Of Media and Men
international thrillers full of espionage and scandal. However important your news may be, there’s always the question of whether people want to read it. The commercial lure of sensationalism is never far away. Mikala Krogh’s The Newsroom: Off the Record shows that dilemma from the inside. Krogh’s film captures the goings-on at a Danish tabloid whose readership is dwindling by the minute. And commercial media need to draw a crowd in order to survive. But what are the practical implications of this tension between sensationalism and journalistic integrity? Take CAPTIVATED The Trials of Pamela Smart by Jeremiah Zagar. Back in 1991, Smart’s trial was the first to be broadcast live and in its entirety. Smart was sentenced to life in prison for coercing four youths into killing her husband. The documentary investigates the influence of the media’s attention on the public and the course of justice. The audience couldn’t get enough of the scandal, sex, seduction and violence the media offered up. But the documentary dives below that surface: the presence of the cameras in itself influenced the proceedings, since those under surveillance change their behavior.
Creating an image In the end, the films in the program all center around creating an image. Take visual artist Aernout Mik’s installation of film Raw Footage, culled from “leftover images” of the war in former Yugoslavia. Soldiers loitering around, daily life – the reality that doesn’t make the news. Raw Footage is shown as part of the
Paradocs program curated by Mik (see page 179), which includes Johan Grimonprez’s prophetic film essay dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), on news as a media spectacle, and Sergei Loznitsa’s sober Maidan (2014), on the protest in Kiev that prompted the current Ukrainian conflict. The Internet promised to answer this pressure on traditional media from government and commerce by democratizing the news. This promise was partially fulfilled – for instance through WikiLeaks, or the role social media have played in civil uprisings. But Ali Akbarzadeh’s Killswitch warns us that the Internet is itself under siege. Akbarzadeh’s treatise places lone wolves such as Snowden, Kim Dotcom and the late whiz kid Aaron Swartz in opposition to the Big Brother of government and corporations, urging citizens to rise up for an open Internet, in the name of democracy. So perhaps we should look at new forms. Those are investigated in IDFA’s DocLab program, which this year includes interactive documentaries on Big Data and other forms of multimedia journalism through which independent documentary makers as well as traditional media like the Guardian, Al Jazeera and the New York Times are in the process of reinventing themselves. Three examples: Brett Gaylor’s interactive documentary Do Not Track, showcased as a work in progress, which traces our digital footprint; the installation Streaming Nation, which offers a bizarre alternative portrait of modern-day Russia through dashboard cameras and webcams; and the immersive journalism project Zero Point, in which Danfung Dennis (a former war photographer for the New York Times and an Oscar®-nominated documentary filmmaker) immerses the viewer in a 360-degree film image – a milestone in the development of virtual reality as a new visual language for documentary filmmakers and journalists alike. This program is supported by Foundation for Democracy and Media and Stimuleringsfonds voor de Journalistiek STIMULERINGS
FONDS VOOR DE
JOURNALISTIEK
CAPTIVATED
229