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'Natural Enemies'?: Narrative and Database call a truce in Gaza-Sderot
Introduction
The interactive web-documentary Gaza-Sderot –Life in Spite of Everything (2008) depicts the everyday lives of people in two neighbouring yet conflicting cities –the one Palestinian, the other Israeli. In doing so, it draws on two distinct media forms that emerge from quite different technologies: the linear narratives of documentary film and the interactivity of the computer database. The distance between these forms is, many would argue, even greater than the three kilometres separating the subjects of Gaza and Sderot, and it is in the language of war and conflict that their relationship is often described. For Lev Manovich (2001, p.225), they are nothing less than ‘natural enemies’ while Thomas Elsaesser (1998, p.21) talks about documentary becoming the ‘first casualty’ of the internet platform. As a professional documentary producer, I share many of the concerns about what happens to documentary when it is disassembled for ‘users’ to interactively navigate. But, Gaza-Sderot appears to offer some hope of a peaceful resolution: just as it challenges the prejudice, fear and hatred between two conflicting communities, so too it challenges some of our assumptions about the ‘natural enemies’ of narrative and database.
The Fragmentation of Narrative
At the core of the disquiet about the very possibility of ‘interactive documentary’ is a fear that coherence is lost and understanding diminished through the fragmentation of narrative. For Craig Hight, for example, the ‘digital documentary’ challenges ‘narrative and argument that are of such central concern to documentary practice’, producing nothing more than ‘“splinters’’ of documentary modes’ (2008, p.6). Sequences of events, the development of characters, the rational exposition of arguments are all supposedly shattered by the remediation of documentary as an interactive experience. Allied to these fears is another assault on enlightenment orthodoxy: the sanctity of the author as sole voice of creation. Authorship thus becomes ‘shared’ or ‘collaborative’ or, at the very least, is relegated to the role of designing the parameters of an ‘experience’. The interactive hypertext ‘arranges the world as a non-hierarchical system’ (Manovich, 2001, p.65) where any component part, scattered over a database, can at the behest of the user be placed into a relationship with any other component part. Power is divested from the author and invested in the ‘user’, who navigates at will to produce her/his own unique experience.
These concerns about interactive documentary - the loss of coherence and the loss of authorship - feed into two particular strands of thought that are associated with discussions of ‘post-modernity’. They are worth touching upon here because they are as much in danger of clouding as illuminating any discussion about the meeting of narrative and database. On the one hand, there is a series of claims made about the empowering potential of the dissolution of grand narratives (Lyotard, 1979), the fragmentation of history and the flattening of hierarchy. And these have often found expression in discussions about the Internet which is seen as organic, non-hierarchical, democratic, and collective. We are all ‘users’ now, actively participating to negotiate and endlessly reconstruct meaning from the splintered fragments of past media content. One particular expression of this emanates from the technological determinism of Marshall McLuhan (1967). Another is Henry Jenkins’ (2008) articulation of the notion of ‘collective intelligence’.
On the other hand, the same phenomena have provoked more critical concern about the loss of connection with an external reality –particularly a concern for Marxists like Fredric Jameson, who sees it as an extended form of reification (Jameson, 1984). Similarly, Guy Debord describes it as the ‘society of spectacle’ in which ‘the image has become the final form of commodity reification’ (cited in Jameson, 1984, p.66). Umberto Eco (1986) employs the concept of ‘hyperreality’ in which real things are replaced by fakes that become more absolutely real than the originals to which they refer. Jean Baudrillard similarly argues that reality has been replaced by simulations –simulacra- which precede and determine the real: ‘It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real’ (Baudrillard, 1988, p.167). Again, the Internet is seen as one of the sites to evince these claims and, even more specifically, they appear in discussions about what happens to film when it meets the web. According to Alexandra Juhasz (2008, p.305), for example, documentaries on You Tube are stripped of knowledge, theory and context and reduced to ‘distractions or parentheses from daily life: kittens, comedians, clips already aired’. In the process, and in contrast to the claims of what Tiziana Terranova (2008) describes as the ‘idealistic cyberdrool of the digerati’, such content is robbed of all radical potential and becomes, instead, disempowering.
Neither of these conceptions of the Internet, as either a site for reality to be negotiated and renegotiated through the participation of amateur ‘users’, or as a hall of mirrors in which reality and self are lost, provide much solace to documentary authors seeking to produce coherent representations of reality. The resultant sense of panic that this engenders is further fuelled by an emphasis in studies of new media forms on phenomena such as Virtual Reality, immersive fantasy games and the use of compositing to create experiences that are deliberately abstracted from an external reality rather than referring to it - in the way that John Grierson, for example, saw documentary as the ‘creative treatment of actuality’ (Grierson,1933, p.8). For documentary scholar, Bill Nichols, the impact of compositing (the digital manipulation of images), for example, amounts to nothing less than a ‘nuclear explosion’ for the documentary (Nichols, 1993, p.56).
Gaza-Sderot as Conventional and Linear
In contrast to this apocalyptic vision, time spent with the people of Gaza-Sderot suggests that reports of the death of the documentary may have been exaggerated. It is in many respects disarmingly conventional and familiar, not least in its choice of subject matter. The troubled relationship between Israelis and Palestinians is surely a weighty enough topic to be considered part of documentary’s traditional stomping ground? And the decision to approach this topic through the metaphor of two neighbouring but divided cities seems an ordinary enough framing for such a story. A familiar observational style is then drawn upon to produce a series of short (two minute) films about the everyday lives of fourteen characters, seven selected from each city: including farmers, shopkeepers, students and housewives. As the subtitle of the film (Life in Spite of Everything) suggests, the editorial intent is to show the lives of ordinary people living in extraordinary circumstances; characterized by bombings, blockades, food shortages and threats to sovereignty.
Gaza-Sderot makes the same implicit claims about its representation of reality as any ‘regular’ documentary film: these are actual people, filmed in their actual environment and represented as fairly and honestly as possible, while the claim to impartiality and balance is implicit in the equal coverage given to citizens from each side of the border. The component sequences of Gaza-Sderot are utterly conventional, presenting nothing new to the viewer in terms of style, and (maybe deliberately) steering clear of techniques such as dramatization, reconstruction or use of digital compositing (not even colour correction, as far as can be seen) which continue to be areas of controversy even within conventional documentary practice. The work involved in producing these films equates to that of more conventional documentary projects: it requires the same research to identify a cross-section of interesting characters, the same skills in building a rapport with these characters and gaining access to their lives, the same production and post-production work in producing meaningful sequences.
The idea that web-documentaries are no respecters of linear narrative is also undermined by Gaza-Sderot. The films were first ‘broadcast’ on the website, two at a time, in daily instalments over a ten week period, within a day of them being shot. Watched in this way, the films showed developments in the characters’ lives as they unfolded –each week bringing a new story about each of the characters. Individually, each of the eighty films also follow a simple temporal path: take as an example the story of Palestinian pharmacist, Amjad Dawahidy, who walks to the bakery in the early morning, joins the bread queue, waits and chats until buying his bread, then walks home to prepare breakfast for his children. Of course, once the films had been uploaded, they accumulated, became part of a database and could be accessed and navigated at will, irrespective of their original temporal situation. Gaza-Sderot doesn’t discourage this reassembling of content - indeed, it explicitly proclaims that ‘users will have a personal, interactive and non-linear access’ (Gaza-Sderot web-page) - but it is surprisingly meticulous in remaining temporally aware. Each of the eighty films is dated, however they are accessed, and, within the ‘Time’ view of the site, are triggered by clicking on a linear graphical time-line which runs vertically through the screen, top to bottom from October 26th to December 23rd 2008. (There is even a short ‘tutorial’ at the opening of the programme which demonstrates how to use the timeline.) Users are thus free to navigate this time-line in any order but are also compelled to acknowledge and make explicit the way in which they disrupt time. Cataclysmic fears about the consequences of fragmenting and disassembling linear narratives begin to look overly pessimistic when, as in this case, the fragments retain these markers of their place in time and such little effort is required to reassemble and reintegrate them.
Analogue Thinking in Digital Documentary
It’s tempting, then, to conclude that linear narrative is an essential and inescapable characteristic of the documentary form and that Gaza-Sderot’s success lies in incorporating a strong temporal linearity in order to overcome and compensate for a weakness in the database technology it employs –it’s fragmentary, interactive and anti-montage tendencies. Much of the writing about interactivity within the documentary field would support this. Michael Renov (1996), for example, emphasizes the importance of retaining the ‘ordering of the real’ in interactive narrative. Similarly, Michael Nash salvages the central role of linear narrative by pointing out that jumping from one place to another does not equate with ‘non-narrative’ (Nash, 1996, p.392). What Gaza-Sderot does with time, then, is little more alarming than spooling through a film, slow and fast-forwarding a video cassette or selecting chapters on a DVD. What this literature tends to do is to look at interactive documentary as a bastard form of documentary proper, applying standards and aesthetics that are firmly grounded in documentary film and cinematic language. An example of this analogue thinking is a paper by Melahat Hosseini and Ron Wakkary (2004) which rather pedantically, point by point, compares web-documentaries with attributes of the documentary suggested by Bill Nicholls to see how they measure up to the ‘real’ thing: ‘The goal of the paper is to develop a methodological framework for analyzing Web documentaries based on current film theory’ (Hosseini, Wakkary, 2004, p.1). While some aspects of the web-documentary are found to conform, the cinematic language they employ inevitably lacks the vocabulary to talk about other crucial aspects, such as a screen that also operates as a menu, and therefore fails to account for these –except in terms of their non-conformity.
It’s worth looking in some detail at another example of a web-documentary to see just how far this analogue, linear, thinking has been forced onto digital, interactive, documentaries and the difficulties this can create in producing as well as analysing them. If we later make a comparison with Gaza-Sderot, it serves to suggest that the computer database brings genuinely new qualities and attributes to the documentary process that cannot be resolved through conventional cinematic language alone but instead require a new, hybrid, aesthetic.
The Wrong Crowd: Inside the Family Outside the Law (2003), by Australian documentary producer and academic Debra Beattie, takes an avowedly ‘cinematic approach’ (Beattie, 2008, p.76). In order to make a ‘particular historical argument’ about police corruption in Queensland, and her personal experience of the ramifications of it, as both child and adult, Beattie (while in principle allowing users to disassemble the history she constructs) seeks to ‘maintain an overall coherence as a logical argument’(Beattie, 2008, p.67). She tries to achieve this through the operation of a concept of ‘suture’; ‘providing an open-ended storyline but all operating within a consciousness that inherently constructs a temporal “suture”’(Beattie, 2008, p.75). In other words, even if users access individual film clips out of their intended sequence, she implicitly relies on their knowledge of cinematic language to mentally stitch these back together in a coherent fashion. In practice, the reliance on cinematic language is even more explicit: while it is possible to navigate along several possible paths (filmed ‘scenes’, supporting ‘notes’, or ‘storyboards’), these paths run parallel, are sequentially numbered to correspond with each other and contain ‘previous’ and ‘next’ buttons –clearly indicating that there is a correct route to be followed. This is confirmed within the ‘scenes’ interface, which has an ‘auto’ mode to allow the scenes to be played one after another, in a set order. What emerges is an entirely cinematic experience, with a ‘manual’ mode that does little more than add accompanying notes and images and allows the user/viewer to navigate the documentary in the ‘wrong’ order, should they choose to ignore the clear, linear signposting. It leaves the viewer wondering why it wasn’t made as a film in the first place and what advantage is gained by its reformulation as an interactive experience.
This cinematic approach only serves to highlight the ‘inadequacies’ of web-based documentaries by setting them up for a fall from the outset. Why establish a linear story-line, then disassemble it, and finally re-link it by numbers for amateur users to piece together again? It’s like expecting a masterpiece of art to emerge from a painting-by-numbers kit! This dependence on cinematic language is hardly surprising, however. For Lev Manovitch, it has not only dominated our ways of seeing for almost a century, but ‘has found a new life as the toolbox of the computer user’ (Manovich, 2001. p.86): ‘cinematic ways of seeing the world, of structuring time, of narrating a story, of linking one experience to the next, have become the basic means by which computer users access and interact with all cultural data’ (Manovich, 2001,p.78-9). An obvious example of this would be the way in which computer games maintain the ‘one-point linear perspective’ through mimicry of the pans, tilts and zooms of a camera. The rectangular cinema screen becomes the rectangular human-computer-interface; both frames offering a window onto the world which assumes the existence of a ‘more vast scenographic space’ outside it (Jacques Aumont et al, 1992, p.13) ‘In short, what was cinema is now the human-computer interface’ (Manovich, 2001, p. 86). The key difference, however, is that the graphical HCI, a product of the database structure to which it provides access and control, ‘divides the computer screen into a set of controls with clearly delineated functions’(Manovich, 2001, p.90). ‘As a result, the computer screen becomes a battlefield for a number of incompatible definitions –depth and surface, opaqueness and transparency, image as illusory space and image as instrument for action’ (Manovich, 2001, p.90). Beattie’s ‘cinematic approach’ to web-documentary in The Wrong Crowd is wrong-footed because it seeks to resolve this battle through force of cinematic illusionism. It is telling that the ‘scenes’ are played not as windows within an HCI but in full-screen imitation of cinema. This serves only to exacerbate this fundamental tension within the computer interface in which ‘the subject is forced to oscillate between the roles of viewer and user, shifting between perceiving and acting, between following the story and actively participating in it’ (Manovich, 2001, p.207). It suggests the need to explore new, more genuinely hybrid, forms that negotiate these tensions in creative ways and for an aesthetic that takes account of this constant shifting between action and representation, database and narrative, ‘these two fundamentally different and ultimately incompatible approaches’ (Manovich, 2001, p. 90).
Non-linear Narrative in Gaza-Sderot
Gaza-Sderot acknowledges these tensions in a much more overt way; seeking to integrate action and representation within the same interface. In the ‘Time’ view, for example, where the screen is split between films from Gaza and films from Sderot, the hyperlink timeline (rather than simply presenting possibilities for action) also becomes part of a representation. By graphically forming the ‘border’ between the two ‘sides’ it performs a narrative function - delineating the relationship between and inviting comparison of the experiences of people across its splitting of the screen. Crucially, it does this by establishing a spatial relationship between the two sides. The timeline not only functions to offer, as an option for action, a linear narrative, but produces a spatial narrative that represents the relationship between the ‘windows’ of the interface. This arrangement neatly resolves a danger inherent in the HCI that users may open more and more windows without establishing any conceptual tension between them. In Gaza-Sderot, the spatial arrangement of these windows, the juxtaposition and comparison of the lives of people living in two cities, becomes a central part of the documentary message. Rather than being an accident of simultaneity, it is a meaningful, editorial act which harnesses the specific qualities of the medium to propel the documentary project.
Moving the mouse from one side of the split screen to the other, crossing the timeline border, triggers the playing of that film but leaves the other intact as a freeze frame. The spatial relationship between the two windows is maintained even while only one is playing. And by moving between the two windows, playing and stopping each in turn, the user is (by governing the relationship between shots) performing a form of montage. In one respect, it represents something akin to traditional, linear ‘parallel editing’–where two parallel stories are intercut, back and forth- and this model is reinforced by the knowledge that both of the sequences were shot on the same day and are more or less contemporaneous. However, the crucial difference from traditional editing is that shots that would normally follow each other in time are here set side by side in space. For Lev Manovich, it is this spatial montage –or ‘montage within a shot’ – that characterises the new language of cinema: ‘The logic of replacement, characteristic of cinema, gives way to the logic of addition and co-existence’ (Manovich, 2001, p325).
Gaza-Sderot goes on to more fully explore this new, spatial language of cinema in another viewing mode called ‘Maps’. Here, the films are located on two searchable satellite images, either side of the timeline. Individual stories are thus placed in geographical relation to each other rather than along the timeline, which instead functions to show the elapsed time of each film as it is played. In other words, the temporal dimension still figures, even in this highly spatialized interface. The ‘maps’ interface mimics a particular sub-genre of documentary –the ‘journey’ or travelogue.
Another interface, ‘Faces’, explores another facet of documentary; an ‘observational’ or ‘docu-soap’ approach that follows characters over time, tracing developments in their lives. Here, the faces of the fourteen characters are arranged either side of the timeline/border. Clicking on any one opens a menu of films about the characters, arranged in chronological order but accessible in any sequence. Again, time is part of the organisational framework but it is the characters that are highlighted in this mode.
Finally, a fourth viewing mode, ‘Topics’, organises the films around themes as diverse as ; ‘bombing’, ‘dreams’, ‘sport’, ‘music’, ‘co-existence’ and ‘weddings’. These are not ordered or prioritized but again arranged on either side of the ‘border’, opposite each other where the themes correspond; again inviting comparison of the experiences of both groups of people.
These different modes of viewing mimic the way in which documentary organises its material along many more lines than just the temporal one: taking journeys, following characters, exploring themes. The way in which Gaza-Sderot is able to facilitate these different organisational structures highlights and is a product of its database nature –playing to the strengths of the medium in which it operates. Database, here, is far from a problem to be overcome in order to achieve coherence (as it is in The Wrong Crowd). In each of its modes, Gaza-Sderot is able to make sense of its material and produce coherent experiences by carefully establishing spatial and other relationships between its component films, and this doesn’t seem to be dependent on temporal linearity.
Rediscovering Non-linear Narrative
But is it narrative? Not in the narrow sense that events are linked along a linear temporal path, but that would be to ignore other, long established facets of storytelling like description and the mapping of landscapes. Jon Dovey, for example, argues that these have been ‘obscured by a reliance on linguistically derived textual criticism’ and that ‘hypertextuality allows these qualities of narrative to be brought more sharply into focus’. The ‘new language of cinema’ that Lev Manovich talks about is thus less a new language than a forgotten or marginalized one. For Manovich, the sequential narrative of mainstream, and especially Hollywood, cinema is historically and culturally specific rather than a necessity of the form. In The Language of New Media, he compellingly charts the history of a spatialized narrative from Renaissance frescoes, through to 17th century Dutch painters (drawing on the work of Svetlana Alpers (1993)) and onto what is for him an important moment in cinema history: Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera (1929) which he claims successfully integrated temporal and spatial narratives into a genuinely new form. Even though this form
was never fully explored by filmmakers, it still finds expression in the work of some directors such as Peter Greenaway.
This other tradition also persists in another sense that emerges if we think of cinema as a process, rather than an end product or text. Jon Dovey describes how conventional linear film always starts out with the ‘hypertextual association of possibilities; a pattern of images and ideas which gradually, through the process itself, takes on a more or less linear form’ (Dovey, 2002, p.137). Through the process of editing, a single trajectory through a database of shot material emerges. Thus for Manovich, ‘cinema already exists right at the intersection between database and narrative’(Manovich, 2001, p.237). What makes new media new, in this regard, is simply that the interactivity of database structures allows these ‘hypertextual associations’ to be more fully explored, for them to co-exist as options, and that they engage the user in the process of constructing a narrative, rather than it being fixed by professional producers. Gaza-Sderot, for example, allows ‘associations’ based on geographical location, the development of character, and the exploration of themes, as well as locating events in time. Though the parameters are set, the user is placed in something akin to the position of an editor, assembling their ‘programme’ from a number of sequences. Indeed, it is striking that the layout of ‘Gaza-Sderot’ should so closely resemble the user interface of a software editing programme such as Avid or Final Cut.
Such programmes also provide a useful analogy for thinking about what the object of study is in new media forms. In these ‘non-linear’ editing programmes, the shots that are loaded into and stored on the computer database exist as media files that can be retrieved and viewed and cut together. The ‘film’ itself exists only as a series of instructions that refer to the media contained on the database; but not as an object in itself. In other words, the database is material but narrative is dematerialised. That isn’t to say there is no narrative, but the object of study becomes the sum of all the possible narrative trajectories through a database of stored media. It calls for a new ‘info-aesthetics’, according to Manovich, that can provide ‘a theoretical analysis of the aesthetics of information access as well as the creation of new media objects that “aestheticize” information processing’ (Manovich, 2001, p.217).
Digital Documentary as Evolutionary and Hybrid
Certainly, new media represents a challenge to the way in which we previously thought about storytelling and demands new ways of thinking about it, but the picture that emerges from our examination is characterized by complex conjunctions and continuities of tradition rather than disjuncture. Clearly, computer and film are very different technologies and privilege particular (spatial and temporal) story-telling strategies. But it also appears that each of these strategies exists within the other, rather than being mutually exclusive. Lev Manovich may be right to describe modern media as ‘the new battlefield for the competition between database and narrative’ (Manovich, 2001, p.234) but it is not a battle in which one claims victory over the other. Rather, it is characterized by ongoing and unresolved, but potentially creative, tensions. Database and narrative may trade blows every so often, but we should think of them as old sparring partners.
The idea that database defeats narrative exists in, and is perpetuated by, the two strands of thought we examined earlier: the first sees the fragmentation of narrative and loss of authorship produced by new media as full of emancipatory promise: the second fears disempowerment through the loss of connection to a reality that can be represented and challenged. Both are predicated on a belief that the digital represents a revolutionary break, a paradigmatic shift, the victory of one discourse over another. Once we remove this rather unhelpful notion of radical shift and instead begin to think about the changes wrought on narrative by the database in evolutionary terms - the evolution and development of older forms and the development of new hybrids - the distance and conflict between them is diminished. The very narrow view of cinematic language applied in Debra Beattie’s The Wrong Crowd, for example, demands that narrative wins, but in Gaza-Sderot, which rediscovers and deploys other narrative strategies, a truce is called for.
Analogue thinking alone cannot be expected to produce convincing digital narratives that resolve the tensions between database and narrative. Gaza-Sderot’s success lies in its hybridity. In its ‘time’ interface, for example, Gaza-Sderot cleverly combines two forms of montage, two forms of narrative: both the spatial and the temporal –arguably achieving a balance between the two, with neither one privileged over the other. That the designers of the interface should use a hyperlink timeline to also graphically express a spatial relationship is no accident but a calculated conceit. Writers including Dovey (2002) have frequently characterized the temporal and spatial dimensions in terms of horizontal and vertical axis. Here, the horizontal temporal axis is wittingly and wittily upended to define a spatial relationship. And as Dovey notes, ‘successful narratives occur when the spatial and the temporal axes are both functioning’ (Dovey, 2002, p.143).
This successful conjoining of narrative forms in Gaza-Sderot is based on a deep understanding by its producers of the forms it seeks to hybridise but also on an awareness that the language of new hybrid media are negotiated, and evolve, in tandem with their audiences. As Manovich points out, interactivity shouldn’t be thought of as the physical interaction between an interface and button-pressing users but as a cognitive process (Manovich, 2001, p232). The pace of evolution in form is dictated not so much by technology but by the ability of audiences to recognise, internalise and command their languages. Gaza-Sderot speaks to an audience that is familiar with both the conventions of film and the conventions of Human Computer Interfaces and, by achieving a balanced amalgam of these, it is experienced as ‘natural’, ‘normal’ and recognisable. In contrast, The Wrong Crowd becomes an unsatisfactory and frustrating experience because it applies a strictly ‘cinematic approach’ but then struggles to meet our expectations of this. It also fails to acknowledge the new ‘aesthetics of density’ that Manovich (2001, p.237) talks about, in which audiences are increasingly capable of multi-tasking between multiple windows. Instead it reverts, wherever possible, to the singular screen of cinema. Gaza-Sderot is not afraid to draw on conventions from cinema; it even employs the classic rolling end credits (white text on black) on its ‘About this programme’ page. But it also draws on other conventions that are recognisable to its audience; in particular, the multi-media CD-Rom with its mix of text, image and film clips. Indeed, Manovich (2001, p.314) suggests that, in retrospect, we may want to think of early multi-media titles ‘as the beginning of digital cinema’s new language’.
The Author is Alive and Well
This deep awareness of form and of audience/user cognition doesn’t suggest a loss of authorship, or an erosion of the distinction between producer and user. There isn’t a single auteur of Gaza-Sderot; it is very much the product of collaboration – but then so too are films. There is, however, a strong authorial voice throughout this interactive documentary. The user may choose her/his path through the database, but these paths are clearly delineated and signposted by the producers. Even the idea that grand narrative is eroded by these database forms is in question: in Gaza-Sderot, the overarching (though never iterated) grand narrative arguably lies in the repeated comparison of ordinary lives in both cities that is central to the structure of the piece. There is the implicit statement that ‘whatever the political differences and competing nationalisms of these people, they share similar goals, fears, and hopes because what ties them together is their humanity’. And although a conventional political analysis of the Palestinian-Israeli issue is never broached, that in itself, is a political stance of sorts. It is almost inevitable that time spent with Gaza-Sderot will lead us to question the politics of competing ethnicities and nationalisms. Indeed, that it doesn’t have to spell this out but relies on drawing the user into an experience from which they will reach their own conclusions may make it a more radically powerful project than many conventional documentaries.
Conclusion
The threat to documentary form posed by database approaches that is perceived by many writers within the documentary field is unwarranted. In Gaza-Sderot, the ‘natural enemies’ of database and narrative find a peaceful co-existence through a carefully authored integration of both temporal and spatial narrative. Confronted with Gaza-Sderot, my own hostility to the idea that documentary can be made in any way other than as a linear film has been forced to beat a hasty retreat. I am even tempted to propose that this is the way documentaries were meant to be made all along and that only now have they found their true medium. Database narratives offer unprecedented opportunities to represent the world in all its true complexity: spreading the documentarian net wider to explore shades and subtleties and layers of association; freeing it from the constraints of a forced route-march through landscape, history and argument. If as authors we have to step back a little and let people find their own way, in their own time, so be it. The journey may be richer for it.
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