Innovation and Representativeness at the NFB - Text 2
Since the early 2000s, the National Film Board of Canada has devoted a large part of its activity to creating interactive projects for the Web, virtual reality headsets or interactive installations.[1] The 2008 and 2013 five-year strategic plans in particular highlighted the institution’s digital turn. Its discourses around the production of interactive programs thus sought to “develop the appropriate grammars for the new technologies.”[2] Although these programmatic texts claimed kinship with the doctrine set out by John Grierson, whose spirit they maintain – that of putting cinema in the service of the public good – they subscribed less to the aesthetic principles of Grierson’s documentary dialectic than they did to the later appropriation of these principles by the direct cinema filmmakers.
Grierson saw a third path between the “realist documentary” (Flaherty) and the “symphonic documentary” (Ruttmann, Vertov): the dialectical documentary, whose signifying form made it possible to express the complexity of the modern world’s interdependencies.[3] With the advent of direct cinema at the NFB, the concept documentary took on a deliberate aesthetic dimension and Grierson’s doctrine was repurposed by the filmmakers and technicians, who placed the filmmaker’s body at the centre of the filmmaking process as a way of taking back the creative initiative. The filmmakers’ engagement with filmed reality and the ideas about the representation of the real which resulted from the synchronous mobile unit’s conquest became a mould for contemporary documentary cinema: innovation, representativeness and participation.
Innovation
During the Second World War, technical research and innovation made it possible to improve existing equipment, and sometimes to create new, in response to the difficulty of obtaining equipment from abroad. The technical departments which grew up at that time would remain one of the major assets of the NFB. It was also because of shortages that Grierson recruited Norman McLaren, who brought to the principle of creative economy an artistic approach to technique. The importance granted to (technical and artistic) experimentation and innovation during the NFB’s early years are also what led to incorporating the research aspect into the 1950 law.[4] But technical research at the NFB has always been subject to its production goals, and direct cinema is undoubtedly the best example of this collaboration between the engineers and the technicians-filmmakers, to the extent that numerous improvements were made at the initiative of the latter.[5] For its part, the 2008 strategic plan saw the digital conversion as the prelude which would determine the transformation of “how audiences are consuming and interacting with audiovisual media,” whose new characteristics were “interactivity, mobility, control of time, user-generated material and a general democratization of media.”[6] The most important word to take note of here may be user, a term derived from the lexicon attached to the technical object and which systematically takes the place of the term viewer. In this way, in the process of change described, not only does technology determine the creative process, but it is the viewer, and no longer the filmmaker, who defines what is innovative according to the transformations underway in the spectatorial experience (interactivity, mobility, content and time management).
Representativeness
With respect to forms, the mandate for representativeness has as its corollary the mosaic and its constitutive element, the vignette. Thus interactive media makes it possible to represent the “great Canadian mosaic.”[7] Significantly, a large share of the interfaces of the web documentaries made by the NFB today employ this form: an ensemble made up of a multitude of elements on which the user can click in order to form an individual conception of the theme depicted in moving from one element to another. The alignment of the vignettes and the absence of space between them represent an ideal of both exhaustiveness and proximity in an ensemble which represents Canada and the world. It offers the illusion of a seamless whole which falls to the user to explore. And by bringing people together artificially, the form of the mosaic does away with the signifying spaces, the vectors of otherness, which exist between them. It sacrifices duration and latency (the “pensiveness of the image” defined by Jacques Rancière[8]), which have a fundamental function in the documentary aesthetic, making room for the viewer’s thoughts and recording those thoughts which arise from the real.
Author? User?
The prevailing principle of interactivity in the discourses which determine the NFB’s production goals appears to be the final delegation of editorial authority, encouraging the user’s participation (in the idea, the form, the point of view) at the expense of the artistic and dialectical dimensions of documentary film. Whereas direct cinema made the camera operator-film director the alter ego of the citizen – whether a character in the film or the viewer – capable of representing them while at the same time expressing their irreducible otherness through their own subjectivity, interactive media, at the NFB as elsewhere, in the name of representativeness and participation, leads to the erasure of the filmmaker and the dissolution of their point of view. Evidence for this can be seen in the propensity to want to replace the triangular relationship “filmer – filmed – viewer,” with its abundance of identification, by a circular relationship in which the place of each is indeterminate and interchangeable (“From the documentary triangle to the documentary circle”[9]).
