#online documentary

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Reblogged from MyTree.TV

Businesses around the globe produce nearly as much waste as they do product — almost 110 million tons annually in the US alone. Washington State spent more than 500 million dollars on waste disposal, recycling, and composting in 2009. But what is the real cost to business and the community?

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New Post has been published on http://www.therakyatpost.com/world/2015/03/02/smog-film-on-china-goes-viral-with-155m-views-a-day-after-release-video/

Smog film on China goes viral with 155m views a day after release (video)

BEIJING, March 2, 2015:

An online documentary on China’s notorious smog has become a viral sensation with more than 155 million views just one day after it was released, state media said on Monday.

Under the Dome, a documentary privately produced by Chai Jing, a former anchor with state broadcaster China Central Television, detailed causes of atmospheric pollution in the country.

They included slack government supervision and lenient penalties for polluters.

The 103-minute film was first uploaded on domestic websites on Saturday and had been viewed more than 155 million times a day later, the Global Times said.

It included interviews with officials from London and Los Angeles, two formerly heavily polluted cities, on how they have sought to control the issue.

Chai, a former anchor with state broadcaster China Central Television, said the film was her “personal battle” against air pollution after her daughter was born with a benign tumour, the Global Times said.

China’s cities are often hit by heavy pollution, blamed on coal-burning by power stations and industry, as well as vehicle use, and it has become a major source of popular discontent with the ruling Communist Party, leading the government to declare a “war on pollution” and vow to reduce the proportion of energy derived from fossil fuels.

Retired senior officials have acknowledged that pollution may kill as many as half a million people a year.

The documentary set off a firestorm of criticism over the government’s failure to act on the issue in a timely and effective manner.

“The government needs to be pushed for more action and the people need to have their awareness raised about what they can do to fight against pollution,” the China Daily said in an editorial.

Chen Jining, who was appointed as minister of environment protection last week, said he watched the entire video and that it should “encourage efforts by individuals to improve air quality”, according to the newspaper.

Internet users voiced strong support for Chai.

“I shall avoid driving as much as possible and instead use public transportation,” said a poster on China’s Twitter-like Sina Weibo.

“Every small move to protect the environment will converge into enormous energy and bring us back blue sky.”

Another user said: “In-depth investigation of smog was… out of reach of the public but now it is different. We have to… borrow the strength of the Internet to arouse Chinese people’s awareness of environmental protection and force the sleeping political system to awake.”

Levels of PM2.5 — airborne particulates with a diameter small enough to deeply penetrate the lungs — fell year-on-year in most cities monitored by the government in 2014, statistics released by Greenpeace in January showed, but pollution remained far above national and international standards.

Influencers: How Trends & Creativity Become Contagious

One of the very first aims when I stepped into this PhD was reading up on the essay film, as essentially this was the new aspect I was bringing into my research, in terms of thinking about online video and noticing within the context of documentary, specifically the essay film. My honours did not touch on documentary, however I did cover some documentary ground in my undergrad, both making a documentary and also doing a cinema studies subject entitled True Lies. 

So I've read Corrigan--The Essay Film--and today I read Adrian Miles's (my PhD supervisor) book chapter on "Interactivity in Documentary" which consolidated so many things I don't even think I can begin to sum up. Importantly it gave me a way to frame my research that's a little bit more succinct, I think. 

The main thing I want to focus on in this blog post is the connection between documentary (moving some of Adrian's discussion into what I have read about the essay film) and online documentary. There's lots of stuff about noticing in Adrian's chapter but I'm fearful that I may confuse myself, at this stage anyway.

One of the very first things Adrian discusses in this chapter is how the problems inherent in online documentary are not new things, but are the problems that have always existed for cinematic documentary, well this branches even to cinema generally. The problem being "how to make something whole from smaller fragmentary parts, where, in both cases, these fragments are already whole" (5). This begins a discussion in terms of the materiality of the cinematic shot as a whole which is assembled into a larger fixed whole- a film. It is this larger fixed whole that is radically altered in online documentary because of the malleability of the relationships between this small wholes, Adrian considers then online documentary to be relational media. This basically outlines the key difference between a documentary and an online documentary, and I don't want to go into this much further because this is more-or-less what I covered in honours.

essayistic parallels

What was the most revealing in Adrian's chapter had to do with the characteristics of documentary and why they suit the networked materiality of the online and thinking about the implications of this on documentary and the network, mainly in consideration of Deleuze's affection-image. This helped me to consider some things about the essay film and network specificity. 

Documentary is a suitable framework for online works because documentary is

primarily concerned with arguments and ideas rather than action, and so occupies the interval between perception and response...all documentary where the distance between noticing and doing becomes a particular type of affective knowing. (22)

What Adrian discusses here is that documentaries are about ideas and, therefore, in most cases largely comprised of affection-images. This is specifically the case in Corrigan's analysis of the essay film when he discusses how subjectivity is constructed in the various modes of the essayistic. For instance, in the portrait/self-portrait essay film Corrigan gives the example of Trinh's Surname Viet Given Name Nam which he directly discusses in relation to the close-up as affection-image that Deleuze outlines in Cinema One: The Movement Image. The film focuses on "numerous individuals who make up an entire nation and who collectively become one multiple subject" (81). In terms of the close-up the individuals are represented independently and it is in the contrast between each of these close-ups where the ideas are contained. In other words meaning within the film is constructed through the relations between individuals, in the gaps which emerge between each of the shots. The overall film revealing a multifaceted view of Vietnam through the contrast between different people. Hence, the purpose of the film is to present an idea through the relations of shots, not through a narrative telling of a story.

This is one case, but it reveals one of the issues I have been encountering whilst reading Corrigan's book on the essayistic and the second question of my research proposal - "will the affordances of interactive online video expand the flexibility and open characteristic of the essay film?" which I now consider to be unanswerable, and Adrian too. This is because I need to think about the essayistic and the network in a different way, avoiding mimicking the "fragmentary nature" of the essay film and using it as a "ready packaged" (5) means to explore the relationship between the essayistic and the network.