The Impact of a Documentary Film on Social Democracy and the Public Sphere - Essay Example

Discuss the impact of documentary film on social democracy and the public sphere Mass Media: Generally, the mass media is explained to possess three key functions – that is of educating about public relations, shaping them, and advocating for a particular policy or point of view. In the view point of usage as education tools, media is known to not only impart knowledge, but also to play a part as a promoting agent of actions of much social utility. Mass media as a public relations tools, helps widely for many organization to gain respect among leaders, stakeholders, and other gatekeepers and in doing so, as a advocacy tools, the mass media assist leaders in setting a policy agenda, shaping debates about controversial issues, and gaining support for particular viewpoints. (Hiebert et al,1985) The main types of mass media are Television- that is one of the powerful medium found to impress, people irrespective of age, sex, income, or educational level Radio- that reaches mass and diverse audiences, giving its audience a increased chance of reaching audience segments Internet – the latest powerful media that is known to rule out other media’s. Newspapers- the one type , read almost by 70% of house hold in US that provides a detail report Magazines- Magazines are different from newspaper in that , that have audience selectivity, reproduction quality, prestige, and reader loyalty Movies and Films – that is found to hugely influence and have impact on a wide range of audience. The Film generally is a term that encompasses motion pictures as individual projects, as well as the field in general. The origin of the name comes from the fact that photographic film (also called film stock) has historically been the primary medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist — motion pictures (or just pictures or "picture"), the silver screen, photoplays, the cinema, picture shows, flicks — and commonly movies. The main form of film that is found to influence and bring in social change is documentary films. (Belch and Belch, 1995) The role of Media in Democracy. The mass media is widely seen as a agent that helps in securing rights of citizenship by disseminating information and a pluralism of views. They play a main role in the formation of 'public opinion' that could even influence the government by operating as a public sphere. The press constituted a public sphere in which an open political debate could take place. John Keane, in his book The Media and Democracy, points out three concepts as important for freedom of media. (Gerbner, 1983) a. Theological - a forum that allows man to deduce between good and evil. b. Individual rights - liberty from the political elite c. Attaining truth. The mass media in many countries is expected to facilitate pluralist debate and the free formation of public opinion in the terms of Jurgan Habermas - ‘public sphere’. The media is expected to play the role of public watchdog, the consumer representation role and the informational role In specific, the role of the media in promoting democracy and participation in the information society includes, Information offered directly to the public- here the media is expected to extract Information from the public sector filters and interprets it properly. In nuts hell it is expected to act as independent observer of public authorities and their information policy, highlighting what is really newsworthy and criticizing what could be done better. Collecting the views of the public – as a definition it could be said that the media reflect public opinion. Engaging the public in a discussion about public affairs. Promoting democratic practices. Drawing attention to the views, concerns and situation of excluded parts of society. (Philo, 1990) Media and personal identity In today’s age of globalization, it is felt to be difficult to construct a personal for people. Especially in young people, they are often found to be surrounded by influential images of popular media. Nowadays, arguably everything concerning out lives is seen to be ‘media-saturated’. Therefore, it is obvious that in constructing an identity young people would make use of imagery derived from the popular media. Particularly in today’s days where the young people are exposed multitude of media s radio, television and internet, and to a fewer extent to magazines has affair chance of being influenced in behavior and their sense of ‘self’ to certain degree by what they see, read, hear or discover for themselves. Such an influence may include a particular way of behaving or dressing to the kind of music a person chooses to listen to. These are all aspects which go towards constructing a person’s own personal identity. From this it could be understood that identity is something that occurs to a person, like a ‘state’ of drunkenness, and is the one that is constructed over a period of time and can constantly be updated or changed. (Wiebe, 1971) (Liebert etal.,1982) Media and Building Citizenship Skills There always exist a strong connection between, communication, education and democracy. It is often said that “Democracy is meaningless without multiple voices...and it is simply impossible to talk about citizenship training in modern society without reference to mass communication." (Meier, Deborah l995, 23) There are three major ways in which media literacy can contribute to strengthening the future of democracy through outreach to the society. First, media literacy practices help strengthen peoples ability to access, analysis and communication skills and build an appreciation for why monitoring the world is important. Media literacy also inform people about the press functions in a democracy, and why it matters that citizens gain information and exposure to diverse opinions, and who people need to participate in policy decision-making at the community, state and federal levels. Secondly, media literacy is found to support and foster educational environments that could accentuate the skills of leadership, free and responsible self-expression, conflict resolution and consensus-building. Thus media literacy could raise awareness of the vital role of being exposed to a rich array of diverse opinions and ideas. (Brown etal.,1994) Frankfurt school of thoughts in the modern era of Globalization: The "Frankfurt School" represents the radical group of German-American theorists who developed powerful analyses of the changes in Western capitalist societies that occurred since the classical theory of Marx. Working at the Institut fur Sozialforschung in Frankfurt, Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s, theorists such as Max Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm produced some of the first accounts within critical social theory of the importance of mass culture and communication in social reproduction and domination. (Adorno, 1991) The Frankfurt School also generated one of the first models of critical cultural studies that analyze the processes of cultural production and political economy, the politics of cultural texts, and audience reception and use of cultural artifacts (Kellner 1989). During the 1930s, the Frankfurt school developed a critical and transdisciplinary approach to cultural and communications studies, combining political economy, textual analysis, and analysis of social and ideological effects of. They coined the term "culture industry" to signify the process of the industrialization of mass-produced culture and the commercial imperatives that drove the system. The critical theorists analyzed all mass-mediated cultural artifacts within the context of industrial production, in which the commodities of the culture industries exhibited the same features as other products of mass production: commodification, standardization, and massification. The culture industries had the specific function, however, of providing ideological legitimation of the existing capitalist societies and of integrating individuals into its way of life. (Benjamin Walter ,1969) In their view, mass culture and communications stand in the center of leisure activity, are important agents of socialization, mediators of political reality, and should thus be seen as major institutions of contemporary societies with a variety of economic, political, cultural and social effects The Frankfurt School also provide useful historical perspectives on the transition from traditional culture and modernism in the arts to a mass-produced media and consumer society. (Calhoun, Craig (1992In his path-breaking book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jurgen Habermas further historicizes Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis of the culture industry. Providing historical background to the triumph of the culture industry, Habermas notes how bourgeois society in the late 18th and 19th century was distinguished by the rise of a public sphere that stood between civil society and the state and which mediated between public and private interests. For the first time in history, individuals and groups could shape public opinion, giving direct expression to their needs and interests while influencing political practice. The bourgeois public sphere made it possible to form a realm of public opinion that opposed state power and the powerful interests that were coming to shape bourgeois society. Habermas notes a transition from the liberal public sphere which originated in the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolution to a media-dominated public sphere in the current stage of what he calls "welfare state capitalism and mass democracy." This historical transformation is grounded in Horkheimer and Adorno's analysis of the culture industry, in which giant corporations have taken over the public sphere and transformed it from a site of rational debate into one of manipulative consumption and passivity. In this transformation, "public opinion" shifts from rational consensus emerging from debate, discussion, and reflection to the manufactured opinion of polls or media experts. For Habermas, the interconnection between the sphere of public debate and individual participation has thus been fractured and transmuted into that of a realm of political manipulation and spectacle, in which citizen-consumers ingest and absorb passively entertainment and information. "Citizens" thus become spectators of media presentations and discourse which arbitrate public discussion and reduce its audiences to objects of news, information, and public affairs. In Habermas's words: "Inasmuch as the mass media today strip away the literary husks from the kind of bourgeois self-interpretation and utilize them as marketable forms for the public services provided in a culture of consumers, the original meaning is reversed”. (Habermas, Jurgen (1989) Habermas is right that in the period of the democratic revolutions a public sphere emerged in which for the first time in history ordinary citizens could participate in political discussion and debate, organize, and struggle against unjust authority. Habermas's account also points to the increasingly important role of the media in politics and everyday life and the ways that corporate interests have colonized this sphere, using the media and culture to promote their own interests. The culture industry thesis described both the production of massified cultural products and homogenized subjectivities. Mass culture for the Frankfurt School produced desires, dreams, hopes, fears, and longings, as well as unending desire for consumer products. The culture industry produced cultural consumers who would consume its products and conform to the dictates and the behaviors of the existing society. And yet, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, the culture industry also produces rational and critical consumers able to dissect and discriminate among cultural texts and performances, much as sports fans learn to analyze and criticize sports events. The period of 1950’s are described as the "the end of the individual." No longer was individual thought and action the motor of social and cultural progress; instead giant organizations and institutions overpowered individuals. During this period, mass culture and communication were instrumental in generating the modes of thought and behavior appropriate to a highly organized and massified social order. Thus, the Frankfurt school theory of the culture industry articulates a major historical shift to an era in which mass consumption and culture was indispensable to producing a consumer society based on homogeneous needs and desires for mass-produced products and a mass society based on social organization and homogeneity. It is culturally the era of highly controlled network radio and television, insipid top forty pop music, glossy Hollywood films, national magazines, and other mass-produced cultural artifacts                   Of course, media culture was never as massified and homogeneous as in the Frankfurt school model and one could argue that the model was flawed even during its time of origin and influence and that other models were preferable, such as those of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Bloch, and others of the Weimar generation and, later, British cultural studies. Yet the original Frankfurt school model of the culture industry did articulate the important social roles of media culture during a specific regime of capital and provided a model, still of use, of a highly commercial and technologically advanced culture that serves the needs of dominant corporate interests, plays a major role in ideological reproduction, and in enculturating individuals into the dominant system of needs, thought, and behavior. (Marcuse, Herbert ,1941) Films Films are the main type of media produced by recording people and objects with cameras, or by creating them using animation techniques and/or special effects. They comprise a series of individual frames, but when these images are shown rapidly in succession, in which the illusion of motion is given to the viewer. Flickering between frames is not seen due to an effect known as persistence of vision — whereby the eye retains a visual image for a fraction of a second after the source has been removed. Also of relevance is what causes the perception of motion; a psychological effect identified as beta movement. Film is considered by many to be an important art form; films entertain, educate, enlighten and inspire audiences. The visual elements of cinema need no translation, giving the motion picture a universal power of communication. Any film can become a worldwide attraction, especially with the addition of dubbing or subtitles that translate the dialogue. Films are also artifacts created by specific cultures, which reflect those cultures, and, in turn, affect them. The main subgroup of films that is highly influential in bringing about changes and influence in society is documentary films. (Aitken, Ian, 1998) Impact of Documentary films on social democracy and public sphere: With the infancy of travel at the turn of the 20th century, documentary film functioned as a window to the world. The initial innovators of documentary film were anthropologists, ethnographers, explorers and showmen. Early documentary film exposed the audience to places foreign and unknown, such as the “Coronation of Nicholas II” in Russia or the “Melbourne Races” in Australia. But documentary film, in the early days, also functioned as a mirror: “The idea was to lure people to the shows in hope of seeing themselves—which they sometimes did (Barnouw , 1993).” Documentary film has served various functions in the last century, often dictated by historical exigence. (Alexander, William, 1989) The First Wave of Activist Documentary In the early part of the 1930s, economic collapse had festered and produced significant political tension and strife. Media outlets were dominated by discourse concerning political ideology. At this moment, the practice of documentary film technology had just acquired sound and celebrated the last moments of silent film. For the first time, spoken word could be added to image. It is at this moment that documentary film enters into the arena of social change for the first time. However, documentary films of the 1930s are part of a larger body of cultural discourse that has accompanied the efforts to accomplish grassroots social change in media during this time. In his book The Cultural Front, Michael Denning addresses the cultural strategies of the labor movement in the United States that took root in the 1930s: “The thirties became an icon, the brief moment when politics captured the arts, when writers went left, Hollywood turned Red, and painters, musicians and photographers were socially minded” . This cultural front “reshaped American culture by fuelling movements as abolition, utopian socialism, and women’s rights sparked the antebellum American Renaissance, so the communisms of the depression triggered a deep and lasting transformation of American modernism and mass culture—the laboring of American Culture” .Some of the most rudimentary forms of activist documentary film were born during the time. The documentary movement became a collective body committed to document worker’s strikes, foreclosures, and elections. The Workers Film and Photo League was the first body of activist filmmakers joined by their commitment to document the economic and social crisis of the time. The League was a national group operating in major cities in the 1930s and produced a prolific body of workers newsreels and films. The upshot of this movement was that it managed to bring workers consciousness to the public sphere through documentary film texts and organized collectives around these objectives. However, does documentary film have the potential, as Grierson suggests, creating instrumental social change? At this moment, the primary revolutionary impulse for socially minded cultural texts—specifically documentary film—was to acquire visibility for the people and ideas that were situated at the margins of society. It was here that the lives of the working class were placed on display for democratic ends. The assumption of filmmakers like Grierson is that multi-vocality through documentary would provide the missing ingredient for a troubled and homogeneous democracy (Barnouw, Eric.,1991) The Second Wave of Activist Documentary The spark for the second wave of activist documentary film began in the late 1950s and was reacting against an era of documentary that was closely tied to corporate sponsorship and interests. In this moment of capitalist expansion, instead of corporations producing to meet demand they were working to increasing the desire for demand through the documentary film genre. During the first decade after World War II, corporate sponsored documentaries rose to 4,000 a year while news media outlets, dependent on advertising, kept strict control over broadcast documentary film content .Reacting to an era of promoting cooperate interests, filmmakers of the 1960s began embracing the role as observer. The films of this period—often called direct Cinema—were ambiguous, leaving conclusions to viewers yet the content often poked into places that society was inclined to ignore or keep hidden. The liberating potential of this genre is that 1) it gave legitimacy to groups at the margins of society but it also 2) exploded the rhetorical potentialities of documentary by foregrounding the ideas and speech of the film subjects. Unlike the earlier era of activist documentary film where the filmmaker—often the narrator—could manipulate footage to create their own arguments, the methodological commitments of direct cinema demanded that subjects speak for themselves: In the new focus on speech—talking people—documentaries were moving into an area they had long neglected, and which appeared to have surprising, even revolutionary impact. Since the advent of sound—throughout the 1930s and 1940s—documentaries had seldom featured talking people, except in brief static scenes .Now film subjects, with the help of technology that recorded synchronized sound and image, took significant interpretive control out of the hands of the editor. It was during this moment that the vernacular voice of marginalized communities began to take root in documentary film. The function of direct cinema was to bear witness and to place judgment in the hands of the audience. Although the activist moment for direct cinema is limited by the reluctance to be an advocate, the genre began to carve the way for vernacular discourse and the production of documentary films for the average working person. A new Documentary movement in activist documentary was mounting. The trend was percolating away from observation and towards intervention. Filmmakers came out from behind the camera and intervened in the world around them. It was a movement that did not conceptualize the intervention of the filmmaker as a limitation, rather, as a political catalyst of social change. The cinema verite approach to documentary film was highly experimental and committed to the pursuit of truth. Direct cinema documentaries would take the camera to a situation of tension and hope for a crisis, as opposed to cinema verite filmmakers were committed to intervention and precipitation of circumstances. The movement involved abandoning the shroud of objectivity for an instrumental public text. This was a radical reconceptualization of documentary film and social change. Instead of conceptualizing the moment of social change as one of constitution, like Grierson whose pursuit for multi-vocality in documentary hoped to repair a crippled citizenry, the cinema verite movement moved to publicize and intervene in political dissent The focus on building community and access to resources was the primary goal of activist video movement in the 1960s and 1970s. (Asen atal.,1991) The Third Wave of Activist Filmmaking This period saw the potential of documentary film as a medium for creating public deliberation and instrumental political change by analyzing the third wave of activist documentary film beginning in the 1990s to the present. The cultural front in the 1930s began a rich history of leftist social critique through cultural texts that continues to influence the political landscape through documentary film. The third waveof activist documentary began planting roots in the late 1980s and extends upon the strategies .( Barrett, Michele , 1988). Denning identifies in The Cultural Front. The strategies and approach to social change are varied and numerous. During this time there was a proliferation of union films that depicted a societal transition in worker-management relations What is specific about the third wave of activist documentary is that it coincides with the development of a new computer technology, the internet. Much like the developments in recording technology and television drastically alerted the project of activist documentary, the internet provides a new addendum to the process of cultural texts and social change. The films functioned rhetorically in a way that provided an essential form of identification with the audience. However, the result was not the curtailing of rational criticism that Habermas predicted . Rather, private citizens in the public sphere constructed a systematic analysis through critical rational debate on the internet and in person that identified the institutions of law and order as the sites of practical blame for the derailing of justice. More importantly, the medium of documentary film has the ability to create counter-publics. Another way that the public sphere and the internet are being brought together with documentary video is through the resurgence of street tapes and activist video collectives. The internet is a medium most closely associated with e-mail and ecommerce. As a result, the development of web-based communication has slowly urbanized into a new breading ground for low cost advertising and marketing. However, a new movement, with democratic motives and not all concerned with profit margins, is utilizing the potential of internet communication for slightly different ends. Perhaps the most significant and sweeping site for activist internet journalism of late is the Independent Media Center. Touted as the “newest phenomenon to hit the political scene,” the Independent Media Center has become a “surprising effective news organization” (wired.com) that includes thousands of volunteer and reporters. ( Brummett, Barry,1994) Postmodern social critic Fredric Jameson argues that after World War II, a new society began to emerge. Jameson refers to a society invested in creating meaning and understanding through cultural texts such as music and film. Prior to this period, theorists and artists alike had placed a great deal of import on the potential of high art—as opposed to popular cultural texts—to influence political subjects. Although social theorists may disagree about why popular cultural texts play a significant role in meaning production, few can deny the impact and mass consumption of culture in the contemporary public sphere More than just a new hip form of media entertainment; the genre has significant rhetorical implications. Documentary film “can perform many of the actions for which language is used—warning, asserting, identifying, informing, ridiculing, critiquing, etc” (Platinga,1997). The documentary genre marries three distinct speech acts, image, sound and word. These speech acts, employed in the package of an entire documentary film or video text, makes understanding the rhetorical aspects of the documentary genre quite complicated. For well over a century, non-fiction film has figured prominently in the public sphere as a powerful means of persuasion. (Corner, John ,1996).In 1928, Stalin attempted to coordinate documentary film content with political goals. During World War II, the United States government heavily invested in documentary bugle-call films, designed to sell war to soldiers and teetering allies. The Nazi party had a documentary film unit, at times headed by Leni Riefenstahl, to bring highly aesthetisized images of political practices to the masses .( Eagleton, Terry,1996) Conclusion Documentary film has the potential to aid—and in moments create—instrumental social change. However, there are many lessons to be learned from the history of documentary film. The history of documentary film and social change is still left to be written. Given the commitment to civil engagement inherent in the theoretical assumptions of rhetorical studies and documentary film studies, each field has a great deal to learn from one another. In practice, the theoretical studies of activist documentary film and public sphere theory may yield important practical information about how activist documentary films and video may function more effectively in the process of social change. In doing so, the study of documentary film and social change has a significant potential to ground some of the most contentious debates in critical theory. Bibliography 1. Hiebert, R.E., Ungurait, D.F. & Bohn, T.W. (1985) Mass Media. 4. New York: Longman. 345-346. 2. Belch, G. E., and Belch, M. A. (1995). Introduction to Advertising & Promotion, 3rd edition. Chicago: Irwin. 112-114. 3. Gerbner, G. (1983). "Field Definitions: Communication Theory." In 1984–85 U.S. Directory of Graduate Programs, 9th edition. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service 4. Philo, G. (1990) Seeing and Believing: The Influence of Television. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 432-434. 5. Wiebe, G.D. (1971) The Social Effects of Broadcasting. In B. Rosenberg & D. 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Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001 22. Barrett, Michele. “The Place of Aesthetics in Marxist Criticism.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawerence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 697-713. 23. Brummett, Barry. (1994) Rhetoric in Popular Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 333-337. 24. Plantinga, Carl R. (1997) Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 239-242. 25. Corner, John. (1996) The Art of Record: A Critical Introduction to Documentary. New York:Manchester University Press, 79-82. 26. Eagleton, Terry. (1996) The Illusions of Postmodernism. Oxford: Blackwell, 343-349. Read More

 

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