Tasked with experiencing an interactive documentary from docubase’s catalogue, I first set out to find something of interest to me, something that would get me intrigued in a medium relatively foreign to me. Given it was a night before uni where my brain and body act out at the idea of having to wake up and catch the train so early, I first tried Hugues Sweeney’s A Journal of Insomnia, and, after getting flash player to do its job, I loaded in. I was met with a warbling, haunting soundscape that was quickly pierced by a lady with a strong European accent, a skin-crawling ASMR-esque spiel about insomnia which both drew me and gave me the creeps.

After selecting to join Sarah from four potential characters whose faces were divided into quarters and rearranged in Frankenstein-like fashion, I was met with a distorted voicemail that sounded way too much like anything from a true crime doc for my liking. “Tonight, you wish to know more? You wish to experience Sarah’s insomnia?”, the original lady’s voice asked. How interactive was this going to be? As it turns out, it was too interactive — I clicked through to ‘make an appointment’ which prompted me to enter both my email address and my phone number. My great anxiety of phone calls, combined with the serious lack of reception at my house, and the sinking feeling that this was going to end up anything like the interactive Take This Lollipop Facebook app that Olivia reminded me existed, stopped me there. I wish! It seemed so interesting. The distorted VHS footage and atmospheric soundscape were just a little too much to handle.

Looking for something else, I stumbled upon VOSE, with its subtitle “Why do our eyes drift inevitably towards the subtitles?” Given we were deep in Italian Neorealism in Histories of Film Theory this week, my mind had begun to wonder about subtitling and its conventions, and this line jumped right out at me. VOSE is a Spanish project, and it was originally subtitled in Spanish, so it was a interesting to see how the subtitles for the English version came through after already being filtered once.

At first, it gives you a statement quote and then throws you into grainy super 8 footage of bullfighters and then takes a step back from there, switching to a clean, b/w widescreen shot of a projector, presumably the one screening the previous footage, and continues to scrawl through other footage while its central narrators — characters A, B and C who exist only through subtitles — narrative observational imagery. They ponder ideas of cinematography, what it takes for an image to feel cinematic and how subtitles enhance certain cinematic feelings. Then, we are introduced to a real life person — a subtitler, a critic — who introduce themselves, and play host to several different ‘games’, or prompts. A lot of it feels like something you’d find when you pressed a big ‘PLAY’ button next to some shoddy screen at an old museum, but in many ways a more refined, more focused version. It’s not there for the sake of giving casual museum attendees a quick bout of info, it’s interested in the inherent qualities of such online screen media. Its docubase bio reads:

“This demonstrates once again that the postmodern documentary is a complex type of documentary that always moves at very different levels, where articulation and representation finds its best form on the web.”