Documentary in the Age of COVID

Figures

Figure 1.1: Visual Haiku created for Corona Haikus – images and words by Alex Tzavella.

Figure 1.2: Visual Haiku created for Corona Haikus – images and words by Tereza Stehlikova.

Figure 1.3: Visual Haiku created for Corona Haikus – images and words by Tereza Stehlikova, comment by Sandra Gaudenzi (2.2).

Figure 1.4: Visual Haikus created for Corona Haikus – images and words by Laurence Finet.

Figure 1.5: Visual Haikus created for Corona Haikus – images and words by Catalina Ortiz Arciniegas.

Figure 1.6: Visual Haiku created for Corona Haikus – images and words by Valentine Goddard.

Figure 3.1: The Smallest of Worlds (courtesy of <www.thesmallestofworlds.com>).

Figure 3.2: One of the rooms in The Smallest of Worlds (courtesy of <www.thesmallestofworlds.com>).

Figure 3.3: A point cloud image, with its undefined edges (courtesy of <www.thesmallestofworlds.com>).

Figure 3.4: A composed space (courtesy of <www.thesmallestofworlds.com>).

Figure 3.5: The navigation structure of The Smallest of Worlds (courtesy of <www.thesmallestofworlds.com>).

Figure 3.6: A 3D-printed miniature (courtesy of <www.thesmallestofworlds.com>).←ix | x→

Figure 6.1: The poster for Dengang Danmark lukkede ned.

Figure 6.2: Worksheet on filming the lockdown material (courtesy of Buster Film Festival).

Figure 6.3: Drawing by girl of her corona life (courtesy of Emil Norgaard Munk and the girl).

Figure 6.4: Screenshot of children in boxes (courtesy of Emil Norgaard Munk and Mariella Harpelunde Jensen).

Figure 6.5: Screenshot of the use of split screens (courtesy of Emil Norgaard Munk and Mariella Harpelunde Jensen).

Figure 8.1: The Documentary Film Council organogram (courtesy of DFC).

Foreword

In late 2019 a mysterious infectious disease had begun circulating in central China and probably in parts of Europe too. Caused by a novel coronavirus that sometimes generates severe and acute respiratory distress among its victims, this disease would later achieve infamy as ‘COVID-19’. Eventually, despite efforts to contain it, the disease spread to every corner of the world, carrying the potential to infect all people everywhere, and thus acquiring the status of a pandemic. Not since the ‘Spanish influenza’ pandemic of 1918–1920 had a fast-spreading disease presented so great a risk to human health in so short a period of time. And never, in the intervening century, had disease-control measures been implemented so intensively and on so wide a scale as they were in response to COVID-19.

Many of us who endured the present pandemic have sought to track its progress in the abstract, by following (perhaps obsessively) the constantly reported changes in epidemiology. Anyone with internet access has been able, from one day to the next, to check numerous data dashboards showing the number of new cases in a given country, the rates of hospitalisation and mortality there, and the pace of distributing and administering doses of vaccine. At the time of writing, the World Health Organization’s website was reporting a total of around half a billion confirmed cases of COVID-19 globally, including more than six million deaths. However, such numbers alone are but a bare representation of the pandemic’s burden. They reveal nothing about the huge variety of negative effects and difficult experiences that have been caused throughout the world, especially during 2020 (and much of 2021) when an effective anti-COVID vaccine was generally unavailable.

In people’s personal and professional lives, and as a matter of concern for national governments, the ongoing story of this pandemic has been one of severe disruption as well as deadly disease. Although the coronavirus ←xi | xii→itself is ultimately to blame for myriad misfortunes, the very attempt to protect people against this pathogenic microorganism has also been a distinct source of tensions within and between societies. In the initial absence of a vaccine, the swift and widespread implementation of non-pharmaceutical methods of disease-control came as a shock. This was especially the case in wealthier Western countries where local populations had long ago stopped thinking of infectious disease as a major life risk. Thus, the surprise caused by the emergence of COVID-19 inside those countries became compounded by surprise at the immense cost associated with heroic and unfamiliar efforts to stop this disease by radically curtailing human interaction.

Where a deadly disease is spreading rapidly through a population, there is a public health advantage to be gained from promoting and enforcing social distancing. By thus reducing the overall risk of human-to-human infection, the likelihood of local healthcare systems being overwhelmed by patients is reduced too. However, it is undeniable that the implementation of stringent disease-control measures also carries the potential to undermine individual human rights and collective economic prosperity. The complete closure of schools, for example, can slow the community-wide spread of COVID-19, but it can also make unavailable any healthcare ←xii | xiii→workers (and other workers deemed ‘essential’) who must then care for their own school-age children. In the longer term, where homeschooling options are unavailable or inadequate, there can be an adverse impact on some children’s education and life prospects.

The features of this crisis are well-illustrated in this timely volume, for which Dafydd Sills-Jones and Pietari Kääpä have assembled a diverse collection of rich reflections by scholars and practitioners. Each chapter provides a fascinating insight into the challenges that disease transmission and social distancing have posed to the concept and continuation of documentary. Moreover, the volume overall reveals much about documentary’s fragility and resilience under adverse conditions. Improving our understanding of ←xiii | xiv→the importance of documentary is important now and is likely to remain so in the future. More pandemics comparable to COVID-19 seem likely to occur, and it is now clear that the full range of human ingenuities and creativities will be required to confront these comprehensively. In the decades ahead, medical and scientific expertise will continue to be important in the search for disease-control solutions. Beyond that, though, disrupted societies will need to be served also by experts in social dynamics and, especially, by documentarians who can help to keep people connected.

Introduction: Documentary in the age of COVID

Documentary, despite its vague and problematic generic boundaries, has stood the test of time. Its roots stretch down further than the beginnings of cinema, back into the early years of photography and cinema’s forebears such as the magic lantern. Due to this long reach, it is also anchored in a range of media forms and genres that have evolved since the beginning of mass electronic communication, giving documentary a choice of homes and retreats, if circumstances ever threatened its existence. Immediately before the COVID-19 pandemic, documentary, arguably, had never been stronger commercially. It had a presence in the new global SVOD platforms that few would have predicted back in the age of broadcast and VHS/DVD, and had been at the forefront of adaptations to the possibilities and limitations of numerous waves of interactive and web-borne innovations in cinema, showcasing a tremendous ability to sustain its presence and viability despite ongoing artistic and technological disruptions.

Documentary’s tenuous grip on its ascription as scientific evidence also remained intact despite the ravages of postmodernism and the ubiquity and embeddedness of screens, and screen representations, in our daily lives. Documentary’s paradoxical relationship to the real served to preserve its flexibility in reacting to evolving philosophical and cultural formulations of reality, allowing it to survive the rupture from idealism (Grierson 1933), to structuralism (Barnouw 1993), to post-structuralism (Winston 2008), to new materiality (Hongisto 2013), and beyond to the post-cinematic and the post-humanist (Nash 2021). One might say that documentary is no stranger to disruption, and that part of the documentary’s function is to grasp the emergence of events, and the flow of time, in its ever-flexible and re-inventable form(s).