TELOS 96
The dossier of this 96th Telos issue is devoted to a subject that is so transcendental in contemporary audiovisual culture that we can barely begin to describe it in these few lines: the digital documentary. We are talking about breathing new life into a genre that is not only powerfully resuscitating in digital form and on the Net, but which also adapts to multi-platform dissemination and reception and is shaped in the present privileged space of innovation and audiovisual experimentation, of languages and formats.
Classical historiography taught us that film had two equally powerful original nuclei: fiction and documentaries, which took reality as their reference point, even if what they did was recreate and reproduce it. The former triumphed as film drifted toward becoming a mass medium searching to do the most business, while the latter was marginalised for decades, despite the efforts of brilliant creators and great theoreticians of its huge potential. Television has merely followed this course, shunting documentaries to less attractive viewing times because it was presupposed that the majority of people preferred fictional worlds to in-depth revelations of the reality surrounding them.
The digitisation of television signals and the resulting proliferation of thematic channels has started to refute such prejudice and the multitude of offerings on the Internet is beginning to totally subvert them: the documentary mould is now exploding into enormous possibilities for expression, in multiple formats, heading towards hypermedia.