest, subtle, funny, brave, poetic, and yes – sometimes dull, sometimes baffling – performances offered by the ‘plinthers’. ( And how interesting to see how pervasive ideas from performance and conceptual art have become. ) I’ve been entertained by it and moved by it, at least by the impression I’ve gained from seeing it when I went to Trafalgar Square in August, when I’ve visited the website, but mainly through watching the weekly Sky Arts show. The images of spectators in the square and the traffic to the website suggests that lots of people have felt the same.

In his farewell blog entry Gormley describes One & Other as a ‘portrait of now’.  The idea of creating a collective self-portrait was also behind Video Nation, and later behind the Capture Wales digital storytelling project that I was involved in. But more importantly what all these projects have in common is the fact that, within clearly defined parameters, the participants have been in control of how they represent themselves. The ‘plinthers’ were invited to use their hour on the plinth/stage as they wanted,  to create ‘an image of themselves’. We invited Video Nation contributors to show us their world – ‘through their own eyes and in their own words’. Polly Toynbee went on, “This is not about observing people as jokes or “characters”, turning them into figures of fun as docu-soaps do. It’s about letting the camera climb inside people’s skin to see the world through their eyes.” As the Video Nation project evolved I began to see the recordings less as documents and more as performances of certain truths that the participants wanted to share about their lives. Despite the audience gaze, they felt like the subjects, not the objects, of the exercise.

Reflecting on One & Other at the project’s end Gormley suggests that the plinth “provided an open space of possibility for many to test their sense of self and how to communicate this to a wider world.”  That works as a description of participatory media too – as the “open space of possibility” that is self-representation. It seems to me that for the spectator it can be affirming simply to bear witness to that testing, undertaken with commitment, with sincerity. (Anthropologist Michael Wesch is doing really interesting work on this. Check out his commentary on Gary Brolsma – the original You Tube star.)