Matters of fact

Ben Walters considers the unceasing evolution of the documentary.

Dec 15 2006

'We care about fact, not fiction.' These words – spoken by one of the key figures of 2007's actuality-based moving-image culture – reflect the rise and rise of documentary's stock over the past year. The form now constitutes an almost weekly staple of the release schedule in a way unthinkable a few years ago, allowing the ICA to mount a 'Documentaries of the Year' season, comprising a dozen titles released in 2006. But is the big screen the best place to look for the development of the form?

The programme includes fine examples of observational documentary – 'A Lion in the House' (about children with cancer), 'Sisters in Law' (about women in Cameroon's legal system) – while 'Favela Rising', about a Brazilian band, reflects the boom in docs about musicians. Other, less conventional strains are evident too: 'Black Sun' is a poetic musing in which the tension between sound and image casts light on the subject of blindness, while 'KZ' excavates the complex, contradictory psychogeography of a former concentration camp site with a distance and multifacetedness that challenges the very notion of concrete narrative on which traditional documentaries rely. Ben Hopkins' '37 Uses for a Dead Sheep' (not in the ICA season) offers a different though comparably nuanced engagement with living history.

Other titles hint at more seismic shifts in the form, to do with the nature of our relationship with the moving image itself – a relationship increasingly tilting towards a sense of control and ownership; even symbiosis between image and identity. At one level, the moving image becomes a subject for consideration, as in Slavoj Zizek's psychoanalytical essay 'The Pervert's Guide to Cinema' and Kirby Dick's investigation of the US certification system, 'This Film Is Not Yet Rated' (the closest nod in the ICA round-up to the resurgent post-Michael Moore agit-prop doc, exemplified this year by Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth').

Perhaps more intriguing as a subject, though, is the use of recording equipment by non-professionals. 'Awesome: I Fuckin' Shot That' (not in the season) distributed 50 DV cameras to audience members at a Beastie Boys gig, but the most familiar mode of camera behaviour is 'auto-archiving': home movies and video diaries parlayed into features like 'Capturing the Friedmans', 'Tarnation' and, this year, 'Unknown White Male' – whose amnesiac subject compulsively recorded his 'first' experiences of the world – and Herzog's superb 'Grizzly Man' (not showing), which was less about its subject's interest in wildlife than his use of a video camera to shape his persona and story.

The declining importance of TV as a site for serious documentary-making was a running theme at the inaugural BritDoc festival in Oxford this July, which was full of filmmakers hoping for theatrical distribution but eyeing the net as the platform of the future. Indeed, welcome as the theatrical flourishing of documentary is, the real story for the real-life moving image this year was online – at YouTube, from which over 100 million videos are now downloaded every day. YouTube has proved the real motor in redrawing definitions of professionalism (and authenticity), offering a new audiovisual culture in which popular demand and the ability to satisfy it instantly entirely bypass institutionalized control. The unprecedented access millions now have to the means of
production, distribution and exhibition offers incalculable potential for self-expression – and represents a new danger for public figures, as shown by the rapid and hugely damaging distribution of racist outbursts by both Republican Senator George Allen ('we care about fact, not fiction, so let's give a welcome to Macaca here') and 'Seinfeld' actor Michael Richards. Whether YouTube will constitute a major platform for long-form documentaries is questionable (although it worked for conspiracy doc 'Loose Change 9/11'). What isn't in doubt is that it points towards a future in which the moving image itself is more accessible, personalized and intriguing than ever before.

'Documentaries of the Year' runs at the ICA from December 13 to January 4.

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