Swedish TV series pioneering participation drama
The Berlin Film Festival is full of surprise hits, and mega movie stars. This year Angelina Jolie was the talk of the town, promoting her Bosnian war drama In the Land of Blood and Honey.
But one of the things that stands out about Berlin, which none of the other festivals offer, is a talent campus.
Most film festivals are not about teaching young film makers how to get their films one day screened at an event like Berlin, which offers 5 days of lectures on movies and how to make them.
One of the most interesting lectures was titled “The Indie filmmaker’s Guide to cross media: story telling in the 21st century.”
How we think about art and how we consume art is all changing. I personally think participation art, isn’t art. But listening to this lecture my view slowly shifted as I learned how fast technology is now changing; as is the way we learn and tell stories.
Today what film and TV have to offer,are very restrictive in their release windows and the way stories are told in these restrictive formats hasn’t changed. However, the audience is way ahead, so there is a big gap between what the industry is demonstrating and what the audience wants. So perhaps there are new storytellers, and ways of telling stories that are evolving.
Future of storytelling debated in Berlin
It took 20 years for the film industry to be recognised as an art form and right now even though “transmedia” is known as marketing gimmick, it might take a bit of time for this “fascination” to become a serious art form.
Despite the migration in user habits from TV to the web, the film industry is alive and kicking and ever new ways of how to tell stories are emerging.
Martin Elricsson the creator of Swedish participation TV shows Truth about Markia shared his views. Charming with dark hair he strode onto the stage asking, “Who controls the production of cultural stimuli?” The answer is that today it’s not primarily an audience culture, mainly it’s an artist doing his art, and then selling it out in the world.
However, all that might be changing, as now there is a thirst for more and more interactive stories. In these, the participant chooses the order in which to get stimuli.
In a way it’s an illusion of participation, but participation TV shows are rather like the adventure books of the 1980s - those ones which asked “do you want to knock on the door, turn to page xyz”…“Do you want to smash down the door turn to page xyz…”?
Martin thinks that in the future, entertainment might be like a party organiser setting up a stage and then people doing their thing for the crowd – or rather like a dinner party, where the guests all exchange ideas and stories and make their own art to entertain each other, where there is no pre-determined story.
In Sweden it’s very popular to take part in live action War plays, where people dress up in costumes (which they spend a fortune on) to act out a scene. In a way it’s a community taking participation stories to the extreme.
But SVT, Sweden’s main TV network, recently screened a series which Martin wrote, a participation drama called The Truth about Marika .The audience had to piece together a solution for a detective story and it was the audience that determined what happened. Adverts called it “fiction with no limits”, where fiction and reality are blurred.
Each programme gave clues but the audience led the production company in choosing the direction of events.
The Truth about Marika: Participation TV
The audience became part of the fiction and chose which way the story went by interacting with the show via the Internet. Then live debates about the show were screened around the programme, questioning what was real and what wasn’t.
In the next series there will be normal people playing roles along side the actors.
The concept of participation or audience involvement has been done successfully in documentaries before such as in Gaza Sderot, the famous interactive documentary about Palestine and Israel.
It sounds like an interesting future for television but whether it’s “art” or not, remains a question event the creatives who came up with the concept might struggle to answer.
Perhaps a similar participation TV show might hit UK screens soon, as it looks like participation media is taking off around the world.
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