At the Crossroads of the Documentary and the Web - Text 5
The term “multimedia” makes it possible to bring out the presence of elements developed autonomously: moving and fixed images, animation, and every kind of sound (music, voice-over commentary, live sounds, noises and sound effects) and text (titles, subtitles, explanatory texts, accompanying texts, captions, hyperlinks, diagrams). With respect to moving images, which are the most apparent connection to documentary cinema, webdocs contain various aesthetic systems within a single object, at times working on photographic display and at other times employing a dashcam or an omniscient camera, practically a surveillance camera. This tendency to multiply the style of recording moving images in the same object has always existed in a certain kind of essay film (works inspired by Chris Marker are proof of this). This practice is increasingly prevalent in contemporary documentary, even in productions addressed to a general public (a development which marks aesthetic influence in return, by the Web – which brings together images of every kind – on cinema, as in exemplary works of cinema in this sense by Natalie Bookchin or Dominc Gagnon), and it is a part of the use of moving images in webdocs.
An illustration of this can be found in This Land (2011), the story of the artist Dianne Whelan’s experience of the far north; Whelan is a city-dweller and lesbian in the midst of Canadian soldiers. This webdoc provides stratified traces accumulated during the expedition from a specific perspective, like a travel log. Online viewers who navigate This Land are always faced with a multiplicity of media through which the various components of the author’s travel experience are transmitted: drawn maps which take shape and come to life on screen, tracing the expedition’s route; photographs showing the immense frozen expanse; video clips capturing the movement of men and machines; sounds which sometimes return us to the moment when the footage was shot; and the author’s long monologue describing her astonishment in the course of this adventure. Animated texts placed here and there over the images mark out the stages of the journey through geographical, meteorological and emotive notations; in so doing, they produce a découpage of the webdoc, like a script being read at the same time as the film unfolds.
