Counter/Public
Authors: Rudin Daniel 
Published: May 2022

The objective of this research-creation exhibition is to demonstrate a theory/praxis research method developed for documentary filmmaker-scholars. The session will demonstrate a method developed while researching my dissertation “Counter/Public: The Politics of Committed Film in the Philippines.” The research focuses on the Philippine “new cinema” (the 1970s-1980s) and follows two articulations—academic writing surveying primary and secondary texts in the field and a parallel interactive documentary and “social history.” The latter consists of conversations with twenty-five cultural producers and political participants (archivists, journalists, actors, editors, filmmakers, and activists) active during Philippine “democratization.” Said conversations thoroughly explore the subject’s involvement, motivations, and ideas and were carefully lit and filmed with two cameras.
I began experimenting with different ways of putting the video footage into tension with the past. In so doing drew upon several theories. One was Allan Sekula’s argument for combining a materialist cultural history with montage. Another was Steve Anderson’s notion of database histories—an alternative to digital historiographies that, instead of historicizing the past, use database and search engine to construct a more flexible, reflexive, and participatory digital archive. A third was borrowed from Sharon Daniel, who envisions interface design as “argument” and user interaction and navigation as “inquiry.” Through an almost iconoclastic approach (in lieu of performative alienation effects), Daniel’s practice attempts to challenge the viewer’s assumptions about narrative construction while foregrounding contradictions between politics and aesthetics.
The result—an interactive database documentary—combines documentary and qualitative research methods. As with many documentaries, I was dependent upon collaboration and ideas proposed by the subject while questioning the subject’s truth claims, aesthetic construction, etc. In terms of the interface design, I chose images of archives, vinegar-syndrome afflicted film, and distressed video as metaphors to represent reification and memory loss. I broke down the interview material into roughly one-minute edits consisting of tightly intercut, differing, and even contradictory recollections of two interviewees. The “script” for these edits was “written” using qualitative analysis software (f4analyse)—revealing patterns and topics that might not otherwise have surfaced. The viewer can access said edits in the interactive documentary (made in Klynt) by clicking on either COUNTER/PUBLIC or COMMITTED/FILM. The long-form interviews are available from a drop-down menu linked to a YouTube channel. The idea is not only to preserve the excess footage but publish the informant interviews (here, as “social history” integrated into and standing alongside an interactive documentary) for viewers who either reconstruct the research process themselves or—if they prefer—perform their own research.
Bibliography
Anderson, Steve. Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past. Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth University Press, 2011.
Daniel, Sharon. "On Politics and Aesthetics," in Studies in Documentary Film: iDocs special edition, Volume 6, issue 2, edited by Judith Aston, Jonathan Dovey and Sandra Gaudenzi (Bristol: Intellectual Journals, 2012) 215-227.
______. Public Secrets. Interactive web documentary. Vectors Journal, Issue 4, 2008. http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/4/publicsecrets/
______. Blood Sugar. 2006, interactive web documentary. In Vectors Journal, Issue 6, 2010. http://vectorsjournal.org/issues/6/bloodsugar/
Sekula, Allan. "Reading an Archive: Photography Between Labour and Capital." In The Photography Reader, edited by Liz Wells, 443-452. New York: Routledge, 2003.