Introduction: The Web Documentary – Connections and (Other) Times - Text 1
Hayao Yamaneko invents video games with his machine. To please me, he admits my beloved animals into them, the cat and the owl. He claims that electronics are the only thing that can work with feelings, memory and the imagination. (Sunless, Chris Marker, 1982).
This parcours will set out a problematized history of a form located at the crossroads of documentary cinema and the possibilities of the Web. Web documentaries, or webdocs, are Internet sites made up of multimedia elements in a non-linear structure with gaps which bear the signs of authorship, or an authorial intention. To explore this hybrid form, its constituent elements will first be described analytically, taking the context of this emerging technology into account. An intermedial archaeological approach is then adopted in order to situate the webdoc in an ensemble of creations in the digital universe, with respect to phenomena dating from before its emergence and to uses which have remained active after its rapid decline. The webdoc is thus linked to a few experiments carried out in the 2000s around interactive CD-ROMs. In these games of signifying diachronies, this twenty-first-century object, the webdoc, is examined in light of its potential for sharing knowledge, making it possible also to link it with an earlier variety of such sharing, the illustrated lecture.
While it may be seen as a hybrid form with fleeting success (mostly in the early 2010s), we will examine the webdoc as a sign of contemporary mutations in documentary audiovisual practices.
In the following sections, brief texts by contributors will highlight important aspects of our conception of the webdoc. In general, in addressing the webdoc we will underscore the consistently innovative artisanal experimentation which characterizes it. Its tools, and even its nomenclature, are in this sense always something to be interrogated, even from a speculative and reflexive perspective. Based on its storage capacity, the webdoc is ready to bring out documents buried in an archive, a possibility which links it with other kinds of documentary production. Similarly, the way in which the webdoc, a worthy representative of the digital turn, lends itself to working on certain historical tendencies is underscored. Finally, we focus on the way in which collective processes mobilize Web technologies in order to extend the constituent features of documentary practice.
