New Digital Cinema

Reinventing the Moving Image

Holly Willis

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231502771
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This introduction to contemporary digital cinema tracks its intersection with video art, music video, animation, print design and live club events to create an avantgarde for the new millennium. It begins by investigating digital cinema and its contribution to innovations in the feature-film format, examining animation and live-action hybrids, the gritty aesthetic of the Dogme 95 filmmakers, the explosions of frames within frames and the evolution of the 'ambient narrative' film. This study then looks at the creation of new genres and moving-image experiences as what we know as 'cinema' enters new venues and formats.

1

THE FUTURE OF THE FEATURE

In 1976, French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard began dreaming of a 35mm camera that would be small enough to fit into the glove compartment of a car. He wanted a camera, in other words, that he could cart along and use to shoot images spontaneously, as he came across them, rather than having bulky equipment determine the time and place of every filmed image. ‘You’re in Holland’, he said in an interview in Camera Obscura,

out in the country and you see a windmill that is completely motionless … You take the camera out of the glove compartment, you shoot, and you get a 35mm image with the highest resolution possible in cinema or television. Suddenly you think of Foreign Correspondent (the sequence when the windmill turns the wrong way). Or of something else. Because you already have an image, and once you have an image, you do something else with it. (Beauviala and Godard 1985: 165)

The result of Godard’s desire was a lengthy and contentious collaboration with Jean-Piere Beauviala, an inventor with Aaton, to try to create such a camera. They ultimately failed, but what Godard so nicely points out is that filmmaking equipment influences the kinds of images that can be made, as well as the ways in which stories can be told. For decades, filmmakers around the world have shared Godard’s dream, fantasising what until recently was a filmmaking oxymoron: lightweight, portable cameras with high-quality image output – a camera that could be used to sketch with first, offering the genesis of a film in a series of images that would then contribute to a story rather than the opposite, namely the imposition of a script as the foundation for the images, which are secondary.

In 1982, Francis Ford Coppola added another element to the filmmaking fantasy when he made One From the Heart, a feature-length narrative produced on the lot of Coppola’s Zoetrope Studio and shot simultaneously on film and video, allowing Coppola to see immediately what he was filming, and even to begin editing the taped material. Coppola also used extensive amounts of composited imagery, as well as exaggerated lighting and effects. The film, a light-hearted romance starring Teri Garr, Raul Julia, Natassia Kinski and Frederic Forrest, certainly contrasts with the intensity of his earlier film, Apocalypse Now (1979), and for various reasons was a commercial failure. Coppola’s venture was extensively documented in the mainstream press, however, with Coppola appearing on numerous television talk shows to advocate a new kind of filmmaking practice that would allow him to construct patently fake spaces, so that his story would not merely unfold against a backdrop, but that the image itself would become a layered construct, and the filmmaking process would expand to include the creation of hybrid spaces and the possibility of working with video images in real time. One From the Heart’s main strengths include its adamantly anti-naturalistic lighting design that underscores emotions and the intersection of spaces that are deliberately non-real with those that seem to be ‘real’.

Coppola’s experiments with spatial representation presaged one of the key tropes of feature-film experiments in digital video that would occur some two decades later. Further, in articulating his intentions for the project, Coppola described an ‘electronic studio’ of the future, a space he imagined within which filmmakers could create entire worlds divorced from the restrictions of Hollywood and the demand for a realist aesthetics. He also envisioned a democratised form of filmmaking that would give would-be filmmakers access to inexpensive cameras and editing supplies. And to make sure we all understood just how democratic his vision was, he conjured the image of a ‘fat girl in Ohio’ whose films would revolutionise filmmaking forever.

Notions of cinematic experimentation afforded by new cameras and video technology were continued to some extent with the advent of the PXL-2000 video camera, introduced in 1987 by Fisher-Price as a low-cost video camera for kids. A small, plastic camera, the PXL-2000 records onto audiocassettes and produces an evanescent, grainy black-and-white image inside a black frame. The camera was adopted by artists such as Steve Fagin, Eric Saks, Michael Almereyda, Peggy Ahwesh and Sadie Benning, who appreciated the camera’s chunky, high-contrast picture quality. Benning’s work gained particular notoriety – she crafted a series of autobiographical video diaries shot in her bedroom in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and their intimate candor, deft use of music and surprising beauty catapulted the young artist into the international spotlight. Michael Almereyda used the camera, too, to shoot sections of his black-and-white feature film Nadja (1994), which was released in its final form theatrically on 35mm, while Ahwesh, in collaboration with Margie Strosser, made the epic Strange Weather (1993), a 50-minute fictional video that plays with our desire to know about illicit activity, as well as our willingness to hear a story – any story. In this case, the meandering activities of four crack-smoking youths are interrupted by a series of recounted anecdotes. In all of these examples, however, the key point is that despite the low-tech genesis of the images, they nevertheless harbour a surprising beauty, while the inexpensive mode of production contributed to a sense of casualness and ease that would have been quite difficult to achieve with expensive film running freely through a movie camera.

These examples sketch only a fragment of a very dense history, and indeed, the history of cinematic technology has never been simply a series of improvements in film stocks, sound recording devices, lenses and cameras, but instead a complex negotiation of ideological and economic concerns that has little or nothing to do with offering filmmakers more ways to make movies. Brian Winston, after chiding those who tout the advent of an ‘Information Revolution’, calling it ‘largely an illusion, a rhetorical gambit and an expression of technological ignorance’, argues instead that ‘there is nothing in the histories of electrical and electronic communication systems to indicate that significant major changes have not been accommodated by preexisting social formations’ (1998: 3). He proposes a model of technological change that insists on ‘the primacy of the social sphere as the site of these activities, conditioning and determining technological developments’ (ibid.). Examining patterns of innovation, repetition and diffusion, Winston borrows Ferdinand de Saussure’s model of utterances to show how his model of technological transformation ‘treats the historical pattern of change and development as a field (the social sphere) in which two elements (science and technology) intersect’ (ibid.).

Winston’s caution is instructive, helping discourage us from the desire to trace the history of recent DV technology as a series of improvements in a continuous movement of progress. Instead, that trajectory includes delays, repetitions and diffusion, and occurs as the result of a complex interaction between the social sphere, science and technology. Indeed, as the electronic studio of Francis Ford Coppola so clearly suggests, what may seem like a relatively recent phenomenon, occurring mainly in the 1990s, has much deeper, often elided roots. Further, as with the PXL-2000 or even the use of 16mm, filmmakers often repurpose cameras and equipment designed for one use, and employ them toward other ends. Finally, cameras and other forms of cinematic technology never merely produce images; they also produce technologies of vision, some of which can expand cinema beyond the limitations of a Hollywood ethos. Whether it is the Direct Cinema movement of the 1960s spawned by crystal synch and the Éclair 16mm film camera, or the rich tradition of activist video made possible by the Sony Portapak, alternative camera technologies and the ways in which artists ‘refunction’ technology toward their own needs affect the nature and possibilities of filmmaking in a complex form of negotiation that is never seamless nor continuous, and may not necessarily lead toward improved capabilities.

The digital feature film

Rather than springing fully formed into life, Coppola’s dream of an electronic cinema limped into reality over the course of 15 years. But it most certainly gained momentum with the advent of the miniDV camera and other tools of DV filmmaking. While many filmmakers long for the transparency of DV, when shooting on inexpensive digital video will not be readily apparent in the finished film, the most compelling DV feature-film experiments to date are those that work in the opposite direction, using DV to push against the confines of an entrenched realism. Some filmmakers cheerfully accept the degraded visual quality of miniDV as a trade for an increased sense of immediacy and intimacy, while others incorporate or even celebrate the image degradation, making it integral to their stories. Some have employed the low-tech equipment to help conjure stronger, less forced performances, often from unprofessional actors, taking advantage of the possibility of shooting extensive footage inexpensively. DV has also been used to alter the traditional production trajectory, continuing the tradition inaugurated by Coppola in the creation of an electronic studio that allows for instant feedback. DV also encourages layering, frames within frames and the construction of spaces that meld live action and graphics or animation. And still other filmmakers have disrupted traditional notions of feature filmmaking by transferring their films to the web, in a sense spatialising their stories or, in some instances, creating forms of storytelling that diverge dramatically from the traditional feature-film format. And finally, others have taken advantage of the Internet and its abundant images to create a form of ‘open source’ filmmaking in which films are made from the surfeit of imagery available online.

It is impossible to view these developments in the evolution of digital filmmaking in isolation from Hollywood during the 1990s, as they constitute a very direct rebuttal to the film industry’s corporatisation, as well as its defensive posture in response to digital technology. Hollywood grappled with anxieties regarding impending obsolescence with a spate of thinly-veiled allegories depicting the dangers of digital technologies in films such as Jurassic Park. As Paul Arthur notes in an essay charting Hollywood’s narratives of looming disaster, ‘It is entirely in the self-interest of commercial movies to capitalise on public fears of imminent catastrophe, to anathematise the spread of emerging technologies, and simultaneously to paint for itself a continuing role in a brave new world of image production’ (2001: 344–5).

Independent filmmakers moved in two directions. First, what Peter Hanson has defined as the ‘cinema of generation X’, namely the group of filmmakers born between 1961 and 1971, shared several key experiences: they grew up during an incredibly tumultuous period which included not only the drug-related deaths of numerous pop idols and the murder of John Lennon but also the attempted assassinations of then President Reagan and Pope John Paul II. Additionally, this generation was inundated with pop culture more than any preceding generation and experienced immense social changes (including unprecedented levels of divorce). According to Hanson, youths responded by creating a culture characterised by irony, apathy and general disenfranchisement. Key filmmakers included in Hanson’s Gen X filmmakers are Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Robert Rodriguez, Paul Thomas Anderson and Richard Linklater, and the tropes of this cinema are multiple storylines, ironic humour, violence, an intense interest in pop culture and a general sense of excess in terms of images and information.

But more recently, with the ready availability of DV technology, many independent filmmakers have also advocated a return to the ‘real’, the organic and the authentic, deploying consumer-grade technology, often in movies centred on the search for connection and identity in a world amok with the invisible threats of surveillance, control and cyber-domination. So while Hollywood revealed its deep uneasiness over the imminent changes brought by DV technology, many independent filmmakers at that same moment celebrated emerging technologies while fostering activist positions of protest to sweeping annihilations of privacy. They also advocated a hands-on, do-it-yourself role that has expanded exponentially; consumers now not only programme their own television viewing with Tivos and their own music with iPods, but they create their own films, burn their own CDs and design their own DVDs. The degree to which our comfortable familiarity with video cameras and other forms of DIY technology only makes us more accepting of the tools of surveillance and corporate manipulation is up for grabs.

This chapter charts the impact of digital filmmaking tools on the feature film, beginning with the Dogme 95 movement, and moving on to detail a series of key projects made since 1995, arguing that the most compelling films of the DV era are those that employ new filmmaking tools to play with performance, design within the frame and entrenched ideas regarding realism.

Dogme 95 and the search for authenticity

Whether chastised as a publicity ploy on the part of provocateur Lars von Trier or celebrated as a bracing corrective to the shallow, manipulative and bankrupt cinema of Hollywood, the Dogme 95 movement garnered an inordinate amount of international attention almost from its inception. Written in March 1995 and presented at the Odéon Cinema in Paris by von Trier and co-conspirator Thomas Vinterberg, the rather poorly argued Manifesto begins by criticising the French New Wave: ‘The New Wave proved to be a ripple that washed ashore and turned to muck’, von Trier and Vinterberg explain, adding that the movement gradually became ‘bourgeois’, because, they say, ‘the foundation upon which its theories were based was the bourgeois perception of art’. Railing against the ‘auteur concept’, the Dogme 95 Manifesto further insists that filmmaking not be attributable to the individual, and that it not be used to create illusion: ‘Dogme 95 counters the film of illusion by the presentation of an indisputable set of rules known as “The Vow of Chastity”.’ The set of ‘vows’ includes these 10 rules:

1 Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be used.

2 Sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa.

3 The camera must be handheld.

4 The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable.

5 Optical work and filters are forbidden.

6 The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)

7 Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.)

8 Genre movies are not acceptable.

9 The film format must be Academy 35mm.

10 The director must not be credited.

While Vinterberg and von Trier explicitly mention the French New Wave and an auteur-based cinema, the movement they are describing, if taken seriously, is most akin to the Third Cinema described by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino who, in their seminal essay ‘Towards a Third Cinema’, call for a cinema that will not be the cinema of Hollywood, nor a second cinema, namely that of the auteur, but a cinema composed of films that ‘the System cannot assimilate and which are foreign to its needs or [that] directly and explicitly set out to fight the system’ (1997: 43). One of the centra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series List
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• acknowledgements
• introduction: exploding cinema
• 1. the future of the feature
• 2. by design
• 3. immersion and excess in new video installation
• afterword: the digital in the material world
• notes
• filmography
• bibliography
• index