Documentary in a Changing State: Ireland since the 1990s

Speaking Out: The role of democracy

When the most compelling visible evidence of events and circumstances on our planet come from pixellated images from mobile phones; when Facebook becomes a symbol of political resistance for its capacity to forge connections between communities under siege and the world beyond political borders; when the most successful ‘concert documentary’ of all time is a 3D film about a sixteen-year-old pop idol; when Jackass 3D (Tremaine, 2010, US) evinces the advancing age of the ‘upstart’ pranksters whose adventures began in the last millennium; when ADHD teenagers assemble customised viewing experiences from Vimeo and YouTube of greater total duration than many feature films that they would not deign to watch, we must ask the question: is documentary fit for purpose in the twenty-first century? There can be little doubt now that the hypersaturation of reality television has begun to impact heavily upon the relationship between producers and receivers of images bearing the label ‘documentary’. A profusion of mockdocumentary , prank-documentary, and pseudo-documentary films like Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy, 2010, US/UK) and I’m Still Here (Affleck, 2010, US) are merely symptomatic cinematic offshoots of imbedded sceptical and ironic responses to the processes of documentary inscription online and on television. These have been at least partly fuelled by the ubiquity of docu-soap and docu-gameshow programming on television since the 1990s, arguably on the turn with the slow death of Endemol’s Big Brother (which finally reached its termination point in UK broadcasting in 2010). A culture of deflation has set in in documentary, and the moment has passed when the release of Fahrenheit 9/11 (Moore, 2004, US) seemed to produce a frisson of fear, or at least generate a considerable and visible reaction, from the political establishment. The role of documentary in the age of social media has yet to be determined. In Ireland we continue to evince confusion about the purpose of documentary film, having only recently absorbed the paradigm of a preceding epoch of advocacy and journalistic investigation. In the wake of the fall of the authority of the Catholic orthodoxy and with increasing public distrust of political leadership, a hunger for interrogation, questioning and resistance on Speaking Out The role of democracy HARVEY O’BRIEN 15 the part of the audience has been met by films offering rather traditional news-documentary approaches to reshaping the real. Continued timidity around libel laws, paranoia about public image, the evident ongoing problematic of a public service broadcaster overseen by a board of political appointees, and the ever-increasing levels to which public figures undergo media training, precisely to avoid being fully engaged in interviews, renders the public sphere ineffective as a mode of documentary discourse. Despite the presence of a free press and mass media, arguably representing at least the possibility of Habermas’ ideal of open communication and democratic debate, there remains a discernible gap between the appearance of ‘hot button’ issues in print and oral media and their reflective and discursive presentation in documentary film. The persistence of hastily edited reportage pieces purporting to serve a documentary function demonstrates the lack of independent voice. Such ‘reports’ continue to be exhibited as prefaces to the ‘real’ heart of Irish documentary discourse – the talking shop/panel discussion. Here though, the haze of obfuscation, evasion and tentativeness makes for, at best, a type of impressionist pointillism in the analysis of social reality. The Irish general election of 2011 gave us the spectacle of a political leader whose primary contribution to media discourse was to pointedly avoid it. Soon-to-be taoiseach Enda Kenny’s refusal to engage in a televised debate hosted by journalist Vincent Browne was a remarkably damning indictment of the perceived value, importance and necessity for television to serve as a means by which the Irish voter could be informed of or engage with the candidates’ views. This type of situation contributes to a sense of helplessness and frustration in the general public, who can never see their leaders or their society truly questioned or measured while a particular ethos holds sway. Without challenging documentary discourse outside of the immediate needs of news broadcasting or primary-level reportage, there is no impetus for change, merely constant anger and an unfocused reactionary desire to blame one thing or another as if getting rid of it would actually result in actual progress. The case of The Pipe (Ó Domhnaill, 2010, Irl) is particularly illustrative, where despite the celebration of resistance powerfully encapsulated by the...