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ABSTRACT
This project explores the graphic interface design of interactive documentaries (i-docs) about housing projects between Canada and France. Against the backdrop of the modernist, utopian fantasies that constructed these large-scale housing developments, contemporary documentarians intervene in the social space of the multicultural city via creative interface design. I-docs like Highrise (Cizek, Katerina. 2010. “Out My Window.” National Film Board of Canada. http://outmywindow.nfb.ca; Cizek, Katerina. 2011. “One Millionth Tower.” NFB Highrise, November 5, 2011. http://highrise.nfb.ca/tag/one-millionth-tower/; Cizek, Katerina. 2015. “The Universe Within: Digital Lives in the Global Highrise.” National Film Board of Canada. http://universewithin.nfb.ca/desktop.html#index), (B4-Windows on the Tower, Jean Christophe Ribot, 2012, http://www.francetv.fr/nouvelles-ecritures/banlieue-b4/), and Sarcellopolis (Sébastien Daycard-Heid and Bertrand Dévé, 2015, http://sarcellopolis.com/en/) employ user interfaces that conjure the vertical and horizontal dimensions of social interaction in the urban built environment. They are most successful when they move beyond narrative to mobilize objects and space, thus enacting the ‘promiscuous relations’ of urban experience and simulating the chance encounters of the urban public sphere.
Geographic Info:
Canada (Toronto), France (Paris, Sarcelles)
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Of course, today, 3-D projection is possible on a 2-D screen, but contemporary aesthetic experiments have not yet deepened this representation of relationalism that urban dwellers feel in real space.
2 For Miles, the Korsakow system puts this potential into practice more visibly than other software for building interactive documentary.
3 The critique of correlationism encompasses a number of post-Kantian positions that receive more diligent treatment in other texts, notably, Graham Harman’s, ‘Road to Objects’ (Citation2011). For our purposes here, I am interested in the ways in which Adrian Miles’s treatment of this critique serves to pressure documentary studies to diversify its objects, to complicate point of view, to push past what might be called talking head humanism, and thus to challenge our notions of meaningful interaction on and offline.
4 The book came out in 1980 in France, 1984 in the US.
5 Internaut is a French neologism for the online user. I find it better captures exploratory modes of interactivity than the English term ‘user.’
6 The transition is cued when the Tibetan man says he looks out of West Lodge, wondering what other musicians are doing in other towers.
7 Sarcelles is officially designated a commune, meaning simply an independent municipality, town, or village.
8 In French discussions of multiculturalism this term carries a negative charge, as communautarisme is considered to be, in itself, fragmenting, with American style identity politics seen as the genesis of ghettos and ethnic and political fragmentation. Several residents of Sarcelles address these concerns, concerns that also motivated the directors to make the interactive documentary.
9 Another term for housing projects that sometimes carries the valence of ‘ghetto.’
10 Users have the option of viewing via photographs or video.
11 Augé also gives a rich description of the experience of the passenger on public transportation, sh/e traverses these non-places:
The only face to be seen, the only voice to be heard, in the silent dialogue he holds with the landscape-text addressed to him along with others, are his own: the face and voice of a solitude made all the more baffling by the fact that it echoes millions of others. The passenger through non-places retrieves his identity only at Customs, at the tollbooth, at the checkout counter. Meanwhile, he obeys the same codes as others, receives the same messages, and responds to the same entreaties. The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations only solitude, and similitude. (Augé 103)
12 Dejean and Rebucci (Citation2015).
13 The directors note that they began the film before these events took place and were inspired to make a film about Sarcelles more by virtue of the promise visible in Jacques Windenberger’s photos of immigrant life in the grands ensembles. Co-director, Sébastien Daycard-Heid had worked with a local collective of young workers in Sarcelles in 2010 to produce a book entitled, Gueule d’Hexagone (Dejean and Rebucci Citation2015).
14 The skeptical reaction of journalists to the grands ensembles is also visible in popular culture of the day (Namias Citation2016). For example, when Charles (played by a wizened Jean Gabin) returns home from prison at the opening of the film Mélodie en sous sol (Any Number Can Win, Henri Verneuil Citation1963), he finds a sea of newly constructed apartment blocks emerging from the dirt. He does not greet these emblems of utopian modernism (shot on location) with pleasure.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Michelle Stewart
Michelle Stewart is Director of the MFA in Media Arts and Culture and Associate Professor in the School of Film & Media Studies at Purchase College. She co-edited Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Practices, and Politics (with Pam Wilson, Duke UP, 2007), which brings together the work of well-respected scholars and producers of indigenous media from around the world. Her subsequent research has pursued questions of minority cinema and multicultural film policy in Europe, with an emphasis on the filmmaking of North and West African immigrants in France. Her latest project addresses digital heritage and digital cinema, in particular, the ways in which Internet art and culture complicate our expectations and standards for self and cultural representation. Her publications have appeared in various film and media journals, including JumpCut, TOPIA, and Film Quarterly. She has been a Fulbright Scholar, Kempner Distinguished Professor at Purchase, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Marseille, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Montreal.