Web-based Documentary Film Between Discourse, Technology and Community Building: the Pragmatic Turn.

• Applicant: Stefano Odorico, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: from 2014 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 243332998

Recent advances in digital technology as well as a strong sociocultural demand for participation, are significantly influencing and altering the concept, design, reception, production and distribution of non-fiction audio-visual works. These new developments have paved the way for the emergence of an increasingly popular new cinematic form hosted on new media platforms: interactive documentaries, which break the classic linearity of film into fragmented space/time productions. My project focuses, as never done before, on the interactive documentary form created for the web from a broad pragmatic perspective which helps us to better understand, especially in terms of communicative co-operational structures, authorship, spectatorship and realism, this very contemporary and under theorised area of non-fiction media production. In many classic linear documentary films the spectatorial position is constituted at both the levels of verbal and image address, while in the case of interactive documentaries new dimensions of interaction, collaboration and participation are added. For this reason, I will utilise and further develop as my main methodology a pragmatic analysis, which focuses on how meaning is constructed at a spectatorial level that is distinct from both the text and the context of reception. This approach, taken by a number scholars, including: Roger Odin, Francesco Casetti, Carl Plantinga and Warren Buckland, has been utilised in film studies only partially, and predominantly to study fiction films rather than documentaries. In my project their theories will be complemented with specific research on interactive documentary films. The most important objectives of my project are: 1. To analyse sociological, cultural, aesthetical and historical aspects of the recent phenomenon of documentaries produced exclusively for the web using new digital technologies;2. To delineate a historiography of web-based interactive documentary in order to define this innovative new media form. 3. To redefine the concepts of interaction, collaboration, participation and realism in web-based documentaries; 4. To introduce new perspectives on studies on the construction of communities of users. In order to reach these objectives, I will make reference to specific formats and to a substantive corpus of interactive non-fiction productions. The expected duration of the project is 3 years, during which I will produce a number of outputs, including: an innovative book dedicated entirely to the subject of interactive documentary, two academic articles to be published in peer-reviewed international journals in film and media studies, and I will organise an international workshop at the University of Bremen.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants