La remediation du documentaire avec une approche alternative des medias activistes

Documentary film, which has been transformed by the technical possibilities provided by new media communication technologies and the environment offered by social networks, is now defined as a research project that is no longer limited to a single medium, but rather shifts between mediums (MIT Open Documentary Lab, 2023). Classical industrial feature-length documentaries are being replaced by new practices in which the means of documentary production and documentary as a medium are shared between individuals and groups by creating a wide and invisible network (Zimmermann & De Michiel, 2017). "New" media documentaries, which often refer to participation and co-production, can be realised in physical space or through digital commons practices, such as interactive or database documentaries (Aguayo, 2019). This study explores how alternative documentary production to state and commercial media is mediated and mediated through links with civil society organisations. Alternative media, which can be defined as a "third voice" between state and private commercial media (Servaes, 1999), can also be approached as a part of civil society (Bailey et al. 2015). Civil society organisations (Özgün Özçer, Face to Face Online Interview, 25 April 2023), which transform themselves into content producers through encounters mediated by social networks and new media technologies, mediate the message they produce in the fields of rights they struggle for, sometimes using the possibilities of old media and sometimes new media. The financial and human resources of non-governmental organisations offer an alternative tactical production and distribution model for documentary filmmakers who have difficulty in finding resources for feature-length documentaries and whose conventional screening networks are limited, to share the values and worldviews they advocate. The study is based on Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's (1999) idea that "The medium is the remediator." In order to investigate what is new in alternative activist new media documentaries, Bolter and Grusin's view that any media is a network of technical, social and economic contexts and that the medium as a technology weaves this network is exemplified by the network formed by the documentary as a medium. Based on this theoretical background and methodological perspective, the study, while exemplifying the relationship established with the medium by the civil society field that produces documentaries in various forms, has selected the perpetrators among the civil society and documentary actors it encountered during the research process lasting approximately two years. The study field was formed from the actors encountered in the workshops of the civil society organisations in the sample between July 2021 and October 2022. Situationism is the aimless drifting walk called "dérive", which is the source of the psychogeography technique in order to investigate the effects of a particular environment on the emotions and thoughts of individuals (Bishop, 2018). This study adopts the technique of dérive and psychogeography as a method, but this time it is not a city that is walked, but an aesthetic, political, technical and social network woven by inter-medium displacement where the field of civil society intersects with documentary filmmakers. In this way, forming the sample from actors who were encountered and had the chance to observe while in the practice and pedagogy gave the opportunity to closely observe the worlds of meaning and aesthetic, political and economic concerns of the selected social agents. In addition, twelve semi-structured interviews, mostly online and 40-70 minutes in length, were conducted with the selected civil society actors and documentary makers between April 2023 and May 2023. The list of these interviewees is as follows: Özgün Özçer, journalist and former editor of Gezegen 24; Itır Erhart, academic and founder of the Open Open Association; NewsLabTurkey: Digital Media Research Association and academician Sarphan Uzunoğlu, Özgür Cihan Uçar and Yasin Serindere, both of whom are documentary filmmakers, and Ulaş Bayraktar, one of the founders of Kültürhane Mersin and a member of the Association for Justice in Space, Cemre Kara, assistant of the Environmental Justice Programme of the Association for Justice in Space; Ezgi Bakçay, co-founder of Karşı Sanat Çalışmaları; Emre Güzel, director of Roofcoliving; Volkan Işıl, documentarian; Ozan Çağlar, documentarian and Karşı Sanat Çalışmaları stakeholder; Deniz Tortum, documentarian and academic. The problematic of the research is "How does documentary as a social practice shift between mediums?" and the other questions asked by the research can be listed as follows: • How do documentary filmmakers decide in which medium the message they produce will be exhibited? • How does the documentarian contact the subjects he/she filmed and how does he/she determine the distance between him/her and the story he/she tells? • How do the new possibilities of social media and communication technologies change the definition of documentary? • What are the intellectual and economic tactics developed by actors producing documentaries for civil society in order to sustain their production? This study, which aims to describe alternative activist media practice through documentaries produced with civil society actors, explores the political and aesthetic origins of these documentaries, as well as the issue of technique, which is one of the main debates of the idea of the medium, together with the social agents sampled. In order to realise this discussion and reflection, the study is divided into four sections. In the first section, the definition, aesthetic and political origins of alternative activist media are discussed in order to genealogise rights-based civil society documentaries. This origin research, developed by Lievrouw (2016) with reference to Bolter and Grusin, helps to historicise the ongoing and constantly shifting mediation relationship between new and old technologies, rather than looking at the possibilities offered by new media and communication technologies from a technological determinist perspective. The second part of the study includes technical enquiries that look closely at the dispute "Does the medium rule the human or does the human rule the medium?" that lies at the heart of the idea of the medium. After analysing the technical issue, Marshall McLuhan's interpretation of the medium as a medium that surrounds people and becomes more important than the message itself and Raymond Williams' understanding of the medium as a social practice that emphasises human agency are compared. The third part of the study describes the research field, method and limitations. In the fourth section, the findings obtained from the field are grouped under the themes of re-mediation, the idea of the medium, the practices of contact with the subject of the documentary, and the economic and intellectual resistance necessary to continue documentary production. As a result of the research, alternative activist documentaries produced by documentary filmmakers as civil society media are seen as a tool and process to better understand the subject, event or situation they approach. It is concluded that in this process of understanding through research, the subject who is filmed and the observer who looks through the camera co-produce mediation. As an example of Bruno Latour's (1993) distinction between the mediator who conveys the message as it is and the mediator who transforms the message and transforms himself, the documentary filmmakers and civil society actors in the research sample perform a mediation practice that allows the stories they tell through moving image to transform themselves. The distance between these documentary filmmakers and civil society actors and the subject or subject to be told is shaped by the decisions made in the process in parallel with Williams' definition of the medium (1990). The social, cultural and economic context and the relationship between the subject and the viewed determine which story is told in which medium. Moreover, representing Grusin's concept of radical mediation (2015), which recognises the contribution of non-humans as well as humans in the process of mediation, documentary filmmakers argue that the form and content of the story to be told is determined by the environment observed with the camera and the time spent in this environment. The actors in the sample agree on the necessity of experiencing the technical possibilities of new media and communication technologies and social networks, because only by using these technologies can tactics and ways of using them be developed to prevent the monopolisation of these technical possibilities by highly capitalised groups such as large software companies or media organisations. In order to produce documentaries outside the formal, semantic and political uniformity imposed by the conventional film market or social networks, the documentary filmmakers interviewed in this study earn money from other sectors that are connected to the image, such as advertising, product photography, virtual reality production, and wedding photography, and provide resources for their productions that will reflect their artistic and political identities. In a way that exemplifies the production of rhizomatic media (Bailey et al. 2015), they have to reconstruct and mobilise their resources for each new documentary project, making connections with the local and the global, so that they have little faith in their ability to produce permanently and continuously. Nevertheless, in line with Ellul's approach, in which he expresses his belief in the struggle practices of small groups with the words "If you oppose efficient things, you should not try to be more efficient than they are, because that would lead you to an inefficient result" (Van Boeckel, 1992), actors in civil society and the documentary field who engage in collaborative production have the hope that their alternative activist production will one day be valued by others who struggle like them and by subsequent generations.