Our Corona Year - Kevin Macdonald: Life in a Day 2020

 Some could argue that Kevin Macdonald's crowdsourced documentary Life in a Day 2020 (and its predecessor Life in a Day from 2011) how Man with a Movie Camera would look like if Dziga Vertov lived in the 21st century. Other critics dismissed Macdonald's collaborative effort as a mere corporate ad by Youtube. Can we say that this is the future of documentary making because it is radically cooperative, an uplifting, emotional roller coaster assembled from over 300,000 videos from 192 countries? It seems to de-center the gaze of the Global North since its many protagonists are from all over the world are filming themselves, thus claiming a voice and recording the meaningful and mundane moments that matter to them. The professional documentary maker is reduced to a mere editor here, selecting and assembling the final product from the works of many filmmakers. He is not the one prescribing the narrative and deciding what is meaningful and what is not, he is not the one picking a protagonist and speaking about/for them. Or is he?

What makes Macdonald's experiment even more poignant is its timeliness: he asked his participants to capture their lives on a specific day in a charged and tumultuous year, July 25th, 2020. A global pandemic was on the loose, social upheavals were ripping communities apart and natural disasters were raging showing the consequences of reckless human activity. It was to be expected that these would make an appearance in the documentary. However, Macdonald claimed that his intention was not to make a chronicle of the pandemic but to create a 'time capsule' which would mean something entirely different for those who will watch it later than for the contemporary viewer. His intention can be appreciated, and also his aim to present all footage as equal and converging towards some 'universal' human experience (if we can talk about such a thing at all).

We can maybe say that Macdonald had too much concept and too little at the same same time. By presenting every sequence as 'equal', he misses the diversity of his collaborators and fails to create a really compelling narrative, other than organizing the material into thematic groups (such as 'love', 'birth', 'food', 'faith', 'death', 'work'). Similarly, by merging everything into this amalgamation of 'human experience', he misses the tensions and contradictions that lurk between these videos. My suspicion is that - ironically - these tensions and contradiction were present or even explicit in the original footages but Macdonald and his editing team leached these out from the final film. For example, the obvious tension between the black woman who talks about her two brothers who were killed in police custody and the Trump-supporting, anti-masker veteran are kept apart and are not really brought into dialogue with each other. It is also obvious that the pandemic affects a North American suburbanite differently, than a South American shoe-repair man or an Eastern European goat farmer. These are all melted into a common human struggle but their specificities and differing degrees are erased. Very different tones and styles are juxtaposed and sometimes create a confusing effect: the National Geographic-style natural scene is presented next to a genuine human drama (such as the mother whose son - who was included in the previous Life in a Day film - died during the COVID-pandemic). Macdonald keeps the tone uplifting and occasionally sacrifices the nuances and dark tones just to forge a sweeping and epic narrative. And in this sense, it becomes clear that despite the collaborative aim of the filmmaker and his intention to withdraw to the position of an editor, he becomes the main creator of the film - no matter what the original intention of the individual, amateur filmmaker was, Macdonald claims the footage and uses it to serve his own artistic vision. Sometimes, entire, compelling narratives are cut into pieces and presented without context (like the couple who are struggling to conceive a child or the health care worker who sings Schubert's Erlkönig). We are only allowed to get glimpses of the possibilities of a new type of narration facilitated by the easily available phone cameras and the ingenuity of amateur filmmakers. The individual struggles, joys, disappointments and visual imperfections are merged into a polished, epic narrative that is visually pleasing, emotionally intense but lacks depth and nuances.