Moving on - technology as a driver of change in Documentary
I have been looking at how to move my MA project forward and doing a fair amount of reading to understand more about how documentary is moving forward and how this might impact it use in a development context.
While researching this idea, it occurred to me that of course documentary has in fact always had a long association with cutting edge technology. Since the very early days of film production in the late 1800s, documentary filmmakers have seized upon the latest incarnation of the film or video camera to tell stories, educate and create their content. But up until this point it was film technology itself that was the technological wonder, capturing action and recording events like never before. Film cameras, miraculous though they were, were big and bulky 35mm machines, and although Eastman Kodak introduced a 16mm film stock in 1923, it was not until 1960, that a real revolution in filmmaking technology liberated and empowered the documentary filmmaker. The technology combined a portable, silent 16mm film camera and the Nagra crystal sync audio recorder, allowing filmmakers to record location sound that synced with the film pictures easily, techniques pioneered by filmmakers like Richard Leacock and Jean Rouch.
This story has itself been captured on film in a BBC film by Mandy Chang The Camera that Changed the World. The film is available to watch via Live Leaks and is very well worth watching for anyone interested in the history of documentary.
Part two is here and part three here.
Enjoy!