Diagonal Thoughts

“While there are great benefits to digital technology, if you embrace it today, you are giving up guaranteed long-term access which you have with analog film.”
Milt Shefter, Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, Digital Motion Picture Archival Project

Let me tell you: the more I’m getting involved in the whole audiovisual digitalisation business, the more confused I get. There’s not only the continuous going-back-and-forth between the issues of preservation of the past on one hand and anticipation of the future on the other (that might be the thing I’m having trouble with most of all), but there’s also the the difficult decision-making process, influenced and clouded by so many powerful, mostly industrial, forces. What to make of this, for example: a recent SUN Microsystems report estimates the cost of ‘digital film’ is about ‘half the price’ of analogue, while another report, published by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, says it’s nearly ‘twelve times higher’! Of course, these costs depend on many complex variables and on their interaction (uses of the content, quality for digitisation, type of content, categories of users, etc.), but still.. it’s hard to make any kind of sense of this kind of ‘findings’, especially when it becomes clear that lots of industrial-based concepts are unsufficiently defined or at least ambiguous. To make things even more complicated, all eyes in the cinema business might be directed towards the digitalisation of film, but this kind of blind all-digital push-mentality might destroy more than we can imagine. An European research project, called FIRST (FIlm Restoration and conservation STrategies), published a few years ago, was not only unable to quantify the costs involved in the digitisation of large collections of film materials, but also conluded that digitisation is NOT a preservation strategy for film, at least not yet: film remains the safest carrier for high quality, high value film content. There are so many misunderstandings about this, even in the professional areas of cultural heritage, so again: digitized content does NOT replace the analogue film original, which means (the cost for) digitalisation is in addition to activities in the analogue domain.

Digital preservation sets out to preserve the “shape and substance” of images or sounds without preserving the format, or the support…. or the original experience. Is this acceptable for film, which has its particular “look and feel” that has inpired, and keeps on inspiring (f.e. there seems to be emerging a new generation of 8mm and 16mm filmmakers. Go to any ‘openminded’ filmfestival and you’ll notice) so many wonderful forms of cultural expression and experimentation? Archivists are widely divided, but would, in the end, agree that it is better to preserve what is possible, than lose a film image entirely. Furthermore, restoration of film can only be done in a optimal fashion, if the original film image is retained. Surely, analogue restoration is often extremely labour- and time-consuming and therefore very costly, and only a few films get the full restoration treatment to the degree that they deserve or need, but then again digital technology is not expected to be cheaper and will definitely not increase the numbers fully restored. Technology companies claim that they have achieved efficient single-image compression schemes (spatial or inter-frame compressions) that are indistinguishable from uncompressed images, but let’s not forget that these compressed images, in effect frozen in time, use, space and quality, can’t be worked on again to improve a restoration or extend quality to provide an new access version for an improved projection system – and technology always keeps improving.

So film is here to stay, at least untill further notice, and it cannot be discarded just because its content is digitized for today’s access on DVD, for VOD etc. Of course, the advent of these digital delivery modes and channels offer unprecedented opportunities for film collections to provide access to their holdings, so digitalisation is still worthwhile, particularly in a context where the traditional theatrical screening model is not responding to a growing demand anymore (According to data published by The Hollywood Reporter, only about 19% of total revenue for the six largest movie companies came from theater showings. The remaining 81% represents revenue generated through DVDs, TV, pay TV and VHS. Let’s hope the traditional film theatres survive, especially the smaller ones. I wouldn’t wanna miss the magic light and sound of filmprojection). But the management of this proces, as well as the cost structure, is extremely complex (see image), not in the least because an important part of the process must take place long before the content is actually transferred, and some of the most critical deeply interconnected decisions influence the whole process. These strategic decisions, for example the mode of distribution and delivery, will decide the resolution and technical characteristics of the digitised content, or the selection of the content to be digitised, and these are positioned all along the chain. This is complicated by the fact that you have literally dozens of ways that a piece of content can be viewed, depending upon the licensing rules, from theater to mobile to broadband to any number of devices in different formats. The methods and processes by which they go from higher resolution to lower resolution have to become increasingly more efficient.

Sure, more and more filmmakers shoot their movies on digital cameras and perform post-production on computers; the studios distribute the films to theaters via hard drives, tape drives or satellite; and then cinemas show the films using digital projectors. So that should reduce the problems, no? NO way. In the AMPAS report mentioned (“The Digital Dilemma: Strategic Issues in Archiving and Accessing Digital Motion Picture Materials”), the authors point to the facts that current 2K digital quality is inferior compared to 35mm film, that digital storage media has a shorter lifespan than film, and the annual costs for preserving film archival masters ($1,059 per title, $8.83 per running minute) is still (at least according to them) a lot cheaper than preserving a 4K digital master ($12,514 and $104.28). Much worse, to keep the enormous swarm of data produced when a picture is ‘born digital’ pushes the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, vastly higher than the $486 it costs to toss the camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the cold-storage vault. One case study states that a two-hour feature film would take up about 129 cartons or cans, which are normally stored in vaults often located in underground salt mines. “Nobody paid any attention to what the budget was because it wasn’t significant,” says Milt Shefter, the project leader on the AMPAS Science and Technology Council’s digital motion picture archival project.

To make things worse, there’s also the amount of information that is generated nowadays. While a director using 35mm film might shoot 15 or 18 minutes of film for every minute used in the final movie, “that ratio goes up tremendously when you go to digital,” says Shefter. “It encourages more use.” For instance, because film doesn’t need to be loaded into the camera, the cameras just keep shooting – even as the director steps out from behind the camera to talk with the cast. Adding to the amount of data created in the making of a typical movie are the files generated during the post-production process, when the footage is turned into a sellable product. Directors believe they have better control when the movie goes to digital. “You can do so much more in the post-production process in digital than [you] were ever able to do in film,” says Shefter. As an article in Computerworld states: “the bottom line is that movie studios are in a position of having to maintain hundreds of terabytes of data for the material associated with any single motion picture, content that’s barely or rarely cataloged or indexed”.

In an article titled “The Afterlife is Expensive for Digital Movies” the Times says that all (blockbuster) movies, including all movies shot in digital, are still preserved onto analog film “At present, a copy of virtually all studio movies — even those like ‘Click’ or ‘Miami Vice’ that are shot using digital processes — is being stored in film format, protecting the finished product for 100 years or more.” Not that the traditional film storage is so great, considering that “only half of the feature films shot before 1950 survive”, and lots of film is rotting away in archives worldwide (remember that broadcasters such as the the BBC, for example, are known to have destroyed or erased many of the programs saved in its videotape and film libraries to make room for new programs). But at least, that we know, while the questions and concerns about digital storage are still very much unknown, as Shefter says: “To begin with, the hardware and storage media — magnetic tapes, disks, whatever — on which a film is encoded are much less enduring than good old film. If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years. Similarly, DVDs tend to degrade: according to the report, only half of a collection of disks can be expected to last for 15 years, not a reassuring prospect to those who think about centuries (The question of the long-term reliability of disk storage was the topic of many studies, see here). Digital audiotape, it was discovered, tends to hit a “brick wall” when it degrades. While conventional tape becomes scratchy, the digital variety becomes unreadable.”

Now acetate-based films and their related materials are more likely to be archived in climate-controlled facilities with fire suppression systems, where film master can be preserved up to 100 years and more. Digital tapes and disks that have replaced acid-free cartons and steel metal cans used for film “have not proved to be a significant successful method of preserving this information.” Some users reported to the AMPAS that the materials on the drives couldn’t be accessed after only 18 months. For example, LTO4, the current standard for tape drives in the movie business, which became available in 2007, is unable to read the contents of tapes written in the LTO1 format, the standard in 2000. “If you’re dealing with a technology where you have to make a decision about what to do with it somewhere within a four- or five-year period, you have to know you’re going to migrate it [or] get rid of it,” explains Shefter. The studios’ solution: to generate the majority of the revenue in that period before they have to make migration decisions. The academy’s report also mentions some examples of the so-called “triage on the fly” process. Broadcaster ESPN (Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) for example runs a huge server farm where, after a week’s collection of broadcasts came in from professional and college sports, somebody – usually an intern – would go in and erase much of the data to make room for the next week’s broadcast content. “That’s a microcosm of what is going to happen in the industry,” says Shefter.

“We are already heading down this digital road … and there is no long-term guaranteed access to what is being created. We need to understand what the consequences are and start planning now while we still have an analog backup system available.” Shefter notes that a requirement for any preservation system is that it must meet or exceed the performance characteristic benefits of the current analog photochemical film system. According to the report, these benefits include a worldwide standard, guaranteed long-terms access (100-year minimum) with no loss in quality, the ability to create duplicate masters to fulfill future (and unknown) distribution needs and opportunities, immunity from escalating financial investment, picture and sound quality which meets or exceeds that of original camera negative and production sound recordings, and no dependence on shifting technology platforms. If these terms can’t be agreed on, the data explosion could well turn into digital movie extinction…

“It is the cinematic image that has expressed in a particularly profound manner this new condition of the image as the inscription of a blank beyond, a closure to the senses, internal to the world and to the very activity of the senses… this beyond that is part of our world, that which makes our eye experience its own blindness as the dimension of futurity (and of an immemorial past)”
— Eyal Peretz, ‘Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses’, 2007

Brian De Palma is an angry man. His latest film, ‘Redacted’, leaves no question about that. De Palma has always been a passionate and critical filmmaker, making cinema that is in itself meta-cinema, smuggling ethical as well as structural concerns in blockbuster narrative films, making the viewer examine what happens in- as well as outside the frame (a friend actually called De Palma “the Michael Snow of Hollywood”). In most of his films he reflects in one way or another – although not always in a very subtle way – on the ambiguous power of images, the mechanics of image-making and the complicity of the viewer in the process, but in ‘Redacted’ (see also earlier post) his critical eye is not only directed to the role and impact of media, but to a world that is slowly but surely loosing its sense of humanity and thruth, a world that is no longer mediated by images, but is becoming all image. De Palma is, as Emmanuel Burdeau of Cahiers du Cinema writes, no longer solely interested in putting other images than the media’s in front of us; “it is no longer to put the truth behind the images that are hiding it; it is not the search for the right point of view, the quest for the initial shot of the film to be as thrilling as it is impossible. We are no longer in a Brian De Palma film. The task at hand is simply to offer a certain way of laying out existing visuals: horizontally, as flat and glistening as the screen these lines are written on.”

‘Redacted’ is a remake of sorts. The director refers several times, sometimes literally (the interrogation scene, the confession in the bar etc. – it’s funny to see how he’s copying parts of his own films now) to his 1989 Vietnam drama ‘Casualties of War’, which had a similar subject. But it’s also a remake of images that are available on the internet, on blogs, forums, social network sites; images that De Palma discovered while doing research and that shocked him to the bone. ‘Redacted’ is based on the true story of a teenage Iraqi girl who was raped, killed, and burned by American soldiers, told as if discovered in bits and pieces scattered about the Internet. The images are mostly recreations or reinterpretations of actually existing footage: an American soldier’s video diary (titled ‘Tell Me No Lies’), a French documentary about routine searches at checkpoints, surveillance camera footage, Iraqi television news casts, and video files on assorted web sites. Through this collage-like approach and the use of new media forms, De Palma explores the very implications of the documentary form and the tension between what we see and what we want to see – the sweet little lies we have become accostumed to.

“What fascinated me was that here was a new set of styles that provided a new way of telling a story I’d told before. I also tried to make you aware, as a viewer, that the images you’re seeing and the way they’re constructed can be presented to create any point of view. You think this is real because of the form it’s in, and of course it’s all fictionalised. So maybe you should think twice when watching a report by an embedded journalist who’s running around convincing you everything is real, authentic and spontaneous.”

De Palma shows no cynicism in using internet images and digital procedures, but rather embraces the potential of the net as a way of making visible the images that are refused by the mainstream media, a medium that is not (yet) as corrupted as television is.

“What I’m trying to do is to make the viewer aware of the techniques that are used to present supposedly the truth to them. They sit there and watch their television screens, and see these embedded reporters and infomercials from Iraq, and how well things are going in Iraq, and they think that’s the truth. In anything on television, somebody is selling something – whether it’s a product, whether it’s a policy. You look on television, this is a commercial medium and everything is for sale. Once you understand that, then you can understand the medium a little better. The web is not so corrupted because there is not that much money involved. Believe me, when the money gets in there, it will probably go the way of television. We’re living in an era where everybody is performing all the time, and posting their performances on the web. Plus there’s reality television, where you’re supposed to believe all this stuff is real, and of course it’s made up.”

The result is a provocative investigation of formal cinematographic conventions and the schizophrenic relationship between reality and fiction, while at the same time De Palma adresses his trademark themes: voyeurism, violence and the relationship between the individual, the image and history in a media environment (btw it might not come as a suprise that De Palma was slaughtered by the press and the audience in the US – f.e. Bill O’Reilly of the right-wing Fox Network called De Palma “a vile man and [‘Redacted’ a] vile film … If even one [new terrorist] enters the fight and kills an American, it’s on Brian de Palma … During World War II, President Roosevelt, the liberal icon, would have put De Palma in prison”). ‘Redacted’ is however also a contemplation on how, as cultural theorist Paul Virilio has remarked, audiovisual media have generated a new relationship with death and disaster, how the spectacle takes the place of critical distance. The space between the camera and the event, screen and viewer is so reduced that death is practically tangible. While De Palma hardly ever turns his camera away from the atrocity, at the same time he seems to propagate a critical, self-reflective distance. In ‘Redacted’ for instance there are some scenes that are staged like a amateuristic Brechtian theatre play.

“One of my favorite aspects of documentary film is how people have a natural way of turning into actors – and often very bad ones – when a camera is pointed at them. Redacted makes conscious commentary on this by breaking a pivotal scene in half, first with the characters aware of their being filmed, second with their being tricked into thinking the camera has been turned off.”

As other recent films, such as Romero’s ‘Diary of the Dead’, ‘Redacted’ is also a reflection on the implications of the all-video, all-the-time society, where reality TV is always on. As Romero said in an interview: “the world is a camera these days, and it seems to be part of the collective subconscious”. An article in Newsweek describes this culture of overexposure, talking about the “Look at Me Generation”, for whom image has replaced “essence”. As an example they quote filmmaker Errol Morris, director of ‘The Fog of War’ and ‘The Thin Blue Line’ who has just finished his new film ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ ‘SOP), about the torture scandals at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib Prison and the shocking photographs that lead to it. In his “non-fiction horror movie”, as Morris calls it, he investigates just how the Abu Ghraib photographs came to be taken, what they revealed and how they were interpreted by the media, exploring what he calls “the irony of images”. In the film we see the dozens of photos the soldiers—most of whom were in their teens and early 20s at the time—took of the prisoners they abused, and of each other, posing and goofing around. In some of the shots with the prisoners, other soldiers’ cameras are visible as well. Their eagerness to document themselves seemed to blind them to the consequences of creating a record of their actions. The pictures not only resulted in the guards’ downfall—without the photos, there would have been almost no proof of crimes—but they may have fed their ugliest impulses. As Morris says, “I often think that if cameras had not been present, these events would not have occurred.”

“Life ain’t nothing but a good groove / A good mix tape to put you in the right mood.”
— Beastie Boys, ‘Professor Bootie’

When an institution like the Ancienne Belgique here in Brussels devotes a special event to a music-cultural phenomenon, you know the bridge between the ‘underground’ and the ‘mainstream’ has been crossed, whatever that might imply. A concert evening titled CASSETTE CRUSTS ON TAPE TRIPS … (curated by (K-RAA-K)3) is all about cassette culture, with acts that either release their work on tape (like the Brussels based collective Buffle) and/or work with tapes themselves (like Nonhorse and the great Jason Lescalleet). The cassette is back, that’s for sure. Some people obessively hunt for vintage used tapes, on second hand markets, on the streets, in order to manipulate and integrate their sounds in new compositions (like some members of the R.O.T. collective), some use tapes to explore personal and public sonic memory (like Aki Onda, who has been working for over 10 years on his wonderful ‘Cassette Memories’ project, a series of performances and registrations in which he uses his diaristic cassette recordings, collected over many years and extensive travels, to investigate and create spaces that conjure up the essence of memory), and then there are the analogue enthusiasts such as Jérôme Noetinger, Lionel Marchetti and Al Margolis, who proove that there is still plenty of life left in so-called “obsolete” gear. Most of all, there is the re-emergence of cassette labels (in the footsteps of the mythic cassette underground of the 1980’s), which seem to spring up out of the underground like mushrooms, not in the least in Belgium, where labels such as Imvated/Dreamtime Taped Sounds/Bread And Animals or Sloow Tapes are at the heart of the Belgian ‘leftfield’ music scene, with wonderful (limited) releases of Orphan Fairytale, Ignatz, Benjamin Franklin, Silvester Anfang, Buffle as well as many international projects.

(image: Aki Onda before his concert with Ken Jacobs at Bozar. See elsewhere on this blog for more info)

The cassette tape is growing out of the shadows, where it’s been enjoying its near-obsolete retirement-status for the past few years – born in 1963, it had it’s taste of decadent euphoria in the 1980’s (thanks in part to gizmos like the Sony Walkman), but got tired of fighting younger competitors, and was silently waiting for its final deathblow – and is beginning to creep back into the spotlight. Metal-reel cassettes are sold for hundreds of euros via Ebay, tapes are turned into USB sticks, belt buckles, cassette bags, all manner of fashion related retrofits and, also, the your-text-on-a-tape image generator (see image). We’ve never seen so many people wearing a t-shirt depicting cassettes before, with slogans like “I Love Music Tapes”, “8-track is back”, “Vintage Music Addict” or “retro cassette, OLD SKOOL”. What’s more: popular acts like the Notwist and Autechre are releasing their promos on tape. As a way of avoiding the leakage of recordings before the official release date, sure (in the case of The Notwist’s ‘The Devil, You+Me’, scheduled for May, it didn’t work, trust me), but Autechre’s Rob Brown has an explanation that sounds better: “Cassettes hold a significance for us because we grew up swapping tapes in a music sharing culture based on high-speed dubbing, not dial-up speed. Our early promos are on tape. They were the last universal format before everything went digital. People sling cassettes about and you find them on the floor. It’s totally different to the world of vinyl.” But it’s not just a gadget stunt or nostalgy trip: “Tapes give a good sense of the music without loads being shaved off, or the dynamics being altered.”

So yes, it’s about the qualities of analogue sound, the physical matter of tapes, the mechanics of the cassette apparatus, … but perhaps there’s more going on. In 2005 Thurston Moore edited the publication ‘Mix Tape: The Art Of Cassette Culture‘, in which the likes of Lasse Marhaug, Mike Watt, Tom Greenwood of Jackie-O Motherfucker, Jim O’Rourke, Richard Kern, Loren Mazzacane Connors, DJ Spooky, Tony Conrad and Christian Marclay contemplated the role of the cassette tape in their lives, as a portable, inexpensive, durable format which allowed them and all of us to record, mix and listen to music privately. For Moore the mixtape, or any form of music sharing, is an affair of the heart, a sort of “Cultural Love Letters”: “the message of the mixtape might be: I love you. I think about you all the time. Listen to how I feel about you. Or, maybe, I love me. I am a tasteful person who listens to tasty things. This tape tells you all about me…” The main character in Nick Hornby’s ‘High Fidelity’ has similar feelings: “To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again (…) The making of a good compilation tape is a very subtle art. Many dos and don’ts. First of all, you’re using someone else’s poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing.” The love is in the process, as the initiators of the International Mixtape Project state: “Mixtapes present a strange collision of the cerebral and the emotional, because they most directly satisfy the need, not of the seeker, but of the sender. They are the mixer’s art, while the mixer’s medium is the art of others”.

For Matias Viegener the mixtape is all about the relation between consuming and producing pop culture. “The mix tape is a form of American folk art: predigested cultural artifacts combined with homespun technology and magic marker turn the mix tape into a message in a bottle. I am no mere consumer of pop culture, it says, but also a producer of it. Mix tapes mark the moment of consumer culture in which listeners attained control over what they heard, in what order and at what cost. (…) The mix tape is a list a quotations, a poetic form in fact: the cento is a poem made up of lines pulled from other poems. The new poet collects and remixes. Similarly an operation of taste, it is also cousin to the curious passion of the obsessive collector. Unable to express himself in ‘pure’ art, the collector finds himself on obsessive acquisition. Collecting is strangely hot and cold, passionate and calculating.” Is it any wonder then, that recordings of countless mixtapes from the 1980s and 1990s are popping up on music blogs all over the world, offering listeners an opportunity to listen to the sounds of a specific moment in time? The ‘prosumer’ mentality, the DIY ethics, the comfort and intimicy of home-taping, the poetics of mixing, the personalisation via the creation of specific artwork, the resequencing and sharing of music to make sense of our most stubbornly inexpressible feelings, a way of explaining and communicating ourselves… does all of this sound familiar? Isn’t this, in a way, strangely related to the rhetorics of the so-called web 2.0 culture? The most ambiguous, but yet revealing, examples of this might be found in applications like Mixwit (tagline: “Yeah, it’s personal”), Mixaloo, Muxtape, Songza or Alonetone (this one is open source). Basically these are ‘virtual’ mixtape machines (most of them even use a cassette interface), trying (!) to revitalize the home-brewed compilation of songs as an “affair of the heart”. Trying, yes, because maybe, and I guess that’s the reason behind the cassette culture whiplash, in a music sharing culture based on the “whatever, where-ever, whenever” paradigm, it has just become too damn easy to be worth caring about… and it’s backfiring on us.

(PS: Some of the applications I mentioned seem to be quite succesful in “emulating” or “remediating” the mixtape experience: Leslie Poston writes: “All week people have been emailing me their favorite Muxtapes. I love it. Maybe I’m showing my age (36), but I’m a child of the 70s and teen of the 80s. Some of my favorite music in my collection is on old mixed cassettes made for me by my friends. This reminds me of that feeling, like your friend is sharing possible musical treasure with you”. Others write: “Dead simple, absolutely clear, quenches a common thirst (sharing a collection of songs with a friend), can’t-mess-up easy (username, email, password then upload MP3s). For a tiny touch of personality you can change the color of the strip at the top of the screen.I imagine this could get shut down, but I love the exercise in simple execution. There are so many ways this could have been complicated. Muxtape’s elegance demonstrates the power of sticking to the point” and, somebody else: “Maybe i’m just getting old but i think this is perfect, the way it mirrors an old school mix tape. if someone takes the time to make me a mix tape, i’m not gonna fast forward through a track. just put it on, sit back and enjoy. people want too much control these days”.)