ABSTRACT
The framework of citizen media complicates the notion of ‘documentary’ in compelling and crucial ways. Various filmmaking efforts by people trying to address civic issues – whether as a means for enacting social change, shifting public narratives, claiming representational autonomy, or expressing personal ambitions – illuminate critical fissures in the edifice of the documentary truth-claiming modality. This entry provides an overview of these issues as an important access point for understanding citizen-led efforts to claim public expression. It considers four modalities in which citizens have accessed and utilized the documentary form to both enable self-empowerment and challenge representational authority. First, the formation of public-access television and non-profit organizations have played an important role in providing access to production and distribution opportunities, but nevertheless depend on institutional structures to ensure accessibility to the means of production. Key examples will include the work of George Stoney, considered the ‘father of public-access television’ in the US, and the Scribe Video Center operating in Philadelphia since 1982. Second, under the banner of ‘participatory video’, various projects initiated by educators, artists, or other social mobilizers offer important examples of collaborative forms of expression that cede control to unaffiliated individuals and communities. By facilitating the sensibilities of citizen groups, participatory projects may challenge the professional conventions of genre, form and aesthetics. Third, activist-led documentary projects that respond to particular situations or events provide alternative sources from mainstream media that both challenge the authority of conventional documentary and journalistic authorship and advance convincing cases for redressing injustices. A key example here is the Independent Media Center, especially founded to cover the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. More recent examples elaborate the potential of crowdsourced material and include the making of the 99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film, as well as innovative examples from the 2011 uprisings in Egypt, including the locally coordinated efforts of the media collective Mosireen and the internet-based project 18 Days in Egypt. Lastly, the documentary work that has emerged from indigenous communities around the world provides an important global perspective on citizen-led documentary filmmaking. Key examples from Inuit communities in northern Canada, Aboriginal communities in Australia, Maya communities in Central America, among others, demonstrate the way in which such communities utilize documentary modalities to reclaim representational sovereignty.
