Dossier Published in Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism

The UC Press Blog published the following discussion with Helen De Michiel and Patricia R. Zimmerman about their upcoming dossier in Afterimage.

View article at ucpress.edu.

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In its forthcoming March issue, Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism will publish a dossier entitled, “Co-creation in Documentary: Toward Multiscalar Granular Interventions Beyond Extraction” by Reece Auguiste, Helen De Michiel, Brenda Longfellow, Dorit Naaman, and Patricia R. Zimmermann. We asked Dossier contributors Helen De Michiel and Patricia R. Zimmermann to tell us more.

Why did you assemble a dossier on co-creation in documentary media practice for Afterimage?

PZ: We five have investigated the new documentary landscapes across different locations, platforms, and spaces for the last five years at the Visible Evidence Conferences on documentary. We have done traditional panels and interactive workshops to open discussion about these emerging co-creation documentaries.

HDM: We want to liberate documentary. Each of us has had adventures and transformational experiences working within a co-creative approach, from making participatory documentary projects to writing and teaching about them. We want to turn the old rules of “how-to’s” into strategic “how-about’s?”

What exactly is co-creation?

Patricia R. Zimmermann

HDM: Co-creation offers a conceptual map for deeper collaborative feeling and thinking together over time. With this approach, I let go of preconceived ideas. I might ask, “What are we noticing together?” This strategy offers a project a framework for ongoing transformative dialogue.

PZ: Co-creation moves from one director to many collaborators. It flips production processes from vertical hierarchies to myriad kinds of horizontal cooperation. It reimagines audiences as participants who generate ideas, images, stories.

How does co-creation deal with the issue of documentary ethics?

PZ: Ethics surges underneath all documentary practices. Who can make an image of whom? What meaning do these images have? How does that image circulate and how is it to be used? How do we do no harm to subjects? Can subjects become collaborators?

HDM: I can’t separate myself from ethical dilemmas. How can we pay more attention to relationships of hope, passion, and power hidden behind the screen? What are the individual and political dynamics that affect and interrupt the project outcome? How can we renegotiate control, meaning, and outcome? Co-creation threads these questions into its process.

Why is co-creation significant in the documentary media landscape?

HDM: Inquiry resides at the heart of the co-creative process. Why are certain forms of documentary sanctioned and not others? The co-creative approach requires courage to listen, and then to see where challenging conversations might lead. Communities, filmmakers, and partners can develop projects alive to their particular needs and desires, and bypass commercial corporate gatekeepers.

PZ: Although sidelined for auteurist work, co-creation forms a key sector of international documentary history. The histories of radical political media collectives infuse co-creation, such as with the Workers Film and Photo League (1930s), Newsreel (1970s), and the decades-long histories of community-based media.

Who contributed to the dossier?

Helen De Michiel

PZ: We are historians, makers, producers, programmers, theorists. Reece Auguiste, filmmaker and scholar, was a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective in the UK. Helen De Michiel has a decades-long career in documentary across analog and digital features, installations, and shorts. She used participatory practices in her episodic 2015 documentary, Lunch Love Community.

HDM: Patricia Zimmermann is a historian, theorist, and programmer specializing in documentary. Dorit Naaman is a scholar and a new media practitioner who produced the web project Jerusalem We Are Here (2016).Brenda Longfellow is a scholar and practitioner with a history in co-creation in her new media project Offshore (2013), and her current project on restorative justice.

Why does the dossier look at new media forms beyond festival/broadcast/theatrical documentary?

HDM: Creators all over the world model new media projects outside of traditional institutions, with non-traditional tools and in non-traditional spaces. This work and the questions it poses inspires our dossier’s “Fifty Speculations and Fifteen Unresolved Questions.”

PZ: Feature-length, highly resourced broadcast, festival, or theatrical works dominate the documentary golden age, adopting industrial genre conventions such as comedy, film noir, thriller. Documentary is a more expansive ecology of different approaches, forms, resources, and structures. Polyphonic new media opens up exciting intellectual and political questions.

HDM: Co-creation is wide-open fluid territory.

Why work as a team to write this dossier?

PZ: Co-creative documentary is global and vast. It mobilizes different engagement strategies that facilitate varying intensities of participation.

HDM: We start by asking “how about this?” We think alone when writing. Yet we imagine together in public what is possible. We honor our diverse histories and different documentary approaches. Awareness of these in-between spaces and connections sparks collaborative energy and drive.

PZ: It is polyphonic: a team with different backgrounds and approaches across history, practice, and theory can crack open more complexity.

How is co-creation different in terms of production, distribution, and exhibition?

HDM: For me, documentary is a permeable open artifact and not just a container for stories and messages. Co-creation invites change,fluidity, and growth. A complicated project might reach a coherent conclusion, or it may remain unfinished and fragmentary.

PZ: Co-creation media practices reconfigure and rewire production, distribution, and exhibition—dissolving distinctions. They are place-based and community driven. They circulate among communities or political groups outside of major festivals. Collaboration rather than narcissism drives it, but so do unresolved political issues such as climate disruption or gentrification.

HDM: This way of working interrogates and refocuses production, distribution, and exhibition practicalities.

Why isn’t co-creation taught in film and media schools?

PZ: For nearly four decades, I have taught in a large communications school. Programs default to American-white-male-centric-industrial models: auteurist, predictable, Western, vertically structured production values.

HDM: Branded individualism is alluring. To teach co-creative approaches means to question basic myths of cinema that a powerful singular imagination guides a finished work.

PZ: Neoliberal individualism infiltrates. Collaborative, community-based, participatory work is demonized. It does not secure students jobs. It’s too political.

HDM: Exposing students to design thinking, dialogue facilitation, and participatory community processes frees them to consider documentary as a starting point, rather than an end point.

What are your hopes for the dossier?

HDM: Our own co-creative experiences have made a strong impact on us. We hope to inspire others to consider, work with, and amplify these approaches.

PZ: Because the five essays and fifty speculations are short and accessible, we hope they will circulate widely. We’d like to see this dossier galvanize ongoing discussions about co-creation as a new possibility for new media documentary.

HDM: It’s time to develop a new body of co-creative ideas and strategies that make sense for everyone interested in exploring new directions for documentary in the twenty-first century.

Letter from Hangzhou

My friend, a film historian and veteran of several speaking visits to China told me, “always remember that nothing there is ever as it appears to you.”

My conversation with her took place in June, just as I was getting ready for a trip to Hangzhou to participate in The Face-To-Face 2019 International Documentary Education Forum, a three-day event convened by the Communications University of Zhejiang.           

This was the month that brought the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising, daily, massive, radical street demonstrations in Hong Kong, the abrupt cancellation of Guan Hu’s mega World War II epic The Eight Hundred at the Shanghai International Film Festival, and ongoing political brinksmanship between China and the United State.

None of this news was officially being reported in China.

 
Against a backdrop of escalating geopolitical disorder, and the Communist Party’s technologically-enabled suppression of free speech, ten of us -- filmmakers and professors -- arrived from Europe, the US, Japan, Korea and India curious to engage with colleagues from universities and art schools around China. From the one-page description in the invitation, I understood that the conference organizers wanted to bring together foreign and Chinese documentarians and educators to exchange ideas and methods for teaching documentary.

A month before the conference, I had to submit the slides and video I would be showing. When I settled into my university hotel room, it was necessary to download three different VPNs, which helped me obtain what I called my western internet in order to gain access to Google, news outlets, and my personal email. Although it looked like there was wifi on my devices, I discovered that I could never predict when my internet would go live for an hour here and there, day or night. From the random wifi connection to facial recognition imaging and fingerprint scans at the airport, to security checkpoints in the subway and train stations, I quickly noticed how ordinary Chinese citizens cannot avoid being enmeshed in the cold, distant gaze of government surveillance.

Travel has a way of making you pay attention to small circumstances that make sense of the larger context. Since nothing was what I thought it to be, I realized that the Forum gathering was going to be an experience in doublethink, holding two completely plausible, yet basically unreal perspectives at the same time.

Our University hosts were gracious and hospitable, eager to answer questions and help us understand what we were doing there. Our young conference liaison told us in English that the university had designed the event to expand students’ awareness of the professional documentary world outside the classrooms. Yet, everyone also understood that the government was continuing to crack down hard on independent cinema, and especially documentary. Where could there be space for honest cross-cultural discussions about documentary truth, justice, freedom of expression or -- government censorship?

 We were transported to a state-of-the-art broadcast theater, on the 22nd floor of the Communications building, surrounded by wall-to-wall hi-definition digital screens. Around thirty students were in the audience at any one time, watching and listening to the presentations. I wanted to know what they were constantly texting on their phones while on the We Chat app – back-channeling or boredom? Others were working as event videographers and photographers, their cameras recording constantly -- from presentations to tea breaks. Watching them, I wondered where these recordings would circulate and how we would be understood as performers in this production.

Two young translators sat in their booth at the back of the theater, simultaneously translating for both the English and Chinese speakers. Opening the event, university officials praised conference organizers for their “dedication to media education, and to delivering prosperity, good works, awards, and global recognition for their students.”

 Hong Kong-based filmmaker Ruby Yang then screened My Voice, My Life, her feature documentary that follows a group of troubled urban adolescents managing important life changes while performing in a musical production in Hong Kong. The film presented youthful creativity and passion as a force for freedom, joy, and inspired expression. Its message and spirit, offered by one of only a few featured Chinese women filmmakers at the Forum, inhabited the invisible and suppressed substrate of the event. Other films chosen and approved for screening on the following evenings included Gary Byung-Seok Kam’s Planet of Snail and Zhou Hao’s Cotton.

With clockwork efficiency, the next two days moved along through highly orchestrated content presentations. In the morning roundtable, the international and Chinese film teachers were each given ten minutes to comment on documentary film education. During this three-hour listening session, the international visitors discussed personal expression, bearing witness in social contexts, developing young filmmakers’ voices, and artistic freedom to ask difficult and unresolved questions about the documentary in a global framework.

 It was chilling to watch and try to make sense of how the Chinese educators framed their remarks. These distinguished filmmakers, who have lived with, and suffered from direct censorship of their work, avoided discussion about how documentary education is impacted by increasing government suppression of freedom of speech. Talk was careful and gently calibrated – a call for more diverse circulation among universities of films for students to see and study; the wish to encourage students to explore hidden emotions and engage with the textures and ideas around everyday life in their culture. This was in direct contrast to the official position offered by several other respondents, that students use documentary media as an instrument to promote government-sanctioned Chinese culture, values, and propaganda, both within the country and globally.

One filmmaker-professor rhetorically asked the group, “what are the masks we have to remove?” The participants knew what he was asking, yet no one dared to directly respond in public. It would be too dangerous.

The masks would not be removed during this 2019 Forum, even with the most inspired spirits coursing behind the big digital screens. When I spoke during the Open Class session about Open Space New Media Documentary practice, I gave it as a specific North American example. Could it be replicated in China? No one in the audience asked that question. If someone had brought it up in public, we would have needed to discuss the cost of self-censorship, democracy, alternative voices, community participation, conflict, and ethics of the documentary form.

Overnight I found myself implementing doublethink. The foreign visitors’ presentations were technical and craft-oriented. In the 30-minute sessions, the university audience could learn a little about the how-to’s of film subtitling, working as a creative producer in an international arena, using interactive online tools and platforms, and entering global educational distribution. When the Chinese producers, working for CCTV, showcased clips and power points about their educational series on artisanal crafts, food culture, nature, and science, they promoted them as superior storytelling in direct contrast to western value systems. The presentation format did not allow us to ask questions across cultural and political divides, nor openly explore unsettling debates among the Chinese filmmakers, students and international visitors. 

A verbal exchange around complicated ideas, questions and issues facing documentary practice and education in China, other Asian countries, and the West never happened at this conference. There remained a huge, dark gap between us. In the provocative image of Professor Perry Link, “the anaconda in the chandelier” was watching. Everyone was aware that the Communist Party, like the giant snake, was hovering above us. We would not know if and when it would strike. We witnessed what our hosts and students must cope with: the requirement to submit to the “dragon seal” of government approval to distribute and show your films, self-censoring so your online postings will not be “harmonized” (i.e. deleted) if your words are considered critical, or having your “social points” removed online if your behaviors or expressions are charged as unruly by government standards.

In 2019, the university is no longer a liminal, somewhat protected environment for creative inquiry and diverse perspectives as it had been, even in the recent past. The state funds the university. Professors answer to administrators, who answer to party officials. The market is king, and surveillance capitalism rules what can and cannot be shown and discussed.

I could simply observe and try to grasp a few pieces of this enormous puzzle -- not as a Chinese media specialist, but as an American filmmaker navigating this experience for the first time. For the students at the Communications University, their options in this moment of extreme government censorship are stark: try to enter the commercial Chinese film industry, work for CCTV making high end, safe propaganda financed by the state, or face potential career destruction, exile, or prison if choosing to make independent, and independently distributed, truth-seeking documentaries.  

Korean filmmaker and presenter, Gary Byung-Seok Kam explained his point of view on the Forum’s purpose: another way for the Chinese government to strengthen its nationalistic cultural policy, and expand its market base and influence in Asia and beyond. I left Hangzhou hoping that our Chinese colleagues in attendance will protect all the video recordings, and re-purpose some of our ideas for how documentary can set the stage for social change, and recalibrate them for their students.

Later that week in Shanghai I met a few independent documentary filmmakers. They told me that they take a long view. They are continuing to quietly make the films they want to make, with no funding or distribution options, and minus the dragon seal of approval by the communist censors. They hold firm in their belief that this is a transitional moment. Citizen pressure is sparking across the cultural map – from Hong Kong to the mainland – and change will come again.

At the Face To Face 2019 International Documentary Forum we inadvertently cast out seeds for change to Chinese youth. If nothing is as it appears to be, then it is impossible now to predict how this new generation of students will nurture and grow those seeds from 2019 -- and once again, struggle to bring forth a new era in Chinese independent documentary film.