At the Crossroads of the Documentary and the Web - Text 1
Emerging at a time when the Internet was taking hold as a platform for disseminating audiovisual content, and then growing with the widespread availability of broadband connections, the webdoc met with relatively fleeting glory in the 2010s.[1] And this is the period, precisely, into which we will now plunge in order to shed light on a few points of contact between Web technologies and documentary practice.
Our discussion of this form will highlight aspects which are both specific to it and others which are part of the long history of shared knowledge propelled by documentary cinema. In this sense we call webdocs websites with original content made up of a montage of multimedia elements (fixed and moving images, graphic and photographic images, texts and sound) connected by the way they are shaped and structured. These forms and structures bear the signature of an author, or of an authorial intention marking their creation.
The structure is interactive: it asks the user to navigate in an archipelago of signifying aggregations. A webdoc naturally needs the online user’s manipulations, because it does not play by itself. Nevertheless, although the online user – who in the end is very similar to a viewer plain and simple; for us the two terms are porous when speaking of webdocs – is confronted with choices, it is more a question of choosing a reading path within a map skilfully drawn in advance than it is of feeding the illusion of constructing a world, a utopia canonically conveyed by the notion of interactivity. On another level, some webdocs invite online users to enter into a dialogue with one another, or with the people appearing in the webdoc. This is a kind of interactive engagement which brings to the heart of the object the very idea of discussion around a theme.
At first glance, the webdoc takes the form of an audiovisual and multimedia website, but it can also take the form of a mobile application. Although each title has its own URL, webdocs are sometimes connected with institutions and their website, which presents them (the way a distributor would) or at the least affixes their logo to them. Some of the institutions which have marked the history of the webdoc are Arte, France Télévisions, Radio-Canada, the NFB, Le Monde diplomatique, LeMonde.fr, Libération, Courrier international, The Guardian, The New York Times and Rue89. Depending on the websites incorporating them, webdocs can be like a film (the Épopée project, 2010), an essay film (ArchivingR69, 2011), a television reportage (The Border Between Us, 2012), activist projects (Le printemps d’après, 2013), or photojournalism (Caméra embarquée sur la ligne de front d’Alep, 2012). As can easily be seen, the webdoc’s variety and constantly shifting forms make it even more difficult to offer a definition of it.
