Election Returns

With the advent of web crowdsourcing making its way into media realms including journalism and photography, it was only a matter of time before the novel concept found its way into filmmaking. "Crowdsourcing" is the idea of outsourcing work (typically at no pay) via the Internet to a broad swath of people, who will presumably deliver the work back to you using the same channel. If you send a tweet out to every one of your followers on Twitter asking them to send you photos of cats for an art project, and they send them back, you've effectively crowdsourced.

Photos of cats is one thing, but using crowdsourcing -- which isn't always reliable -- to make a documentary is another. That didn't stop Jeff Deutchman, a filmmaker and acquisitions manager at IFC Films, from employing the concept in the production of his new documentary, 11/4/08. Reaching out to 26 filmmakers and friends all over the globe, Deutchman asked them to film their experiences last November, 4th as Barack Obama became the nation's first African American president. Receiving tons of footage captured everywhere from Berlin to the UAE to Los Angeles to New Orleans, Deutchman whittled it all down to a whirlwind 70 minutes, giving viewers a globe-trotting look at the momentous election night. 11/4/08 just had its world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival and Deutchman sat down with PAPERMAG to discuss the filmmaking process, the future of crowdsourcing and using a camera to do away with time and space.

Your film consists of footage that was shot by filmmakers all over the world, which complicates the role of director. How would you describe your role in this project?

I'm not calling myself a director, but rather a curator. I know that might have some affectation to it, but I think it's a more accurate description of what I'm doing. Even though I shot footage, I shot it alongside 26 other people, and didn't do it in any greater capacity than they did. And then I edited the film, which was a technical job. So in terms of the possessive credit, I felt like what I was doing was conceptual, I conceived of it. Beyond that, I was essentially constructing something out of the footage I received. It didn't sound as appropriate to call myself a director.

The editing room is where movies take shape, especially when it comes to documentaries. Was there a specific mold that you wanted the film to fit into, or did you want to see where the footage led?

Definitely the latter. I vaguely had certain biases going into the process -- I know what kinds of documentaries I like, so I never thought, for example, that I'd have voice-over narration. But it could have been a very different film had I had different filmmakers shooting it. The other thing is that it was determined by what was going on in the world as I edited. Post started on November 5th, I was getting footage up through May, and while I was watching the footage I kept watching the world around me receding from the ethos that existed on 11/4/08. My response to the footage changed every time I looked at it. That determined, to a large degree, what the film became. But anything I constructed was very dependent on the found footage. If none of the footage was compelling, there might not have been a film.

Assuming crowdsourcing becomes a bigger trend in documentary filmmaking, do you see there being certain benefits to making films this way?

I think there have already been films that did this in various capacities. Internet projects have been doing this - the Star Wars: Uncut project, or there are all sorts of photo-collecting projects involving 9/11, for instance. I think my film is definitely in that tradition, and as a whole I think it's definitely representing something new. I think that what benefit there could be is, when you increase the number of authors in the production of a film, it changes things in relation to the subjectivity/objectivity problem that documentaries in particular have always had. There've been all sorts of movements in documentary history that essentially try to address this issue, that no matter what, there's subjectivity involved. Even if you're making a film that's cinéma vérité, where you try to disguise the fact that there's an author there, it's always subjective. When you introduce a collective of people, all making different subjective choices, subjectivity doesn't go away, but it becomes more polyphonic. The goal with the film’s website is to continue collecting footage from that day, make the raw footage available, encourage people at home to make their own projects - then you're really exploding subjectivity, and eventually the idea is that it could become this really democratic project where you're not avoiding subjectivity, but you're increasing the amount of voices.

Is everyone's own home video footage of election night equally artistically merited? It seems implicit in your point that everyone's viewpoint is equally merited, but doesn't that devalue the difficulty of making a good documentary?

I don't believe that everything is equal, but I do believe that people today are more interested in making up their own minds about things. You could argue that - I do have some of the same feelings about the Internet as a whole, and there is a lot of footage from that day, and every other day, all over the place, but there isn't a lot of organization to it. One of the things I'm trying to do with the website is suggest that the Internet can be like a library, with having one website devoted to one day. Everything from that day can be found on this website. It has value for historical, educational, research purposes.

There's so much emotion in the characters, and a significant lack of political analysis.

I can see it in a couple of different ways. I'm deliberately withholding some of my own reactions because I want to see the different reactions to the film. I will say that there is something naive about the expression of emotion on that day, but there's also something wonderful about it. There's a time for sober analysis, and a time for emotion.

In your film, time stands still and space does not act as a barrier between people. Were you thinking about the cinematic implications of this when conceiving of the film?

Yeah. It's an experiment. I think when you're making art, it's important to impose rules on yourself. One way of looking at this project is that it's the opposite of the Michael Apted Up series. His rule was that he'd focus on a limited number of subjects, so he was limited in terms of space, but he had all of time to play with, and he would follow them over the course of their whole lives. Because of that limitation of space, he's able to successfully say something about time. What I'm doing is the opposite -- I'm limiting myself to one day, and because of that limitation, I'm able to explore space. If I had told people, film anything having to do with the election -- leading up to it, after it, the inauguration, from all over the world, there would be nothing interesting about that, because cinematically there would be nothing there. If you don't have that rule, you don't have anything.