Chapter 3 - From observer to enactor and performer in documentary making

Transcription

1 Chapter 3 - From observer to enactor and performer in documentary making The ideas developed in the first and second wave of cybernetics the role of the observer, negative feed-back, positive feed-back, autopoiesis and structural coupling with the environment - have been around for more than half a century now and have gradually influenced the way we understand our relationship with science, with social sciences, but also with humanities and the production of art. Documentary making, of course, has not been exempt from such influence. How can an art form that is concerned with representing facts and reality (rather than fiction) not reflect, and be inspired, by the evolving importance of cybernetic notions such as structural coupling and feed-back? What sort of observer is the documentary maker? What structural coupling does she have with her environment? How is she influencing, framing, acting, enacting the reality that she is trying to portray? I am obviously not suggesting that filmmakers have directly been inspired by Cybernetics in the sense that I would doubt, maybe I am wrong, that a lot of them were reading Wiener, Von Foerster, Varela or Maturana. But I am suggesting that concepts of circularity, feedback loops and interaction had found different names in different domains but reflected a similar way of thinking. They are indicative of the cultural shifts of the 20 th century, of the spirit of its times, of its zeitgeist. The cybernetic focus on the role of the observer is parallel, and probably mutually influencing/ed, by the crisis of the author in literature, or of the artist in visual arts.it is not the aim of this research to assess if it is science that fed into art or vice versa. I personally think that there are no one way causal relationships between cultural domains and that cross fertilisation between modes of thinking, mixed to economic and political realities, allows a ping pong escalation towards new ways of thinking. I also retain Katherine Hayles s prudence; I want to resist the idea that influence flows from science into literature. The cross-currents are considerable more complex than a one-way model of influence would allow (1999:21). But what is clear is that the whole tendency of the 20 th century has been towards a slow opening of the role of the author in order to involve the receiver in a co-authoring role. The Open Work Umberto Eco has eloquently traced the origins of such a trend. In The Open Work he reminds us that the openness of the art work had always existed, in the sense that any work of art, even if it is not passed on to the addressee in an unfinished state, demands a free, inventive response, if only because it cannot really be appreciated unless the performer somehow reinvents it in psychological collaboration with the author himself (1989:4). But there is a difference between mental interpretation, the involvement of the receiver in making sense of the piece, and active collaboration, the wished and necessary involvement of the receiver in constructing the piece of art. If any work of literature needs the reader to collaborate in the act of mental interpretation and understanding, only the open work demands to finish a work that is deliberately left incomplete by the author. Eco calls works in movement works that characteristically consist of unplanned or physically incomplete structural units

2 (1989:12). After noticing the parallels between the evolution of scientific and artistic though, Eco uses examples in all possible artistic expressions (literature, music, visual arts but strangely not cinema nor documentary) to questions what the open work might tell us about our contemporary culture. The open work assumes the task of giving us an image of discontinuity. It does not narrate it; it is it. It takes on a mediating role between the abstract categories of science and the living matter of our sensibility; it almost becomes a sort of transcendental scheme that allows us to comprehend new aspects of the world (1989:90). He then concludes that openness ( ) is the guarantee of a particularly rich kind of pleasure that our civilization pursues as one of its most precious values, since every aspect of our culture invites us to conceive, feel, and thus see the world as possibility (1989:104). The Open Work versus the enactor and the structural coupling with the environment It would be tempting to use Umberto Eco s terminology in this research. After all the changing role that the documentary filmmaker had in the last century could easily be described as a gradual search for openness in the way of documenting reality. One could say that the open work is also visible in the performative and participatory documentaries that really started as a genre in the 1960 s. While accepting to be filmed, and to perform in her film, the documentary maker opens up to the unforeseeable and accepts to partially loose the control of her shooting. Slightly more difficult is to see how the final documentary (once edited) can become a work in movement that, following Eco s definition, characteristically consist of unplanned or physically incomplete structural units (1989:12). I would not dispute openness in documentaries. I just think that it is not enough to describe the evolution of documentary language in the last sixty years. Eco s narrative only concentrates on the relations author-participant. He stays within the system to system relation without considering the environment. He links the understanding of art with its historical cultural context but he is not interested in what happens outside of the artistic world. The relationship with reality is not his problem, nor our perception of it. Hence his discourse is for me relevant but strangely not open enough, or at least not large enough. By using the cybernetic terminology of feedback and structural coupling while analysing documentaries I might encounter the problem of using biological analogies in a cultural realm but I gain an interdisciplinary breath that Eco s open work does not offer me. I can place the filmmaker in structural coupling with the reality she is shooting, and notice how the unforeseeable environment will demand openness and adaptation to the filmmaker while filming, but also how the environment will change at the same time. Circularity offers me a wider systemic framework where the relation filmmaker-filmed is only one ring in the chain filmmaker-filmmaker, filmmaker-environment, filmed-environment, filmmaker-final documentary, audience-final documentary etc Stuctural coupling and feedback mechanisms are not exclusive to documentary making, on the contrary, they describe our way to exist. This is what autopoiesis is all about. Structural coupling does not predict what the final documentary work will be like but it describes a process that has levels of openess with variable and dynamic outcomes. The feedback mechanisms that nourish the structural coupling relation filmmaker/camera/filmed does not guarantee a final

3 open documentary but places the documentary maker (the author, the observer) in the same dynamic that she encounters in any moment of her life: enacted perception and co-emerging of reality. Opera Aperta is a book that was first edited in Italy in This is before personal computers and way before the World Wide Web 1. Eco concentrates on the openness of mediums that are not digital (Henri Pousseur s music Scambi, where the performer can choose what to play or Mallarme s book Le Livre conceived as a mobile apparatus). Maybe because of the linearity of the mediums he is considering, for Eco the final work still belongs to the author. Although the participant gains agency in the relationship author/work of art, what matters is still the intention of the author. The work in movement is the possibility of numerous different personal interventions, but it is not an amorphous invitation to discriminate participation. The invitation offers the performer the opportunity for an oriented insertion into something which always remains the world intended by the author. ( ) The author offers the interpreter, the performer, the addressee a work to be completed (1989:19). Since I ultimately want to analyse interactive documentaries I am keen to use a framework that allows me to doubt the determination of a world intended by the author. I want t challenge in this research the idea that interaction has to be contained in an author s framework in order to work. It seems at least essential to distinguish between intention of the author and content. Ultimately, if one wanted to be quite radical and consider Wikipedia.com as a collaborative documentary on our current knowledge it would be difficult to distinguish the author and the addressee or the limit between the intention of the author and the final content. When in the year 2000 Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger decided to launch a collaborative free content encyclopedia on the Net they had a vision for a product and for a logic of participation, not a vision for a specific content 2. They knew they wanted people from around the world to add content but they did not know what each page would contain at any precise moment. They are therefore not the authors of Wikipedia s content, but the author s of its logic of behavior. They are facilitators that can also become content author s by participating to their own website, as anybody else would. Coming back to Umberto Eco s definition of work in movement one could say that Wikipedia is not just a work to be completed (1989:19) but a work that never reaches a final form, since it is in constant evolution. Furthermore, while in Eco s music examples it is quite clear that there is a distinction between the author and the its performers and interpreters, I would claim that there is no clear distinction between authors and participators in Wikipedia, as Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger can at any moment write in their own artefact. The new media participative artefact can have rules, and that is where the intention of the author is visible, but its content has a life in itself and is out of the author s hands. 1 Interesting enough 1962 is the year where the first ideas of what would become the ARPANET in 1969 were formulated by J.C.R. Licklider of Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN). In a series of memos discussing his "Intergalactic Computer Network" concept, Licklider formulated most of the ideas that created the Internet as we know it today. 2 For more about the history of Wikipedia see (retrieved ).

4 I have also chosen to take cybernetics as a framework because it allows me to speak about cultural shifts that have certainly shaped art and literature, but that were also core to early computer science and to the development of Human Computer Interaction. Cybernetics has been very influential in the early days of computer design. The feedback loops of first wave cybernetic were at the core of computational logic based on input/output 3. In the 1960 s and 1970 s second wave cyberneticians, like Gordon Pask, started experimenting with computing learning environments 4 and with digital interactive art 5 proving that a computer could be much more than a 3 As we have seen in Chapter 2, first wave cybernetics was born in a war environment and was very interested in Man-Machine Interaction. The pivotal contribution of cybernetics to military control says Kaltenbacher (2008:25) was probably embodied in the development of the Whirlwind Computer at the MIT in the late 40 s and its offspring, the SAGE computerised air defense system (Edwards 1996, p.75). A radar defense system, that offered real-time simulation of data and displayed it in a form that humans could understand. 4 Gordon Pask s life long research on Conversation Theory was supported by several experiments with adaptative teaching machines and computer aided learning environments. After experimenting with CASTE (Course Assembly and Tutorial Learning Environment) and machine-to-machine learning environment Eucrates, in 1974 Pask designed THOUGHTSTICKER: a human-to-machine learning environment. THOUGHTSTICKER was designed to imitate the type of conversation that a tutor would have with a student. Unfortunately the hardware and software of the day was not adequate for such an ambitious project, and it is only in the 1980 s that Paul Pangaro, a cynbernetician expert in information technology, built a functional version of it on a LISP machine (a general-purpose computers designed in the 1980 s to run Lisp as their main software language). For more on THOUGHTSTICKER see: Pangaro, Paul (1997) THOUGHTSTICKER: An Idiosyncratic History of Conversation Theory in Software, and its Progenitor, Gordon Pask. Available at retrieved Gordon Pask was convinced that conversation was our main way to interact within human beings but also with our environment. For him an aesthetically potent environment should respond to a man, engage him in conversation and adapt its characteristics to the prevailing mode of discourse (1971:76). Art had to be reactive and adaptative in order to trigger both an internal conversation between the art and the audience (one s inner conversation through personal interpretation) and an external dialogue (a change of the artwork itself that is visible for others). This led him to experiment with what we would now call interactive art, a notion of artwork where the audience and the environment is actively influencing the artefact. One of Pask s most famous artwork is Musicolour: a machine that would take a musical input through a microphone and create an output that consisted in lights of different colours projected onto a large screen in front of the performer and an audience. Built in 1953, Musicolor was not using computer technology, but it was already using a feedback loop logic and it was preparing the grounds for a type of art that would be dymanic and interactive: it would adapt to its environment and audience while also reacting to it. More than ten years later, in 1968, Gordon Pask presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London s Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition, a work that was this time using early computer technology to create a socially oriented reactive and adaptative environment (Pask, 1971:88). Colloquy of Mobiles was composed of male and female mobiles (electro-mechanical robots) which would search for one another and engage in uncertain and complicated behaviours. The male would emit light beams from their upper parts, which the females would try to reflect back at them (Pickering, 2002:429) creating a sort of dance to which the spectators could participate by using mirrors that would redirect the light rays and change the behaviours of the mobiles. What seems interesting to me in Colloquy of Mobiles is that I see in it a precursor of digital interactive art, where communication codes are filtered by the machine through code and create an environment that is interacting with the spectator but that does not follows the codes of our sensimotor perception. Spectators can interact with the mobiles with mirrors but they do not know what the output of their interaction will be. This man-machine interaction puts both the spectator and the machine in a learning position, and pushes them to adapt to each other while interacting at a different or higher level of discourse (Pask, 1971:91). For more on Colloquy of Mobiles and Musicolour (including pictures) see Pickering (2002), Pask (1971) and Reichardt (1971).

5 computing machine, and that it could be used to interact with ordinary people (in the sense of not formed engineers) in a public space 6. Since my focus is ultimately digital interactive documentary, which is a form that uses digital interactive media, I am keen in using a framework that has influenced the medium itself. Cybernetic concepts of feedback and enaction serve me well, because they describe on one side the origin of computer interaction (still relevant in interactive documentary) and, on the other side, the relation formed between the observed and the observer (important to analyse the dynamic between filmmaker, subject filmed and viewer). Finally the reason for which I use cybernetics is also that I am interested in extrapolating a vision of life as dynamic and multiple, as opposed of life as reactive and causal in the cultural realm. My approach is the following: if we accept, and this is an intellectual challenge rather than a claim of truth, the idea of cognition as enaction, and autopoiesis as condition for life, then interactivity is not an option, but our fundamental way of being. Inter-activity as our constant embodied activity of relationship with the other, the environment, the not-me. A not-me that actually depends on me and that therefore is linked to me in a dynamic interactive fit. If we accept the notion of enaction then any documentation of our being in the world has to reflect in one way or the other this constant interactivity of ours with our environment, and the multiple realities that can emerge from it. Each medium has its own affordances and its ways of doing so. Without entering the useless debate of which medium is best at documenting reality, I just want to highlight how linear and interactive documentary have tried different strategies to be coherent with an enacted vision of perception and have created artefacts that are very different in terms of style, effect and experience. In this research I will therefore argue that the evolution of documentary form after the 1960 s can be analysed in Cybernetics terms, and for a very good reason, because a certain acknowledgment of the constructivist role of the filmmaker has started to emerge, and be accepted, in those years by filmmakers themselves. [Meanwhile in the documentary world ] The 1960 s and Cinema Verite While mathematician Von Foerster was publishing On Self-Organizing Systems and Their Environments in 1960, emphasising how the observer of systems can himself be constituted as a system to be observed (as cited in Hayles, 1999:10), in what could seem an unrelated field, film making, the introduction of lightweight cameras, portable sound equipment and stock that could be used in lower light conditions allowed fluidity of movement and location shooting. For film critic Stella Bruzzi, 6 Gordon Pask s experimental machines were thought for different types of public spaces: Musicolour was performing in theatres, THOUGHSTRICKER was intended for schools and Colloquy of Mobiles was designed for an art gallery. Gordon Pask also collaborated to an ambitious architectural project that was never built: the Fun Place. Designed by architect Cedric Price in , Fun Palace was meant to be a laboratory of fun with facilities for dancing, music, drama and fireworks. Central to Price s practice was the belief that through the correct use of new technology the public could have unprecedented control over their environment, resulting in a building which could be responsive to visitors needs and the many activities intended to take place there.

6 changes in technology brought to a less formal and more responsive style of filmmaking (Bruzzi, 2000:69). This has led to what has been called Direct Cinema in America, and Cinema Verite in France 7. Although the terms are often used interchangeably, they actually evolved in different styles so one should not confuse them. In Direct Cinema the director aims at being not-intrusive and relies on editing to give an impression of real time. Long takes with off camera sound are frequent and voice over is rare. Bill Nichols has called this type of documentary Observational. Observational documentary he says conveys a sense of unmediated and unfettered access to the world. The person behind the camera will not draw the attention of the social actors or engage with them in any way. Instead we expect to take the position of the ideal observer (1991:111) 8. The evolution of this style has later been called fly on the wall. The aim of the filmmaker is to give the sense to the viewer of what it is like to be in a given situation without emphasising the experience of the filmmaker herself. In Cinema Verite, on the other hand, the filmmaker wants to be visible: she wants to engage with the reality she is filming and documents this precise performative act. The aim here is to give the viewer a sense of what it is like to be the filmmaker in a given situation and how that situation alters as a result (Nichols, 2001:116). Comments from participants become central to the films argument; the bodily presence of the filmmaker in the shot becomes essential, as we want to see how she reacts to a given situation. Various forms of monologue are often used and the editing normally tries to maintain continuity between individual viewpoints. Cinema Verite stands for film truth, the idea emphasizes that this is the truth of an encounter rather than the absolute or untampered truth (Nichols, 2001:118). The performative attitude of a filmmaker can obviously be of different types and of different degrees. This has lead to some confusion on the terminology to be used to indicate a type of documentary where the filmmaker takes an active and enacted position while shooting. Stella Bruzzi has chosen the word Performative documentary, while Bill Nichols has oscillated between Interactive documentary, Participatory documentary and Performative documentary 9. Those terms obviously 7 I am not saying here that no Participatory or Observational documentaries had ever been done before the 1960 s. As Nichols himself debates in Introduction to Documentary, Dziga Vertov s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is a good example of early experimentation of the effect of a camera in a moving environment, but it is an exception rather than the norm. It is only in the 1960 s that the Participatory and Observational mode became an established genre, precisely because it had become core to the cultural preoccupation of their time. 8 Good examples of observational film would be Primary (1960) by Robert Drew, High School (1968) by Frederick Wiseman or some parts of Chronicle of a Summer (1960) by Rouch, when the film profiles the lifes of several individuals in Paris. 9 In Representing Reality (1991) Bill Nichols uses the term Interactive documentary, while ten years later, in Introduction to Documentary (2001), he describes it as a Participatory Mode. In Blurred Boundaries (1995), he also uses the word Performative documentary to describe a mode characterized by its ability to deflect our attention away from the referential quality of the documentary (1995:93). The distinction between Performative and Participatory documentary becomes clearer in Introduction to Documentary (2001) when Nichols sees the Participatory documentary as emerging clearly in the 1960 s and emphasising the role of the filmmaker in shaping a given situation while shooting it, while the Performative documentary seems to be more representative of the 1980 s as a mode that underscores the complexity of our knowledge of the world by emphasizing its subjective and affective dimensions (2001: 131). Good examples of Participatory documentaries would be Chronicle of a Summer (1960) by Jean Rouch or Shoah (1985) by Lanzman, while examples of Performative documentaries would be Marlon

7 mean slightly different things, but they have in common the idea of a filmmaker interacting with her environment, participating to what is shot and therefore offering a performative and active vision of reality. To simplify a terminology that I have found confusing myself I will turn to a third party and use the definition that film critic Anne Jerslev 10 gives of Performative documentaries as films that use performativity as a strategy. Performativity, she sais, calls attention to processuality and the difficulty of drawing clear demarcatory lines between a level of mediation and a level of reality (2005:106) Performativity emphasizes that facts are never just facts, they point out the unavoidable constructedness of mediated realities (2005:98). With this definition Jerslev does not concentrate on the type of performance that the filmmaker adopts during her filming but on the personal reality that is coming into being through the very act of filming it (2005:111). Performative documentaries interest me because I see in them an active questioning of the role of the observer (the filmmaker and the viewer) and of her reality. Documentary here is understood as a doing, it is therefore logically impossible to regard any documentary as a straightforward representation of an a priori given reality (Jerslev, 2005:107). This doing is not to be understood in Umberto Eco s way, a performative documentary can be an open work (that demands to the user/reader/watcher to finish a work that is deliberately left incomplete by the author) but this would only concern its final edited form. For me a documentary is a doing process. The making of the documentary, the shooting of it, the editing of it, the viewing of it and the distributing of it all have their opportunity of openness, their readjusting realities and their observer intrusions. I see the doing of the documentary as a chain of systems that influence each other and that create new realities. The filmmaker that is shooting a family dispute is influencing it by her mere presence or by her interventions she is part of the doing of that instant. The editor that cuts the rushes of that same dispute is doing again a new reality; she shapes a film that illustrates only part of the dispute within a new context, which is the film, by using particular framings and scene juxtaposition techniques. But also both the filmmaker and the editor not to speak about the people that had the original dispute, and then the final audience - have been themselves affected by their own doing in the chain of events. The process of making a film is not a linear doing of a single artefact, but the totality of the circular feed-back loops that have been created during the doing of those multiple realities. I see in Performative documentaries an attempt to test different levels of intrusion of the observer (the filmmaker, but also those who observe her) in her environment - and hence different effects on the environment itself. The attention to The circularity of such a process and the co-dependence of the structural coupling Riggs s Tongues Untied (1989), Ngozi Onwurah s The Body Beautiful (1991) and Marlon Fuentes s Bontoc Eulogy (1995). 10 In her thorough article Performativity and Documentary (2005), Anne Jerslev accuses Stella Bruzzi of confusing the meaning of performance (the noun), performative (the adjective) and performativity (the verb) and to end up with a statement, her famous documentaries are performative acts (Bruzzi, 2000:7), deprived of any real added value. After elucidating the differences performativity and performance that she claims are at the origin of Bill Nichols s complex terminology Jerslev claims that there are different types of performances and different degrees of performativity. She then concludes that Performative documentaries can be of different style and genre but that they are about the filming of a personal reality that is coming into being through the very act of filming it (2005:111).

8 filmmaker/filmed/audience remind me the appropriateness of cybernetic terminology for the study of documentary making. [Meanwhile in the technology world ] From film roll to digital recording, via magnetic tapes The growing visibility of the filmmaker in the different types of performative documentaries is indicative of the cultural changes of this century and of its search for a new subjectivity, but it is important to highlight the role that media and technology had in such rapid changes. The basic production kit (composed of camera, image storage medium, audio storing medium and editing facility) has radically changed in the last fifty years, and those changes have heavily influenced the role, the aesthetic, and the economics documentary films. The feed-back loops that interest me, the levels of autopoietic openness or closure that are present in the process of documentary making are also depending on the technology that is used. The passage from the Cinema Verite of the 1960 s to a performative documentary such as Flying: confession of a free woman (2007) (that will be analysed next as a case study) is explicable via cultural theory, but also via the technical changes that have allowed affordable and portable filming kits to be used by non professionals - and by digital tapes that are cheap enough to keep the camera running for hours without thinking whether those shots will be useful for the final edit. As soon as television production began in the 1950 s it became clear that some means of storing a broadcast was essential. This would allow archiving, but especially it would permit delayed playback and editing. Film roll had been used in cinema, but its materiality and affordances meant that any editing demanded physical cutting of the reel itself and this was a fiddly and time consuming process - that was unsuitable for a media that had to be on air for long hours. By 1958 the first mechanical tape-editing process was introduced by Amex. It would allow television to record live on tape 11 but not to edit without the need to physically cut the tape with a razor blade and reconnect the videotape with splicing tape (Acker and Wurtzel, 1989:271). In 1960 Amex overcame the problem by introducing electronic editing: recorded scenes where now transferred onto a new tape allowing the old cut to become a simple copying process onto a fresh tape 12 followed by the copying of the next scene. This change had serious economical and stylistic implications: on one hand electronic editing became a distinct industry than film editing (television editors had different skills than film 11 This means directly from a camera or a control mixing room to a tape. 12 The rushes, the material that was shot on camera, would stay on what is called in television jargon a rush tape, and the edited scenes would be assembled onto a fresh tape, called a master tape.

9 editors 13 ) and the other hand television programmes acquired a style of fast edits with shorter scenes 14. Documentary production got stuck between two industries: sometimes documentaries where produced for cinema release, but most of the time there were commissioned, produced, and aired by broadcasters. This obviously meant that television production techniques had an impact on documentary styles, topics and aesthetics 15. The dramatic boom of television also started to impact production demand. Broadcasters needed to fill their schedule with content, and documentaries were perceived as an educational slot that could easily satisfy their public broadcaster mission, or the needs of a commercial nice market. Montage, and therefore video aesthetic, is one of the aspects that changed the most in early 1970 s television production. The introduction of computer-assisted editing systems allowed to combine computer memory and video production equipment and to gain in precision editing. In 1972, Sandcastles, the first made-for-television movie was produced entirely with video cameras and edited on videotape. The repercussions on documentary making were quite clear: video production was becoming perfectly acceptable by industry standards, even for documentary makers. Shifting from film to video, as a storing media, was not a neutral step. In the 1980 s video tapes started becoming smaller and smaller in size and their price radically dropped within few years 16. The smaller size of the tapes pushed the industry to create camcorders, portable cameras with a built-in videocassette recorder 17. Armed with a lighter portable camcorder that had its own built-in microphone, the film crew was reduced to one or two people 18. The smaller crew and the relatively low cost of the video stock had a huge influence in documentary filming and style: cameras could now be left to roll waiting for a good grab, cameramen/women could run around and effectively try to be a fly on the wall. Mobility and reduced costs of filming, have dramatically changed the attitude of the crew. The relationship between the crew 13 This distinction has then been abolished again with the introduction of digital technology that, as noticed by Lev Manovich in After Effects, or the Velvet Revolution part 1&2 and Import/Export, has merged different languages and savoir-fair into generally used industry softwares. Everybody who is practically involved in design and art today knows that contemporary designers use the same set of software tools to design everything (Manovich, 2006b:5). Editing too, is now becoming a subcategory of design. 14 This difference became even bigger when in 1967 the Electronic Engineering Company of Californa (EECO) developed a time-code system that enabled each individual video frame to be addressed with its own unique eight digit code (ibidem). This meant that a editing machine could find within seconds the precise shot that the producer wanted to use in her edit. Once the machine could retrieve a shot by itself, without endless shuffling through the tape, the editing process speeded up considerably. 15 One of multiple examples is the introduction of slow motion shots that got possible thanks to Amex s first colour slow-motion video discs. This effect had not been possible before and got used for the first time in ABC Sports World Series of Skiing, in It would be hard to imagine today a sport programme that would not make use of slow-motion shots! 16 In 1987 a 30 minutes reel of 1-inch tape osted around $40, while a 30 minutes Betacam (which is much smaller in size and fits into a Betacam video camera) was costing $10 (Acker and Wurtzel, 1989:272). 17 It is easy to forget that before camcorders the videocassette recorder was connected to the camera by a cable. This was obviously limiting the camera operator s mobility and would limit the temptations to do walking or running shots or to stay for too long without a tripod (as the videorecorder was quite heavy). 18 Normally a cameraman and a sound engineer (that would check the levels of the sound while the cameraman was shooting).

10 and the filmed subjects (what I would call the structural coupling between them) has become more open, more flexible and less controlling. The camerawoman is now more waiting for something to happen rather than pushing for something to happen. The extended times of shooting also allow more time for personal relationships between the crew and the filmed subjects 19 and this is meant to change the feed-back mechanisms between them. In the 1980 s the professional standard Betacam 20 took the industry lead while the domestic market also saw the introduction of mass consumable cameras (8 mm and Hi-8). The boarder between professional and amateur filmmaking became thinner. The fly on the wall and the performative documentary style blossomed pushed by a technology that allowed them to experiment at a relatively low cost. Cameras were given to non professional to record video diaries, and the filmmaker became more and more visible. The presence of the observer, the filmmaker, in her environment got fully accepted: the camera started being handheld, shaky shots became acceptable and a more performative style of shooting became popular. Roger and Me (1989) by Michael Moore is a famous example of such mode. Moore is constantly present, interviewing and walking in his own city Flint (Michigan,USA). The constantly moving camera focuses on him while he desperately tries to interview Roger Smith, the elusive head of General Motors, responsible for the closing of the General Motors which eliminated 33,000 jobs and left the one-industry town destitute and on the verge of economic collapse. His performance, his deliberately pushy attitude, is partially fed by camera that is always on. Any reaction from his resistant interviewees, any aggressive response to his pushy attitude, will be recorded and possibly used as a proof of the obstructive attitude of General Motors. Yet again, the light technology that has been used for the filming is an integral part of the set of relationships that have been created during the shooting and that have created the final outcome that is the film Roger and Me. This also had repercussions on the inhabitants of Flint that have felt part of the process of opening to the media and that have seen their town released world wide. Finally, this way of filming must also have effected Michael Moore himself, by empowering him into the role of the protagonist of his home town, a role that must have several personal implications. After light weight film cameras and portable sound recording kits, the technology moved to digital video and to digital cameras in the 1990 s. But most importantly it is the editing technology that moved to digital: Avid established itself in the early 1990 s as the first digital professional editing software that could edit film and 19 During the long filming of My Kid Could Paint That, filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev becomes friend with the parents of child artist Marla Olmstead. Since the whole documentary is geared at proving whether the 4 years old child is really, as the parents claim, the author of the astonishing paintings that are sold in an art gallery, Amir Bar-Lev is faced with a dilemma: if he concludes that the child is not the author than he betrays the trust that the parents have on him, but on the other hand if he claims that the child is the author just to please his new friends he betrays his own professional integrity. I believe that this dilemma, due to the friendship that is at stake, has been facilitated by the fact that Amir Bar-Lev has lived with the family for a while. In his whish to be invisible to the kid, and shoot her while she is painting, he has been constantly recording with his camera while staying at their place. This would not have been possible or would have been much more intrusive- in a previous technological setting. 20 Betacam is a family of half-inch professional videotape products developed by Sony from 1982 onwards. In colloquial use, "Betacam" singly is often used to refer to a Betacam camcorder, a Betacam tape, a Betacam video recorder or the format itself. (Source: Wikipedia, available at retrieved )

11 television programmes entirely through a computer 21. Once the rushes are digitalised into the computer s memory the shots become open to unlimited transitions and transformations. Special effects, incorporation of graphic layers and smooth transitions are quicker and easier to achieve than with tape editing equipment. As noticed by media theorist Lev Manovich, digital editing has lead to a new hybrid visual language of moving images in general (2006a:7), what he has called an aesthetic of remixability (2006a:9). But to my knowledge if remixability had a big impact in video industries such as advertisement, fiction (special effects) and motion graphics (title sequences) it has only marginally influenced documentary style. A part few exceptions (like in historical reconstructions where special effects can be useful 22 ) the documentary logic is not too prone to image manipulation and tend to stick to simple cuts or dissolve transitions (what is also called a mix between two images). The possibility to record as much as possible on camera, since the tape stock is relatively cheap, means that the documentary filmmaker does not need to plan her shots ahead of filming. Typically a filmmaker would shoot for a period of time and then view her tapes 23 before starting her editing. But if the rushes are very long it is very probable that the filmmaker does not remember what was exactly shot and it is the tape content itself that will inspire the editing, rather than the pre-fix plan of the editor. What I am trying to say is that a certain bottom-up approach is facilitated by a high quantity of rushes, since the filmmaker is less in control of her material. One could argue that it is the rushes themselves that lead the editing by imposing their strength to the eyes of the editor, rather than the filmmaker deciding in advance what those rushes will precisely contain and what the edited scenes will look like. This bottom-up approach is also pushed by digital editing technology. The rushes are digitised, or just transferred, into the computer memory. The editing software allows the visualisation of the video as if it was film roll: a frame by frame string of 21 Avid was introduced at the NAB show in April 1989 but became an industry leader by the mid 1990 s. Avid is essentially a non-linear editing software. Non-Linear Editing is a technique used in digital systems where a digital source (such as digitized film, video or audio) is used to create an edited version, not by rearranging the source file, but by creating a detailed list of edit points (ins, outs, fades, etc.) The editing software reads the edit list and creates a new version (the edit) by applying the list parameters to the playback of the source. This type of non-destructive editing is one of the advantages digital editing has over cutting film or magnetic tape. Films are generally edited by making a digital transfer from and using this process during editing. An EDL (edit decision list) is then output from the editing software, which is used to produce cuts and dissolves in the actual film using automated equipment. Increasingly though, movies are beginning to be output digitally in high resolution (1080 or 2160 lines) to make Computer-generated imagery (CGI) possible, and cinemas are beginning to shift towards digital projection, so that it seems likely that photographic film will eventually be eliminated from the process altogether, with movies being delivered either by satellite link or on hard disk. Source: Wikipedia. Available at retrieved Historical and natural history reconstruction documentaries are obviously the exception that confirms the rule: in 1999, BBC broadcasted the series Walking with Dinosaurs which was set to create the most accurate portrayal of prehistoric animals ever seen on the screen. The production of the series took two years and made heavy use of cutting-edge computer graphics and animatronics effects. But this type of documentary is nearer to educational programmes than to the Performative documentary style that is at the centre of this research. 23 In television jargon this is normally called logging rushes.

12 images 24. The editor can therefore scatter video sequences into a timeline as if they were photos hanging of a drying line. The holes are visible, they are visualized on screen as an empty film rolls, but they can be filled up later. By having an overview of the documentary time line editing becomes less linear. Chunks of video can be edited separately and can then be dropped into the main documentary at any place. The modularity of the editing software also allows unlimited number of video cut and paste operations making the editing process somehow similar to puzzle making. In a similar way in which a puzzle s empty space invites our glance to be filled, digital editing visualisation language invites the editor to cut and mix sections of videos until the whole takes a form. There is an internal balance of feed-backs and readjustments that end up creating a finished piece. As a result the documentary acquires a quality of moments of life next to each other rather than a predetermined narrative structure. This could explain why Performative, Participatory or Observational documentaries often give feeling of segmented narrative, rather than fluid narrative. The other big change in documentary making that has been heavily pushed by digital technology is the thinning distinction between professional and amateur documentary making. Both digital cameras and digital editing software are responsible for such transition. On the editing side, since documentary style tends to go for simple cuts, and low use of video effects it does not need sophisticated high end software. Even the most basic and mass distributed video editing software can be used to edit a documentary. On the digital video camera side, consumer market digital camcorders are increasingly used by national broadcasters, demonstrating a change of attitude towards what is considered broadcastable quality 25. The recent explosion of Youtube 26 contributors is indicative of the coexistence of different definitions and logics of documentary making. On one side we find the professional documentary makers that shoot with professional equipment and aim for a cinema or television distribution. On the other side we have an amateur world of personal computer documentary makers that are not seeking for a profit and are 24 This was not possible in magnetic video editing. Moving images could only be viewed as a full screen shot (like when looking for a specific shot in a VHS tape) and not as a film roll (as when looking for a specific frame holding a film strip into one s hand). 25 The main difference between what is called broadcastable quality and amateur quality has to do with the compression rate of the video and audio material. Professional high end digital cameras will record a higher quality image than a commercial digital camcorder, but television guidelines are becoming more tolerable on quality issues. In its 2008 Technical Standards for Network Television Delivery guidelines, the BBC admits that it is inherently difficult to define precisely what a suitable quality product is ( ). This is an unavoidable consequence of the rapid technical developments at this time (BBC Guidelines, 2008: 11). So to make the distinction between what is broadcastable quality and what is not, the BBC guidelines give a list of ten general indications of what is good quality material. Point nine of the list, thought, states that in certain circumstances, for example shooting actuality material or where a high level of mobility is required, the use of a DV palmcorder type camera may be considered acceptable for acquisition. Specific agreement from the Genre Commissioning Team must be sought before using this. Where use of this format is agreed we require particular attention to be given to sound and lighting considerations (ibidem). 26 In The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life, Lev Manovich declares that the numbers of people participating in these social networks, sharing media, and creating user generated content are astonishing at least from the perspective of early 2008 (2008:3). He then quotes Wikipidia to establish the number of new videos uploaded to YouTube every 24 hours (as of July 2006) to 65,000 (source: accessed February 7, 2008).

13 happy to distribute for free their creations on the internet. And in between the two we find a vast layering of semi-professional, students, experimental amateurs, digital video-artist and new media artist that are using both channels of distributions, and both logic of production, but within their own custom-made needs and aspirations. Digital video editing software has brought to an exploding variety of documentary aesthetics and the existence of the internet as an alternative distributing platform from the professional world of broadcasters has legitimate those aesthetics, giving them an audience and a commercial weight 27. The difference between an amateur video on Youtube and a professional documentary on BBC is not simply based on the quality of sound and image. It is not that one can be broadcasted and the other one has to stay in a domestic or alternative circuit. Today they are both broadcasted (although via different media) but that they have a different aesthetic and a different approach to content (I shall concentrate on those different aesthetics in the next chapter). Digital technology and networked media (the internet as a distributing platform, but also as a communication and production platform) are creating an audience-consumer, a producer-viewer breed that did not exist before. The observer (viewer) is also a second level observer (filmmaker) while both uploading and viewing videos on YouTube. The digital filmmaker can step out even more than before from the observer s chair. She is enacting a double role: the actor-receiver. The question for me is to understand which are the consequences of this shift of position and how it can be detected. What are the shifts in filming techniques, in editing techniques, and ultimately in the form of the documentary itself, that are indicative of a new positioning of the filmmaker? What type of enactor-performer is the filmmaker becoming? Also, if author and participator are somehow potentially the same individual, or group, how is this affecting Participatory, or Performative documentary? I intend to answer those questions thought the analysis of two specific documentaries: Flying, confessions of a free woman (Jennifer Fox, 2007) and Over the Hill (Sunny Bergman, 2007). But before moving into such analysis I believe a last digression, or lateral jump, is necessary in order to position issues of participation and embodiment within the larger history of cinema making. Although this research is specifically concentrating on documentary genre it would be difficult to ignore the influences that the video activists of the 1960 s and 1970 s had on the subsequent practices of filmmaking. I do not intent here to have a comprehensive history of experimental cinema, or of video art, this would be way beyond the scope of this research. But themes of embodiment, feedback, participation, authorship and immersion in cinematic experiences have all from such experimental cinema practices. The role of the filmmaker, both in cinema and in documentary, has a history that depends on cultural, technical and artistic influences. In the last fifty years avantgarde filmmakers have pushed the cinematic experience outside of the single-screen space environment, preparing the route for discourses of video participation and immersion that are now central to digital interactive documentary (and digital art in 27 The existence of an amateur film world next to a professional one is not new this has been possible since the 1960 s with the introduction of Kodak amateur s Super 8 film cartridge but the distribution channel that is the internet has blurred the line between those two worlds, giving authority and audience to both of them.

14 general). As we will see in the next session, Cybernetic discourses and System Theory had a role to play in this evolution, in the sense that they facilitated a holistic view of media as connected and interdependent with culture and human perception. Cinema production was to become more than movies. Film, video, and media in general was to be seen as a tool for expansion of cultural awareness, giving the filmmaker an active role in society. [ Back to the 1960 s, in the video art world.] Video Activism, Radical Software and the Expanded Cinema As television was becoming main stream media in the 1960 s theorists and video artists 28 started to be interested, and sometimes concerned, about the impact of such medium in our society. In 1969, inspired by McLuhan s writings and seminars, Frank Gillette, an artist and radical media activist, conceived the Raindance Corporation in New York. Gillette's intention was to found an alternative media think tank; a source of ideas, publications, videotapes and energy providing a theoretical basis for implementing communication tools in the project of social change (Gigliotti, 2003). One of the best known achievements of the media think tank that was the Raindance Corporation was the publication of Radical Software. In June of 1970, Beryl Korot and Phyllis Gershuny sent the first issue of Radical Software to the printer. Between 1970 and 1974 another eleven other issues were to follow. In Radical Software s first editorial, Korot, Gershuny, and Shamberg, were emphasising the relationship between power and control of information, and the importance of freeing television from corporate control. It also included a balanced assessment of technology as a cultural force, and recommended an ecological approach to understanding it (ibidem). In the same first edition, video activist Youngblood, was describing his concern: We are conditioned more by cinema and television than by nature (Youngblood, 1970b:54). In few years television had rapidly established itself in the U.S.A as a media of the masses. In 1948 approximately 200,000 American homes had television sets; fifteen television stations were broadcasting regularly. By 1958 some 520 stations were broadcasting to receivers in 42 million homes. Today there are tens of thousands 28 Both Video Activists and Avant-garde filmmakers have used video technology to challenge the cultural and economic status quo of their times. The difference between the two is not a clear cut, but over all the term Video Activism tends to describe use of video for political purposes (typically to offer an alternative to official news channels) while Avant-garde filmmaking tends to refer to the use of video and television technology in the art context. In an article about Video Activism, journalist Maureen Paton traces the links between early video activists and current digital activists: the introduction of video in the 70s and 80s encouraged a new breed of guerrilla film-makers who recorded Vietnam protests, civil rights marches, environmental disputes, women's rights and gay rights rallies. And with the arrival of the camcorder and the development of the internet in the 90s and the dawning of the digital age, the possibilities now seem endless (2003) s Avant-Gardism, on the other side, is more linked to the debate between high art and low art and the engagement that Avant-Garde artists of the 1970 s wanted to have with popular culture. In this context, says cinema critique Michael O Pray, the idea of the underground re-emerged with its implication for an art that comes from below, from beneath the accepted culture, as opposed to leading from in front (1996:2).

15 of broadcasters and approximately 100 million homes have television sets. More than 95 per cent of American homes have TV sets today, approximately 14 million of which are color. In fact there are more TVs in U.S. homes than telephones, bathtubs or refrigerators. TV antennas bristle from the rooftops of ghetto shacks that don't even have plumbing. An estimated quarter-billion television receivers are in use around the world Television is the software of the Earth. (Youngblood, 1970a:1) For Youngblood, as for many video artists and activists of the 1970 s, and especially the members of the Raindance Corporation, cinema but also video and television - had a potential that was not been used by national broadcasters and private corporate. The moving image had the power to change a society, but broadcasters and film studios were not experimenting enough with the medium to let it reach its full potential. The world has changed since the invention of cinema, we believe in a world with no boundaries between matter and spirit yet cinema language still comes from literature and Vaudeville (1970b:54) and commercial cinema works against art, alienates people and uses conditioned responses to formulas (1970b:59). Youngblood took as a mission to divulgate the work that cinema activists 29 had been doing. By publishing a book, Expanded Cinema, he divulgated their experimental video work but he also raised awareness about a media society that for him was becoming an ecology, an intermedia network : Cinema isn t just something inside the environment; the intermedia network of cinema, television, radio, magazine. Books and newspaper is our environment, a service environment that carries the message of social organism. It establishes meaning in life, creates mediating channels between man and man, man and society. (Youngblood, 1970a:54) For me Expanded Cinema is a fascinating book that shows how much current discussion about new media started way before the digital age. Youngblood could see in the 1970 s the beginning of a networked world (and this was before the World Wide Web!) and was searching for a medium that could express non-linearity and chaos and reflect the world as it is, while expanding our consciousness 30. I also clearly see a link between Youngblood concept of an intermedia network 31 and System theory insomuch media is not considered as a stand alone entity, but as a part of a bigger system that both influences, and is influenced by media. Cybernetic discourse is very much in the foreground here. Youngblood places himself in Cybernetic Age, characterized by many as the post-industrial Age (1970:41). He sees himself in a society in transition; leaving behind the Industrial Age he wants to use art and video technology as an instrument to develop a new consciousness, and a new world. Such a world needs a new notion of cinema. In Experimental Film and Video, artist Jackie 29 To name just a few of the artist reviewed in Expanded Cinema: Will Hinde, Pat O Neill, John Schofill, Ronald Nameth, Carolee Scneemann, Michael Snow and Andy Warhol. 30 Synaesthetic cinema is the only aesthetic language suited to the post-industrial, post-literate, manmade environment with its multi-dimensional simulsensory network of information sources. It is the only aesthetic tool that even approaches the reality continuum of conscious existence in the nonuniform, nonlinear, nonconnected electronic atmosphere of the Paleocybernetic Age (Youngblood, 1970a:76). 31 The term Intermedia was first coined by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe the inter-disciplinary activities of drawring, painting, theatre and cinema that got deliberately mixed in the 1960s.

16 Hatfield underlines how Expanded Cinema isn t at all about movies. It is about a cinematic spectacle (2005:237) a notion that expands cinema to public participation, new spaces and mediums. Cinema as a process of becoming and transformation. This explains why Expanded Cinema is searching for a new language, a language that bypasses traditional logics of montage. Since for Youngblood the media is an expansion of our consciousness, it is necessary to find new channels of expression that can free our mind from rational causality in order to let our feelings speak. Synaesthetic cinema subsumes Einsteins s theory of montage-as-collision and Pudovkin s view of montage-as-linkage. ( ) It doesn t chop the world into little fragments ( ) because it is not concerned with the world in the first place. The new filmmaker is showing us his feelings. Montage is indeed an abstraction of objective reality ( ) but synaesthetic syncretism is the only mode in which the manifestations of one s consciousness can be approximated without distortion. (Youngblood, 1970a:85) A new cinematic language, a use of the camera that opens our perceptive abilities, a montage that allows us to create the not yet imaginable and a use of viewing space that opens our sensitive horizons this is the vast programme of Expanded Cinema. From this vast programme some pollination seems to have happened. The current use of video in art installations, mobile phones and networked digital platforms seems to indicate that the intermedia network is very much around us. Also Cybernetic ideas of structural coupling of the video maker with her environment and their mutual influence- have clearly blossomed in documentary making. Combining a less intrusive filming equipment with an awareness of an en-acting-observer role, the filmmaker has taken an increasingly more performative role. As we have seen before, digital technology is now exacerbating the performative and participatory tendencies which started in the 1960 s. In the next section I will use two documentaries as case studies to illustrate the legacy of Cybernetic and Extended Cinema in the praxis of Performative documentaries. By zooming into filming techniques and video aesthetics I hope to illustrate how some current linear documentaries show a state of tension between semi-controlled and open participation in documentary making. Those case studies are still linear documentaries, in the sense that they have been produced for cinema and television distribution, but they show a tendency to transform the role of the filmmaker to an enactor more than a simple observer. [Back to the documentary world ] Cybernetics, digital production and the praxis of Performative documentary making The two case studies that I have chosen are Flying confession of a Free Woman (Jennifer Fox, 2007, USA) and Over the Hill (Sunny Bergman, 2007, Holland). Both those documentaries are recent, they where shot and edited with digital equipment and produced for television and cinema distribution. Those documentaries

17 were thought as linear films but they have a digital presence via the internet, and they exist under the DVD digital format. Both films were shot by women and tackle feminist issues, although this is not the reason for which I have chosen them 32. I have chosen them because I believe they illustrate how contemporary Performative documentaries are oscillating between a linear causal language and a non-linear digital language. With different filming techniques, different aesthetics and different uses of digital technology they show a wish to open up documentary language and to redefine the role of the filmmaker. In Flying confession of a Free Woman Jennifer Fox tries to understand what it means to be a women in our world by filming herself and her friends during five years. In Over the Hill Sunny Bergman looks at how mass media society makes woman feel about their bodies by filming herself in the quest of the perfect body. In both cases the filmmaker is in front, and sometimes behind, the camera lenses 33, but especially in both examples the process of filming is transforming the image that the filmmaker has of herself. The filmmakers want to engage with the reality they are filming and they documents this precise performative act. I am choosing Performative intimate 34 and introspective 35 documentaries because they often use the camera as a tool for self-reflection, and the filmmaker s body is treated as an environment of change. In Performative documentaries, says film critic Anne Jerselev, the camera constructs reality by recording reality (2005: 92). It is the feedback loop between filmmaker and environment that interests me. More than any other types of films Performative documentaries use observation and reflexivity as a filming methodology: the camera observes the filmmaker that is then observing herself in the shot. Interviews and exchanges with others are often geared at adding one level of observation in this circular process of self-search. The individual is seen as emerging from multiple levels of observation. Here cybernetic notions of circularity and multiple levels of observable systems can be very useful. Also, introspective and intimate Performative types of documentaries tend to put the viewer in an affective encounter with a realm of specificity and corporeality, of embodied knowledge and existentially situated action (Nichols, 1995: 2). In other words they use cybernetic enaction, and embodied action, as a logic of filming. Case study 1. Flying: Confessions of a free woman - blurring the distinction between the observer and the observed 32 The choice of a feminist topic illustrates a personal interest but is not linked to my argument. The core of this research is Performative interactive documentaries, and not feminist issues. 33 Obviously both positions are not possible at the same time, but throughout the filming of the documentary they take the three roles of director, camerawoman and performer. 34 Intimate documentary has also been referred to as autobiographical documentary (Katz & Katz, 1988) or domestic documentary (Renov, 1999). 35 This is a personal terminology that relies on the definition of introspection as Contemplation of one's own thoughts, feelings, and sensations; self-examination. (Source: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in Published by Houghton Mifflin Company).

18 Flying: confessions of a free woman is a 6 times 1 hour episode documentary by American filmmaker Jennifer Fox. The advertising leaflet described the film as a personal memoir, feminist manifesto and examination of Global Woman and a mixture between Sex and the City and documentary genre. Its website describes it as a documentary film series on modern womanhood from an international perspective, exploring love, sex, motherhood, work, abortion, miscarriage, fertility, IVF, abuse, marriage, and more 36. Flying is what I would call an introspective and a performative documentary: the very personal story of a self declared free woman who starts doubting about the benefits of her cherished freedom. Although she has been fighting all her life to be a sexually liberated and professionally independent woman, travelling the world and making documentaries, Jennifer faces a crisis: the forty-something woman looks back at her achievements and finds a constantly-on-the-run woman, unsure about the future of her love-relationship, and struggling with her desire/fear of having kids. Looking for her own identity as a woman she decides to face her crisis through the language that she knows best: she turns the camera on herself and starts a five years autobiographical documentary. During those five years she will travel to 17 countries, meet and interview women of different cultures and social levels and record on camera her own evolution and life throughout this journey. She will look at how women live, how they speak when they are within themselves, how they live their sexuality, how they react when they have been physically abused in other words she will ask women to speak about what it means for them to be women. Passing the Camera The technique that Jennifer has experimented while filming the documentary is the Passing the Camera one. Using a small DV camera that has a two directional microphone attached to it, she never stops recording her conversations, passing the camera from hand to hand, each person pointing at the one that is speaking. The effect that is obtained is one of continuity and apparent spontaneity. Jennifer is not the director-filmmaker of the movie since her friends are filming too, especially when Jennifer is speaking 37. What interest me in the Passing the Camera technique is that what is happening here is that the boundaries between the observer 38 and the observed are being challenged. What is being openly acknowledged is that the observer is not only observing but she is also co-creator of the reality that is around her. She is not only part of the system but also acting on it and in it. The camera, the act of filming, is making the transition 36 See the film s website for both the quotes and a trailer of the film In her blog of the 1 st of April 2008, Jennifer writes: When you Pass the Camera, no one person has the power, but every one in the conversation has the same agency to ask a question and to answer a question. It is exciting and liberating a little bit like a game of truth or dare when you are a teenager except it doesn t tend to provoke wild stories, but somehow invites the passers to dig deeper in themselves and come up with new answers. It tends to give people ah ha moments those moments when you say something that you haven t said before to anyone or haven t said in just exactly that way. From Retrieved

19 between the internal and external conversation visible to the third participant of this scene: us. The camera constructs reality by recording reality (Jerselev, 2005:92). If Jennifer is a first level system, and her conversation with a friend opens a second system (where her friend is what cybernetician Von Foerster would have called a second level observer), we, the viewers, are now the third level of observation. Conversation, what artist and cybernetician Gordon Pask has described as a reactive and adaptative environment, has now become a technique of filming. If conversation is both Jennifer s technique of filming, and also her subject of filming, it is because what is being documented here is not a conversation as it happened but the way the camera is itself part of this conversation and also how it is shaping this conversation. Moving around from one hand to the other the camera performs a sort of ballet that decides who is observed and who is observing and by doing so also changes their behaviour and their agency 39. My hypothesis is that this way of filming is indicative of a cultural shift in the perception of authorship and representation of reality: the legacy of second order cybernetic discussions about the role of the observer, in observing systems, and the causality shift that it implied, have become core to some of today s filming. Examples as Flying are very useful because they are based exactly around the feed-back loops of the Second Order Cybernetics: the Passing the Camera technique temporary locks the observer (Jennifer) and the observed (the interviewed) in the same system (the scene) using the feed-back mechanism of the conversation 40 to create the emotional opening that is necessary for the documentary to work. When in conversation, Jennifer is in interaction with her environment. Since the aim of her movie is to document how women talk about themselves, and how they do experience their role in society, Jennifer enacts her own position of woman in front of the camera. She is not always behind the camera, she gets in front of it when her friends are filming her. By doing so she blurs the line between observed and observer. What Jennifer documents is her own interaction with her friends, with herself and with her partner. In her blog she claims that turning the camera on herself focuses her, as if visualizing herself on a screen helped her to become aware of her situatedness in her life. She, as a subject, emerges while shooting, while interacting, while enacting. Youngblood s vision of Expanded Cinema as a way to expand consciousness (1970:41) is particularly relevant here: Jennifer is using her camera exactly in this way, as a tool to visualize herself and therefore become conscious of herself. For me 39 I have tried myself to pass the camera with some friends. The moment the camera is switched on conversation goes on but the glances of people change. Suddenly the person who is speaking automatically looks at the person that holds the camera and starts ignoring the other people in the group. 40 The feed-back in a conversation is not just a response. A response is a reaction to a specific stimulus, in a conversation it might be an answer, but the feed-back is a larger concept as it incorporates the consequences of such answer. I use here cybernetic terms in their wider sense, not in their strictly mathematical or biological domain. I include learning, psychological and emotional changes as a result of positive or negative feed-back between people. A conversation between two or more individuals can change, or not, the feelings and the way of thinking of such participants. A negative feed-back dynamic will tend to leave the individuals unchanged, while a positive feed-back will push them to change and to set new aims for themselves. Positive feed-back will be at the basis of the process of learning.

20 Jennifer documents levels of interaction. Her embodied action 41 fills the screen. Her body, her constant presence on screen is crucial. It is by experiencing, and documenting her experience, that she moves on. She is conversing, crying, thinking, changing or aborting with her flesh and emotions. She documents herself, her enactment, her evolution during the five years of the filming. Her friends and family are sometimes observed (when filmed by Jennifer) and sometimes observers (when they film her) but the viewer of the final documentary stays in the role of the observer. Her technique of filming opens up two of the three levels of observers. She swaps role with her subjects of filming, but not with us. We, the viewers, can be active by interpreting her movie, or feel emotions, but we cannot step into the observed seat. The line between the first and second level of observers gets blurred, but not the one with the third level of observers. There is an opening, but a partial one. Jennifer documents the sequence of positive and negative feed-backs loops 42 that allow her to evolve and change during the five years of her mediated quest. Learning, changing, adapting, responding conversing this is what is being documented: the constant reassessing between the individual and her environment, the dynamics of their structural coupling. The emphasis is on what historian of science Andrew Pickering has called the unpredictable liveliness of the world (2002:430), a constant flux of novelty. This liveliness and unpredictability are very present in Jennifer Fox s autobiographical documentary. Everything seems to happen in those five years, crises emerge get solved and then reoccur in different shapes and Jennifer manages to grab this unpredictability by choosing a filming technique that openly documents positive and negative feed-backs. Experiencing the linear documentary 41 As we have seen in the previous chapter with embodied action Varela, Thomspon and Rosh want to emphasise the fact that sensory and motor processes, perception and action, are fundamentally inseparable in lived cognition (1991:173). 42 I see positive feedback happening when a system changes as a result of its interaction with its environment - as opposed to negative feed-back when the interaction with its environment brings it back to its previous state of equilibrium. While negative feedback is the essential condition for stability, positive feedbacks are responsible for growth, self-organization and change. I am aware that those terms come from a mathematical background of missile control and from a biological understanding of self-organization but they have been gradually extrapolated in other fields such as psychology and social sciences, not to mention to art (1968 s ICA exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity in London is an obvious example). I am using here Joanna Macy s larger view of the notion of positive and negative feedback. The system s self-organization, Macy says, is understandable in terms of the changes incorporated through positive feedback loops. When perturbations in the environment persist and produce a continual mismatching, between input and encoded norms, the system either becomes dysfunctional or hits on new behaviours which are adaptative to the new conditions. These are then stabilized at a new level of negative feed-back (1991:76). If we see Jennifer as a self-organized system we can also describe her changing and learning as a succession of positive and negative feed-back loops between her and her environment. This is only possible if we take what I called a wide view of autopoiesis in the past chapter, a view of the living organism in constant adaptivity to its environment, a view that accepts the idea of change in the living system.

21 So how is the passing the camera technique of filming influencing the film aesthetics? How is this technique affecting the experience of the film for the 3 rd level observer: us, the audience? When I went to see Flying at London s Birds Eye View festival in 2008, I was impressed by the intimacy that the film conveys. I knew nothing about the Passing the Camera technique and I could only notice the omnipresence of Jennifer in her shots (through image or through a voice over that explains her thoughts). By the end of the film I had the impression of knowing her. Her documentary is a mixture between a long confession, a diary, a friend s chat. The feeling is not of voyeurism as Jennifer is speaking to her audience, she is active in the discussion, so we feel part of it, we are not outsiders. The voice-over acts as a stream of thoughts through pieces of her life that we accept as disjointed, since this is about a real person and not a fictional one. A closer look into her filming and editing technique shows a powerful mix of stylistic choices: 1. There is a high percentage of very close-up shots of her face, followed by close-ups of the people she is speaking to. Those close-ups put us, the 3 rd level observers, in the position of Jennifer s friends: we are there. We listen to her conversations with her lover (fig. 1), we listen to her questioning her mother (fig. 2), we listen to her thoughts (fig. 3), we are sometimes friends, sometimes pure observers, sometimes member or her family. (fig. 1 Flying: Confessions of a free woman) (fig. 2 Flying: Confessions of a free woman) (fig. 3 Flying: Confessions of a free woman) 2. The voice over links shots and events using a standard montage technique but most voice-overs express her thoughts, her questions and doubts. Once again: we are

22 listening to her while actively thinking about her issues. We understand her and we feel understood too 43. We are not passive: we are in discussion. 3. The conversations that Jennifer has with others are deeply personal. People seem at ease, they appear natural. This is probably the result of the Passing the Camera technique, but interestingly enough this technique is not flagged, nor openly used as a filming style. In very few points of the 6 x 1 hr episodes (and I believe in none of the 2 hrs cinema version) we see the camera effectively passing between people. No unwanted shots of the ceiling, no distracting noises while the camera microphone is being banged on the table, no long pauses waiting for the next person to stabilize the shot before the conversation continues. Those shots have mainly been cut out. When the sound is interesting (the conversation between two people keeps flowing even if the camera is not pointing at the right person) it is used but its sync-image 44 is replaced by a shot that Jennifer considers more appropriate. By respecting the traditional editing rules of cutting out shaky images and excruciatingly long shots, Jennifer positions her film as main stream broadcastable material: this is not arty material, it is a performative documentary with an edge 45. She is also keeping in control of the paste and the narrative flow of the documentary: only the good grabs are kept and dialogues are cut to be interesting, yet intimate. The audience will probably never know about the passing of the camera, they will just feel lead through Jennifer s life, sometimes friends with her, sometimes uncomfortably close, but normally not bored by her. What I find interesting about Jennifer s stylistic choices is that although she opens herself up while shooting, she stays very much in control during the editing process. Passing the camera means that no outside cameraman/woman is present while they speak, which allows more spontaneity; it also means that Jennifer s friends are in control of the shots while Jennifer is speaking 46, so in a sense she puts herself in a position where she has to let go. During her shooting phase Jennifer is both an observer and a participator. But, once she steps into the edit suite, her montage gives her back total control. She can keep what she wants and disregard what she does not want to show. Uncomfortable grabs and hurting discoveries might be preserved, but the form of the documentary keeps a clean narrative shape. While Jennifer was lead by the camera and by her friends input when she was shooting, she is the one that controls paste, narrative and rhythm via montage. Now she is an observer of herself. Her editor might have an input in her decisions, but the final cut represents what she believe is observable by us, the 3 rd level observers. The observer goes online Jennifer has used digital equipment to shoot her film. The camera that she has used is light and portable. The bidirectional microphone is small and clips itself to the 43 This is the feed-back that several people gave to Jennifer Fox during the discussion that followed Flying s screening in London, to which I participated. 44 The sync-image is the one that was recorded on tape in conjunction with the original sound. 45 For me, and I believe for the audience in the room, the edge seemed to be an intimate way of speaking of feminist issues. 46 In the credits of the documentary Jennifer Fox actually puts herself and women from all over the world under the title of Director of Photography.

23 camera. The tapes are inexpensive 47. She was therefore able to shoot by herself, during five years, with a minimal budget. The textuality of her shots is typical of semi-professional cameras: distorted wide angle features on extreme close-ups, overexposed images when shooting against a light source and visible autofocus moves when the subject in focus moves. But all this being said, I would assume that she uses digital equipment for the flexibility it gives her, and not as a stylistic choice. Pixelation, image distortion, special effects or multiple layering of sound and image (all effects that are particularly simplified by the digital media) are not part of her palette. The moment Jennifer takes a clear digital decision is when she decides to have a presence on the internet. Flying s website has several aims: it promotes the documentary (you will find release dates and channels, a shop to buy the DVD and some background information on the whole project) and it attempts to create an area of debate (Jennifer has her own Blog, viewers can comment on her film and a competition of Passing the Camera is advertised). (fig 4. Flying s home screen, source: In the Passing the Camera part of her website Jennifer invites viewers to send their own videos experimenting the pass the camera technique for themselves. This takes the form of a competition where the winners get to create the 7 th episode of Flying 48. I have participated to such competition as I wanted to see for myself if the passing the camera technique was really able to create a more fluid style of filming 49. I decided to edit on camera 50 and to portray a typical day where I would invite some girlfriends home. While my experience of shooting the video was both fun and intriguing 51, the experience of uploading my video to Jennifer website was quite frustrating. Past my first reluctance to give up my privacy and open part of myself to 47 A search on the internet for the price of a 60 minutes MiniDV Pro tape gave me prices varying between 1 and The competition closed in May I did actually even co-win the competition! 50 To edit on camera means that there is no editing involved after the shooting. The final cuts of the film are the moments in which one has started and stopped recording. This technique is liberating for me because it jumps the editing process (that I personally do not like) but it presents some risks : what you shoot is what you get, and it stays in that order. The narrative is therefore always chronological and any mistake is there to stay. 51 Fun because passing the camera creates a gamish dynamics in a group, and intriguing because I realised how difficult it is to stop controlling the shot and allow others to record you.

24 world wide internet view, I suddenly got excited by the prospect of world feedback and debate. But this never happened. The website was designed to upload videos but not to comment on other s people entries. One could send comments about Jennifer s film, but not about other participants to the competition. I felt in a way abused: what was this competition all about? Was it a way to invite people to experiment with a new technique of filming but then there ought to be a way to comment on such experience- or was it a trick to add free content to her website and to promote her passing the camera technique? The fact that one could only post a video, but not discuss with other participants about such experience seemed to suggest that the competition was just a promotional trick. It also made me realize that Jennifer was using the internet with the typical precaution of technological in-betweeners : she would dare to be present on the internet but not to embrace the full potential of the media. Jennifer is a documentary maker, she is not an interactive designer. When she allows people to send their videos she does not allow them to comment on each-other videos, nor to create a community online of women that want to share their stories. Her website stays as the website of a documentary, it is a promotional website and not a stand alone documentary. is a good example of how it is difficult for linear documentary makers to adapt to a non-linear and open medium such as the internet. Jennifer uses the web, she uses the participative functions of uploading videos, but then she does not let go of her authorial role. She is exposing her documentary; she is not expanding it since it cannot evolve into something else. The Flying website shows a tendency, a will, to embrace an open communication and at the same time the difficulty of changing media, and with it, of changing language, logic, and positioning about reality. For me Jennifer has experimented with fluidity, enaction, feedbacks and interaction with her environment while filming, but her usage of the internet shows no wish to use digital technology as a production tool that can shape a new form of documentary making. Her website is mainly a promotional site, disguised behind some web 2.0 participatory options. I believe that my next example, Over the Hill, has gone one step further. Over the Hill was also shot for cinema and television release. But its success brought its producers to the idea of creating an online forum around the topics raised in the film. I have chosen this case study because I believe that the website has managed to become a documentary in its own rights. For me it exemplifies the difference between a website of a documentary and a website that is a documentary (or what I would call an interactive documentary). Case Study 2. Over the Hill: from the observer to the enactorperformer Beperkt Houdbaar (Over the Hill) is a Dutch documentary about women s relationship with their bodies in a society where the media are constantly pushing for the perfect look and the size zero shape. To proclaim the absurdity of media created beauty Sunny Bergman, a young Dutch documentary filmmaker, puts herself on the spot: she does a photo shoot and shows the difference between her original photo and the Photoshop modified version of it; she goes to America and meets a plastic

25 surgeons that wants to re-do her anew; she interviews women on how they perceive their bodies and she finally declares war to the media construction of impossible perfect bodies. The documentary itself is a 90 minutes linear film that I would describe as Performative 52. Contrary to Flying: confessions of a free woman it does not use any particular technique of filming apart from Sunny Bergman s performative presence on screen. Here the camera is not a tool for self-focus and introspection, but a witness that can record Sunny s interactions with the world. My interest in Over the Hill, apart from the subject matter itself, is not in the linear documentary itself, but in the fact that it expanded into an online product. Released in 2007 in Holland in the cinema circuit, the documentary was such a success that the producers decided to create a website to be a forum for women to express themselves. This website was build as a full social forum rather than as a promotional site (which I believe is the case of Flying s website). (fig 5. home screen, retrieved ) The website hosts a forum, allows women to send videos and picture of themselves, it encourages comments and ideas and launches an anti-photoshop campaign. In cybernetic terms we could see how the website is in structural coupling with the people that collaborate in it. It grows by incorporating their comments and videos, it changes shape if participants require it, and if Sunny Bergman agrees with it. One could debate if such system is autopoietic and operationally closed 53, as would be a 52 As seen earlier in this chapter I am using film critic s Anne Jerslev definition of Performative documentaries as films that use performativity as a strategy. In this case Sunny Bergman deliberately puts herself in front of the camera to experiment on her own flesh the excesses of the beauty industry. Had she just filmed other people seeking for surgical advice her documentary would not have been the same. By being the main performer of her film she takes the responsibility of its message. She tells her story, and remembers us that this story could be ours. She becomes a witness, an observer, but also a participator of this highly mediatised world. 53 Using Maturana biological terminology in a social context, Niklas Luhmann sees the media as autopoietic operationally closed systems. In The Reality of Mass Media he explains how media need more content to justify their own existence and to keep alive. Analyzing collaboration and participation in web 2.0. social forums, new media theorist Lev Manovich has recently noticed how much social media is totally dependent on comments and reactions to other people entries (2008, The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life). If the circularity of information is not enough to sustain that a website is effectively a living autopoietic organism, it is in my view enough to say that a social forum can be seen

26 living organism. But to me it is not important to define a social forum as biologically alive, what counts is to point out its dynamic interdependency with its environment. Over the Hill website is fed by its users, and feeds them with content. They grow together and depend from each-other. Contrary to a linear video documentary that does not change form after being edited, the Over the Hill website is constantly evolving, changing shape while still speaking about the women-body relationship. Youngblood s vision of an expended cinema as more than a film is maybe taking shape through this example: a film that resonates into the intermedia network and that creates mediating channels between man and man, man and society (Youngblood, 1970a:54) 54. I personally consider this type of website as what I call a digital interactive documentary where reality is constantly created by its participants via their participation through videos uploads, comments, news letters and podcasts. Using digital networked technology Over the Hill s website portrays a mosaic of views of women on their own body, or on the way mass media is representing and transforming their body. For me it is as much a documentary than its linear version but with a difference: this time it is not Sunny Bergman s journeys that is central but the totality of the individual points of views that are expressed in the website 55. Over the Hill started as a film, a linear documentary, that documented Sunny Bergman s interest for the topic of women and their bodies. The film documents her findings. It documents her quest for coherence. Similarly to Flying: confession of a free woman it uses the performativity of the filmmaker and the feedback that it generates while filming as a strategy to document reality. The website of Over the Hills documents women documenting themselves. It is not anymore an act of subjective coherence but a container of multiple subjective coherences. What it is documenting is diversity of points of views, yet union of interests around a same topic. It uses a relational logic rather than a narrative one, where participants reacts to others entries and comments on each others using feedback as a creative motor to position the self but also to represent a reality that is constantly evolving and cocreated by its participants. I see comments and feedback as cybernetic feedbacks 56 and not as simple additions of content. A comment can be a response, an addition, a position, a reaction a lead into another direction. If one isolates the single comment (comment -> response to comment) it stays within a linear logic of a one to one communication. If one sees the comment as a part of a system (the whole website or the series of entries that belong to a specific discussion) then it becomes part of a process of adaptation and transformation. The whole website is changed as a whole by this new entry, and it opens itself to a new set of possible entries that would not have been possible without that comment. If we see the website as a dynamic net of as having some of the attributes of a living organism and therefore can be seen as a dynamic system in structural coupling with its environment. 54 This is not to say that the film by itself does not create channels of debate, but the networked nature of an online forum is certainly facilitating such debate because it affords man to man, and man and society communication. 55 Effectively this is a common characteristic to any social forum, and is not differentiating itself from other social forums a part from the fact that its community is quite topic focused and that its initiators are documentary makers and not web-designers. This gives it a particular edge: it is a community that has in common a documentary and that expands it to a social level. 56 A feedback that generates a change in the system itself.

27 relations (between participants, between the participants and the web creators, between associations linked to the individual video or comments) then a comment to someone else s entry is not only an addition, but an unquantifiable set of new possible relations. The website is an autopoietic entity that needs those relations to be dynamically linked and alive. Experiencing Over the Hill s website The look and feel of Over the Hill s website is clearly functional and content focused. A white background with black font allows easiness of reading and quickness of loading. Just a few photographic icons -using close-ups of body parts- remind us that this is also a fun site, and that it has its antecedents in film language. Design, content and navigation here are the main protagonists of the quality of the browser s experience. Even if there are videos in the website it is not their framing, or their technique of filming, that shapes the overall feeling of the website. Here what counts is the quality of engagement that one develops while browsing the content and the consequent active decisions that one takes: read only? Add a comment? Send a picture? Shoot a short video? (fig 6. retrieved ) The website is in Dutch only, which makes the reading of the posts for non Dutch speakers practically impossible, and is populated by people that probably saw the linear documentary 57. In the forum section, women propose topics of discussion or just post a personal comment. Both the private and the public dimension are possible. Women send photos of their bodies, videos of themselves scrutinizing their cellulite before going to the beach, pictures of their vaginas 58 or just articles that they have 57 I have no statistics to prove this point, but when I met Sunny Bergman she told me that after seeing the movie people felt empowered and wanted to contribute to the debate. The website was the consequence of a general demand, where the movie had acted as a catalyst to bring up a social issue and take a position about it. 58 This is a clin d oeuil to a scene in the film where a plastic surgical doctor proposes Sunny Bergman to redo her vagina to give her the perfect Playboy look. See film trailer at (retrieved ).