This short article is about an impressive and important technical training guide developed and written by Video Tiers Monde which is situated in Montreal, Quebec. VTM has connections with a network of people throughout the world, people who are involved in the grassroots effort to bring video production to the communities in which they live. The most important principle at work in this process is the democratization of the means of production through direct control of information flow and exchange. Now more than ever, this particular ideal has become a possibility because the technology is cheap and is available to large numbers of people. It has become possible for example to create a communications network in which diverse national groupings cooperate with each other in the production of news on an independent basis. Small cameras and even smaller videocassettes allow information to be exchanged at great distances. Definitions of local and national cultures will be radically transformed as people in different communities produce and watch their own work and the work of others.
In response to requests from many countries VTM spent two years developing their Portable Video Production Guide and Kit. As they put it: "The handbook will have succeeded in its objective to the extent that it helps its readers produce images which are completely new and original because they reflect not only different realities but also different ways of perceiving reality." The writers of the handbook introduce it with many qualifications regarding the limitations of manuals: ". . . the chapters on the language of audiovisual production and production techniques are not there to be imitated, but rather to be understood, relativized, subverted and surpassed."
A videotape accompanies the manual. Unfortunately there is a substantial gap between the video and the text. The former is paternalistic and tries to 'instruct' videomakers in the best way to shoot a scene, to construct a narrative and a political statement. In a debilitating sense it sets out a program of technically correct approaches to the production process which the text of the manual explicitly suggests should be looked at and examined with some care, if not suspicion. It falls prey to a teaching methodology and to a pedagogy more akin to traditional film school approaches than to the radical project which VTM has set for itself. The videotape is so limited that it raised questions in my mind about the manual because no aesthetic language should ever be portrayed in such a restricted way. In the video we are 'taught' the correct rules for shooting different kinds of scenes in the field. The videomakers who are portrayed seldom speak and never overtly analyse the teaching process in which they are engaged. In fact, the self-reflexivity so important to the creation of culturally specific videotapes, images which will reflect and comment upon the everyday reality of different cultures is completely absent from the video.
I will comment here on only one aspect to highlight a problem which can be found in training videos like this one. What characterises this video is the omnipresent voice-over which is found in so many documentary and ethnographic films. The voice-over is meant to lead the spectator through each stage of the viewing, to frame their experience for them, to provide information which the image on its own cannot. This reliance on voice transforms the image into a device of illustration, a pivot for explication, a kind of blackboard which the teacher uses to communicate with a group of students. The problem is that the voice-over gains an authority which it often doesn't deserve and which disguises the true intentions of the imagemaker. The video on its own doesn't gain that authority from the integrity of its images or the integrity of the process in which it is involved. The voice-over tries to create a context in which the viewer-student will duplicate or mirror what has been seen. The ultimate irony of the voice-over is its lack of faith in the viewer and in the image. It is an attempt to control both sides of a rather complex communicative situation.
Critical Approaches to Culture, Communications + Hypermedia is a set of resources on the World Wide Web developed by Ron Burnett in Vancouver, Canada. All rights reserved. ©Ron Burnett 2007