Reconfiguring Archives in Interactive Documentaries

Besides presenting a creative account of reality as a digital format, the interactive documentary plays with the interconnectedness of intermediality by assembling various audio and visual sensory modalities, including moving images, photography, illustration, animation, text, and sound (Whitelaw 2002; Aston and Gaudenzi 2012; Nash 2021). Following this train of thought, using archival footage may open creative possibilities, as it entails repurposing historical, institutional, or personal audiovisual materials into new narratives. Several authors (Russel 1999; Bruzzi 2006; Haggith 2012; Baron 2014) have significantly contributed to the critical reflection on the use of archives within traditional documentary forms, considering the historical, creative, and ethical layers of such content manipulation. On the other hand, archives in interactive documentaries still require more critical analysis, as archival footage drifts from its indexical nature (Haggith 2012) through decontextualization or repurposing, affecting the textuality of the interactive narrative.
This paper aims to merge these two territories and analyze how archival footage contributes to an epistemological account of reality in interactive documentaries. Drawing upon De Jong’s (2012) taxonomy to classify how archives are used in traditional documentaries, we analyze how two interactive documentaries - Welcome to Pine Point (Simmons and Shoebridge 2011) and A Short History of the Highrise (Cizek 2013) - reuse and repurpose analogue archives, while interplay these archival materials with other multimedia formats. Departing from the traditional formats of documentary film, De Jong identifies the following uses of archive footage: i) the archive as an illustration (a visual reference and indexical clue); ii) as a historical backdrop (a historical framework and context for the narrative); iii) a metaphorical tool (to produce subjective layers of meaning or create critical or ironic tones); iv) a narrative resource (to create a new dramatic narrative); v) and the archive as legal evidence (an indexical link to past events, referring to legal circumstances). De Jong’s taxonomy provides a methodological framework for the development of this study, which also aims to analyze the documentaries through the concept of “archive-image” (Didi-Huberman 2008); i. e., how archives are used in interactive documentaries and the meaning deriving from how such footage is placed within the navigation structure of the interface, contributing to the multimodal narrative.
We argue that interactive documentary provides a territory of engagement and continuous momentum to revive the past by using the archive as historical validation and a shared collective memory space while reimagining new readings and engendering multiple archival imaginaries.