A new formalization of the documentarian's intentions
A new audiovisual object, the interactive documentary has been increasingly available on the Internet for several years. A few major producers already stand out, such as the National Film Board and the channel ARTE, which offer a catalogue of several hundred varied and large-scale works on their web portals. Furthermore, a significant portion of so-called traditional media—newspapers, TV and radio stations—offer interactive documentary multimedia experiences to varying degrees on their websites. For example, the public television news channel BBC News offers hyperlinks to video capsules, photos, and analytical texts, and personalizes its web information offering based on the viewing device. The newspaper La Presse has launched an interactive and multimedia version of its newspaper through which readers can navigate information in different media forms as they wish. Similarly, the website of the NPR broadcasting network in the U.S. offers audio and video clips of interviews and documentaries—as broadcast or in their entirety—sometimes accompanied by an analytical text, as well as participatory blogs for registered internet users.
Faced with these new distribution platforms and this new field of expression, it seems necessary and consistent, as a documentarian, to understand how these new interactive documentary apparatuses take shape through their experimentation. Furthermore, I believe it is necessary to first examine the new relationship that exists between media users and these documentary objects that they consume in different forms and with which they interact, before undertaking the production of my web documentary. Thus, I will be able to determine how I must adapt my linear creation approach and better define my contribution as a specialist in the genre when I engage in the production of an interactive documentary form.
From the beginning of my exploration of this audiovisual object, it appeared necessary to invest myself in the production of an interactive documentary in order to stimulate my reflection and illustrate some of my conclusions. Research and creation: two approaches that, sometimes retroactively, sometimes prospectively, fed into one another throughout the production of this thesis. I analyze the creation aspect of my approach in more detail in the autopoietic section of this thesis, where I describe certain particularly revealing moments in the process of creating the interactive object. My final objective is to participate in a better understanding of this new form of documentary and, ultimately, to collaborate in engaging with it in the most effective, informed, and coherent way possible.
For Arnau Gifreu, the existence of this new interactive apparatus is largely due to the complementarity existing between multimedia and the documentary; one possessing great capacities for navigation and interactivity, the other allowing multiple representations of reality:
In some ways, a fusion begins from mutual attraction: the documentary genre contributes with its several modes of representing reality, and the digital media genre contributes with its new navigating and interacting modes. (Gifreu 2011, p. 354)
Arnau Gifreu emphasizes that recent technological and structural evolutions of the Internet now make possible a quality of web navigation that was unthinkable until recently. According to him, these new capacities for content access and interaction have allowed for the emergence of this new genre combining, on one hand, the audiovisual aspect of the documentary and the interactivity of interactive media, and on the other, information content and the ludic navigability of the interactive interface.
There are obvious formal differences between a documentary object with a planned linear progression and one offered in interactive mode (duration, the active role of the spectator, narrative segmentation, etc.). This evolution of the documentary object questions the role of the director usually responsible for the narrative structure, as they are henceforth engaged in the creation of a work that is less directive in its progression, even less directed in its form. As early as 2001, Mitchell Whitelaw questioned the value of coherence and truthfulness in these works, still unusual at the time, whose narrative structure is a priori deficient, if not non-existent:
New media forms pose a fundamental challenge to the principle of narrative coherence, which is at the core of traditional documentary. If we explode and open the structure, how can we be sure that the story is being conveyed? (Whitelaw 2002, p. 1)
This possible relativity of the narrative coherence of the interactive form prompts me to question the responsibilities that usually fall to the documentarian during the making of a film (linear work) and the necessity of modifying and adapting them when the latter engages with the interactive form of the documentary. John Grierson, a producer and documentary theorist since the birth of the genre, offers an initial reflection on the role of the documentarian in this rendering of reality when he postulates that the documentarian is an interpreter of reality. He simultaneously allows for an understanding of the new task of the creator of interactive works:
In documentary we deal with the actual, and in one sense with the real. But the really real, if I may use that phrase, is something deeper than that. The only reality which counts in the end is the interpretation which is profound. (Grierson 1966, p. 145)
My own experience as a filmmaker of reality subscribes to the same conclusions concerning this capacity of the documentarian to interpret reality in a "profound way" as advanced by Grierson.
Over the past twenty years, I have produced, directed, and edited several dozen cultural and scientific documentaries, as well as those focused on societal issues. These audiovisual works, varied in their content and form, have always followed a similar production process. Indeed, on each of these occasions of social communication, the creative process began with a stage of sensitization, information research, and reflection essential to understanding the issues to be presented. Subsequently, the shaping of these reflections takes place during the development of a discourse and the production of an audiovisual document. Finally, the distribution and reception of the document itself, as completed, transmits the information deemed relevant and the desired message. Each stage is built according to the previous one, the process ensuring as much coherence as possible between the director's main communicative intentions and the spectator's reception of the message. Roger Odin describes this mechanics of the narrative apparatus well. According to him, the public participates in a prescribed manner in the construction of the interpretation of the discourse presented to them:
The spectator indeed constructs the text, but does so under the pressure of determinations that traverse and construct them, most often without their awareness. The spectator is neither free nor individual: they share certain constraints with others. (Odin 2000, p. 54)
As a filmmaker, I apprehend the possible absence of these narrative flow constraints – or, at the very least, this loosening of the narrative structure of the interactive work – and its impact on the usual communication dynamic existing between the work and its spectator. As a creator, I feel that the construction of the relationship between the spectator and the discourse of the interactive work, variably presented and received, eludes me. Marie-Laure Ryan also expresses doubts regarding the narrative coherence of the interactive documentary and its discourse:
Yet, if interactivity is the property that makes the greatest difference between old and new media, it does not facilitate storytelling, because narrative meaning presupposes the linearity and unidirectionality of time, logic, and causality, while a system of choices involves a nonlinear or multilinear branching structure such as a tree, a rhizome, or a network. (Ryan 2006, p. 99)
Conversely, as I pointed out previously, the documentary also possesses objectives other than narrative ones, which are potentially less threatened by a branching or network-based narrative structure. In her doctoral thesis on interactive documentary, Sandra Gaudenzi analyzes the creative process of the documentary and offers another perspective on the dynamic existing between the work and its public:
What is interesting about the documentary form is not so much its attempt to portray a reality of interest to the filmmaker, but that the way the filmmaker chooses to interact with reality, to mediate it through shooting, editing and showing it, is indicative of new ways of thinking about reality, and therefore of forging it. (Gaudenzi 2013, p. 13)
Sandra Gaudenzi considers the documentary as a tool for interaction with reality and for reflection, both for the filmmaker and for the spectator. She observes that, in its interactive form, the documentary is subjected to the actions of an active spectator who also has to understand and forge their own interpretation of reality.
Jean-Louis Weissberg names this new active spectator of interactive film the "spect-actor." He borrows this concept of the spect-actor from Augusto Boal, playwright of the Theatre of the Oppressed and Forum Theatre: "[…] all human beings are actors (they act!) and spectators (they observe!). They are spect-actors." (Boal 2002, p. 15). Weissberg assigns it here a new meaning relative to the active posture of the spectator in the context of interactivity:
The notion of actor does not here designate the spaces of freedom enjoyed by the performer, in the theatrical sense, or the actor in a sociological sense (the social actor). It refers directly to the notion of the act, almost in a gestural sense, as opposed to mental appreciation. And the hyphen is essential, since it couples the perceptive function *spect* (to watch) to the performance of the act. (Weissberg 1999, p. 169)
I observe, however, that originally, Boal aligns with the essence of Gaudenzi's point. For him, it is much more than a change in spectatorship regarding the performance in progress or an act of modifying the spectacle; it is a change in the sharing of tools for reflection, expression, and power over society:
The Theatre of the Oppressed has two fundamental linked principles: it aims (a) to help the spect-actor transform himself into a protagonist of the dramatic action and rehearse alternatives for his situation, so that he may be able (b) to extrapolate into his real life the actions he has rehearsed in the practice of theatre. (Boal 1995, p. 40)
This change in the sharing of expression tools challenges me as a filmmaker who has always had the responsibility in production work to conceive a spectacle to be watched as is by the spectator. However, as we shall see in the first chapter describing the production process of several of my documentaries, as a documentarian, my main communication objective has always been to convey to the spectator a sense of responsibility regarding the subjects to which I exposed them and upon which I invited them to reflect. This research-creation thesis will examine this capacity for reflection enabled by the interactive documentary, and the sharing of this reflection—this dialogue on the real—that this interactive form allows between the author and their spect-actor.