“It’s happening again. The documentary, long underappreciated for its transformational impact on film form, is again offering new ways of representing and intervening in the world. Only this time, rather than simply using new techniques to represent social change, the documentary form is itself the subject of social and technological change. Documentary marks the place where our representational endeavors come face-to-face with reality. Little wonder that Vertov’s attempts to position film as part of a social network remain so relevant, and that Direct Cinema and Cinema Verite’s efforts to redefine the filmmaker-subject relationship had such a large impact. Today, at a moment when location-aware mobile phones equipped with HD video cameras are nearly ubiquitous, when networked computers have broken the distribution bottleneck, and when game play, crowd-sourcing and the social turn have redefined media practice and enabled widespread participation, documentary makers have been quick to respond. This chapter will explore the implications of these new voices; of new, playful, interactive organizational logics; and the new social and political enablements of the documentary form…all of which can be traced back to a set of technological transformations crystallized in the mobile phone…”
“Repenser le documentaire social” in Laurence Allard, Laurent Creton, Roger Odin, eds., Téléphone mobile et création (Paris: Armand Colin/Recherches, 2014).
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