Reading Notes: Interactive Documentary and Remix Culture

Digital Distribution, Participatory Culture and the Transmedia documentary.

Robert Greenwald - Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq war.

Movie depicted prominent intellegence experts taking Bush's team to task about the war in Iraq.

Greenwald made it successful by his partnership with online organizations such as MoveOn.Org and AlterNet - they created house parties for people to discuss.

This allowed Greenwald to make more films with this distribution plan. Outfoxed and Iraq for Salew.

From Tyron:

 Greenwald helped to give form to what I am calling the transmedia documentary, a set of nonfiction films that use the participatory culture of the web to enhance the possibilities for both a vibrant public sphere cultivated around important political issues and an activist culture invested in social and political change. 

This concept of transmedia documentary builds upon and partially reworks the nonfictional modes of representation that Bill Nichols (1991: p. 3) has associated with “the discourses of sobriety,” which operate under the assumption that non-fiction films

“can and should alter the world itself, they can effect action and entail consequences.”

More;

Although these new forms of participatory culture are often treated as revolutionary, they are grounded in a much longer history of activist media. In fact, as Michael Renov (2004: p. 10) points out, media activists in the 1960s, such as Newsreel, sought to solicit involvement from their viewers, creating texts that “were active and intended as participatory,” leading to wholesale re-evaluations of normal film and television techniques in order to equip viewers with the means of engaging in their own media criticism. Newsreel also took advantage of alternative distribution techniques, placing advertisements in alternative weeklies and holding screenings that served as fundraisers for organizations such as New York-based community radio station, 


more:
Despite these forms of documentary activism, it is less than clear what happens once these films engage viewers. In fact, a number of critics, including Micah White (2010), have argued that online petitions, what he calls “clicktivism,” have short-circuited more demanding forms of political activity, breeding passivity rather than producing active political participants. Although the transmedia documentary opens itself up to this risk, projects such as Zeiger’s and Greenwald’s help illustrate the potential for filmmakers to direct attention to a specific issue.

Films to think about :

An Inconvenient Truth, Food Inc, Murderball, The Age of Stupid, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, I want Your Money (ALL Follow this distribution model).