A Short History of the Highrise was premiered at the 51st NYFF as part of the convergence program. Short history documentaries are a bit of an oxymoron: they’re never short and almost never accomplish the comprehensive goals they set out to achieve. But we now have the interactive documentary; not just a method but a ‘genre’ in the making. The producers of A Short History of the Highrise (NFB National Film Board of Canada and the New York Times Op-Docs) using the best of available technology, have engineered an application that allows a user to scroll and swipe across their tablet or computer screen, probing much deeper layers of a film presentation without significantly altering the narrative arc of the documentary. Presto! Convergence, and the possibilities are almost limitless. Poetic brevity can ignite a depth that is completely controlled by the viewer. The very notion itself binds the viewer with the subject in a way that a passive viewing can never achieve. In the case of the Short History of the Highrise, viewers are allowed to plumb the director’s raw source material, follow an animation of a Roman traversing an ancient street replete with the earliest high-rise mixed-use buildings, hear an academic commentary on the current commodification of highrise apartments, or fill-out characters we see in the documentary with their own anecdotes.

‘Plumb’, ‘follow’, ‘hear’, ‘fill-out’, need we say anything more about this emerging documentary genre? Its only a matter of time before convergence is utilized by all manner of producers in a post-cinema screening world. You can see it coming, millions of followers of Breaking Bad gleaning notes from the show’s writers or researching the latest in ‘street drug’ crime. Imagine sorting out the complexities of Kingdoms and back stories for Game of Thrones. Documentary once informed all film with cinema verite and a raw realism that has since never left it. Again, convergence techniques coming out of documentary filmmking may be a game changer.

A Short History of the Highrise confirms that complex issues can be sourced and presented on screen without losing their complexity. Even though only 32 minutes in length (4 segments at 8 minutes each), the presentation asks all the big questions and the swipe and scroll allows further and deeper levels of understanding. The Producers specifically chose a rhyming song like narration to induce participation at the most essential level of hearing. Still photographs are cleverly and subtly manipulated with one superimposed animated element, often a cue for its meaning, and lending the pictures movement and connectivity to subsequent images, all paced with the deliberate rhythm of the narrator’s voice.