Life in a Day - filmed by you

Last time I posted the lacture of Michael Wesch from Kansas State University regarding the new powerful change in peoples relations and the possibilities in oneself representation that is possible due to YouTube. That brought to my mind film Life in a Day I have watched month ago during the opening of the Cracow Film Festival. It is a project (or experiment as it is called by “authors”) undertaken on YouTube. Users were asked to submit the videos showing how did they spend 24th of July 2010. I was wandering how will I bear 1,5hour of YouTube-alike films although I can “watch” YouTube for hours without such dilemmas. I suppose I doubted in the change of format. How will YouTube films act on a big screen? How will I react to this clash of media civilizations? My viewer’s experience of YouTube films is far from my cinema experience (private vs. public sphere, dark space in case of cinema etc).

Surprisingly watching Life in a Day was not painful or unpleasant at all. In fact I really believe I could watch this global flow of images all night long.

The discourse of the organizers of the project is very “you-centered”. They underline it intensively that the real author of the film is the “you” - which in fact means the whole community of Internet (YouTube) users. The film is your (our?) perspective on reality. Life in a Day has the strong taste of the Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda (Cinéma vérité). Now everybody can be Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera recording the flow of everyday life in which trivial elements and everyday life routine is not destructive but on contrary intriguing phenomenon.

The montage of users’ films from all over the world gives the impression of participation in the truly global text in which the western oppressive perspective is less visible than on the other audiovisual platforms such as news. It looks like the strategy of “global Hollywood”* does not work in this case. We can see images from non-dominant countries (as I call regions usually labeled as Third World) shot by inhabitants of these regions, although some of them must have been shot by western “cameramen” as they reveal the surprise of the local customs and reality. However in fact the questioning the strategy of global Hollywood is quite naïve here because the creator of the project is still the western big production studio under the name-brand of Ridley Scott. It constantly upkeeps the division into creative, vibrant prestigious western center, and the rest of the world where the brilliant ideas are realized. All 4,500 hours of footage sent from all over the world had been seen, selected and edited in the western cultural paradigm.

Although many doubts occur (including the question of authorship – on the screeing in Cracow the author of Polish fragment of the film was present, although he was the author of 20-seconds image that neither me nor any of my friends have noticed , is it a real authorship?) Life in a Day seems to be a new quality as far as use the power of networked individuals in creating the new cultural text.



* T. Miller, N. Govil, J. McMurria, R. Maxwell, Global Hollywood, British Film Institute, London 2001 the idea of the mechanism of global Hollywood was inspired by F. Fröbel, J. Heinrich, O. Kreye, The New International Division of Labour, Cambridge University
Press, London, New York 1980.