Researching Interactive Documentary: in between innovation and legacy
Clicking, selecting contents, watching, exploring, choosing paths, and contributing. We live in a digital world where most users are no longer confined to sit back and enjoy watching a movie; instead, the new audience generation is looking to step forward and have an active role in the mediascape. Such a desire for an agency is not constrained to the entertainment industry. Since the beginning of the 2000s, documentary film has been shaped by digital technology and embraced interactivity as a potential practice.
From its conception, documentary film has always been (and still remains) a practice without clear boundaries, which allowed it to evolve in a myriad of aesthetics and view points. More recently, digital platforms and web 2.0 provided an avenue for the growth and expansion of the field. Interactive documentary appears as a story booster, which allows expanding the narrative in multiple directions, including different perspectives of the subject matter, providing a manifold of pathways, and comprising the effective engagement of the audience, sometimes even allowing contributions to an ever-growing database of contents.
Yes. It’s exciting to think about reality as a malleable and evolving process instead of a close-ended procedure, and interaction opens a new lode of possibilities for exploring the practice and the theory of portraying the real. But one must keep pace with the development of this innovative and fast-moving area, and researching an evolving field may often feel like stepping into quicksand.
Back to basics
Whereas traditional documentary adhere to reality by virtue of its modes of production, interactive non-fiction works deal with the intertwined layers of different media materials, some of them predigital, such as photography, sound, text, and moving image, uploaded to an interactive interface to allowing the user’s agency. As so, interactive documentary becomes a matrix of media formats and media aesthetics combined into a digital platform and delivered by an interactive mechanism that offers multiple possibilities to engage the audience with the contents.
In the midst of this technological whirlwind seems easy to let ourselves dazzle by the allure of new technologies and forget about the fundamentals of documentary that should keep us grounded to the realm. Over the past years, taking advantage of the jumbling and novel field of study, we have been seeing that some scholars tend to entitle several multimedia objects as interactive documentaries, when in fact some of them have little to do with a documentarian approach and are mere conglomerations of media in a digital platform. While Mitchel Whitelaw (2002), who coined the term interactive documentary, states that “true stories may be the crucial ‘content’ that makes for a compelling new media experience” he also stresses that most of the interactive documentaries (at least back in 2002) are mere “remediations” of documentary film language, using new media platforms as a mechanism for delivering chunks of traditional documentary. Also Almeida and Alvelos (2010) consider the word “documentary” has been abusively used to describe “every single multimedia piece that incorporates video no matter its nature, technique, language or scope”.
As a documentary filmmaker and digital researcher I’m constantly struggling between embracing the novelty and exciting expanding field of interactive documentary and keep reminding me of the guiding principles of the documentary genre. I do not intend to be a guardian of the documentary tradition, but I find myself very often considering that some basic rules must be set to accept a digital work within the realm of documentary. In those moments, I go back to basics and rekindle the words of John Grierson.
“Dear John Grierson, thanks for the word documentary”
“Dear John Grierson, thanks for the word documentary” is the opening sentence of Mark Cousin’s postscript documentary in “The Story of Film: an odyssey”. Besides leaving us the word “documentary”, Grierson (1934) elaborated a list of principles to identify and support documentary film to achieve the ordinary virtues of an art form. According to him, as documentary filmmakers:
1) we believe that cinema’s capacity for getting around, for observing and selecting from life itself , can be exploited in an art form. (…) Documentary would photograph the living scene and the living story;
2) we believe that the original (or native) actor, and the original (or native) scene, are better guides to a screen interpretation of the modern world. They give cinema a great fund of material. They give it power over a million and one images. They give it power of interpretation over more complex and astonishing happenings in the real world (…);
3) we believe that the materials and the stories thus taken from the raw can be finer (more real in the philosophic sense) than the acted article. Spontaneous gesture has a special value on the screen.
Grierson goes on to advocate that by dealing with different materials, documentary film should draw upon a different aesthetic, making use, nevertheless, of dramatic fiction techniques to convey a socio-political perspective over the subject represented.
Fortunately, several interactive documentaries draw upon the principles defined by Grierson and manage to combine innovative interaction strategies with the fundamentals of documentary film in cutting edge works. The National Film Board of Canada, for instance, has succeeded to balance experimentation with preserving the propositions of the genre, maybe because inherited the tradition directly from the founding father of the documentary movement. Grounding their decision making process in the premise “story comes first”, producers, directors, and creative technologists endeavor to produce a number of evolving and innovative interactive works, exploring the world and presenting groundbreaking approaches both the reality and to the interactive format.
This expansion of documentary production into a wide variety of forms, within the interactive sphere, has allowed the genre to develop new modes of subjectivity, new approaches to its subject matter, and new relationships with the audience. The interactive documentaries produced over the last 20 years present an array of aesthetics and interaction strategies, challenging practitioners and scholars to identify styles and patterns across the genre. The emergence, changeful and uncertain form of interactive documentary compelled researchers such as Kate Nash (2012), Dayna Galloway (2013), and Sandra Gaudenzi (2013) into an attempt to make sense out of this field of study, as well as to define it, proposing taxonomies to classify its nuances. Each one of the researchers followed a particular method and proposed a different terminology, but we may draw a parallel regarding their similarities.
While Galloway (2013), drawing on McMillan’s traditions of interactivity (2002), proposes four categories of interactive documentaries considering the communication between the interface and the audience, Kate Nash (2012) classifies different categorical structures of contents in database webdocumentaries, and Sandra Gaudenzi expands Bill Nichols (2001) modes of documentary to its interactive form taking into consideration the kind of interactivity behind each digital work. It’s relevant to underline that the previous categories are not equivalent neither the table intends to level them.
Perspectives on a multidimensional research
Like any other field of research, the choice of a methodology for addressing interactive documentary rests on your research questions and perspectives, pursuing a path that will provide you meaningful results towards your research goals. During my doctoral research, focused on the audience in interactive documentary, I begin by considering an empirical quantitative research based on google analytics from the NFB’s documentaries. But back in 2015, I found several flaws in the data that will mislead me to inaccurate findings and I decided to drop off the empirical account for the sake of ethical research values.
I moved to a theoretical approach and begin to explore different research frameworks that could grant a deeper understanding of the audience’s perception in interactive documentaries, instead of a behavioral analysis based on the interactor’s performance. First I tested a multimodal analysis, through a social-semiotics framework (Nogueira, 2015) and then, looking through the lens of an interdependent relationship between interactive documentary and audience, I decided to support my analysis in a phenomenological approach, focusing on the encounter and how that particular moment affects the audience’s perception (Nogueira, 2020).
But regardless the methods employed by each academic, I believe that we need to consider interactive documentary as a complex process and a multilayered object, taking into account its various dimensions, such as content, form, and interaction:
Content — consists in the analysis of the story elements, including theme, characters, time and place where the documentary takes place, social and political argument, and eventual plot structure, in the multiple narrative possibilities. It should contemplate what the viewer sees and listens, and how the story is told, even if the documentary offers several possible paths and outcomes.
Form — is the way in which the interactive documentary depicts the fragment of the world represented, exploring the intermediality of the digital object in its various dimensions. What types of media are used (from static to dynamic media, from time-based contents to space-based chapters), and how are they combined to convey meaning? A multimodal analysis contributes to a deeper understanding of the interactive documentary’s form and aesthetic.
Interaction — As open works, interactive documentaries grant multiple non-sequential narratives, therefore is significant to identify the kind of interaction strategy adopted and expose the architecture behind the documentary’s contents. The aim is to understand the importance of the interactive documentary’s structure to the user’s experience and performance. Drawing a flow diagram where we consider every possible interaction choices may be an effective way to disclose the documentary’s interaction system.
With such a holistic approach, I believe that the symbolic value of various modalities (film, still image, sound, text, interface, navigation) can be converted into a meaningful whole and contribute to a broad understanding of the interactive documentary. However, considering the expansive and evolving field of interactive documentary, I do not intend to present a normative approach or a sealed framework. Conversely, this proposal may converge, overlap, and link up with other research approaches and, hopefully, contribute to an extensive interpretation of the field.
References:
Almeida, A., & Alvelos, H. (2010). An Interactive Documentary Manifesto. In R. Aylett, M. Y. Lim, S. Louchart, P. Petta, & M. Riedl (Eds.), Interactive Storytelling: Third Joint Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2010, Edinburgh, UK, November 1–3, 2010. Proceedings (pp. 123–128).
Galloway, D. (2013). Establishing methodologies for the analysis and development of interactive documentary (Abertay University).
Gaudenzi, S. (2013). The Living Documentary : from representing reality to co-creating reality in digital interactive documentary. University of London.
Grierson, J. (1934). First Principles of Documentary. In R. Barsam (Ed.), Nonfiction Film: Theory And Criticism (1976) (pp. 19–30). New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.
Nash, K. (2012). Modes of interactivity: analysing the webdoc. Media, Culture & Society, 34(2), 195–210.
Nogueira, P. (2015). Ways of Feeling: audience’s meaning making in interactive documentary through an analysis of Fort McMoney. Punctum. International Journal of Semiotics, 1(1), 79–93.
Nogueira, P. (2020). Ways of affection: How interactive documentaries affect the interactor’s felt experience and performance. New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 17(1), 49–68.
Whitelaw, M. (2002). Playing Games with Reality: Only Fish Shall Visit and Interactive Documentary. Most, (October).
