What are reality and truth anyway? And what do changing technologies and approaches to the world mean for documentary in the age of mistrust? Those were the topics of debate at the CPH:Conference industry event of the 23rd edition of the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (CPH:DOX) on Tuesday afternoon.
The session, moderated by Tabitha Jackson, the former Sundance Film Festival chief and new director of the venerable Film Forum non-profit arthouse cinema in New York, touched on audience research, media theory, and the growing impact of synthetic media and AI and how truth is “increasingly fluid, personalized, and context-dependent,” as a preview of the panel highlighted. It also asked: “If seeing is no longer believing, how do audiences decide what is real? What happens to precision, verification, and public service values in the post-truth world? And how should documentary rethink its relevance, ethics, and craft in an AI-augmented media ecosystem?”
The panelists debating these issues were editor and director Joe Bini, whose editing work has included such Werner Herzog films as Grizzly Man, such Andrea Arnold films as Bird and an episode of Mr. Robot, Sofie Hvitved, the head of media at the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, and independent researcher and strategist Sameer Padania.
Bini discussed having “lived in this half-weird reality” going from film to film, both documentary and fiction, where “the world of cinema is a large part of my reality.” He explained that, “a lot of what I’ve done is feature-length documentary that’s a very specific form,” sharing: “My feeling is that it really doesn’t work half the time. There are much better forms of documentary and much better forms of cinema.” He questioned if a categorization like documentary is necessary or even makes sense.
Bini offered: “Authorship more and more now is [about] the person taking it in,” rather than the filmmaker or writer.
Burden of Other People’s Dreams: Chapter One – Ganymede, his project featured at CPH:DOX, addresses that. The fest describes it as “a surreal, abstract memoir of Joe Bini’s life as a film editor and storyteller, presented as a live cinema experience for one audience member at a time.” In his artist’s statement on the festival website, he writes: “Burden of Other People’s Dreams: Chapter One – Ganymede is a story told by an author who refuses to be an author, so they try to convince you that you are the author. Which is ridiculous, since clearly you’re the reader. But then it turns into a film, and suddenly you’re a viewer. Which is even more ridiculous.”
During Tuesday’s panel discussion, Bini described the experience as “a book film,” explaining: “You pick up the iPad. You start reading. You don’t know what to expect. That’s a big part of it. I’ve done a lot of live cinema. What I really like about live cinema is that nobody knows what the fuck it is. So my project is very much functions on that level. You’re reading a book for some time. It then becomes a movie. This movie moves in weird places in time, and then it goes back to being something you read.”
Hvitved also discussed “the loss of control and authorship” in an age where younger audiences’ “perception of reality” is changing, including the idea that virtual artefacts in the likes of Minecraft and Roblox can be more appealing than material objects.
She asked if we may be moving into a world of “liquid content,” meaning content that is “dynamic, context-aware, and continuously adaptable across platforms, devices, formats and user preferences.” As an example, she mentioned Gary Hustwit’s Brian Eno doc Eno, which is edited by AI in real-time, ensuring different forms, every time it is watched. “When will the static become liquid and what does that mean?” Hvitved asked in conclusion.
Meanwhile, Padania argued that the relationship with power defines reality. “‘We’re in an era where misinformation comes from the top,” he said. “You’ve got a White House that is putting out generative AI-generated footage,” he said. “Reality is what they want to create.”
