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Life in A Day 2020 – A Collaborative Investigation of Everyday Life

 


 A lot can be said about Kevin MacDonald's project Life in A Day (2020), which he started a decade ago by producing the first Life in A Day documentary back in 2011. While there are several aspects to be criticized in the film, it still manages to bring a certain novelty and raises questions that are important for our field of study. I will start with the latter. 

Life is A Day is not a typical documentary where the filmmaker goes into the field and tells the story of others through her own camera. Instead, the filmmaker lets the people film their stories through their own cameras. Now, there are a couple of things to discuss here. Firstly, this can be a good example of collaborative work and exploration of numerous everyday lives. But then, what is the role of the filmmaker in it and what happens to his authorship? The producer and his team definitely did more than merely putting all the received footage together. I think this documentary, among everything else, demonstrates the significance of editing and sound. There is a certain logic in which the producer selected specific scenes, put them chronologically, edited and added a specific sound to them. I believe the documentary could have been made into something totally different if the producer edited it in any other way. For this reason, I would rather question the collaborativeness of the film – did the final product live up to the expectations of its individual creators?


Although I like the idea of giving the voice to the people to tell their own stories, at the end of the day, the producer decides what is worth keeping and what is worth cutting. This reminded me of Kevin McElvaney's project – #RefugeeCameras. The photojournalist decided to give single-use cameras to refugees he met in Izmir, Lesbos, Athens and Idomeni in order to let them document their journies and stories. The idea behind the project was to give a voice to refugees and not let others decide what is important to say and what is not instead of them. I think MacDonald had a similar aim while creating the Life in A Day project – to show the local point of view (filmed by the locals themselves). But instead, he created one storyline out of the single stories, not necessarily reflecting all of them. 


I always feel some kind of discomfort while watching the attempt to compress a story into a narrow temporal frame. Google's annual videos of "A Year in Search" are one of the examples – there is always something missing. It is impossible to compress life in a day, not to mention compressing the lives of so many people in one film. Moreover, what is the producer's message? Is he trying to show us life in all its spectrum? What should be our next step after watching the film? 

I think Life in A Day succeeds in making us think about the accessibility of the wider public to visual anthropology. By accessibility, I mean not only the film being free to watch, but also it being reachable to people without any specific training in ethnography and/or filmmaking. Digitalization allows us to become consumers and producers at the same time. While it is challenging the initial form of ethnographic filmmaking, I think this new mode of producing films might create innovative methods of telling the stories.  





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