“Welcome to the real world: the return of documentary film-making”
Enjoyably enough, I am featured in today’s edition of The Times, though I can’t help thinking I should drop the completely up-myself-sounding “theorist” moniker. It was always supposed to be a bit of a joke. (I once had business cards with ‘Licensed Theory Practitioner’, back when I used to do mostly nothing, printed on them.) Thanks to Jess Search, who obviously had a big hand in this. She needs a Wikipedia entry. I’m only upset that there isn’t more mention of the Peers, but more and more I learn that the traditional media finds concepts like collaboration difficult to deal with. Apologies.
… the good news is that, after a bleak period when reality television drained the life – and the money – out of the medium, the British documentary is fighting back. Jess Search, chief executive of the Channel 4 British Documentary Film Foundation, has been instrumental in supporting the industry and championing new talent through the tough times. Search, who is also chief executive of the Britdoc film festival, had a hand in successes such as In the Shadow of the Moon, Black Gold and We are Together…
JAMIE KING
The writer, theorist, activist and academic Jamie King came to documentary as the natural progression in a ten-year multidisciplinary body of work that explores the politics of information. His two documentaries about aspects of piracy, Steal this Film and Steal this Film II, are spirited, amusing assaults on the ivory tower of “intellectual property”. Screened in festivals around the world, but mainly, true to the spirit of the subject, downloaded from the internet, the two films have between them been seen by an estimated 4.2 million viewers.
“Steal this Film has had a lot of success, which made me realise the power of the audio-visual medium at this moment,” says King of his decision to embrace documentary. “The medium is the message, as McLuhan said. We’ve got the distribution mechanism and this very cheap means of production. We can do this without having to ask anybody.”
King, his collaborators and the Channel 4 British Documentary Film Foundation are developing an initiative that could revolutionise independent film-making. VoDo (short for voluntary donation) is an online payment system through which viewers would be able to donate directly to the artist whose work they had downloaded.
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“Television captured documentary and owned it for a while,” she says. “Documentary became synonymous with television. But while our television is still incredibly high-quality in terms of the craft skills, what has happened to the whole TV industry means that there are much narrower opportunities for expression. Our talent base is now turning to making independent and feature-length documentaries because that’s where you can give rein to creative expression.”
