Can it be mere coincidence that Ricky Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, Ed Pincus, Robb Moss, Ross McElwee, Robert Gardner, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Alfred Guzzetti, Frederick Wiseman, Albert and David Maysles and WGBH all have common roots in Cambridge? Whether in the domain of personal documentary or poetic ethnographic filmmaking, these names are not only prominent, but attest to an underlying set of institutional and perhaps even philosophical concerns.
Common to their cause were new questions regarding the relationship between the documentary filmmaker and the subject, the ‘truth’ of particular stylistic approaches, the implications of strategies for coherence be they narrative or poetic, and the affordances of new technologies. For the most part, these filmmakers (like WGBH) were associated with MIT’s Architecture Department or Harvard’s Peabody Museum and Sensuous Ethnography Program. Although MIT’s program tended to concentrate on the ‘personal documentary’ and Harvard’s on ethnographic filmmaking, in fact both were closely connected through the intertwining of the familiar and the exotic, finding the unfamiliar in the everyday, and expressing the exotic through the familiar. Students moved between these programs, both sharing deep roots in the Pragmatic tradition and mobilized by technological innovation.
Drew Associates, which included Leacock and the Maysles brothers, experimented with self-developed camera-sound synchronization systems in order to shoot such breakthrough films as Primary (1960). Before long, they switched over to the Nagra III (1957), the recorder and sync system of choice for this new generation of filmmakers. Lightweight, portable cameras (from Arriflex to Bolex) also enabled the new approach to recording ‘direct’ encounters with the world observed. More recently, from the late 1980s through the first decade of the new millennium, Glorianna Davenport and her colleagues in the Media Lab's Media Fabrics interactive cinema group carried on the tradition while radically transforming it. Projects such as Elastic Charles, Jerome B. Wiesner, and New Orleans in Transition offered non-linear and multi-authored approaches to documentation by pushing the limits of available technologies and making creative use of multiple videodisks and hypercards <http://mf.media.mit.edu/>
Our goal is to pick up this tradition, to rework it in light of our new technological affordances in such a way as to enhance and potentially radicalize both the notions of ‘personal’ and the ‘ethnographic’ pioneered by this documentary tradition. If the portable shooting and sound equipment associated with movements such as ‘direct cinema’ enabled filmmakers to enter situations far less obtrusively than they had ever done in the past, and observe the world ‘fly-on-the-wall’ style, crafting the results into a personal vision, what can we make of the millions of camera-equipped people in the world who are directly encountering their own realities? Particularly in situations where groups of camera-equipped people, from tens to hundreds or even thousands, share a direct experience (a celebration, a disaster, a concert), how can we make use of the ensuing visions? The advances of ‘direct cinema’, enabling the single filmmaker to approach the world far more directly than ever before, are here extended to the direct encounters of the witnesses themselves as generators of imagery. Or consider this through the lens of the ethnographic filmmaker. What can we do with access to the vision of the ‘other’ … not just as individuals, but as large scale groups? What people choose to film at a particular encounter, and now, would seem to hold great potential as tangible evidence of a way of seeing and re-presenting. And in the aggregate, it offers distinct possibilities for the ethnographically-attuned eye.
In each of these cases, the movements launched some 50 years ago with Cambridge-based personal documentarists and ethnographic filmmakers, and more recently through the interactive cinema of Davenport and colleagues, posed questions and pursued approaches that remain relevant. The difference today is that we can resituate these projects, further decreasing the space between the filmmaker and the subject, by making use of the viewing subjects themselves as both producers of images and organizers of stories. To do this, we can work with already widely-dispersed cameras in the form of most cell-phones; we can learn from sites such as Qik where streaming video is uploaded and archived; and we can consider making use of easy-to use on-line video editing programs such as Stroome or interactive interfaces such as that in MIT’s Berliner Sehen. The overarching point is to shackle access to ‘direct’ visions of the world to the advances of social media, in the process exploring a new form of collaborative filmmaking. Documentaries have of course long been collaborations – but for the subject it was collaboration as conceit, of pretending that the camera was not present. We propose a different form of collaboration, one in which the subject is also a producer of images, is also a teller of stories, and this in the aggregate, where participants have access to one another’s imagery and one another’s edited versions, and where they can contribute their own ideas and make their own edits and documentaries.
If we can successfully develop social protocols, we should be able to encourage both multiple documentaries and accretive and increasingly developed documentaries. This (as I see it anyhow) is the crux of the challenge. The second great challenge is how to balance the role of the professional documentary maker with the documentary-producing public, that is, the master-narrative with the many competing individual narratives that always abound but are rarely voiced? We very much want to enable the latter, but to also find an appropriate place for the former. While we can probably involve colleagues at MIT and Harvard in this project, how might we involve WGBH in this experiment? Its place seems natural given its deep history of involvement with this longer documentary movement. Finally, we might give some thought to organizing a conference, perhaps together with Harvard and WGBH, that takes as its starting point 50 years of the Cambridge tradition of documentary…. It would offer a good way to put the new questions squarely on the agenda and attract visibility in the fundraising world.
William Uricchio,
Director and Principal Investigator
The MIT Documentary Lab
Can it be mere coincidence that Ricky Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, Ed Pincus, Robb Moss, Ross McElwee, Robert Gardner, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Alfred Guzzetti, Frederick Wiseman, Albert and David Maysles and WGBH all have common roots in Cambridge? Whether in the domain of personal documentary or poetic ethnographic filmmaking, these names are not only prominent, but attest to an underlying set of institutional and perhaps even philosophical concerns.
Common to their cause were new questions regarding the relationship between the documentary filmmaker and the subject, the ‘truth’ of particular stylistic approaches, the implications of strategies for coherence be they narrative or poetic, and the affordances of new technologies. For the most part, these filmmakers (like WGBH) were associated with MIT’s Architecture Department or Harvard’s Peabody Museum and Sensuous Ethnography Program. Although MIT’s program tended to concentrate on the ‘personal documentary’ and Harvard’s on ethnographic filmmaking, in fact both were closely connected through the intertwining of the familiar and the exotic, finding the unfamiliar in the everyday, and expressing the exotic through the familiar. Students moved between these programs, both sharing deep roots in the Pragmatic tradition and mobilized by technological innovation.
Drew Associates, which included Leacock and the Maysles brothers, experimented with self-developed camera-sound synchronization systems in order to shoot such breakthrough films as Primary (1960). Before long, they switched over to the Nagra III (1957), the recorder and sync system of choice for this new generation of filmmakers. Lightweight, portable cameras (from Arriflex to Bolex) also enabled the new approach to recording ‘direct’ encounters with the world observed. More recently, from the late 1980s through the first decade of the new millennium, Glorianna Davenport and her colleagues in the Media Lab's Media Fabrics interactive cinema group carried on the tradition while radically transforming it. Projects such as Elastic Charles, Jerome B. Wiesner, and New Orleans in Transition offered non-linear and multi-authored approaches to documentation by pushing the limits of available technologies and making creative use of multiple videodisks and hypercards <http://mf.media.mit.edu/>
Our goal is to pick up this tradition, to rework it in light of our new technological affordances in such a way as to enhance and potentially radicalize both the notions of ‘personal’ and the ‘ethnographic’ pioneered by this documentary tradition. If the portable shooting and sound equipment associated with movements such as ‘direct cinema’ enabled filmmakers to enter situations far less obtrusively than they had ever done in the past, and observe the world ‘fly-on-the-wall’ style, crafting the results into a personal vision, what can we make of the millions of camera-equipped people in the world who are directly encountering their own realities? Particularly in situations where groups of camera-equipped people, from tens to hundreds or even thousands, share a direct experience (a celebration, a disaster, a concert), how can we make use of the ensuing visions? The advances of ‘direct cinema’, enabling the single filmmaker to approach the world far more directly than ever before, are here extended to the direct encounters of the witnesses themselves as generators of imagery. Or consider this through the lens of the ethnographic filmmaker. What can we do with access to the vision of the ‘other’ … not just as individuals, but as large scale groups? What people choose to film at a particular encounter, and now, would seem to hold great potential as tangible evidence of a way of seeing and re-presenting. And in the aggregate, it offers distinct possibilities for the ethnographically-attuned eye.
In each of these cases, the movements launched some 50 years ago with Cambridge-based personal documentarists and ethnographic filmmakers, and more recently through the interactive cinema of Davenport and colleagues, posed questions and pursued approaches that remain relevant. The difference today is that we can resituate these projects, further decreasing the space between the filmmaker and the subject, by making use of the viewing subjects themselves as both producers of images and organizers of stories. To do this, we can work with already widely-dispersed cameras in the form of most cell-phones; we can learn from sites such as Qik where streaming video is uploaded and archived; and we can consider making use of easy-to use on-line video editing programs such as Stroome or interactive interfaces such as that in MIT’s Berliner Sehen. The overarching point is to shackle access to ‘direct’ visions of the world to the advances of social media, in the process exploring a new form of collaborative filmmaking. Documentaries have of course long been collaborations – but for the subject it was collaboration as conceit, of pretending that the camera was not present. We propose a different form of collaboration, one in which the subject is also a producer of images, is also a teller of stories, and this in the aggregate, where participants have access to one another’s imagery and one another’s edited versions, and where they can contribute their own ideas and make their own edits and documentaries.
If we can successfully develop social protocols, we should be able to encourage both multiple documentaries and accretive and increasingly developed documentaries. This (as I see it anyhow) is the crux of the challenge. The second great challenge is how to balance the role of the professional documentary maker with the documentary-producing public, that is, the master-narrative with the many competing individual narratives that always abound but are rarely voiced? We very much want to enable the latter, but to also find an appropriate place for the former. While we can probably involve colleagues at MIT and Harvard in this project, how might we involve WGBH in this experiment? Its place seems natural given its deep history of involvement with this longer documentary movement. Finally, we might give some thought to organizing a conference, perhaps together with Harvard and WGBH, that takes as its starting point 50 years of the Cambridge tradition of documentary…. It would offer a good way to put the new questions squarely on the agenda and attract visibility in the fundraising world.
William Uricchio,
Director and Principal Investigator