Do the problems of medium definition in a “post-cinema” age play out differently for documentary?
Longer post here…
I was intrigued by a recent Twitter conversation between Derek Kompare and Michael Newman about the at-times fuzzy distinction between cinema and television.
This conversation crystalizes many of the discussions going on in both media studies (about convergence) and film studies (about “post-cinema”). I haven’t dived fully into the scholarship, so forgive my trudging onto what’s possibly well-trodden ground, but I started wondering what this discussion might have to say about the festival documentary – and what documentary distribution might have to add to this discussion.
I’m inclined to side with Michael that the forms still hold a good deal of stability though I should provide a working definition of what I see these media to be in this context. I see “film”/”cinema as a kind of cluster concept around a few attributes: discrete temporality of aesthetic experience (often the feature length but can be shorter), single commodity of purchase or rental, initial/potential orientation to a theatrical audience, and lingering aesthetics inherited from the pre-digital years of cinema. It’s a cluster concept because not all of these attributed will necessarily be present. Television might similarly be a cluster concept: serial or episodic temporality, broadcast model, ad-based or subscription model, largely home viewing context, and (less frequently) video aesthetics.
On-demand video has emerged as an in-between complication and driver of the instability Derek is mentioning above. On the cinema side, movies are increasingly consumed on a subscription basis, whereas on-demand and home video have increasingly divorced television from the broadcast model.
Documentary cinema would seem to illustrate this well. Even more than fiction films, documentary films cannot sustain themselves economically with theatrical release, and on-demand and streaming distribution has been an important fact of the documentary mediascape. But this does not mean everything is blurred. Documentary distribution in Europe, where the film festival is such an important institution, might look schematically like this:
Again, this is schematic and deserves to be backed up with a more empirical look. And for the sake of discussion I’m collapsing theatrical and video distribution. But roughly, there is a heavy overlap between documentaries playing on the festival circuit and television broadcasts. Television channels (state or private) may commission such festival films or they may pick up broadcast rights at festival markets. There are some documentaries (often shorts, experimental work, or personal docs) which may be screened only at festivals or may have a theatrical or video release without a broadcast. There are also television documentaries (journalistic, nature, infotainment, etc) which have neither a festival run or a theatrical/video release.
To take a few examples of festival docs:
- Pipeline: funded by Czech television and production companies geared toward television broadcast, festival run, and DVD release via a niche distributor (Deckert)
- Chuck Norris vs. Communism: funded and ultimate broadcast by HBO Europe, strong festival run, Italian DVD release and US streaming on Netflix and VOD.
- The Grocer: produced by small production company KinoLab, festival run, unknown TV release, no video release.
Contrast the European context with the outlook in the U.S.
There are other important national contexts, of course, but these schema illustrate how the blurring-of-media is context specific. Despite some important film festivals, the festival circuit is much less important for documentary in the U.S., and a larger proportion of festival showings lack a television broadcast, theatrical run, or video release. I don’t know for sure how much bigger, if at all, theatrical and video release of documentary is in the U.S. but at the very least film and video distribution is robust. Netflix, for instance, has made a specialization out of documentary streaming. And a good number of theatrical docs do just fine without much festival or television play, though video release is still crucial.
This is a long-winded way to say that the blurring of TV, cinema, and video is a crucial fact of documentary distribution today. At the same time, there are significant areas of autonomy, especially in the festival-oriented context, much more so than in the context of for-profit entertainment fiction. Both conventional television and cinema-theatrical forms have a much greater autonomy and stability for documentary than for popular cinema and television.