Post by Matthew Freeman, Bath Spa University

This post continues the ongoing “From Nottingham and Beyond” series, with contributions from faculty and alumni of the University of Nottingham’s Department of Culture, Film and Media. Today’s contributor, Matthew Freeman, completed his PhD in the department in 2015.

The media industries readily produce fictional stories across multiple media, telling the tales of the Avengers across comics, film and television, inviting audiences to participate in the reinvigorated intergalactic Star Wars universe across cinema, novels, the Web, video games, and so on. This transmedia storytelling phenomenon is of course a common go-to strategy in Hollywood’s fiction factory of brand-oriented franchise-making, tied up with commercial notions of digital marketing, merchandising, sequels, “cash nexuses,” and so forth. But what is becoming increasingly apparent is that transmedia is so much more than media franchising. In an age where the distribution of media across multiple platforms is increasingly accessible, transmedia has emerged as a global strategy for targeting fragmentary audiences – be it in business, media or education. And yet while scholarship continues to dwell on transmedia’s commercial, global industry formations, far smaller communities and far less commercial cultures around the world now make new and very different uses of transmedia, entirely re-thinking transmedia by applying it to non-fictional cultural projects as a socio-political strategy for informing and unifying local communities. There has been little attempt to track, analyze or understand such a socio-political idea of transmedia: Henry Jenkins famously theorized transmedia within a digital and industrial context,[1] but what does it mean to examine transmedia from a cultural perspective?

In one sense, examining transmedia from a cultural perspective first means acknowledging the innate multiplicity of transmedia’s potential. James Hay and Nick Couldry, hinting at this very idea, argue that the oft-cited model of transmedia – that is, the one seemingly based on convergences in the name of commerce – is far from the only model, especially when positioned globally: “international differences are obscured by the generality of the term ‘convergence culture’, and it can be helpful to consider convergence ‘cultures’ in the plural.”[2]

And so in another sense, examining transmedia from a cultural perspective also means establishing a whole new cultural-specificity model or approach to understandings of transmedia, taking into account the politics, peoples, ideologies, social values, cultural trends, histories, leisure and heritage of individual countries and their smaller communities. Taking a cultural approach to analyzing transmedia surely means mapping the many faces of transmedia in many different countries. For instance, while in the US and UK transmedia has evolved into an established marketing and brand-development practice,[3] emerging research across Europe paints a different picture of transmedia. In Europe, transmedia can occupy the role of a promotion tool for independent filmmakers, or that of a site of construction for social reality games, or even serve as a means of political activism.[4] In countries such as Spain, meanwhile, entire curricula are being developed around the potential application of transmedia as a tool for educational and literacy enhancement for students seeking global citizenship skills (Gomez 2013; Scolari 2013).

Hence one thing starts to become very clear: when conceived of or utilized as a cultural practice – rather than a commercially-minded industrial one – transmedia is suddenly no longer about storytelling, at least not in a fictional sense. Instead, it is about something more, something more real – that is to say, something more political, more social and more ideologically profound.

Allow me to offer some examples. Towards the end of last year I was invited to consult and to teach in the School of Sciences and Humanities at EAFIT University in Colombia. The invite was for the launch of a new MA in Transmedia Communication, the very first of its kind in Latin America. After consulting on the content of the MA program throughout the autumn, I then flew out to teach in Colombia, delivering a week’s worth of lectures about the different models, strategies and techniques of transmedia storytelling – focusing primarily on UK and US contexts. The aim here was to try and lay out the core characteristics and tendencies of many transmedia stories so students could then apply particular ideas when developing their own transmedia projects. What struck me about the whole experience was just how irrelevant some – though thankfully not all – of my own ingrained ideas about what transmedia actually is were to a Colombian audience. For them, transmedia is not – or rather should not be – a commercial practice of promotion, fiction, world building, franchising and the like. Instead, it is a political system that is nothing short of pivotal to developing social change in local communities; for them, transmedia is about reconstructing memories.

Though documentary has for many decades played a vital role in Latin America’s media ecology, independent producers and universities are the key drivers in the country’s current transmedia trend. While at EAFIT University, a number of innovative transmedia projects caught my eye – all of which aimed to fulfill this promise of developing social change and reconstructing local memories. One project, now currently underway, aims to create non-official narratives of the Colombian armed conflict from the victims’ point of view. By using different media platforms such as games, maps, web series, books and museums, the Medellín victims will be able to communicate their thoughts about the Colombian armed conflict to local and national public spheres. Another project, this one a graduate student’s, uses transmedia as a tool to gather and articulate the emotional fallout of the people from Medellín who have been displaced from their homes. The aim is therefore to document the citizens of Medellín, and Colombia, and show what it is like to be displaced in one’s own city, reconstructing an entire generation of historical memories concerning victims of internal displacement via the use of non-official stories and the representation of these stories across platforms.

In other words, in the context of Colombian culture, transmedia is not just a tool for social change – it is a blessing born out of a long history of cultural tradition that can help Colombians reconstruct the country after more than 50 years of armed conflict. As one of the students enrolled on EAFIT’s MA in Transmedia Communication asserts, “I strongly believe that transmedia in Colombia can contribute to creating processes of memory, recognition and solidarity for the victims of the Colombian armed conflict. I think that using and developing transmedia with local communities can be the clue to starting real processes of reconciliation in the country.”

The emphasis, again, is on using transmedia for something real. And so it seems particularly important to continue more fully interrogating non-fictional transmedia cultures – in the plural. Susan Kerrigan and J.T. Velikovsky begin to interrogate non-fictional transmedia storytelling through the framework of reality television formats, [5] just as Paul Grainge and Catherine Johnson (2015) consider the BBC’s coverage of the 2012 London Olympic Games through the lens of transmedia. And yet it is still far from clear in academic circles what it might mean to fully conceptualize a “real transmedia,” as it were. As my and William Proctor’s Transmedia Earth Network will aim to address, perhaps it is now time to move beyond emphases on industry and technology and instead to more fully embrace how cultural specificity (politics, heritage, social traditions, peoples, leisure and more) informs “real” transmedia stories with real cultural impacts and powerful resolutions for communities around the world. How do the unique politics, heritages and social traditions specific to a given country inform alternative models of transmedia? In Colombia at least, transmedia is now used to reshape its cultures and its communities – and in the words of one Colombian student, this is because, in Colombia, “transmedia is still a field of experimentation; it is new, it is unknown and we are the ones defining it and making it important for all branches of our knowledge.”

Free from the shackles of its Western understandings, then, Colombia’s notion of what transmedia actually is raises important questions about the future of transmedia, both as a phenomenon and as a focus of academic enquiry. How else is transmedia being interpreted by other cultures? And how else might it begin to reshape cultural communities and to tell their real stories of political and social traditions around the world? Only time will tell…

Notes

[1] See Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

[2] James Hay and Nick Couldry “Rethinking Convergence/Culture,” Cultural Studies 25.4 (2011): 473-486.

[3] See for example Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: New York University Press, 2010) and Paul Grainge and Catherine Johnson, Promotional Screen Industries (London: Routledge, 2015).

[4] See Carlos Scolari, Paolo Bertetti and Matthew Freeman Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot, 2014).

[5] See Susan Kerrigan and J. T. Velikovsky, “Examining Documentary Transmedia Narratives Through The Living History of Fort Scratchley Project,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (online 2015, DOI: 10.1177/1354856514567053).

Post by Richard Hewett, University of Salford

This post continues the ongoing “From Nottingham and Beyond” series, with contributions from faculty and alumni of the University of Nottingham’s Department of Culture, Film and Media. This week’s contributor is Richard Hewett, who completed his PhD in the department in 2012.

Alfred Hitchcock must rank as one of the most discussed and documented filmmakers of the 20th century, the number of books that focus on his life and work having turned into a cottage industry since his death in 1980. This year alone has seen the publication of a second volume of Sidney Gottlieb’s collected interviews and short stories, Hitchcock on Hitchcock, Alain Kerzoncuf and Charles Barr’s Lost and Found: The Forgotten Films, and a new biography by Peter Ackroyd. Over the years a number of screen documentaries have also been produced, the latest of which, Kent Jones’ Hitchcock/Truffaut, premiered at Cannes last month.

The director clearly continues to exert the same fascination that he inspired during his lifetime, but on television, at least, the love affair between documentarists and Hitchcock now risks falling into the same trap as Ackroyd’s biography: having nothing new to say, and no new way of saying it. As Hitchcock TV profiles are legion, I will focus here on those made specifically for British television. What emerges is a clear picture — in creative terms, at least — of diminishing returns, though it seems with no similarly diminishing interest in the man himself.

Prior to Hitchcock’s death, the number of UK documentaries were few in number, the filmmaker featuring more regularly in extended interviews for arts-centered magazine programs, many of which have since been culled (repeatedly) for biographical features. Unsurprisingly, Hitchcock’s visits to British TV studios were inevitably timed to coincide with the release of his latest cinematic work. Thus we have a 1960 interview for Picture Parade (BBC) (the year of Psycho’s release), a 1964 interview with Huw Wheldon on Monitor (BBC) (coinciding with Marnie), appearances on Profile (BBC) and Late Night Line-Up (BBC) from 1966 (surrounding Torn Curtain’s release), a 1969 NFT appearance (BBC), being interviewed by Bryan Forbes (circa Topaz), and so on. These appearances are notable primarily for the control Hitchcock himself exerts, both subtly and otherwise. Whether or not the questions were pre-screened is impossible to say, but the director is seldom led along any conversational routes he does not wish to pursue, with the result that the same anecdotes are repeated, sometimes verbatim. The one British TV documentary made during his lifetime, the 1972 Aquarius (ITV) entry “Alfred the Great,” is little different, featuring a combination of studio interview material and footage of Hitchcock directing the opening sequence from Frenzy (1972). Here, as elsewhere, Hitchcock both literally and metaphorically calls the shots. The sole occasion on which the director is visibly challenged in any of these appearances is, interestingly, the only one to take place in front of a live audience. In his NFT interview, Hitchcock effortlessly works an appreciative crowd until interlocutor Bryan Forbes, having pointed out that Hitchcock seldom concerns himself with social consciousness, takes issue with Hitch’s repetition of Samuel Goldwyn’s maxim that “messages are for Western Union.” Forbes cuts short the resultant rumble of appreciative laughter, curtly stating, “Yes; I don’t think the applause is actually well placed, because not all films that fall into that category are necessarily bad films, and Goldwyn was getting a cheap laugh, really, which is echoed here…”

At this point, Hitchcock visibly cools.

This moment does not appear in the majority of the television documentaries made following Hitchcock’s passing, though the stories he consistently regurgitated during his lifetime are, perhaps inevitably, employed as a framework upon which to build. Three examples stand out in this respect: the two-part Omnibus (BBC) documentary from 1986; another two-part entry in the Reputations series (BBC) in 1999 (Hitchcock’s centenary year); and Living Famously (BBC) from 2002. Each relates, often via reliance on identical archive-interview footage, the same tales: the infant Hitchcock being scared by his mother saying “Boo!”; Hitchcock’s fear of “everything,” but in particular policemen — the latter a result of being locked in a prison cell (at his father’s behest) while still a child; explaining the difference between suspense and surprise; bemoaning his lack of technique for having let the bomb go off in Sabotage (1936); and explaining that he never said actors were cattle, only that they should be treated as such.

It is entirely natural, of course, that documentary-makers should rely on such primary material, even if much of Hitchcock’s self-celebration goes unchallenged. His statement that after an initially unsuccessful screening for studio bosses, breakthrough film The Lodger (1926) was conveniently left on the shelf for three months before being dusted off and hailed a classic conveniently ignores the fact that Ivor Montagu was brought in to re-edit the film in the interim, removing several of the title cards. However, when the Omnibus and Reputations entries were made, there had been no significant UK television documentary focus on Hitchcock’s career for several years. (The BBC had in 1997 mounted a Close Up on Hitchcock retrospective, which featured actors and directors briefly discussing his work.) The inclusion of such notable (and now departed) talking heads as James Stewart, Joan Fontaine, Ann Todd, Teresa Wright, Farley Granger, Janet Leigh, Charles Bennett, Samuel Taylor, Hume Cronyn, Arthur Laurents, John Michael Hayes and Ernest Lehman provides valuable archive material, which would in turn be plundered for later such efforts.

There is also a sense, with these documentaries at least, of new discoveries and revelations waiting to be made — even if some of these later transpire to be false. Saul Bass’ claim, in Omnibus, that he in fact directed the Psycho shower sequence stirred up a storm of angry protest from many who had worked on the film (though Bass had been responsible for the storyboards), while Tippi Hedren’s reflection, in Reputations, on the post-Marnie rift provided a much-recycled sound bite: “I am totally responsible for it… No; I’m not, he is!”

By the time of Living Famously, this talent pool of primary sources, alas, starts to dwindle, and the same stories and reflections begin to derive from biographers such as David Freeman and Donald Spoto, or critics including Barry Norman, though the indefatigable Patricia Hitchcock O’Connell is still present to defend her father’s (and mother’s) reputation. There is perhaps a sense of the well running dry. As with the 1960s interviews conducted with Hitchcock himself, few new questions are asked. It is almost as though Hitchcock continues to exert editorial control over his legacy from beyond the grave, much as he did with the montage piecing together of shots in his movies. Given the paucity of new biographical detail, the sensible approach — and the one taken by the two most recent original TV documentaries, Paul Merton Looks at Alfred Hitchcock (BBC, 2009) and Jonathan Ross’s Perspectives: Made in Britain (ITV, 2013) — is to focus on lesser-addressed areas of the director’s life. Perhaps in a tacit admission that the old style of expository voiceover documentary has run its course, each of these takes a familiar media face and places it onscreen to deliver a personal take on the great man, both focusing on the British period, which allows an in-depth look at the more obscure (in terms of television airings) early work. Merton humorously acknowledges his reliance on archive footage by splicing himself into the interviews, introducing an irreverent note of which Hitchcock himself might have approved. The documentary closes with Merton loosening the necktie that he has (atypically) worn throughout the program, intimating that he is about to perpetrate the strangling (though presumably not rape) of Hitchcock in the style of Frenzy’s psychotic killer. Ross takes a somewhat different tack, using his and Hitchcock’s shared geographical origins (each hail from Leytonstone in East London) to unpack both the director’s early life and Ross’ personal relationship to his work. Though this verges on a vanity project at times, it at least introduces some new material, including Ross demonstrating how the effects shot from Blackmail (1929) was achieved.

And that, for the moment, draws a curtain (though not a torn one) over original Hitchcock documentaries on mainstream British television. The recent Talking Pictures entries, on Hitchcock and his leading actors (BBC, 2014, 2015), apply an entirely cut-and-paste approach, linking much archive footage that did not feature in previous programs (including a large segment of the NFT interview), with Sylvia Syms’ knowing voiceover. This is perhaps as far as can now be travelled in terms of a biographical or career overview, but British television documentarists of the future would do well to take a leaf out of Kent Jones’ book, or from Michael Epstein’s documentary Hitchcock, Selznick and the End of Hollywood (1999), to focus on particular periods, themes or relationships in Hitchcock’s career. Even the documentary extras which have proliferated on DVDs and BluRays over the last 15 years tend to address mainly the American films, and it would be gratifying to see a Hitchcock season — perhaps on BBC Four, which occasionally re-airs the Reputations and Living Famously material — that spotlights lesser-examined works, such as the wartime propaganda films (Bon Voyage [1944] and Aventure Malgache [1944]), the comedies (The Farmer’s Wife [1928], Mr. and Mrs. Smith [1941]) or (comparative) failures such as The Paradine Case (1947) and Under Capricorn (1949).

Until then, the Hitchcock TV documentary furrow would seem to have been definitively plowed.

Post by Andrew Bottomley, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This is the fifth post in our “Honoring Hilmes” series, celebrating the career and legacy of Michele Hilmes on the occasion of her retirement. 

Professor Michele Hilmes is retiring at the end of this Spring semester (May 2015), after a highly distinguished career of nearly 30 years in the media studies field – more than 20 of those years spent in Antenna’s home, the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. To mark the occasion, a few of her students and colleagues at UW-Madison put together this radio documentary/podcast in her honor. After all, what better way to celebrate Michele than with the very medium she has spent so much of her career investigating and championing?

Written, Produced, and Directed By:
Andrew Bottomley

Co-Producers:
Jeremy Morris and Christopher Cwynar

Editors:
Jeremy Morris and Andrew Bottomley

Sound Mix:
Jeremy Morris

Host:
Andrew Bottomley

Featuring (in alphabetical order):
Megan Sapnar Ankerson
Chris Becker
Ron Becker
Jonathan Bignell
Aniko Bodroghkozy
Norma Coates
Kyle Conway
Christopher Cwynar
Brian Fautuex
David Goodman
Jonathan Gray
Tona Hangen
Eric Hoyt
Kit Hughes
Josh Jackson
Jason Jacobs
Henry Jenkins
Derek Johnson
Michael Kackman
Danny Kimball
Bill Kirkpatrick
Derek Kompare
Shanti Kumar
Kate Lacey
Elana Levine
Lori Lopez
Amanda Lotz
Jason Loviglio
Janet McCabe
Allison McCracken
Cynthia Meyers
Jason Mittell
Jeremy Morris
Sarah Murray
Darrell Newton
Lisa Parks
Eleanor Patterson
Josh Shepperd
Matt Sienkiewicz
Lynn Spigel
Katherine Spring
Jonathan Sterne
Derek Vaillant
Neil Verma
Alyx Vesey
Tim Wall
Jennifer Hyland Wang

Music:
“Odyssey” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons BY 3.0

“Crashed” by Stereofloat
Licensed under Creative Commons BY-ND 3.0

Old Time Radio Clips (in order of appearance):
This is Your Life (TV)
The Jack Benny Program, “How Jack Found Rochester”
Martha Deane Show, “Dewey Wins”
The Burns & Allen Show, “Gracie Allen Inc.”
NBC Chimes
The Mercury Theatre on the Air, “The War of the Worlds”
The Mercury Theatre on the Air, “The Fall of the City”
Suspense, “Sorry, Wrong Number”
The Shadow, “Phantom Voice”
CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Them”
Gang Busters, “Crime Wave Special Report”
Lux Radio Theatre, “The Thin Man”
The Thin Man (film)
Hollywood Hotel, “One in a Million”
The Movie Parade, “Design for Living”
Hootenanny of the Air
Amos ‘n’ Andy, “Andy the Actor”
Fibber McGee and Molly, “Fireball McGee”
The Texaco Star Theatre (Fred Allen), “Amateur of the Month”
The Aldrich Family, “Girl Trouble”
The Chisholm Trail
Transatlantic Call: People to People, “Women in Britain”
We Hold These Truths
On a Note of Triumph
Serial (podcast)

Special thanks to Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson, as well as all the participants for recording themselves.

Besides the morbid subject matter, I found two developments in this show particularly disturbing. The first is the way in which cinematic stylings are used to bring this documentary in line with HBO’s aesthetic. The second is the rhetorical position Jarecki places himself in, in regards to his role as a documentarian. Although these two developments seem unrelated, they interact to create a dangerous documentary television standard.

I wasn’t overly concerned with Durst’s story, especially in regards to his guilt or innocence. As the series progressed, it became more clear that little trust could be placed in the highly stylized version of events depicted in the show. The cinematic aesthetic, standard in HBO shows, were especially macabre and out-of-place when applied to a true-crime story. The title sequence, for instance, is indistinguishable that of a fictional crime story that might air on any prestige television channel. The show makes frequent use of crime reenactments, like one might see on a 60-Minutes special, but the high production value of an HBO show make these sequences uncomfortable; the fact that Susan Berman really was shot in the head and died on the floor of her bedroom makes the frequent cuts to the reenactment footage downright grisly, as the editing lingers over shots of spreading pools of blood. Assumably the aesthetic is meant to act as a cross-legitimation: to make the show seem up to HBO’s high standards, and to make the high standards of HBO shows live up to real life. Yet instead it ends up fictionalizing real life to make it more theatrical, adding slow motion and color filters to the cold murder of a real woman.

The plot’s timeline obscures when interviews and other filming took place in relation to each other. The issues with the timeline, as seen in the show compared to what director Andrew Jarecki says, has been much discussed online. The dangerous part of the questionable timeline of police involvement is the suggestions that Jarecki specifically withheld evidence in order to maximize publicity. The audience is allowed increasingly long sections of behind-the-scenes footage of Jarecki and the rest of the crew. The more background information we got, the more concerned I was about the rhetorical position in which Jarecki places himself.

It’s not particularly unusual for a documentarian to be included in the story that they’re filming. One might argue it’s inevitable that the presence of a film crew will have an effect on the events they’re filming. Yet Jarecki includes a lot of footage of himself struggling to come to terms with the potential guilt of the subject at hand, arguing aloud that he liked Durst personally, which made it hard to believe he might be guilty of two murders (in addition to the shooting and dismemberment of Black, events with Durst does not deny happened). At some point in the timeline, the crew uncovers new, potentially damning evidence in the form of a sample of Durst’s handwriting that seems to match that of a letter sent to the police in regards to Berman’s body. Although Jarecki claims to have been working with the police and with legal advice throughout the process, it becomes clear from the behind-the-scenes footage that there was no official supervision guiding them when they found the handwriting sample. Rather than informing the police or an attorney of their find—a find which could potentially reopen the case against Durst—Jarecki removes it from the premises and conducts an extensive investigation, calling on the expertise of a handwriting analyst to compare samples. Although this makes for absorbing television, it also completely destroys the chain of custody on this evidence, putting its potential use in a legal context up for question.

The disregard for legal procedure becomes especially underlined when Jarecki states that he’s out to get “justice.” Rather than attempting to record the truth of a situation—ostensibly the purpose of a documentarian—Jarecki explicitly sets himself up as a vigilante, using film-making to correct injustices in the world. It’s not that documentaries can’t be used to change the world or to correct injustices, in general. However, they do so by using small, specific examples to expose larger, systemic problems. The large systematic problems in the legal system are there, starting with the fact that there was evidence like this handwriting sample waiting to be found. The Jinx doesn’t offer any particular critique of the law, though. Rather, it sets Jarecki and his crew up as vigilante investigators, coming to the truth of the situation where the law couldn’t (and all while the cameras happen to be rolling).

Because of HBO’s prestige branding. The Jinx‘s presence on the network legitimizes the show as an acceptable approach to documentary making. Supporting vigilante documentary as an acceptable approach to seeking “justice” is a potentially dangerous trend.  That Jarecki’s publicity grab worked so effectively to draw eyes (including, I’m sad to say in retrospect, my own) spells out a troubling direction for television to move towards.

Now in its eleventh year, Columbia, Missouri’s True/False Film Festival is rapidly becoming a major stop on the North American festival circuit. Focusing on documentary films, True/False openly embraces films that play with the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. This year, one of the festival’s standouts was the premiere of

If you have watched The Wire, you know her face—angular jaw, wide-set eyes, sleek dark hair. Brandy Burre plays Theresa D’Agostino, Tommy Carcetti’s political consultant and Jimmy McNulty’s hook-up partner, in a fifteen-episode arc during seasons 3 and 4. After her stint on the show, Burre went on hiatus to raise her two young children with boyfriend Tim in the quaint town of Beacon, New York. When she decided to reenter showbiz, her friend and neighbor, documentary filmmaker Robert Greene, was on hand to capture the process. At the beginning of the 18-month-long shoot, Greene did not realize that he would document both the rebirth of Burre’s career and the end of her romantic partnership.

The film opens with a shot of Burre from behind, washing dishes. Dressed in a bright red dress and flanked on either side by pots of crimson flowers, lit by spotlights that fall off into darkness, she seems to be on a theater stage, in a kitchen meant to evoke mid-century motherhood and all its attendant strains. While holding a glass, she speaks in voiceover about being the kind of person “who breaks things.” Then the film switches into a cinema verité register with the muted colors of digital video, and it becomes clear that this stage set was Burre and Tim’s kitchen all along. Greene had cast Burre in a scene from a Sirk-ean melodrama, staged in her own home.

A documentary filmmaker explicitly interested in questions of performance (his most recent feature, Fake It So Real, focuses on independent pro wrestling), Greene uses Burre’s personal life upheaval “to get at the theatricality of performing yourself, the theatricality of everyday life and how we can make melodramas in our heads.” The majority of Actress is direct cinema-style depictions of Burre’s daily life—handing her children juiceboxes from the fridge, rolling up a porch rug in advance of an impending blizzard, driving to New York City to sing at a cabaret—and interviews in which Burre speaks directly to the camera, explaining her thought processes and emotional logic. While these scenes of humdrum life and clarifying confessionals have a potency all their own, they take on more affecting power when combined with the occasional stylized sequence, some of which blend more seamlessly with the narrative than the brilliantly-lit kitchen scene.

Specifically, a few bravura slow-motion shots, combined with haunting music, make the melodrama of Burre’s life come even more into focus. After watching a video of her daughter’s birthday party in California, celebrated while Burre stayed in New York for a singing gig, Burre weeps. In the next shot, its temporal relationship to the former uncertain, the camera follows Burre in slow motion as she checks on food she is cooking on the stove, then walks through a dark room to the foyer. Her young daughter stands on the staircase, waving a clothes hanger, which Burre takes, holding it in one hand and throwing her head back as if accepting a trophy. Harry Belafonte’s sweet, mournful version of “Waly Waly” (also known as “False Love”) plays throughout this slow-motion shot, imbuing the mother and daughter’s simple gestures with poignancy and emphasizing Burre’s emotional turmoil over the break-up of her family.

The filmmaker’s techniques serve to draw attention to the constructed nature of the film and to emphasize the internally dramatic quality of Burre’s ostensibly ordinary life. Thus, the film both expands the nature of documentary filmmaking (alongside other formally inventive and metacritical recent documentaries such as Stories We Tell and The Act of Killing), and expands the acceptable limits of life melodrama. Rather than cling to the notion that cinema verite’s objectivity is the path to truth, Greene uses a cinema verité style to both show the external reality of Burre’s daily life, and to express her personal, subjective experience of it.

In addition to directing, Greene is also an accomplished editor, having cut recent documentaries Owning the Weather and Making the Boys. While in some ways Actress resembles personal documentaries made by Miriam Weinstein, Ed Pincus, and Ross McElwee, Greene also draws on his experience editing fiction films, such as indie director Alex Ross Perry’s forthcoming Listen Up Philip. As such, it is not so odd that Greene points to inspiration in a specific genre of fiction filmmaking: the musical. Writing for Sight & Sound in January 2014, Greene explains why he rewatches Mary Poppins every time he begins editing a film. He writes, “Musicals have similar narrative/non-narrative tensions [as documentary films] and the best movies artfully exploit this to create unique viewing experiences. …The narrative arrangements are similarly broad, fluid and nontraditional and exploring the way musicals propel stories forward with set pieces, layered meanings and use of expressionistic imagery can be highly instructive.” One hopes current and future non-fiction filmmakers are listening.

Actress is an Opening Night Selection at the Wisconsin Film Festival. Director Robert Greene and star Brandy Burre will be in attendance.

Welcome to Fort McMoney, an interactive web documentary designed to raise awareness of the conflicts among industrial, political and environmental interests in the development of oil. The film slash video game, which debuted in late 2013 and takes place over multiple weeks, is coproduced by Canada’s National Film Board, Montreal’s Toxa and the French/German TV Network Arte. The film’s unsubtle title indicates the stakes: visit the town, gather your evidence, and take a stand on whether Fort McMurray, the canary in the oil mines, should be allowed to develop unbridled. Your success at navigating the game is measured in terms of influence: every person you meet, every place you visit, and each survey you answer in the game raises your influence levels, giving you more leverage in the game’s regular “referenda” on oil politics. This round’s debate topic — Should Oil Be Nationalized? – currently has over 18,000 votes for and 6,645 votes against.

The docu-game is an intelligent and well timed intervention into the North American oil debate. Canada’s headlines pit the “ethics” of Canadian oil against the environmental activism of its deterrents. President Obama’s decision over whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline (which would transport oil from Alberta to the U.S.) looms.

The combination of documentary and video game attracts diverse media audiences (for instance, I don’t play video games, but I love documentaries) and the choose-your-own-adventure aspect demonstrates more directly differing points of view and the effects of various decisions. From a distribution perspective, the game is genius: Fort McMoney’s tri-national media partners Le Monde (France), The Globe and Mail (English Canada) and Radio Canada (French Canada), and Süddeutsche (Germany) are not just mouthpieces but interactive participants, as journalists from each media outlet play the game and report on their experiences. These media also pledge to publish substantive features on the politics of oil. Connective media platforms are in on the act: players get about 10 minutes of free viewing/play and then are asked to register, either through their Facebook accounts (bye-bye, personal information) or via email addresses; and the “help desk” is essentially the director David Dufresne’s Twitter feed.

If Fort McMoney’s innovation and intelligence is clear, the ultimate intention of the game remains an open question. Writing about his creation via The Huffington Post in November 2013, film director Dufresne is confident that the viewer/player’s experience will be transformative. “The world’s future is being shaped by energy issues. And gaming is a lever for raising awareness,” he asserts. “The Fort McMoney experience will be a kind of web-era platform for direct democracy.”

We need not rehearse here the problems inherent in the celebratory rhetoric of interactive media as a panacea for social and political blights. Regardless, whether intended as promotional hype or sincere evaluation, Dufresne’s claim to direct democracy deserves careful scrutiny. Matthew Hindman’s The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton UP, 2008) makes a compelling case for the failure of the Internet to develop the idealized public sphere. Hindman redefines the digital divide from a hierarchy of access to a hierarchy of voice, where even the most compelling ideas can be ignored, hamstrung by economic, social or algorithmic barriers to information. One hopes that Fort McMoney’s creative approach can be sufficiently amplified by its media partners and players to cut through the noise.

Perhaps a more dire problem lies not with Fort McMoney’s medium but with its message. Fort McMoney presents a vision of a sad city stretched to its limits by the ebbs and flows of oil. While the game’s players debate whether taxes should be higher, workers better treated, and environmental concerns alleviated, there is no space to say, “Stop. This shouldn’t be happening at all.” The film does not (cannot?) challenge the political, economic or cultural conditions that gave rise to this carbon democracy in the first place. Nor does it offer alternatives, asking what political possibilities might exist, what other arrangements of people, money and energy might be assembled, that could help foster less destructive situations.

This line of argument is not intended as critique. Fort McMoney presents a more radical scenario and more compelling overtures to debate than our dominant political parties and institutions have managed. The docu-game is not meant as policy prescription but as a stimulant to attention and reflection. In this sense it is a welcome intervention into the bread-and-circus routine in North American oil politics. But if democracy is understood merely as a set of conversations and referenda over already existing arrangements, this falls short. One hopes that Fort McMoney will inspire us to do more than vote for a slightly less dystopic vision of Canada’s canary.

While the series’ documentary aesthetic has often led to the assumption the show itself—as in NBC’s The Office—was the final product of the documentary crew’s filming, and that we have been watching an edited narrative pieced together from larger swaths of footage, the choice to position the diegetic documentary as public television and a successful international export pushes against this assumption in interesting ways.

The end of the trailer for The Office: An American Workplace first glimpsed in “Promos” featured a logo for WVIA. Although I am not familiar enough with public television station names to know for certain this was the local PBS station in Scranton, a quick Google search confirmed my suspicion that it was (and I had a nice chat about it with the station’s official Twitter account). It’s a decision that makes sense given that public television offers the most logical platform for long-form documentary programming within the contemporary television landscape, and a logical parallel with the U.K. series’ own documentary reveal (which didn’t have to reconcile the same broadcast/public television divide given it was public television to begin with).

Their choice of title, in addition to being used in the U.K., also calls back to the origins of reality television, An American Family, which appeared on PBS stations in 1971. What’s interesting about this parallel, however, is that it positions The Office: An American Workplace as a dramatic rather than comic program. An American Family—the making of which was recently dramatized in HBO’s Cinema Vérité—is considered the progenitor of reality television, as what was supposed to be a somewhat mundane glimpse of American life became a story of separation, divorce, and Lance Loud’s groundbreaking “coming out.” And unlike contemporary reality television, wherein we operate with a fairly clear understanding of how reality editing works to refract real events, the Loud Family were caught off guard, publicly pushing back against what they thought was an overly negative portrayal of their lives.

That An American Workplace inspires a similar reaction among The Office’s characters struck me—and others—as ahistorical given the proliferation of reality television and surrounding discourse, but it fits as an extended homage to An American Family and the reaction of its subjects (albeit amped up for comic effect). However, the choice to tie into this documentary tradition also works to de-emphasize the sitcom origins of The Office in favor of a more serious narrative based around the same footage. The show has often pushed its sense of realism into increasingly absurd and ludicrous scenarios, but the trailers for An American Workplace have largely focused on character-driven comedy, working to reground the show in a more realistic setting. An American Workplace allows Greg Daniels and the producers to shape The Office’s legacy, the diegetic documentary functioning as a selective frame through which the characters—and thus the audience—remember the previous nine seasons.

The choice to feature WVIA by name—although the show never calls attention to its public television roots directly, and they missed an opportunity to embed the trailer on WVIA’s website—also works to ground the documentary within the local. Initially, this registered as an implicit acknowledgement that the appeal of a documentary about a paper concern in Scranton, Pennsylvania might not have an inherent appeal outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania and its surrounding area. The series may have lost its focus on the mundane as it sought to keep storylines fresh in later seasons (like Jim and Darryl cavorting with celebrities in their new jobs in Philadelphia), but limiting the reach of their documentary to the immediate surrounding area would have been an effective way of reframing their “celebrity” within the same isolation the series documented early on.

However, “Promos” goes on to reveal multiple trailers translated into different languages, suggesting a successful international sale; in addition, Ed Helms’ Andy spends the episode responding to online comments people are posting on the trailer, suggesting at least some degree of promotion beyond the immediate Scranton area. In both cases, The Office resists giving up its expanding sense of scale, projecting the broad appeal of The Office itself onto the documentary. There’s hubris in the implication that international markets would be interested in a documentary subtitled An American Workplace as opposed to developing their own, similar documentary projects within their own countries (which is what the BBC did with 1974’s The Family based on An American Family), hubris that speaks to the conception of American programming as superior in value within the international market. It also speaks to the universality of The Office, a nod to its network of international viewers and a pat on the back for the ways in which its stories of love and life resonate with viewers across America around the world.

The distinction between The Office and The Office: An American Workplace remains somewhat unclear: are these really separate narratives based on the same material, or rather simply the same narrative promoted differently? It seems difficult to imagine NBC’s The Office airing on public television, but it would also push against this sense of realism if what we’ve been watching were an entirely different product entirely. These diegetic debates aside, however, The Office: An American Workplace has immediately created a space where the meanings of the NBC sitcom can be discursively reframed to best position the show’s legacy as the series prepares to say goodbye.

1. YouTube is ramping up its investment in branded channels to make itself more like TV. There’s a danger, though, in alienating the amateurs that YouTube initially capitalized on to distinguish it from TV. More favorably, YouTube is trying to help out nonprofit campaigns, and it has tweaked its search algorithm to better favor videos that viewers truly engage with.

2. Some big numbers in the news this past fortnight: There are now six billion cell phones worldwide (though that still leaves one billion without one), and there are one billion smartphones out there. Internet advertising reached $17 billion for the first half of 2012. American mobile devices ate up 1.1 trillion megabytes of data across 12 months, and US high speed broadband connections are up 76% over last year. The biggest number in the news? A French woman received a mobile phone bill for $15 quadrillion.

3. Amazon is going to take advantage of all the consumer data it gathers by working more closely with advertisers and ad agencies to place ads on Amazon sites. The Do Not Track movement is trying to limit what consumer data advertisers can obtain from our web browsers, much to advertisers’ chagrin. Adding more chagrin is a study highlighting how frequently mobile ad clicks are merely accidental.

4. The newspaper audience is shrinking — or maybe it’s not — but either way, Britain’s Guardian is the latest to look at ending its print edition. In the US, the Chicago Tribune is shifting to a paywall strategy online, which sounds like a bad move if you buy the idea that print outlets should be following what The Atlantic is doing. Newspapers in Brazil don’t like what Google is doing, and they’re now going to have to deal with the New York Times encroaching on their turf in an effort to expand its global audience.

5. A new study finds that young people commonly copy and share music among family and friends, but it was also determined that file-sharers buy more music than non-file-sharers, lending some food for thought to the music industry, which will see peer-to-peer users warned about illegal sharing activities soon. Unfortunately, the musicians’ cut of digital music income remains paltry, but Pandora insists the money is there.

6. As the compact disc turns 30, Neil Young is pushing for a new digital format, one superior in sound quality to mp3s. Meanwhile, music streaming marches onward, with Xbox now joining the fray and the BBC starting its own service, while Spotify looks to expand in new areas, such as in Japan and on smart TVs.

7. 20^th Century Fox professes to be very excited about new technologies, while one of the most pervasive of Hollywood’s recent technological efforts, 3D, is supposedly on the decline (again). Given recent studio turmoil, it’s unclear who exactly will lead Hollywood through this next stage of technological production, but it’s seeming likely there won’t be as many unpaid interns working for them as before.

8. The new documentary nomination rules that Michael Moore helped the Academy usher in for this year’s Oscars have apparently only caused new problems, so now Moore is proposing new solutions, including getting rid of the old solutions. Much of this revolves around issues of distribution, and the story behind Detropia illustrates how challenging distribution of docs has gotten today.

9. The gaming company Zynga is experiencing all sorts of turmoil, from declining stock to rumors of employee revolts to lawsuits against an ex-employee being portrayed as a threat to current employees. But at least there’s FarmVille 2, now with 50 million players. Of course, it’s no Angry Birds, now with 200 million players.

10. Some of the finer News for TV Majors posts from the past few weeks: Community Art, Ratings Takes, Scrambling Ban Eliminated, Cord Cutting Boxes, Connie Britton’s Hair, New Moonves Contract, New Local Ratings System, Real PBS Issues, DVR Boosts, Variety Sold, House of Cards Scheduled.

Series 2 sees 91 high-definition cameras fixed throughout the Accident and Emergency ward at London’s Kings College Hospital each episode chronicles a single day in one of the UK’s biggest trauma center. Able to turn and zoom in any direction, these cameras are controlled by remote control from a mobile gallery parked outside. 168 production team members filmed for a month, accumulating 7600 hours of footage, to produce 14 episodes. It is a mammoth technological undertaking, illustrating how Channel 4 likes to do things big – it’s a public service broadcaster, but one funded through adverts, so it has to reel its audience in.

Each episode of 24hrs in A&E (which airs in the US on BBCAmerica) assembles a series of central stories and surrounding vignettes. We have victims of road traffic accidents, gang stabbings and massive strokes. But we also have the little old lady who fell out of bed, or the man who left in that splinter way too long. It’s often a masterpiece of storytelling, confronting us first with the injury and the team’s attempts to treat and diagnose before slowly building up the picture of the patient and what happened through retrospective interviews with friends, families and medical staff. It illustrates Channel 4’s public service remit in action, working as a flagship ‘state of the nation‘ documentary, and a chronicle of multicultural Britain through its patients and staff. Yet at the same time it demonstrates technological innovation through its filming processes.

In recent years Channel 4 has built a stable of these fixed-camera documentaries, chronicling daily life in model agencies, hotels, maternity wards and high schools (and even a houseshare of dwarves during panto season). The form debuted with The Family in 2008, where Paul Watson’s groundbreaking 1974 BBC documentary serial was updated for the Big Brother age. The observational camera crew were absented in favor of 40 fixed cameras fitted around the Hughes family home, with a live gallery in the house next door, filming for 100 days to build up a picture of ‘everyday’ family life. Creatives and executives were careful to highlight the program’s ‘normality’ in contrast to the pictures of dysfunction and conflict painted by previous Channel 4 hits Wife Swap and Supernanny. This was serious, 9pm, ‘event’ documentary. Its title suggested universality – ‘The’ family – a chronicle of the institution, featuring white, British-Asian and British-Nigerian families. Building on Channel 4’s remit to ‘appeal to the tastes and interests of a culturally diverse society’, the programme established the fixed-camera format as a distinctive (another remit buzzword) feature of a new era of Channel 4 observational documentary.

The Family’s success helped signal a way forward in the imminent post-Big Brother era, with Channel 4’s defining reality TV series slowly limping towards its cancellation in 2010 (since revived by channel Five). These fixed-camera documentaries utilized Big Brother’s surveillance technology to present a new spin on the classical ‘fly-on-the-wall’ style. By making its camerapersons invisible, the documentaries attempt to reduce the observational documentary paradox, with their around-the-clock filming and all-seeing cameras bringing connotations of directness, immediacy and transparency.

You can see the value for Channel 4: a standardised format, deployed across a range of subjects, producing a string of new programming, for a limited development spend. The accumulation of vast tranches of footage allowing relatively lengthy runs compared to a single-authored documentary series or one-offs. From One Born Every Minute to The Hotel to Educating Essex – they all unfold the same way. A fast-paced opening montage introduces the concept and location, foregrounding the technology and the breadth, yet intimacy it allows. Highlighting the combination of the spectacular and the mundane that will unfold. Then they settle down to tell 2 or 3 main stories through observational footage and contextualizing interviews from participants. You could set your watch by them. As with any success story, this boom tipped over into a glut of fixed-cam documentaries chronicling the emergency services at the beginning of the year, leading to grumblings from the press.

However, as I noted, these programmes have particular value for Channel 4’s public service remit, though they are distinct from the majority of the channel’s socially-focused factual programming. The channel has a tendency towards livening up complex political issues within a challenge format, which offer more than a hint of neoliberalism – the need to ‘provide access to material that is intended to inspire people to make changes in their lives’ is literally written into the channel’s remit. Series like Benefit Busters or Fairy Jobmother, with their tough love and use of NLP strategies on the long-term unemployed, seem to come straight out of a government press release. Whilst Secret Millionaire and its search for the ‘deserving poor’ and community volunteers to hand a cheque to (whilst going on weeping personal ‘journey’) is a virtual blue print for Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ – someone will surely step in to provide these public services we’re cutting.

In contrast – perhaps because the technology provides the high concept – the medical (and school-based) fixed-cam documentaries step back and let us view the daily work of the public services. Of course there’s the hand of a master storyteller behind this, shaping those thousands of hours of footage into linear stories and perfect moving moments. But whilst the programme depicts the cost of timewasters and drunks, the long waiting times, and the struggle to provide care, this is soft political advocacy. A heart-rending personal story (nearly always) wrapped up in a warm hug. All this technology allowing television its small-scale intimacies, and the NHS its moments of grace.

1. Happy Mother’s Day! Nielsen reports that among American moms, half have smartphones, and they love Facebook and Pinterest (Twitter, not so much). For the general US population, mobile data access is a big area of growth, while check-in apps are still mostly niche. In India, women use their phones more for talking and texting, whereas men do more web browsing.

2. “More video is uploaded to YouTube in one month than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years,” tweets a YouTube exec, with 60 hours of video uploaded every minute. Now there’s word that YouTube could add a premium subscription service. But with YouTube getting so vast, some are finding smaller competitors offer a better platform, especially for mobile sharing.

3. Ebay and Wal-Mart are looking to develop their own search engines to battle against Google’s dominance, right as a Google report insists that search engines have First Amendment rights, which would mean Google could pick and choose which content and in what order to load up for a search reply. But Google isn’t allowed to violate internet privacy the way it apparently did by hacking into Safari to track users. Microsoft might also be cheating by making Internet Explorer the only browser that will work right on the upcoming Windows RT system.

4. While the documentary has a storied history in Canada, filmmakers are having a hard time finding funding for documentaries today thanks to federal cuts. If they can dig up an extra $20,000 or so from someplace, those filmmakers can get their films into the DocuWeeks program, which will still be a conduit to Oscar nominations, over Michael Moore’s objections.

5. News out of the National Association of Theatre Owners CinemaCon convention included 20^th Century Fox planning to end 35mm film distribution next year, which will have complex consequences. Plus all manner of new theatrical magic is on its way, including lasers. A few theater chains are reporting a surge in attendance right now, while the AMC chain might be looking to sell to China.

6. Overall home entertainment spending is up for the first time in awhile, though that’s mostly thanks to digital streaming and Blu-ray, and not DVDs and rental stores, of course. Blu-ray might decline too once people realize they’ll now have to sit through two government warnings before getting to the movie.

7. Microsoft has invested in the Nook, which is now worth more than Barnes & Noble itself. B&N is trying to find ways to reconcile physical and online book sales without killing off the former, as possibilities for survival and the future design of physical books are up for speculation.

8. April was a bad month for video game sales, and while EA did well last year, investors didn’t like its weak outlook for this year. EA has big development plans, though its big investment in social gaming company Playfish hasn’t paid off yet, as a CityVille competitor has flopped.

9. Rovio had a huge year in 2011, thanks of course to Angry Birds and its one billion downloads, and the company is hoping to replicate that success with the new Amazing Alex. Zynga is also trying to recapture magic with a Farmville sequel. Zynga’s acquisition of Draw Something’s company doesn’t seem to be working out, but its cloud technology is apparently to be envied.

10. Some of the finer News for TV Majors posts from the past few weeks: Renewals/Cancellations/ Pickups, Request for Family Programming, Dish Ad Skipper, Aereo Warning, HBO No, TV Everywhere Trademark Fight, Dish Dropping AMC?, Just Cancel, Kutcher Ad Pulled, Online & TV Ad Buys, Nielsen on Viewing, Bloomberg Wins, Hulu Authentication Coming?, BSkyB Defending Itself, Murdoch Criticism, TV & Diversity.