Video Theories

A Transdisciplinary Reader

Dieter Daniels, Jan Thoben

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501354106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Breaking new ground as the first transdisciplinary reader in this field, Video Theories is a resource that will form the basis for further research and teaching. While theories of video have not yet formed an academic discipline comparable to the more canonized theories of photography, film, and television, the reader offers a major step toward bridging this "video gap" in media theory, which is remarkable considering today's omnipresence of the medium through online video portals and social media. Consisting of a selection of eighty-three annotated source texts and twelve chapter introductions written by the editors, this book considers fifty years of scholarly and artistic reflections on the topic, representing an intergenerational and international set of voices. This transdisciplinary reader offers a conceptual framework for diverging and contradictory viewpoints, following the continuous transformations of what video was, is, and will be.

Section II

Relations

4
Video | Film

Introduction by Marc Ries

Today, the digital image, the second variant of video following its initial analog, electronic existence, seems to be entirely definitive, even within the technical framework of cinema. Nonetheless, the relevance of the perceptual difference between the film image and the video image, in both technical and aesthetic-material respects, remains to be addressed. As does the significance of their current convergence in the broader context of their historically fluctuating relations. The texts presented in this chapter intend to describe the diversity of approaches to, and outcomes of, film and video in the light of their diverging characters.

Film is there. A solid body of images, produced by collaborative efforts in the areas of creation and design and presented to the world as a mostly storytelling unit, formerly in designated locations only (i.e., movie theaters) but now also in the smaller format of telecommunication devices. Film perceived in this mode of its existence is received as a work, as a self-contained, objective artifact and in the commodified form of a pictorial product, even if it costs nothing.

Video, in contrast, is gone/there.¹ Video, this particular picture and sound, is a multitude of signals, is a “signal image” that moves itself away from and toward things and bodies but, within this flow, can take on many different stable intermediate forms. Video is only conditionally available yet has many subcomponents of all modes of existence at its disposal, feeds narratives but is not one itself, has an only porous commodity form, yet is economically and politically viable. Video is the positive foil of Nietzsche’s god, who “saw with eyes that saw everything; he saw man’s depths and ultimate grounds, all his concealed disgrace and ugliness. . . . He crawled into my dirtiest nooks. This most curious, over-obtrusive one.”² Or, to echo Jonas Mekas, “film is an art, but video is a god.”³

This chapter will first consider the interrelations between film and video before outlining the relationship between image and reality in the context of cinema, television, and video, beyond the formal parameters of each. In the third section, the cinematic modes of video usage as considered in the texts in this chapter will be described and explored.

Phenomenology of a Relationship

1. Video in Film

What interest do movies show in video? To what end is the other image incorporated into filmic narratives? Cinema has considered video subsequent to television and has constructed a meta-image to mold the social nexus of video technology into a narrative, for example, of a false TV regime duping populations with devilish ideological details.⁴ There are, at first glance, four broad intermedial modes of relationship between film and video. In each of them, video is marked as the other, the image that is alien to cinema, that enters from beyond cinema’s bounds. Yet at the same time, cinema has found video to be a useful foil against which it can show its own subjectivity in higher definition.⁵

Video as news. The discrete filmic narrative, self-sufficient in its completeness, can be perforated by the reality of broadcast television images—image flows from the outside world that penetrate homes, living rooms, and narratives, and influence the course of events.⁶ The hors-champs—the out-of-field—brings in a different dispositive from that of cinema. This beyond is a “more radical elsewhere,” another entity, with which cinema forms a close partnership in order to generate additional epistemic and narrative value.⁷ A news program broadcasts images containing information that propels the filmic narrative; TV verifies fictional events by citing an imagined reality. These images come from an outside world; they construct a paradoxical confirmation of film’s as if—paradoxical because it cannot be realized by means of film technology—and promote narrative forces. The images thus simulated, or produced by duplicating the co-reality generated by the TV channels’ regime, are a resource for filmic storytelling.⁸ At the same time, they stimulate reflection by the viewer on the media difference; they breed a reflexivity that exposes both image types to scrutiny.⁹

Video as a celebration of self. In a second mode of relationship, the video image is used to celebrate a (filmic) individuation within the narrative logic. In Luis García Berlanga’s film Tamaño natural (Spain 1974), the character Michel makes a life-sized, mail-order, female doll his live-in lover. He gives her seven different names, dresses her in different outfits, and films their interaction with his own Portapak equipment. After filming, Michel and the doll sit on the sofa together and watch the videos of their shared happiness. It is a happiness that could be described in the words of Hollis Frampton: “The gratification was so intense and immediate.”¹⁰ Here, again, video is a medium for verifying and validating an individual life script. While the film itself assumes an observer role, the pictures within the picture document the character’s unusual actions. In this way, Michel and the doll are not only playing to the camera but also creating their own biographical picture-world through video. The viewer gets the uneasy feeling that these images, in contrast to the body of filmic images, are not entirely theirs, do not address them. The secondary images, the film-alien, individuated video images, which are instantaneously integrated into the character’s lifeworld, celebrate the self—even if this self is “only” an actor with a doll. Social media have long since vindicated this form of video celebration.

Video as scene-of-the-crime and surveillance device. Filmmakers were quick to develop an interest in surveillance scenarios and to imagine systems of monitoring that soon became part of everyday life.¹¹ What fascinates cinema about video is no doubt its potential—as an alternative dispositive—to convey the reality of a disorder, a deviation, a flaw. Speaking without the mediation of director or script, in the rough, objectivized form of video brut—in mostly black-and-white, blurred, or oddly framed images—video allows cinema to tap into new associative resources. Michel eventually uses his Portapak to monitor his lover and, as a result, catches her cheating on him.¹² Today, images recorded by surveillance cameras are frequently used to convey evidence of delinquency both in movies and series.

Video as new flesh. Cinema uses the electromagnetic properties of television and video to generate occult, demiurgic, dystopian qualities, or fictions. The meta-images created in this way throw transmedia light on the ontology of the images, both retrospectively and constructively. The forces that are thus attributed to the other medium, meanwhile, provide affirmation of cinema’s as-if creationism.¹³

2. Becoming Film: Video as Film

Cinema has adopted video as a viable image act, which has proven useful for storytelling due to its contingent relation with reality. The fragmentariness peculiar to video images, their function of capturing and securing evidence, their semiotic surplus, their association with the nonvisible and the excluded, was initially used by filmmakers and video activists to add a kind of proto-political value to their own aesthetic through video films. Jean-Luc Godard’s video essays of the 1970s, Six fois deux and France tout détour deux enfants, for example, though made for television, employ cinematic concepts of organizing the subcomponents, condensing them into a semantically—theoretically and narratively—coherent form, which operates asynchronously to television grammar.¹⁴ They are one expression of a tendency to promote film’s heretical development, allowing excursions into video activism or left-wing video ethnography.

Digitization has caused the film-becoming of video to diversify. Cinema has shed parts of its system of production. Video images are appropriated as found footage material, as mechanically produced, automatized, or affected videos by unknown videomakers. Focus is placed on montage and off-screen text, giving rise to new film aesthetics and new narrative forms. The image as news, as a testimony, as the trace of an occurrence has gained autonomy, has detached itself from conventional models to follow its own intrinsic value, has become a hyper-naturalist fiction or an irrefutable statement of fact. In Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s Blair Witch Project (USA, 1999), we still see a 16-mm camera and a video camera competing to create a hyperrealism; Faceless (Austria/UK, 2007) by Manu Luksch is comprised exclusively of recordings from L ondon surveillance cameras combined with a suggestive, narrative voice-over spoken by Tilda Swinton; Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait (Syria/France, 2014) by Ossama Mohammed and Simav Bedirxan presents a film collage consisting of video fragments and cellphone footage of the collapsing Syrian city of Homs, clandestinely filmed and collated from video platforms.¹⁵

3. Becoming Video: Film as Video

Digital video—as a recording medium and support material, as a postproduction technology and as a medium of distribution—has risen to become the universal medium for moving pictures. But this takeover occurred without causing any structural changes to the cinema system. Tried and tested film languages and aesthetics have adopted the technology on their own terms. Likewise, the means of distribution have merely been extended. Films are now also made available for transmission beyond the territorial cinema screening via Internet platforms. These film videos are scaled-down entities that have merely adapted their presentation format—their dimensions—to a different technology. The intrinsic constitution of the film, its inherent logic, based on a coherent, predetermined, conditional body of images, is still asserted in the reshaping and reformatting undertaken by video and, before that, television.¹⁶

Model Reality/Co-Reality/Corporeality

Film in cinema and as a mass medium pursues the generation of a model reality, a model world. Although the model is constituted of elements of the here-world, the narrative, aesthetic act of generation asserts its own intrinsic right and interprets the here-world in different ways. The concept of film is always removed from our concept of reality; the two are simply different. Even if a film purports to show a realistic portrayal of a certain context, its inherent logic nevertheless alludes to a model without which the film could not exist. The model is formed essentially via principles of selecting and condensing. In and through the scenes, the film formulates its model proposition. The plot focuses on fragments that enable the story or account to be coherently encapsulated and direct the viewer to an (anticipated) understanding, whether it is shared or not. Of course, many films also operate with ambiguity and mystification. But that, too, is only possible in the context of a preformulated model. The narrative and actors operate within the model.

While cinema generates model realities, television, as a social technology, produces a co-reality: a second reality that correlates with social reality, just like real life. The TV reality of news, specials, shows, and d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Section I Foundations
• Section II Relations
• Section III Repercussions
• Section IV Dialogues
• Index
• Copyright