Documentary in a Changing State: Ireland since the 1990s

Digital Impacts on Documentary in Ireland

Introduction There has been a long tradition of documentary film-making in Ireland, as comprehensively outlined by Harvey O’Brien in his 2004 study.1 Documentary helps to interpret history and promote human understanding while dramatising and sometimes bending reality. While it is often suggested that all new media simply refashion older media,2 being digital is not always considered a defining aesthetic norm. In any case the digital documentary format is now so wide and all-inclusive, it is difficult to define much less pin down, as I illustrate using a case study of The Rocky Road to Dublin (1968). The growing importance of new digital media is most certainly extended by the opening out of even more possibilities for production and distribution. Thompson and Bordwell affirm in their latest edition of Film History how digital technology made documentary ‘independent’, and also made ‘avantgarde filmmaking easier and cheaper’, while giving non-professionals access to creative choice previously available only to high-budget film-makers.3 Nonetheless, the authors conclude, digital tools did not revolutionise the formal and stylistic strategies established within the avant-garde or documentary traditions. ‘They made certain effects easier to obtain, but they did not introduce a radically new aesthetic’,4 an assertion echoed by many in the industry. Also, it is strongly suggested in the literature that new digital techniques ‘did not overturn established principles of form and style and in general the results of digital production blended seamlessly into long-established production processes’.5 A key focus of discussion involves teasing out the uniqueness of new digital media and mapping its specific importance for the future, as calibrated through well-used concepts like ‘interactivity’, ‘hypertextuality’, ‘database logics’, increased ‘access’ and manipulatability of the text, alongside more obvious notions like the ‘demateriality’ of new digital bytes of code and information, as attributes of developments within the documentary format. The trends that began with cinema verité in the early 1960s, towards lighter, 124 Digital Impacts on Documentary in Ireland PAT BRERETON less expensive and easier to use equipment, continued to build at an everaccelerating rate for the subsequent decades. Essentially, image-capture technologies have changed so rapidly that even well-funded professionals must constantly be ready to adapt to new formats.6 As a result of these changes there remains a growing need for a creative and critical dialogue with new generations of audiences and film students and their differing consumption patterns. New media modes of distribution and consumption, most notably encapsulated by the web, have greatly affected our understanding of the contemporary documentary. New Digital Formats The DVD format for instance was examined in a special issue of Convergence7 to help focus attention upon new possibilities and opportunities for audiovisual distribution and consumption. New strategies for appreciating documentary and media generally also draw on scholarship which focuses on video games logic, together with the proliferation of new modalities of computer -mediated communications, all of which are becoming evident within more contemporary audio-visual production, calling attention to how documentaries can be re-conceived, produced, distributed and consumed. At the other end of the spectrum, multimedia teachers frequently complain that trainee documentary film-makers simply shoot too much footage, treating the digital technology like an all-encompassing cheap and disposable storage database. Often such inexperienced student film-makers have no predetermined mindset, framed around aesthetic coherence, from which to assist the creative process of editing large data files and collating raw digital bytes of material. Echoing Lev Manovich’s assertion,‘rather than seeing reality in new ways’ students often simply ‘pour all of it onto a hard drive’.8 Furthermore, within film studies some purists recall the craft nature of physically cutting strips of celluloid, before manually splicing them together as a ‘more intuitive ’ and ‘creative process’ for putting a film together, as opposed to what can be considered as the limitation of computer editing, where cutting and pasting is achieved too easily at the click of a mouse, often leaving no time for internalising, much less rationalising the underlying structure. Trial and error become the only modus operandi in computer manipulation. This apparent danger, embedded within the new high-speed technology with its deep storage capacity, is reiterated by one established Irish documentary editor I talked to, Tom Burke.9 Burke speaks of the ‘huge double-edged sword’ around new digital technology and DV digital cameras, which took off in the 1990s. His major concern is around ‘how you can shoot so much material and...