Long form documentaries are being usurped by shorter films that are easier and cheaper to make. Is artistry being sacrificed for the sake of brevity?
“I hesitate to even call them documentaries”, says award-winning director David Goldsmith. He is looking out of the window of his seventh floor flat at the top of Highgate Hill in north London. From where he stands there is a panoramic view of the city. His living room is decorated with photographs telling a history of his filmmaking. It is the perfect setting for a documentary maker of Goldsmith’s calibre.
He has been working in the industry for over 40 years for BBC, ITV and ITN. It was here that he won a BAFTA covering the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege. His book, The Documentary Makers: 20 Interviews with the Best in the Business, published in 2003, is a must read for anyone with a passion for the craft.
Short form documentaries – the new type of storytelling
But Goldsmith is concerned that online short-form documentaries are damaging the way we consume video media. Now, audiences will only sit through five minute snippets, and Goldsmith is worried this will permanently change the filmmaking process.
Short form documentaries are a new type of storytelling. They have emerged as newspapers have increased their multimedia output in a declining print market. Longer films, for Storyville or Dispatches for example, would use long shots, landscapes, music and montages to tell a narrative over an hour. But online films do not allow for this. They rarely exceed 10 minutes, have lower production costs, and rely heavily on voiceover. Short form caters for an audience’s increasingly short attention span, and it has been championed by online editors as an exciting innovation, and an essential tool.
But Goldsmith doesn’t accept this as an explanation for the demise of long form. He argues that short form is pandering to our penchant for bite-size media, a quick fix, which has a much lower production standard than was once required. “Documentary making,” he says, gesturing dramatically with his hands, “was once seen as the means of communicating aspects of life in all its guises, using a pretty wide range of techniques.”
The media is changing
He believes that these practices are suffering because of the way the media is changing. “We’ve now moved into what is “dramatic” because TV demands it. So the short form is one hell of a compromise. It’s an absurdity in a way.
“Somebody gets an idea or a commission for doing something and they stick a camera on their helmet or whatever, and this constitutes a documentary. This to my mind is a passive form of documentary making: it’s too easy.”
Over 3,000 miles away in New York, filmmaker Albert Maysles is telling a similar story. Once called “the best American cameraman” by Jean-Luc Goddard, Maysles’ filmography includes portraits of Marlon Brando (1965), Orson Welles (1966) and an indelible study of American aristocrats living in squalor, Grey Gardens (1976). He is still working at the age of 84.
He praises the modern toys associated with short form, such as featherweight cameras and cheaper recording equipment: “The cameras are lighter and cause less obtrusion, the tape runs for an hour instead of only 10 minutes and it costs $3 or $4 an hour instead of several thousand for the ten minutes of film.” But for Maysles, the problems come back to the narrative. He says filmmakers now want to spoon feed audiences with commentary, rather than letting the viewer use their imagination – something the longer form champions.
Losing your concentration
Maysles believes that when it’s difficult to show what is happening through visuals alone, new filmmakers are resorting to narration. “Documentary is at its best when stories are captured directly without narration or host,” he says. “There is a great opportunity to humanise by way of the video media, but not enough effort is directed that way.”
Heavy narration is an inevitable part of an online film in which everything has to be communicated quickly. Most film-makers agree that audiences don’t have the concentration for long-form content on the internet.
According to Jakob Nielsen, one of the world’s leading experts in online behavioural studies and website usability, this is a result of our declining attention span:
“After one second online, users get impatient and notice that they’re waiting for a slow computer to respond. The longer the wait, the more this impatience grows; and, after about 10 seconds, the average attention span is maxed out.”
Fast media
Long-form documentaries therefore struggle to work online compared to their younger, cooler brother. Nielsen calls the television experience “passive”: we lean back and consume the programme the way the director wants. Conversely, online is an “active” experience, in which we lean forward and can change direction at any time, with one click of the mouse. Nielsen says that when watching television programmes we make decisions between every thirty minutes and two hours, and sit back and absorb. However, with online content we make a decision on average between every 10 and 120 seconds, constantly jumping between pages and websites.
“The velocity of media consumption has increased dramatically,” Nielsen continues. “Readers no longer linger over lovingly described passages. They click here, they click there, they click everywhere. But they don’t stay. With online, the means of production are in everybody’s hands.”
So does this mean that there is no artistry in short forms?
In Colombia’s capital, Bogota, freelance journalist Matthew Bristow has just finished a two-year project on the Colombian drugs trade. It cost somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 to make, and was shot on a low-cost, compact camera. The three-part series of films, the first of which was shown on BBC’s Newsnight, was subsequently snapped up by the Guardian. They are all under 10 minutes long.
Using video to make a living
Bristow agrees that they took a different kind of skill to long form, but considering the miniscule costs and his lack of training, he feels that they are still of value: “I’ve never been to film school or anything like that, and I don’t know much about documentaries. I’m just a reporter who bought a Sony Z1 and learnt Final Cut Pro.
“It’s getting much harder to make a living from print journalism, which is one reason a lot of us have moved into video. All the advertising revenue has moved to things like Google, so they are cutting costs, and shutting their foreign bureaus. Now newspapers and magazines are increasingly asking for video to accompany print stories, which is what I’m trying to get to grips with.”
Someone who supports Bristow’s efforts is Michael Tait, the Guardian’s multimedia editor. He is frustrated that people slate short-form documentaries.
Short chapters work online
For Tait, short-form multimedia content is a vital part of an ongoing business model for newspapers: “A lot of the old guard, in their 50s and 60s, are showing examples of old conservatism. In many ways they are showing that they don’t have the imagination to come up with the ideas themselves. It’s about new technology coming up against closed minds.”
Tait argues that telling the story in short chapters is vital. Online, people often won’t get halfway through a film because they get what Tait calls “snacked off”.
He explains: “If it doesn’t absolutely demand my attention then I’m going to go somewhere else and look at something else. You’ll find with online films there’s voiceover, there’s very fast exposition straight into a story without placing the onus on the viewer.”
Is short form more democratic?
Despite claims over the last 15 years that the documentary is dying, Tait is optimistic about the shift towards short form: “People say there is always a funding crisis and there’s always a lack of will on the part of the broadcasters, but I think there are actually more documentaries, there’s certainly more factual TV.”
Tait is also a proponent of the democratic power of the short form and its ability to give access to technical skills so people can broadcast themselves. “This is an explosion in the ability of anybody to make a film,” he adds. “It doesn’t mean they are going to make a good film, but they can make it.”
Or just the aftermath of the recession?
At City University, Chris Brauer, head of online journalism for the MA programme, is reluctant to call short form the future. He explains that cost has had a huge impact on the way that media is presented to people now; and cheaper, shorter films are affecting visual journalism practices in the same way that investigative reporting has been rocked by the economic downturn.
Shorter formats are constantly being created, such as 12-second TV and Twitter, but Brauer sees this as a modern phenomenon. “It’s a ‘much of the times’ situation, where all of these technologies have emerged at the same time. It does speak to the culture of communication in 2010 but it doesn’t necessarily speak to a culture of communication that will endure.”
According to Brauer the increasing importance of documentaries at film festivals such as Sundance, shows that long form is still relevant when it comes to the big screen: “It could well be that long form documentary in the practice of journalism is on the wane, but then there has to be the opportunity for that format to adapt itself for public presentations.
“Stories can be told in multiple fashions. It lies with the viewer to interpret what’s being communicated in the format.”
Back in north London, Goldsmith concedes that some short-form work has an artistic quality and that it is encouraging budding filmmakers to engage with the craft. While it does not allay his fears, he is still convinced that there may be a future for the long form after all.
“It is the responsibility of the younger generation to get round this problem,” he says. “You’ve got to push the standard, got to find a way of beating the system.”
by JP Watson