Diagonal Thoughts

“The great creator is the great eraser”
Steward Brand (Long Now foundation)

As always, I’m involved in a few different projects right now. One of them is the compilation and editing of a (Dutch only) reader on ‘Cinema in Transit’, consisting of a few essays describing and reflecting on current transitions in the world of cinema, taking in account the expansion of cinema over countless media, technologies and modalities, the fragmentation and individualisation of the cinematic experience and the digital image replacing the analogue one. Another project is titled BOM-Vl. (an acronym which stand for something loosely translated as “preservation and disclosure of multimedia archives in Flanders” – yeah, governement funded projects tend to have expensive titles), a quite prestigious project that involves the local broadcasting industry (in the driver’s seat, of course), several universities and cultural organisations, who are trying to figure out a way to digitalise and archive all their data via a communal platform. Slightly Utopian? You bet. One of the elements that, for me, tie together these two projects, is the issue of the digital access of audiovisual archives, and the question whether “film” (so I’m not talking about digital-born content here, but film, with all it’s material and technical characteristics) can (or should) actually be digitalised to match its ‘look & feel’.

Since quite a few years we have all been enveloped in the rhetoric of the so-called digital revolution, promising a brave new world of media, and the moving image not in the least. While most of us celebrate the immense potential of this techno-social shift (see the Video Vortex category on this blog, a.o), we are forgetting about the things we are loosing in the process. One of the things that is fading away is the (traditional) cinema experience, which is really a way, an art perhaps, of seeing the world. Now it seems that celluloid is doomed, and that experiencing the moving image has become something completely different for a whole new generation out there, enjoying cinema when-ever, where-ever, on their iPod or portable phone, on the bus and in the bathroom, what’s becoming of the photochemical cinema, and the places that show, nurture and feed it? Will all of this be a folklore phenomenon soon?

One of the people who tackles these questions, in a provocative way, is Paolo Cherchi Usai, who’s the Director of the National Screen and Sound Archive in Australia right now and published, a.o., the inspiring book ‘The Death of Cinema’, which is, as Martin Scorsese notes in the introduction “an elegy to the thousands copies of films being destroyed every day, all over the world…” and “a portrait of a culture ignoring the loss of its own image (…) a devastating moral tale, the recognition that there is something very wrong with the way we are taught to disregard the art of seeing as something ephemeral and negligible.” The subtitle of the book is “History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age”, which is derived from the The Clock of the Long Now (01999), a wonderful project of Steward Brand of the Long Now foundation, who seek to “promote ‘slower/better’ thinking and to foster creativity in the framework of the next 10,000 years”. The Clock of the Long Now is one of the projects that provokes us to think outside of time, extending the idea of the length of the future that we think about. It’s a monumental-scale 10,000 year clock that is intended to ‘tick’ once every year, ‘chime’ every 100 years, and ‘cuckoo’ every 1000 years. The Long Now intends to situate the monument in an artificial cave, built within a mountain range in the Nevada desert. Btw: another member of the Long Now is the great Brian Eno, who has always been interested in he experience of time and the idea of the eternal present, something that can be heard in some of his albums he made since the 1970’s, in which he developped sonic landscape as extended present tense, music that expressed “the Long Now” and “the Big Here” (remember ‘Music for Airports’?).

Cherchi Usai, like the people of the Long Now, points to the fact that we we’ve lost the ability of thinking long term, now that time has been sliced into ever finer parts, and there seems to be an ever-decreasing horizon into the future, with very little encouragement to lay long term plans, not in corporations, not in the government… and even in education and the cultural world we are only looking as far as the next quarterly results, the next public project, the next exhibition, the next opportunity “to score”. Cherchi Usai ultimately want to question this “self-perpetuating wave of cultural fundamentalism”, especially when it comes to cinema, where digitalisation quickly has become a pervasive ideology (as everywhere). “Why”, he asks, “is our culture so keen in accepting the questionable benefits of digital technology as the vehicle for a new sense of history?”

So we’re very happy Paolo is willing to publish one of his recent writings in the ‘Cinema in Transit’ publication (in Dutch) – and it’s a text that deals in a very critical way with the matters which I’m supposed to “research” for the BOM project. Titled “Four Unsatisfactory Answers to the Question of Digital Access” (it is an early draft version of an essay which will be included in the forthcoming book Film ‘Curatorship: Archives, Museums, and the Digital Marketplace’, co-edited by Usai with David Francis, Alexander Horwath and Michael Loebenstein (Vienna: Synema – Gesellschaft für Film und Medien / Österreichisches Filmmuseum, 2008)), the essay structures the popular perception of the digitalisation of film against the concrete work of the filmarchivist (or curator), constantly dealing with a complex web of factors including market value, aesthetic value, history, public funding etc.. One could read his writings as the product of bitter nostalgia easily, I guess, but here is someone with a genuine love of cinema, dealing on a day-to-day basis with the decay of the things he cherishes, and honestly, working with people who can’t wait to transfer our audiovisual heritage into bits and bytes, no matter what, to exploit via Video-on-Demand and what not (although I understand their concerns), this is a voice that I want to hear, a necessary voice. As he writes: “In practice, the commercial world is already within our gates, and it has been within our gates for quite some time. This is no longer a matter of whether or not we want to deal with it; it is a matter of how we can we deal with it without betraying our cultural mission.(…) Digital access” is the name of the game, now and in the foreseeable future; we all know that, but the word “digital access” is embedded with a whole array of philosophical, ethical and strategic questions. How will “digital access” change the way we look at film or we listen to a sound recording in an archive or a museum? And how are we going to explain the history of projection and recorded sound in the digital age, and still protect our own integrity as archivists and curators?”

These are valuable questions to be integrated in the debate, questions that we have to try to work out, before we get trapped in an impossible choice: preserve or show? Because, face it, who will want to pay for the continuous work of audiovisual archives (in the traditional, object-oriented meaning) if everything is commercially available via the internet, in a nice digital package, in different formats to suit all your needs?

“The future is process, not a destination.”
Bruce Sterling

As in ‘Cloverfield’ and ‘(REC)’ (see earlier post) George A. Romero’s new installment (the fifth) in his ‘Dead’ series, ‘Diary of the Dead’ also tells a story from a subjective in-the-thick-of-the-action viewpoint. It’s about a group of film students who are making an independent horror film when they become trapped in a world being consumed by flesh-eating zombies. They then turn their attention toward making the film into a documentary on their personal horror experiences. Romero reworked a script he drafted a decade ago and chose to shoot with hand-held cameras only, after witnessing the ballooning growth of mobile and networked audiovisual media. Like in ‘Cloverfield’, this choice has had a huge impact on the choreography (since it’s based on long, continuous takes and “the camera was 360, so everybody was an acrobat, ducking under the lens when the camera came past you”), soundtrack (no music, just sound effects) and image framing (instead of using ‘product shots’ the action is off-hand – in an interview in Empire Romero says “we’re trying to ‘happen’ upon the violence rather than focus on it.”) In another interview with Romero (‘Videotaping is believing’), Chris Vognar made an interesting comment: “horror finds itself in a new world of video narcissism. In this world, nothing exists unless it’s on camera, and life and limb are no more valuable than multimedia immortality”, something Romero agrees with: “The world is a camera these days, and it seems to be part of the collective subconscious”. But Romero’s skepticism of an all-video, all-the-time society pokes through the film’s surface. In ‘Diary of the Dead’, the show must go on, even with a bunch of flesh-eating zombies on your trail… YouTube awaits. If the camera is rolling and the footage uploading, even if you’re (a living) dead you’re still alive.

Romero’s film also features a chorus of voices questioning mainstream media and their “official” account of “the truth”. A more outspoken critical exploration of the politics of image-making and reception is on display in Brian de Palma’s ‘Redacted’ – a word meaning ‘edited’ or ‘blacked out’ (the film’s first image is a written disclaimer on the screen, with more and more words gradually being deleted). This low budget movie ($5 million) offers a reconstruction of the events leading up to and following the widely reported rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by four U.S. soldiers in the town of Mahmoudiya in 2006. De Palma negotiates with reality and fiction, using only (mostly staged) footage that was (supposedly) recorded via mobile video, security cameras and webcams (but actually shot in HD video, as it was funded by HDNet films), published via video platforms, blogs and (Iraqi) TV news reportages. By recreating images which are systematically removed from the official “news” reports about Iraq, de Palma questions the filters through which we see and accept the world, the power of the mediated image and how presentation and composition influence our ideas and beliefs. This movie triggered quite a bit of critical responses and political controversy in the States, so I’m curious to see how Europeans will look at it (it should come out in traditional roulation soon, but it’s available online if you look for it a bit. More on this when I watched it in the cinema)

“Sure he’s a snooper, but aren’t we all? I’ll bet you that nine out of ten people, if they see a woman across the courtyard undressing for bed, or even a man puttering around in his room, will stay and look; no one turns away and says, ‘It’s none of my business.”
(Hitchcock, When asked by Truffaut if the main character in ‘Rear Window’, L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart), is a snoop. Later in the interview they expand that perspective to include the cinema audience)

The beginning of the 21st century may just well be among the most culturally and socially confused eras to emerge in recent history, when you consider society’s mass-fascination with reality shows, webcams and camera phones on the one hand and its ever-present obsession with surveillance and mass observation technologies, fueled by the Post 9/11 anxiety, on the other. This dichotomie has been explored by lots of creative producers in the past decennia, which was the subject of exhibitions like ‘ctrl (space): Rhetorics of Surveillance’ (curated by Thomas levin for ZKM) and ‘Balance and Power: Performance and Surveillance in Video Art’ (curated by Michael Rush), with great work by Sophie Calle, Jim Campbell, Jordan Crandall and Harun Farocki, to name a few. The impact of ubiquitous observation technologie was also very present in recent feature films as varied as Andrea Arnold’s ‘Red Road’, Michael Haneke’s ‘Cache’ or Paul Greengrass’ ‘Bourne Ultimatum’. But while these movies use CCTV footage to draw on feelings of paranoia and unease, here is a new film that has another take on the complex relationship between the intentional exibitionism that seems to be an essential part of our relation towards the internet and television, and our involuntary relinquishing of privacy to the cameras of power systems. The official description of ‘Look’ (it came out in december in the States) goes like this: “There are now approximately 30 million surveillance cameras in the United States generating more than 4 billion hours of footage every week. And the numbers are growing. The average American is now captured over 200 times a day, in department stores, gas stations, changing rooms, even public bathrooms. No one is spared from the relentless, unblinking eye of the cameras that are hidden in every nook and cranny of day-to-day life.” By shooting his feature entirely from closed-circuit viewpoints (but actually shot with Hi-end cameras – the ‘dirty’ look was created in post-production!), director Adam Rifkin wants to bring forward the question: “who are we when we don’t think anyone’s watching?”

But is this really a critical statement, or just a marketing stunt? The trailer suggests the latter. It suggests a film that draws on the new fascination of surveillance and sousveillance, as new playgrounds of the mass media, as a new market based on narcissism, exhibitionism and voyeurism in a so-called “panoptic” society (pan = everything; optikos = to see). This looks like a film that lures us, uncritically, in a silent acknowledgment and even enjoyment of the “tyranny of intimacy and the end of privacy” (taken from ‘ctrl (space)’ catalogue). No trace here either of a perspective on the voyouristic notion of cinema itself, while brilliant films like Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom’ and Coppola’s ‘the Conversation’ have proved that giving cinema an opportunity for self-reflection, can have an unsettling impact. In ‘Peeping Tom’ director Michael Powell plays a brilliant mirroring game, involving himself, as filmmaker, and the spectator in the process of voyeurism, so that by the last shot – showing a blank cinema screen – we are all aware that we have become victims of our own gaze, confronted uneasilly with the relationship between watching and participating. Is ‘Look’ equally confronting, or will it just provide us with a way to get around our prohibitions and exploit our voyeuristic tendencies, using a format that is just another smoother way to bridge the the gap looming between us, the screen and the events in the image, between our notions of reality, simulation and fiction?

The movie ‘The Tracey Fragments’, directed by Bruce McDonald was released last year (not yet in this part of Europa), to critical acclaim. Not only because it features Indie sweetheart Ellen Page (now in ‘Juno’) and a soundtrack by the Canadian band Collective Broken Social Scene, but thanks to its narrative, that unfolds as a non-chronological series of split-screens frames. Nothing new of course – see for example Pablo Ferra’s cool split-screen scenes in Jewison’s 1968 ‘Thomas Crown affair’, Fleischer’s 1968 ‘the Boston Strangler’, Godard’s 1979 ‘Numero Deux’, and of course the de Palma movies, to name a few. Now there seems to be a comeback, probably influenced by the ’24’ TVseries, the interaction between cinema and comic books and the multi-screen installations that are spreading in art spaces today. Far from ideological or critical motives (split screens f.e. as a way to focus on the mechanics of screen culture by announcing their very constructedness, generating a critical rupture — one that we posit as intrinsic to audiovisual media), here it is supposed to serve as a device to convey the emotions of the main character, “like an echo, or like embroidery. We thought, the more we can experience the world the way little Tracey Berkowitz does, the closer we’ll feel to her romantic notions, her tendency to exaggerate. We want to feel her crisis.” As a reporter from CBS news states: “At various moments, images and dialogue recede, foreground and overlap. The effect is a shattered film for a shattered adolescent psyche”. I’m curious to find out if it really brings something fundamental alternative to the hip pseudo-rebellious teenage angst genre, that is charming the press and audience in the States nowadays.

But anyways. The story has a more interesting dimension:McDonald has also launched Re-Fragmented, an online initiative in which all the footage from the shoot of the film was released (via Bittorrent) for users to download and re-edit their own related projects including music videos, new trailers or to re-edit the entire movie themselves. The Creative Commons licensed initiative also makes available the musical score.

Most of the new versions are assembled here

Watch how copyright law is re-writing history, starting with the Civil Rights documentary “Eyes on the Prize,” which has been out of print because of legal trap doors and outrageously expensive licensing fees. Due to the film’s heavy saturation with archival footage and images, its licenses were extremely expensive. The filmmakers could only afford temporally limited clearance contracts. Some lasted for up to ten years. However, after a few years when the first license expired, it became illegal to commercially distribute Eyes on the Prize. It now exists scattered across the V.S.. on VHS in random school libraries. Unless copyright and fair use undergo serious reform, Eyes on the Prize will vanish. So will many other films that have undergone similar predicaments. Not to mention the important projects that copyright intimidates their prospective authors from attempting to create.

Movie directed/produced by jacobs Caggiano, awarded with Fair Use award on the Media that Matters Festival.
licenced under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0