The Mini-Documentary

5D MKII

The mini-documentary.

I started this by writing about the ubiquity of HD SLR and quick video portrait vignettes. All of that is old news. We all know you can shoot a documentary on a 5d MKII and as easily make it ready for Vimeo or Front Line in the same number of keystrokes. My wonder is, what does the ubiquity of the motion oriented story telling medium do for our identity within a globalized community? Is there something broader and more honest about pairing a short bit of one persons story with images and often music which is paired with it to create a specific mood. I first thought to myself, what is the difference between short documentary portrait and a news segment. Both are produced; both short; both information about contemporary issues. Then it occurred to me, if the purpose of documentary as a story telling medium, is to reflect who we are, and then help define who we can become, the nightly news does not do any such thing.

The historian in me looks at any form of story telling as a cultural artifact that reveals a modicum of truth about the world in which we live right now. Not truth with a capital T, but rather truth as interpreted and read into a work. In the introduction to Virtue, Commerce and History J.G.A. Pocock explores the role of texts as an interpretive community in which the truth lives as fleeting and changing as the truth of opinions. Each text takes on its own truth based on its constituents. To me that notion has truth with a capital T. Each perspective that is expressed in a documentary, whether opinion, fact, reinterpretation of truth, etc., carries its own honesty and within its own self is true. What makes this interpretive structure even more complicated within the realm of documentary is that we are dealing with not only words but images: exposure, frame rates, lighting; sound: voice overs, non-diegetic sound, ambient noise, music choices. Each of these aspects combines to create an emotional connection with the viewer and deepen the interpretive community in which that film, as a text, lives.

So do we as humans live in a world in which the new mini-documentary is a place which reflects who we are, and what we can be? Each time I open up Vimeo I'd like to think so.