Digital storytelling as ‘national cinema’?

Abstract

Digital storytelling is a co-creative media practice developed in California in the early 1990s in which ‘ordinary’ people are taught to create short, usually autobiographical ‘digital stories’. This article focuses on arguably the most famous digital storytelling project – the BBC’s ‘Capture Wales’ programme – to argue that not only are these digital stories, which are produced in workshop settings by non-professionals and exhibited primarily on the Internet in digital archives, ‘cinema’ but, moreover, that they collectively constitute a kind of ‘national cinema’. Crofts has, for example, argued that ‘[l]ocal cultural traditions and their articulation through film’ have ‘underpinned the best-known’ national cinema ‘movements’, which have tended to emerge at ‘historical moments when nationalism connects with genuinely populist movements to produce specifically national films that can claim a cultural authenticity or rootedness’ (4). This is the reading of Capture Wales – as, in fact, a co-creative national cinema – that this article offers.

Notes

1. There is, in fact, a broader historical precedent to this kind of institutional and cultural negotiation. As Dai Smith writes, ‘Wales was seen by the Welsh as an integral part of the Empire of Nations. Welsh could be thus Welsh by origins, language, territory and religion and British in politics, social aspirations and links. Except for a few nationalist patriots, there was no contradiction in this’ (Smith 1984, 45).