A couple of weeks ago documentary film maker Adam Curtis spoke at BBC Vision Forum on his
latest work, a co-production with installation theatre group Punchdrunk, called It Felt Like a
Kiss.
A few notes:
- The internet is changing the dominant sensibility from wanting to
be told stuff to wanting to experience stuff.
- Punchdrunk has
cottoned on to the fact that personal experience is the most important
thing. Everything else, TV included, feels thin.
- The internet, on its own, can't do stories. Hybrids of TV and the web
may be the way forward.
Adam Curtis' recent documentary series The Trap pushed at the boundaries of TV. It Felt Like a Kiss bursts the linear structure to bits.
This made me think of David Foster Wallace's answer
to the question why he used so many footnotes:
'There is a way that reality is fractured right now, at
least the reality I live in … the difficulty about writing about that
reality is that text is very linear, is very unified and, I, anyway,
am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that
doesn’t totally disorient it…’
In the last two years, watching TV online has
become common place. From a technical point of view, it should be easy to allow video footnotes in a film. If the director has two things he wants to say, he can let the audience
choose which thread to follow.
Footnotes are a well-understood structure in
the written word. They give the reader a little more control, but
preserve the flow of the narrative. Why not use them in film?
Given Adam's recent work, perhaps video footnotes would be the
breakthrough that he is waiting for.
I emailed him about this momentous invention.
I didn't hear back. (To be fair, I'd guessed his email address, so
perhaps that's not surprising.)
Never mind. Diarmid
Scrimshaw from Warp Films pointed out that Sheffield Doc/Fest was running a
competition for CrossMedia documentary ideas. We put together a hypothetical documentary that
makes use of video footnotes. It's called 'Unsettle' and it's about
Ngawa, a pregnant refugee from Zimbabwe. Here's an excerpt from the proposal:
We believe the footnote structure allows us to capture the ever branching
nature of reality. It allows us to follow one perspective, but to be
aware that in every situation there are many equally valid points of
view — even if sometimes they seem contradictory. It may be that we
also use the video footnotes to explore other things affecting Ngawa. For example, summarising the underlying governmental policies, or showing
Ngawa’s family without her and seeing how they are now dealing with
the political situation in Zimbabwe. We can also freeze time for a
moment, allowing us to ask Ngawa to watch what happened and comment on
what she sees. Perhaps she’ll talk about how she answered questions in
immigration control. She may tell us that she wishes she’d told them
more about some other aspect of her treatment in Zimbabwe but felt
scared and intimidated and so under the pressure of the moment she got
confused and didn’t express herself well at all.
'Unsettle' is a prototype for a simple yet powerful concept for
documentary storytelling. This has never been done before but now, for
the first time ever, you’ll see the world from alternative points of
view almost simultaneously and YOU will be able to decide what matters
enough to find out more.
We submitted the idea last Friday. Fingers crossed... it might come to something.
Note 1: There are some interesting examples of cross-platform documentaries on the CrossMedia Pitch Competition
page. Gaza Sderot and Voyage au bout du charbon are, at the very least, good enough to criticise. It's disappointing that none of the documentaries are from the UK.
Note 2: Adam Curtis is blogging about the production of his next
film. That man is worth the licence fee.
Update: Unsettle was shortlisted for the Cross Platform award, but lost out to the worthy winner Thilafushi by El Zorrero Films.
