Much ink has been spilled and pixels punctuated regarding the ongoing controversial topic around the copyright, downloading, streaming and file sharing of creative content — yet there has been little discussion (outside of organizational listserves and at festival forums) of documentary cinema and file sharing.
This may be in large part due to the fact that public discourse is catching up to a trend that is really less than five years old. Whereas commercial and mainstream fiction cinema has been swapped, downloaded and streamed online since file sharing’s early days, documentary has only recently come into its own online sharing milieu.
I remember doc-makers quietly excited to see websites like documentariesonline.com pop up like fresh tulips in fields of well-trodden, yellowing, commercial-fiction grass. “It’s not directly helping me, but it’s great that documentaries have reached a point where people want to pirate and share them,” went the measured reflection in those early days of doc download dribbles.
Yet some years later that dribble is forming its own alternative torrent and sharing sites have proliferated, not to mention the squeaking in of docs on that corporate compendium of banal and alluring audio-visual culture, YouTube.
Exactly like their more popular fiction cousins, documentaries are increasingly ripped from DVD and Blu-Ray, compressed, uploaded to torrent and video hosting sites and shared faster than you can say ‘an inconvenient truth.’ Some prescient doc-makers saw this coming, and from the get-go played with ‘em instead of against ‘em, such as the makers of The Corporation, who released a by-donation torrent of the film as a parallel option to the “illegal” counterparts.
And while many doc-makers are “glad to get it out there,” as the adage goes, they are also “glad to eat and pay rent.” As someone who knows scores of independent documentary makers who have self-financed their films or gone into debiliating debt during production, I would also add that many are also “Glad to hopefully break even.”
So how do documentary file sharing and streaming sites that do not remunerate the makers fit into this proverbial squeeze between getting it out there and eking out some kind of living in the media arts?
This question has come up recently in a discussion with documentary filmmakers around a new site called Thought Maybe.
In the town of Bescanó, two hours north of Barcelona, one theatre applied their creative smarts to the tax issue and came up with a fresh solution. Rather than selling tickets, the 300-seat Teatre Bescanó began selling carrots.
