Hi Everyone.
Some of you have had personal attachments to the film since it was premiered in 2004 (thanks to Chris). Others have recently seen it for the first time in late 2009. I’m interested in any and all reactions to the film itself, of course, but especially in observations or questions that highlight the differences between then and now – certain key things have grown, changed, or developed in the last five years (I shot a fair bit of the film in Kodachrome Super 8, for example, which is now a dead medium).
The long-troubled artist-made or independent film distribution situation versus the promise of web distribution + art gallery exhibition is another interesting topic. I assume The Auteurs is just going to get better and better in terms of formats and quality. What’s it going to look like in five years?
Or… maybe you’ve got something else to say.
My personal view. The more I watch the film the more similarities I see to my own life . Like Clive, my parents moved to the west coast and I migrate between there and Winnipeg. Winnipeg has just been hit with the deep freeze – 32 below and LOVE IN THE WHITE CITY rings true – “where the buses are so slow” and the trucks circle the city.. We scrape the ice off of our windshields and curse the frozen door handles. .As the film moves from the prairies to the west coast we move from the ambient sounds of trains to the seagulls of BC.
I think the more I watch it Clive, the more I see of your personality in this film. Wonder and vulnerability. Throughout the film the violence and tenderness of life are expressed over and over again moving between these two regions of Winnipeg and the west coast where poverty and wealth intermingle.
I would like to see the film put in a time capsule to be opened up 100 years from now so new generations can discover the wonder. DAVE
One of the troubles for “experimental” or better described, non-commercial film, is that it has been forced to an existence on a festival circuit, after which point, it’s often completely inaccessible to audiences. The Auteurs inclusion of Trains of Winnipeg online, provide a great access point for those who were unable to see these films during their festival run. Not only is there an ease of access based on the unique nature of the titles included, but more thrilling is the idea that your location is no longer restrictive. Seeing non-commercial films during a festival run usually means being located in a major urban centre. It’s a romantic idea thinking that one can live anywhere (with a decent internet connection), and have great cinema at their fingertips.
The isolation of Trains of Winnipeg resounded with me on a personal level, growing up in a ‘rail city’ along the main line west of Winnipeg. Seeing any cinema there was a challenge. I can only imagine what works I would have seen at a much earlier age, with the possibilities that online distribution offers now. As Clive mentioned, we’ve seen incredible changes in 5 years with regards to changes in media distribution and exhibition.The challenge remains in promoting opportunities like this site and film to broader audiences, so it doesn’t become niche its service and appeal.
Just think it is fabulous that this extraordinary film is available to a wide audience—certainly going to turn my students onto it, they could learn something from the elegance of this film, the beauty and resonance of understatement, and the imagination and discipline of working with small means. I’ve always been incredibly moved by this film since I first saw it 3 or 4 years ago—and had the pleasure of watching it again this morning.
I was reminded of a quote by Brecht from Three Penny opera: "Consider the darkness and the great cold in this vale which resounds with mystery. " It’s a phrase that perfectly sums up this film’s accomplishment, as a meditation on time, death, the extraordinary randomness of experience, all narrated with clarity and with an understanding that one only approaches, never resolves the real mysteries.
What I love about the film as well is that it is profoundly anti romantic—esp in 18,000 dead in Gordon Head, where stories of random and unfathomable death are narrated through the banal and mundane detail: a little jean jacket, an orange juice stand in an atrium, a surly operator. More than any monumentalizing ode to tragedy, these fragments of memory, like the like the sketchy, partial and ephemeral images which make up the film ring true to our everyday experience.
There’s one huge difference between Trains of Winnipeg and much of the other work that we are probably thinking of when we talk about experimental film or fringe film or the avant garde, whichever term you prefer. (And I agree with Alex that a negative definition is probably best when talking about a field that encompasses such a diverse range of practices; “unconventional” cinema is probably about as precise as we can really get. And it’s all certainly non-commercial.) The difference is this: Trains of Winnipeg was explicitly designed for this new media world. It had incarnations as a book of poems, as a CD of poems with music, was produced using many different formats and technologies, and exists as a series of stand-alone short films as well as a feature film cycle, and also as a website. Clive’s project has consistent personal, formal and stylistic characteristics that come across no matter how you encounter it, and this is true partly because it was built into the project from the outset. I also think that a lot of the flexibility of Trains of Winnipeg is rooted in the clarity and distinctiveness Clive’s voice — by which I mean not only his literal speaking voice, but his literary, visual and, I think, ethical “voices” as well. For me, Trains of Winnipeg actually represents a new way of thinking about how to produce experimental cinema, how to think about the relationship between the work and the way it will be received. I’ve understood that better since we initially screened it at the Images Festival.
By contrast, when I think of many of the other films that have stuck with me — say, Artavazd Pelechian’s Seasons of the Year, Len Lye’s Free Radicals, Su Friedrich’s Sink or Swim or Nathaniel Dorsky’s Arbor Vitae — it seems to me that they were made to be seen in a specific kind of setting on a specific type of technology. I don’t think all of this type of work will be able to “come across” in an on-line format, or even when projected large from a good video transfer. This would be particularly true for the work of a filmmaker like Dorsky or David Gatten, who make work to be projected at 18 fps, with the flicker of the projector hovering at the edge of perception. The video screen, of whatever type, is a continuously emitting screen, while the film projector lights up the screen intermittently. For many kinds of film this probably doesn’t matter much, since story films and information films generally de-emphasize the presence of the medium itself. But for experimental film these kinds of specificities can be a matter of life or death. What is gained in terms of accessibility — and it’s a real gain! — may be lost in terms of the finer points of the quality and intensity of experience.
We are, in a sense, talking about an act of translation when we move from one distinct medium to another. To an extent,Trains of Winnipeg doesn’t require the same kind of translation because it emerges from the same technological “language” as this new medium of distribution . (This, of course, doesn’t mean that it isn’t a somewhat different experience to see it as a 35mm film projected in a theatre with an audience than it is to watch it at on-line at The Auteurs. Rather that the work is by its nature amenable to presentation in many formats.)
I love the accessibility, but remain a skeptic about whether a lot of the greatest films can actually survive the translation.
I’m entirely with Chris on a love of darkened theatres and have always reveled in the intensity of the theatrical experience. (heck I’m even nostalgic for when we could smoke in the back rows but that’s another story and betrays my age). But with all due respect, holding firm on the aesthetic purity of the celluloid fix isn’t going to help to lure in our younger colleagues. I’m teaching an alternative cinema workshop this year with students in their early twenties who are internet babies. They log (no exaggeration) tens of thousands of youtube ‘films’ every year, spend all their spare time surfing, skyping and downloading. Three of the 10 in the class are making films parodying the internet, using impenetrable language about memes. (ok impenetrable to me) They have had little or no exposure to the long and resonant traditions of alternative and avant garde cinema except for the week or two they get in an intro to film course. To add fuel to the fire, our universities are going through a profound financial crunch which affects budgets for acquisitions and rentals. Buying or renting artist videos is almost always more expensive than buying or renting the latest mainstream film. Having experimental/ avant garde (or whichever term fits) films online opens a small and (to be sure) imperfect window on this tradition. But, perhaps when the taste is whetted, our young ones may venture out of their basements and into the dark of a (non) smokey theatre once again.
Hi,
(First of all, thanks for the kind words where expressed!)
In reverse order:
Brenda: I’m with you in hoping that exposure to the FULL history of cinema will create a desire in students to see at least some films in their original form. I hope that certain work, seen as projected “real film” in a dark theatre, will come to be valued as a rough equivalent to the live music performance (where few would argue that there’s no point, it’s the same as the recording). Audiences will continue to develop their “cinematic viewing chops” over time, and really I think this is all just getting started, it’s still early days for cinema.
Chris: you’re right, I DID make the film with what I called “scaling” in mind, I wanted it to work on a large screen in 35mm and also on tiny screens, without “translation” as you put it. I think you’re right that it’s embedded in this work, but not in some others. And this exhibition variety mirrors the melange of materials I used. It was utopian in a sense (or maybe a bit crazy), trying to blend three film gauges and nine video formats into a “whole” work. But there are works I’d like to make in future that would only work as shown in a traditional cinema, and others in a gallery, and still others that need the capabilities of the internet to “function.” There’s no question for me that certain very “filmic” works would lose all meaning if seen on video, it would be like hearing a symphony on a tiny transistor radio, or worse in some cases where they would all but “disappear”. But in other cases, we might be surprised as resolution increases in the next few years. We’ll be streaming (real) HD soon, and maybe 4K after that, and in ten years all bets are off. With the “must be seen as film” films you’re describing, the real problem is the disappearing projection equipment, where even the truest film purists just won’t be able to get spare parts at some point. That makes me want to cry sometimes, but I want to make art and I want to use whatever I can get my hands on to make it.
Brenda: thanks very much for this: “a meditation on time, death, the extraordinary randomness of experience.” Sweet music to my ears!
Alex: your growing up on the flat-as-a-pancake prairie of southern Saskatchewan, far from the art cinema houses (yet in a very exciting visual context, with all that light as far as the eye can see) brings you to film-making and film exhibition with a special perspective. If not for the curvature of the earth, you might have been able to see us in Winnipeg in the distance, down the rail line, but as you say the isolation is something that’s being transformed now by technology. These days, some of your younger equivalents will be combining “big sky watching” with watching films on The Auteurs. Quite a difference. I know, for myself, I grew up in a small city and saw my first experimental film when I was 21. It changed my life.
Dave: thanks for starting the conversation on such a quality, personal note. VERY nice to hear how the film’s become tied to your own memories, and especially that the work might still resonate at 32 below. We do seem to have mirrored experiences in recent years.
For those who don’t know, Dave’s run the Winnipeg Film Group’s Cinematheque for many years, where I first test-screened the the film outside of the lab. So he was one of the first people to see it, and now in my mind he’s very much part of its history. He’s one of those “programmer heroes” out there, keeping an independent cinematheque alive despite huge challenges, and showing amazing work all the while.
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One interesting strain that’s running through some of the comments so far is about the re-mixing of the personal and the formal, which is something I thought about a lot while I made these films. I tried to work with the personal, my own memories, feelings, biography, as though they were “raw material” (how can I stretch this, texture it, what will happen if I place it here); and I thought of the film’s formal elements, film stocks, video formats, how they physically or visually interacted with each other, their textures and tones, and their over-all structure, in emotional and personal terms (WHY is hand-made film-making important, why does making art with your mind AND body seem to work better, why are these issues so charged with emotion, are there different kinds of narrative arcs that naturally stem from different cultures)? Or, put another way, there’s something about moving image art that makes me want to approach everything optimistically, holistically. Maybe it’s the movement itself.
I’m glad to see that the discussion is up and running, in so many fascinating directions. There’s a lot to say, and luckliy we’ve all been given a generous amount of time and space to attempt to say it, so many thanks to Danny and the Auteurs crew.
I guess I’ll chime in first of all by responding to a few of Chris’s points, and touching lightly on Brenda’s follow-ups, because in terms of the technological / aesthetic stakes we’re dealing with when we think about the new digital platform that Clive’s Auteurs release represents, those questions / concerns strike me as being right on the money. I think that for a lot of reasons, there is a push in some circles to see the Internet as the great leveller in terms of access to heretofore obscure or minoritarian artwork. There are many reasons to be cautious about this, as Chris explains. Clive’s work is uniquely suited to a multi-platform dissemination, and there are a good number of other artworks that could retain their fundamental integrity under such circumstances. One that comes immediately to mind is Godard’s HISTOIRE[S] DU CINEMA. I can think of other artists whose work is sufficiently hybridized and “impure” (in the non-modernist, Gesamtkunstwerkish sense) to allow for a similar transition / translation, although this is just my opinion and they themselves might vociferously disagree: Michele Smith, Travis Wilkerson, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (sometimes), Ursula Biemann, and the most recent work of Ken Jacobs and Phil Solomon.
But other contemporary film art is working with the specific demands of the medium, just as has always been the case. Indeed, Dorsky, Gatten, Peter Hutton, Luther Price, Jennifer Reeves… The trouble is, we’re finding ourselves not in a neutral situation of potential pluralism, but in a precipitous slide towards digital hegemony. Granted, certain work, like Gatten’s, Price’s, and Jacobs’s, seems to be coming to them in the first place precisely because film is dying, and so they’re doing things with it that only film can do (e.g., throwing it in the ocean to register purely chemical traces of passing time). But speaking as someone who has to do a new dance with some university administrator almost every term for what I consider basic teaching materials (i.e., a projector, a dark classroom, a rental budget — anything beyond a Netflix subscription and an Ethernet cable is becoming a challenge these days), there are corporate and institutional imperatives for throwing everything into the Intertubes or onto a shiny disc, regardless of whether said Thing can retain its aesthetic integrity that way.
Now, Clive’s film.
I had never had the pleasure of seeing Trains of Winnipeg before. And I must say, Clive, at the risk of putting you off a bit (hopefully not!), it took me a while before I really got what you were doing with the piece. The first film in the suite, “Love in the White City,” struck me as an odd creature, playing by an aesthetic rulebook with which I was unfamiliar. (Keep in mind, I went into Trains cold — I’d read nothing about the film.) I was initially very frustrated by the prominence (even aggression) of the voiceover poem, which, I felt at first, was smothering the images. And you see, this will tell you a great deal about my own aesthetic biases, and how good films like yours serves to break them down or retrain (Ha! “Train”) them in new directions. Because, despite my rather late arrival in the previous century, my convictions are deeply modernist, I tend to like very filmic films, deeply musical music, don’t want anyone sticking their chocolate in my peanut butter, etc. But the power of Trains’ hybridity and yes, IMPURITY, convinces. Well, it convinced me. I learned how to keep my audience receptors wobbling between ocular, musical, and linguistic inputs, without trying to force on-site connections between them. I opened to the drift, the flow. And it was almost always beautiful.
I’ll have more to say about specific parts of the film as we go along — it strikes me that in many respects, “Active Pass,” “Hitler!” and “Trains of Winnipeg” are the key nodal points to the work — and I also hope we can discuss how your multi-mediated, film-poem approach allows Trains of Winnipeg to be both Grand and Personal, a very deliberately subjective, “located,” non-totalizing alternative to some of the great, wonderous summative films of the Canadian experimental tradition (Reason Over Passion, The Hart of London, Very NIce Very Nice), but there will be time for all that and I have rambled enough.
But thanks to all, especially you, Clive. This will be fun.
wow. just an observation today. but I happen to be in Florida now, after starting this discussion in Toronto, and there is something profound and worth noticing about how we have so quickly adapted to these virtual conversations. Thankfully Clive knows all of us, and I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a few of you before. But it’s yet another benefit that we have this expanded forum to discuss, debate (and hopefully differ in opinion) about unconventional cinema. I’m still concerned that this allows us to further segregate ourselves into finding like minded individuals online, as opposed to introducing unfamiliar terrestrial neighbours to our interests. But I digress.
The discussion of historical cinema spaces and romantic notions of seeing film projected in them continues to be the standard by which all other viewing experiences are judged. (funny how we don’t talk as much about using a VHS cassette with poor tracking, and AV equipment without remote controls?)
My first experience in viewing ToW. (had to shorten it, as it felt appropriate in an online culture – Clive if this isn’t cool with you, please let me know. and please no one point out the irony in me typing all of this, as opposed to just typing the title in full). The ROM was for a very brief period showing films on Friday night in their theatre as part of their programming expansion. The initiative didn’t last long unfortunately. Again, I think it relates to what Brenda and Michael stated about miniscule budgets. The film worked in the setting because it allowed people to wander in and out of the theatre as they wanted, taking in as many of the poems as interested them. There were few people (if any) beside myself who stayed for the entire film, and I left the theatre with very mixed emotions. I was thrilled having had the opportunity to watch the 35mm print in a theatre, but was upset that there was a full museum of people surrounding me, and so few had taken the opportunity to see the film, instead looking at static objects, and missing something that was a fleeting opportunity.
I don’t feel we’re witnessing the end of film presentation in ‘proper’ public spaces. I do think we’re seeing an expansion of possibility in how and when we see motion picture. Much like the opportunity to see live opera still exists and at a premium. so too will the opportunity to see film projected. but in the future it will not be an experience to be taken for granted.
now back to watching more of ToW.
this IS fun. Was really struck by some of Michael’s comments on the deliberately subjective, non totalizing aspects of TOW, Clive’s own comments on mixing of the formal and personal and ? (Chris maybe) comments on the prevalence of ‘voice’ in the work.
No one has talked about the music but it seems to me that what really works in the piece is the extraordinary balance between spoken word, the electronic music and image. The drone and rhythm of the music seem to me to drive the piece, making the spoken voice performative and providing a kind of hypnotic acoustic scaffolding for image and voice.
Poetry doesn’t always make a perfect transition into film—it’s often too schematic, too constrained and too overly formalized by the demands of rhythm or rhyme, or too self consciously ‘literary.’ To be sure, there are a few (very few) moments in TOW that veer close poetic preciousness, but overall the kind of poetry that Clive writes (and I have a feeling this is where it all started) is bound far more to experience, to a kind of materiality of the everyday than to excessive flights of metaphysical fancy. So much of the experimental tradition, and so much of the criticism and writing on the experimental tradition has been taken up with the issue of vision and perception where language is often an object of suspicion—deadened by rationality and responsible for separating us from some ecstatic sphere of premediated experience. (Brakhage/Elder). I like Clive’s poetic language because he always seems to start from the mundane –his parents’ moving into a condo as a premise to reflect on mortality; trains as a way to think about the inevitability of movement and time, it’s all purposefully non-monumental.
At the same time I think TOW shares a lot with Lipsett’s Very Nice, Very Nice (which Michael evoked). The cumulative vision is one of a world in fragments, random violence, the overbearing presence of consumer capitalism..probably ‘Neighbour Walk Softly’ comes closest to Lipsett in its dystopian vision. But what is different from Lipsett is that nihilism is balanced with personal epiphanies inspired by experiences in everyday life .. And yes, “Hitler” seems key to that—interestingly enough, one of the only sequences where language is graphic not spoken.
Quick notes, more later:
1. “ToW” is the abbreviation I use myself, so no problem.
2. “ROM” = “Royal Ontario Museum” in Toronto, for non-Canadian readers.
3. And Michael: nice use of “minoritarian!” I love having to look up a word, means I’m learning. On that note, one interesting thought I had this morning was that I know more about my own work than I did 24 hours ago. Thanks for that.
Also, I agree with Alex re. VHS: for myself, the “horse left the barn” about 25 years ago when people started watching videos instead of going to theatres. Not coincidentally, this coincided with a renewed interest in art cinema and then independent cinema thru the 80’s. But the video store selection remained artificially constricted, with work that didn’t find a commercial distributor left out of the system.
The web won’t solve everything overnight, and some problems are pretty damn hard to solve, but internet-based distribution of various kinds offers some better solutions than we’ve had to choose from in the recent past, with huge potential for growth from here on.
I also think it’s worth noting that if we think REALLY long term (in technological terms, say 25 years down the road), there are going to be big surprises in store, guaranteed. This is a short passage of time in human terms (never mind the planet or universe…), and some of the film works of today will be transferred to “future formats” that might actually “translate” them quite well, who knows? We don’t know what’s coming next, except that we know there will be more change.
In the shorter run, I think some of the film works we’re talking about will be shown in darkened gallery rooms (“blackened white rooms”). At least, I think there’s huge potential there too, as a parallel to the web, that’s already being explored. The simple act of asking a curator to place two rows of seats in a room where a cinema-based installation is being screened, considered too odd just a couple of years ago, is now creating a hybrid cinema/art space where I HOPE film will continue to be shown long term in its many forms, including those works that don’t function as any kind of video.
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Re. this broader use of the word “voice”: I think of this a lot to do with writing literary fiction (one part of my current project), but I’ve never thought of it to do with filmmaking for some reason. I think it’s an important perspective: all of the “language” (as Chris puts it) that goes into making a film, and especially a film-maker’s body of work, culminates in a recognizable (even if sometimes entirely visual) whole.
(And thank you both for mentioning Lipsett.)
Also also, agreed that the music is very important.
Getting back to this quite late on Thursday, and a LOT has been added since yesterday.
One thing I’d like to clarify: I am not a celluloid fetishist. On the contrary, the huge amount of experimental film being made at present that seems to be about nothing more than the filmmaker’s fetishization of the material and of filmmaking processes frankly disgusts me. But for me it’s key to recognize that SOME work simply demands certain conditions in order to be properly experienced. The same is true of at least some work in any art form — music, painting, sculpture, whatever. I don’t think there’s anything romantic about that, it is simply acknowledging the specificity required by certain work. And now I’ll leave that alone. (But not until I’ve seconded Michael’s remarks about the tendency towards “digital hegemony!”)
Brenda is right on poetry and film. In fact, I’d go further: usually poetic language kills films. ToW is a rare exception. There are some very smart people who disagree with me, but I think that Willard Maas’s Geography of the Body (1943), for example, is a VERY BAD FILM. (Which, yes, you can find on the web.) The voice-over effectively destroys the viewer’s capacity to see the images, much less to put them together with the words. It’s possible I would find something to like in this poetry — I think it was George Barker’s — on the page, but in this film it seems insufferable. Perhaps the matter-of-factness of the cinematographic image, however artistically transformed, demands a certain level of matter-of-factness in the words that appear in conjunction with it as well?
My biases are probably similar to Michael’s, but I’m not generally hostile to language in film. Compare the Maas film, for example, with a heavily narrated film like Harun Farocki’s Images of the World and the Inscription of War, which I love. Here, the language is flatly read, dense and demanding, but it’s prose and it’s building an argument, and it relates to the images in a number of different ways that add up to something remarkable. It also works with rhythm (and music!) in a distinctive way. What Clive does with spoken poetry and music in ToW is something different again, but it has none of the preciousness that comes across in most films that try to use poetry, and the balance between music, image and word shifts throughout the film.
Which brings me back to the issue of “voice.” I’m convinced that one of the reasons that this film has been so successful with audiences is because, despite its experimental nature and the radical shifts in style within it, it is so strongly grounded in everyday experience, direct expression of emotion and plain speech. I loved the way Michael put it: “I learned how to keep my audience receptors wobbling between ocular, musical, and linguistic inputs, without trying to force on-site connections between them.” That’s it exactly: ToW opens up many potential connections between its constituent elements, but it doesn’t force the issue, so it doesn’t create the kind of anxiety that is sometimes part of the experimental film experience.
Another counter-example: James Benning’s North On Evers (1992), which is also a film about moving back-and-forth across a large country, about aging, about a divided society. In North On Evers there is a nearly continuous hand-written text in black lettering moving across the bottom of the screen, superimposed over the images. When the words overlap with a dark area of the image, you can’t read them at all, which is frustrating, but even when the words are legible you have to decide second-by-second whether to concentrate on text or on image. It’s a very good film, but the tension this oscillation between word and picture creates is considerable, and would surely off-putting to many. ToW, on the other hand, seems to me to employ a more open form, despite the fact that each part is carefully constructed in relation to each other, and at certain times similar tensions may be at play.
In “Line and Surface,” an essay from 1973, Vilem Flusser talks about the shift from a world of linear thought to a world of surfaces, with film and television screens as the key surfaces. I won’t try to summarize his argument, but certain points clearly apply here. Flusser says:
“Written lines impose a specific structure on thought, in that they represent the world by means of a point sequence. This implies a ‘historical’ being-in-the-world of those who write and read written lines. … Very recently, new channels of thought have come about. … They impose a radically new structure on thought in that they represent the world by means of moving images. This implies a posthistorical being-in-the-world of those who make and read these moving images. In a sense, it may be said that these new channels incorporate the temporality of the written line into the picture, by lifting the linear historical time of written lines onto the level of the surface. “Now, if this is true, it means that ‘surface thought’ is absorbing ‘linear thought,’ or at least is beginning to learn how to do so.”I think North on Evers and Trains of Winnipeg are both dealing with this — which Flusser calls a crisis — but in very different ways. Interesting films to compare in many ways…
Finally had a chance to chime in and I’d like to say how fruitful this discussion has already been. One aspect that I find especially compelling is the question of whether online distribution will improve the chances of non-mainstream and/or non-narrative film and video work for finding a greater audience. I wonder whether there was a wave of similar optimism at the advent of home video in the ‘80s. I fondly remember seeing a shelf of Brakhage titles at an otherwise ordinary Blockbuster store in Calgary in the mid-’90s and thinking that this was some brave harbinger of things to come. Alas, it wasn’t, and judging by the way things are going, cinephile-oriented video stores may soon be another casualty of the current paradigm/platform shift, which will make places like The Auteurs more crucial.
Yet speaking as someone who discovered a lot of this kind of work at film festivals like TIFF and Images, I hope that there will continue to be a real-world/tactile context for neophytes to discover it. What’s more, I worry about the future for any kind of artistic practice that demands a little more thought and attention on the part of the spectator or consumer than the quick-hit/instantly digestible nature of the vast majority of web content.
A loss of widespread popularity didn’t spell the end for opera or poetry, last I checked. Yet the apparent loss of interest by whippersnappers in the sort of engagement that only happens in a dark room with other people (ideally people with whom you can talk about it afterward) will spell big changes for every aspect of the medium. A film professor friend told me what happened when he recently polled a class of undergrads about their consumption habits. When he asked how many had gone to see a movie (any movie) at a theatre in the last six months, only a few hands went up. That didn’t surprise him so much. But then he asked how many had rented something from a video store and it was still a pitiful number. When he asked the students how they were watching movies, several explained that they were downloading new movies or seeing streaming versions on bootleg sites. It’s hard to imagine that the practice of patronizing a Batman or Twilight movie may someday become a marginal activity (and that the IMAX-scaled frames of The Dark Knight or the hyper-accelerated montages in the Transformers movies are even comprehensible on a laptop screen) but the consumption patterns may soon make it so.
I think some of these questions are human/social, I mean not solely confined to cinema. I THINK people will always be drawn to (non-virtual) communal experiences. And to the “tactile” (in and out of quotations).
When I film with a film camera I look through the lens – the light bounces off surfaces (touches them) and enters my eyes, and I FEEL this in a way that seems tactile (it is, in a sense). When I use a video camera, I look at a tiny monitor, and this seems less tactile, there’s less physicality (it seems halfway between filming and “recording” sound). But I do use video cameras (quite happily) and when I do I sometimes try to add-in some sort of physical element to the making process, to make up for the loss of the thru-the-lens experience. And the reason I do this, is that it seems to produce better results. Engaging the mind + body (a crude way of putting it, it’s not a dichotomy) seems to use more of the whole mind.
Likewise, when we gather together, and “touch” things (cinema screens, or each other), we FEEL, and this transcends mere cleverness, and the habitual.
I made my last “film” with a mix of Super 8 film and a digital SLR (it includes a super-charged equivalent of a “motor drive”). In other words, I was “making video” while looking through a lens again, by using a still camera. Which felt very odd at first, but it worked.
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Re. optimism: it’s been interesting to read our references to the 80’s, and I remember how bleak things looked at the start of that decade. Then, a lot of things improved during that time, cinema included and partly because of the new “home video market.” For a while, there were amazing independent video stores (mostly long gone, but not all). I know that my favourite had a big impact on my life. Of course, I lived in Montreal at the time and so I also had access to several great cinemas showing the best films in the world as films, surrounded by lovely flesh-and-blood people. The mix was good, no question about it, but I can’t bring that back by wishing it was so.
Winter hit Toronto this week, and glowering out the window doesn’t seem to be changing that. So I look for today’s, this season’s, charms. (The Auteurs is one of them.)
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Jason: thanks for using the word “whippersnappers.”
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Note: I live in a city now that also has a fair amount of great cinemas, and lots of excellent festivals and galleries. So it’s still a great “mix.” Although a little less filmic.
Part of The Auteurs experience, for me, has been accessing the social media community that seems to hover around the films like a virtual storm of communication. The service is more than accessing the “films”, and its future potential (I’m just assuming there will be future developments in terms of formats, etc.), they’ve also done a lot of hard work creating a (very well designed) social experience, that’s wonderfully international – kind of utopian in fact (in the positive sense of the word, if that’s still allowed).
I think it might be interesting to talk about this, along with the presentation of the films. I realize not everyone’s into this yet (social media). But I think, soon, it will be like not owning a phone. And it will be connected, increasingly, to the experience of visual media art. It will “mediate” the experience of “film art”.
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A nice accident: after joining, and filling out my own membership info., and choosing my “Favorite Auteurs,” coincidentally (they’re displayed alphabetically) this is the order of the first six as they appear on-screen:
Bruce Baillie
James Benning
Ingmar Bergman
Stan Brakhage
Vittorio De Sica
Atom Egoyan
The thought of this mix makes my head swim!
Wow. It’s been such a pleasure reading through what you all have to say that I haven’t been sure when or how to jump in! Thank you all.
I guess to start I should place myself. I would say I’m an elder of the Internet generation, just right on the line, meaning much that is happening online feels like second nature to me, yet I don’t use it with the complete ease of those in their teens and early-20s. And I am a rare “whippersnapper” who is still in love with celluloid and viewing films in a dark cinema with other people.
I think the points brought up by Brenda referring to how young people watch films today are really interesting. I’ve heard from film professors that their students are now watching entire feature films in segments on YouTube, a sort of Cliff’s Notes of the most “important” scenes. Thinking of the ways in which people watch online, I would agree with Chris that the segmentation of ToW makes it uniquely suited for this form of distribution (and we at The Auteurs are extremely lucky to have ToW and Clive). But it is also complex and lyrical. In this way, could it be a “bridging” piece for those new to experimental or non-commercial films? I hope that it will be for some in The Auteurs community.
I would agree with Chris that there are some films that are meant to be seen on a cinema screen and in a very particular setting. But that, as Alex and others have mentioned, online distribution is an exciting way for people to watch films they wouldn’t see otherwise. I remember watching a film print of Gunvor Nelson’s “My Name is Oona” and falling in love with it. Even though I know she would be horrified to know that you can find the film online, I was excited to happen upon it again and shared it with others in The Auteurs community who had never seen it before. Is it better for people to be exposed to this film, even out of its ideal context? I’m not sure… But I think there will always be people who want to see a film the way the filmmaker originally intended it to be seen, regardless of the viewer’s age.
It’s funny that both of you bring up VHS, Clive and Alex. VHS has become somewhat of a collector’s item in certain circles, found in the same context as the LP. I suspect that this is the case because in the transition from VHS to DVD, many important titles were lost. I think this is the real danger in advancing technologies. It would be devastating to lose a film completely, which is maybe why the drive to make all films available online, or at least digitally archived, is actually more important.
And as for the film, ToW.
Watching the film was a personal experience for me, as it was for others in this discussion. The first thing it made me think of was jumping train cars as a teenager in the Midwest of the U.S., not riding very far, because there was nowhere for me and my friends to really go. The trains signaled a possibility of the larger world for us, which is also what films do for so many people.
Ways cinema will (continue to) evolve, that will draw people together in one space for the communal experience we’ve all been expressing concern for:
1. by adding live elements to the screening experience, most obviously through live soundtrack performances and other collaborations with musicians/composers; but this will also expand (expanded cinema) to include MANY other live performative aspects; there are lots of contemporary examples of this, including at our amazing Images Festival here in Toronto, but it’s an explosively growing trend wherever cinema’s made.
2. by adding “liveness” to cinematic works, in other words making each viewing experience unique thru adding dynamic or interactive elements to how a film is seen (I’ve been experimenting by using both cinematic and web-creation tools, making works meant for cinema + gallery + web presentation, with dynamically controlled coding to produce liveness); this uniqueness is part of the allure of the live event, when we go to a live music concert it’s partly because of its one-time-only value (along with the attractiveness of the communal cultural experience).
3. other suggestions: __________________________?
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Alley: I’ve only recently become aware of the fascinating “sub-generation gap” you describe, which I think is partly defined by people who’ve grown up with “massively multiplayer online games” (MMOG’s), who have an embedded relationship with the internet that’s quite new and different than the web experience is for people who are… older than 25, approximately? Trying to predict what will happen to cinema in light of this new paradigm is especially hard.
And, I love the description of your truncated train hopping experiences. In researching the world of trains for the film, I came across many new things, the on-line world of trains buffs, contemporary hobo culture, specialist train graffiti artists, and of course the wide world of train hopping (which, among other things, seems to be a type of extreme sport – as it can be quite dangerous); but as you say so well, the attraction to the “larger world” is part of being human, and part of peoples’ love for cinema from the beginning.
Note: cinema can also be quite dangerous.
Late to the table (I’d claim I was deep in thought musing on all things experimental and filmic, but anyone who knows me knows I’ve been racing about setting scaffolding for this fledgling architecture we have dubbed ‘Garage’)— late to the table, and the whole first course has been eaten. This reminds me of the Copenhagen Documentary Festival, where I was accosted by five individual filmmakers (in elevator, on stairwell, in lobby) on the way to the official dinner, each armed with impassioned arguments about the future of film distribution, and finally I ran hungry through rain-soaked streets only to find scraps and half-bitten hors d’œuvres remaining, the unchewable stuff. At least there was wine.
But, interestingly (for me at least), I sit down at the exact moment when the words ‘cinema’ and ‘dangerous’ hang in the air…
Cinema=Dangerous. Always was, wasn’t it? Cinema, real (reel) cinema.
Knives out for the entrée.
“For me, the primary function of cinema is to make us feel that something isn’t right. There is no difference between documentary and fiction here. The cinema, the first time it was seen and filmed, was for showing something that wasn’t right.
The first film showed a factory, the people who were leaving the factory. It’s similar to photography, which is also something quite close to our world. It’s like when we take a photo in order to have proof of something that we see, which is not in our mind, something in front of us, of reality. The first photograph shown to the world in newspapers was of the corpses of the Paris Commune, it showed the bodies of the Communards.
—so, you begin to see that in the first film ever shown we see people leaving a prison, and the first photo published in a newspaper showed dead people who tried to change the world. When we speak of cinema starting from there – or of photography, documentary, or fiction – we’re speaking of its very realist basis. It’s sort of a basic historical given that the first film and the first photograph are somewhat terrible things.
They’re not love stories, they’re anxieties. Somebody took a machine in order to reflect, to think and to question. For me, there is in this gesture, this desire – be it the gesture to make a film or a photograph, or today to make a video – there is in this gesture something very strong, something which says to you: ‘Don’t forget.’ —_Pedro Costa_
We’re at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. There have been debates, sometimes angry debates, on here (The Auteurs) for some time now. Is Cinema Dead? No (not yet anyway). Is digital video the same as film? No, but it’s still motion picture (interesting you bring up that Trains of Winnepeg was shot partially on Kodachrome Super 8, Clive— we’re also at a point in history where certain mediums are dying fast, leaving only digital approximations of certain tonal qualities in their wake.) Do the rapid changes in means of production (the ubiquity and accessibiity of digital cameras) and the (alleged) democratization of distribution (aka the web, and the potential VOD revolution) change the way we make and receive cinema? Yes, of course they do, in the same way that the internet has changed the way people read and absorb information (through processes of amoebic non-linearity, simultaneity, multiplicity- the meme, the virus, the disease of inattention, the opportunity for cut-up and remix and direct, personal engagement with media). You don’t shoot long shots for an I-pod film.
I wrote this about two years ago now on this forum, when there were only 20 people on here
At the dawn of the 20th century, Freud, Jung, Nietzsche and Marx were all writing, proclaiming the death of old Gods (the theological animal itself, the psychologies that drove it and the economic system that allowed it all to thrive).
Now a new century has begun, its name largely writ in information blips, invasive surveillance technologies, advanced propagandas and soundbite/linguistic reductionism. I think this is why I am increasingly obsessed with memory, imagined histories, false identities, entropy, and filmmakers who approach that horizon, blur lines between genres. What has been lost? An innocence about film, perhaps. It is as if we are living in a perpetual loop, moments after The Tower of Babel collapsed, brought down not by a God, but by a conglomerate of jealous corporations.
In “Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now”, Eleanor Coppola interviewed Dennis Hopper and he compared film-making then (1978-9) to the early days of cathedral building, when it would take a team of thousands to draft and design and finally lay the stone. He imagined a future where a feature film might be created entirely by one individual, working with nothing more than a portable camera and sound equipment strapped to their back.
Hello, now.
Hello, also, via Ute Holl ( re: Maya Deren’s Anagram ), another hard proposition— that “…the task of cinema is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious into art, but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds or souls” Romanticism meets (post)modernism in a darkened alleyway and they both leave looking flustered and wearing each other’s shoes.
So, Trains of Winnipeg— it’s the juxtaposition between experimental form and pure (personal) tone poem that hits me square between the eyes (and ears). It’s vanguard cinema, which is as much about approach as content— every visionary filmmaker out there I know is working not to get lost in translation, cutting for multiple mediums: the 35mm print, the 24progressive DVD, the h.264 compressed Vimeo edit, something viral and lo-fi for YouTube. If it’s a doc they try to get all that done and push a cut for a TV PBS or HBO deal. Plus print media, viral distribution of photo stills, artwork, whatever they can milk or extract from the work that’s strong enough to stand solo, plus interviews and production extras— and tap on top a plan for guerilla screenings, for events, for merchandised freebies and hype and megaphones on soapboxes on street corners. Branded and flayed and then blogged to death, most films now approach the event horizon of an abbatoir.
This is not a bad thing, perhaps: only the strongest, most coherent of content is not disposable in such a bloodbath.
So what works?
This might work- The Auteurs. To create a space where some kind of quality is debated and delineated, where editorial is kept to a high standard. What first drew me to this site was an instinct that it might become something akin to the original Cahiers du Cinéma, and throw open the doors to a new thinking about film for a modern world. Curation. Questioning. Discussion. Chewing the cinematic fat.
Food for thought.
A few brief replies, since some of my other present duties (filling out a year-end ballot wherein I am forced to choose between a number of Oscarbatory atrocities) are too painful to countenance…
1) Social Media: it marches on, and becomes more and more sophisticated, which is fascinating in its own way, as a medium apart from the content one sticks into it. I’ve spent the last ten years in creaky old Yahoo! Groups and, before that, Usenet chatboards, which, Net-wise, are the equivalent of, well, a VHS tape. Clive, your partial list of favorite Auteurs is an interesting example, how we enter ourselves into these processing networks, Venn diagrams of taste and discrimination which, when they work, will bring us into contact not so much with our aesthetic equivalents but with our taste-communities, people with a reasonably coherent set of shared values from which productive discussion and argument can emerge. This is great, since it helps us avoid all those useless arguments wherein no one is even sharing the same basic ethos. (In the words of US Rep. Barney Frank, re: health care: “Arguing with you would be like arguing with a dining room table.”) But the danger, of course, is greater insularity, which we all know is the case.
2) VHS. I have a ton of the goddamned things. Weigh me down like cinderblocks, but what can you do? But at least it has a frame-rate, which is more than can be said for non-BluRay DVD. But yes, Facets and some other specialty rental outlets focus on titles still available only in VHS. And all my best pirated materials (e.g., never-on-video experimental films that were aired once in the mid-90s on the old SBS “Eat Carpet” show in Australia, or in the middle of the night on RAI-TRE) are on tape and burning them to disc would be a waste of time. And did you know that some films actually DEFEAT both VHS and DVD’s transfer attempts? You can’t pirate Kubelka’s “Arnulf Rainer,” for instance, because the flicker just messes up the tracking in whatever machine you put it in. Putting that film on video is a mistake on a basic, mechanical level.
3) Clive, I can’t say I’m surprised to learn that Bruce Baillie is an important maker for you. The textures of ToW, and not just in the titular train-based segment, share a great deal with Baillie’s work, in terms of expressive, reality-heightening use of saturated color, the framing of trellises, bridges and buildings against the blanched-out sky as a kind of blank canvas, and mid-tempo pace that moves more slowly than natural vision, but a bit faster than the obviously “poeticized” slo-mo avant-garde gestures we’ve grown accustomed to from other makers. Like Baillie, you tend to bring observed life into your work but suspend it, never making it exactly stand forth as “documentary,” but neither is it entirely transformed into some pure objective-correlative of your private consciousness. ToW, like “Castro St.,” “Valentin de las Sierras,” and “Quixote,” explores the world, thinks about it, but refrains from pressing it into service.
(I’m not at all sure I explained that well….)
A couple of more-or-less random responses. (I wonder if these sorts of conversations tend to have a sort of branching quality, as more people join and introduce more ideas?)
1. re: the origins of cinema — I love Costa’s observations and agree with them as far as they go. But they also ignore, as does all commentary on cinema that tends towards the “realist” line (i.e. almost all commentary on cinema), two other key elements: animation and experimental photography/cinematography. Animation, which predates filmmaking, was never about realistic representation, it was always about creating something from the imagination and giving it apparent motion on a surface. Experimental photography and filmmaking of the Marey/Edgerton type, was always about making it possible to see aspects of the natural world that are we cannot perceive directly with our senses. At historical moments like this I think we have to reassess our ideas about origins and precedents. Who would have thought, say, 40 years ago, that Emile Cohl’s animated films, e.g. Fantasmagorie (1908), would turn out to have been such crucial precedents? (Incidentally, it’s now available on-line in a restored version that frankly looks a lot better than the poor 16mm prints that are generally available.) Ovid’s Metamorphoses was 2000 years old in 2008, I believe, and Cohl’s Fantasmagorie turned 100. We’ll have to start looking at these kinds of “texts” more carefully if we’re going to understand contemporary media.
2. re: high definition. I come back to the question of branching. Digital image-making devices seem to branch in two directions: one is towards animation, the other towards pure representation (i.e. filming “reality” or filming actors in a pretend reality). Neither moves towards the kind of balance of the real and the subjective that characterizes ToW and much of the best of experimental film. In cinematic terms, it seems to me that high-definition video represents a real break with what went before because the medium has no real PRESENCE. Mainstream filmmaking may always have desired this kind of transparency (or thought it did), but the point is that it could never achieve it: the real, physical character of the medium was always a presence, its materiality could be de-emphasized but not entirely suppressed. Of course the shared digital matrix of digital animation and digital “image capture” also means that the two are readily combined, which is itself a new situation. Digital image-making branches, but the different branches can be easily grafted back together!
Will come back to ToW and questions of distribution and audience when I have more time, but I’m not totally convinced that, as Tobias says, “only the strongest, most coherent of content is not disposable in such a bloodbath.”
RE: ‘cinderblock’ vhs—it may be banal but important (in an ecological sense) to point out that there is currently no place (at least no place in Toronto where I’ve contacted dozens of production houses and schools) which recycles old vhs tapes. I had boxes and boxes of these hard plastic artefacts because in the old days of the eighties and nineties, you would get your rushes printed on vhs. So yep, the only thing you can do is load them in garbage bags destined for landfill where they will no doubt take a millenium or two to decay. We’ve talked for years about the materiality of the medium—but most of the time only as an aesthetic reflex—maybe in the face of looming environmental crisis, it’s time to shift the terms of the debate to real world concrete objects and artefacts.
Of course that’s the flaunted advantage of digital and web based forms of distribution—that they have a lighter ecological footprint—but then again if we think about all those laptops and monitors plugged into grids running on coal fired power plants….In the techno utopian mind, digital was the very embodiment of immateriality and was supposed to avoid all that messy transmogrification of the material body of film—the decay of nitrate, the fading, the colour transformations, the shedding of emulsion, the release prints and negs that turn brittle and break. Talk to any film preservationist today though and they are freaking out. The shelf life of dvds is only about 5-10 years, and all forms of digital storage may be precarious at best. One step forward two steps back.
Is ToW an exemplary multi media or new digital project—absolutely but I do believe it uses modularity in a way I find infinitely more satisfying (as an aesthetic experience) than having to click through screens or follow links in more data base oriented work. That to me has always been the source of my frustration with CD Rom type projects—I don’t have the patience –and what you are lead to is often more of the same. I prefer being put on a train and taken somewhere that surprises, engages and moves me.
Brenda
re: “as does all commentary on cinema that tends towards the “realist” line >… Animation, which predates filmmaking, was never about realistic representation”—yes, of course. although, I don’t think realism must be a direct representation of the real, front-of-eyeballs vision— Svankmajer’s Bohemia springs to mind. Another debate perhaps.
and
“bloodbath…”. OK, Chris, yes again— I’m not so sure either…
I’m flicking matches in part to spark petrol already spilt across the ground, and in part to represent others on this forum who don’t yet have a voice in this debate. In a way I’m talking less about this film and more about a general tendency amongst generation-next, and trying to highlight a distinction between fractured work (a film torn apart slap-hazard for marketing) and a work that has the scope, depth and fluidity to embrace translation. Hence my comment about coherence (for coherence, perhaps substitute the word quality, which might in turn be a euphemism for [production + value], attention to detail, purpose ). I like Trains. I like how it moves to the back of my brain and takes up space so I am still thinking about it days after I first watched it. I like how I can get it on my laptop now if I want, to revisit pieces or elements that left me troubled. This is a highly interactive work.
I think it’s vastly important that this film exists (and was created with the intention of existing) across platforms. But is it a film, exactly? Or is it an audio-visual poem that lends itself to multiple platforms? What are the implications of this modularity for cinema, if any?
and also re: VHS… yes, formats, physical realities, plastic bricks and reels in cans vs (etheric, intangible) digital data streams— I don’t want to quote someone else again, but Paolo Cherchi-Usai talks a lot about this— Curation, archiving and decay: what means a film when it exists as a series of 1010101010s you can open in a text editor? Does this even matter? Is there a romanticism to projectors and cinemas (and celluloid in particular) misplaced in this century? ToW is a very intimate work. I watched it with headphones and laptop. I can’t imagine it (partly because I haven’t experienced it) on a big screen sharing the experience amongst others…
Reading Tobias’ post, it struck me that I can’t remember how I first watched ToW — at a screening or on TV. Since I end up watching a lot of material at home on screeners (previously VHS, now DVD) so that I can write preview pieces for newspapers in the hopes of encouraging people to go to actual places to watch the works projected on actual screens, I realize that I spend far less time in theatres than I assume I do.
At the same time, though, I find myself imagining that I am watching these films in the “correct” context of those screenings I’m ostensibly promoting, i.e., forgiving technical issues or sub-standard colour under the presumption that the later projections will be flawless, or believing that various aspects of the film will “play” better in a room with other people in it. (One persistent irritant: the effectiveness of horror or comedy films is almost impossible to judge with any accuracy without experiencing them in a crowd.)
I wonder if other viewers do this - that is, feel self-conscious about watching films in the “incorrect” context and then compensating by imagining how the experience would be different in some supposedly ideal one. I like to think it makes me a more charitable kind of viewer but it also affects how I’m experiencing the films in very powerful ways. For instance, watching an eight-hour Lav Diaz epic in one or two-hour chunks at home (and with food and bathroom breaks) is so fundamentally different than sitting all day or night in a theatre, those experiences may not be comparable at all.
Anyway, that’s on my mind given how online distribution of films is likely to make the viewing experience even choppier and more interrupt-able (sic) than ever. ToW’s design makes it a far more flexible and successful kind of work in this context than, say, Satantango. Now if we could only convince Bela Tarr to make a movie using only a mobile phone…
Bela Tarr making a movie with a cell/I-phone, or creating work for broadcast on one? —either way, I’m inclined to imagine a reaction similar to this ↓ : )
That’s a really funny clip Tobias. Thanks!
The subject of sound has come up briefly, and this might be a good time to talk about it. Clearly there are some film-making greats who’ve focused mostly or entirely on cinema as visual art (and they feel almost invisible, and pissed at times). But cinema’s also about language (conventional use of the word), and sound (sub-divided into music and non-). My personal tendency, when I’m making anything, is to think in terms of the elements I’m bringing to the table. There has to be enough on the table. If there’s one thing, maybe visual only with no intertext or little narrative (I think there’s always a little – but that’s another debate), then of course that’s great IF that one element is really, really good (but it puts more strain on that element, using it on its own).
Or: with just spoken narration, the famous example I know that stretched the definition of “film” (a la Wikipedia):
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“Blue is the twelfth and final feature film by director Derek Jarman, released just four months before his death by AIDS-related complications. Such complications had already rendered him partially blind at the time of the film’s release. The film was his last testament as a film-maker, and consists of a single shot of saturated blue colour filling the screen, as background to a soundtrack where Jarman’s and some of his favourite actors’ narration describes his life and vision.
“On its premiere, Channel 4 and BBC Radio 3 collaborated on a simultaneous broadcast so viewers could enjoy a stereo soundtrack. Radio 3 subsequently broadcast the soundtrack separately as a radio play and it was later released as a CD.
“On July 23, 2007 British distributor Artificial Eye released DVD tying Blue together with Glitterbug, a collage of Jarman’s Super 8 footage.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
(Another topic again: we can see how modularity has been part of cinematic experimentation throughout its history – just not in the cineplex.)
But back to “cell phones” (hopefully not for too long): I bought one a couple of years back (guess which one) that has a very good image, and especially good sound on headphones. I watched several movies on it right away, including ToW. The films that relied sufficiently on sound (sound design, soundscape, music and spoken words), or text, or character development (or a mix of these), came across very well. There’s no question it was weird, and still is for me: watching a “movie” in the palm of my hand. And I think a few of these films, especially some of the character dramas, didn’t benefit at all from larger screens (for me, a great character drama is still an important part of cinematic history, even if it doesn’t bring any visual richness to the screen).
Of course, there are other cinematic works that are ridiculous to watch in this way, many too obvious to list. But my first experience of this loss in translation was years ago, and was a wonderfully ridiculous example. When I was 15 the local 500 seat porn cinema was bought by an entrepreneur who turned it into an indie movie house. I headed down there and watched the first film I could see, which was “Doctor Zhivago.” Despite its “problems” (personally, when the full moon comes out I’m not moved to write poetry, I have more of werewolf response), I LOVED all those dazzling fields of daffodils in full filmic glory on a giant screen. This film had what we used to be call “sweep.” Then, a few years later, I watched it again on VHS and it had pretty close to ZERO value (for me) on what was then called the “small screen” (unless you analyzed its politics, but again another subject). So this film might have experienced a kind of death. It ONLY worked on a extra large screen, which it’s rarely going to enjoy ever again (you can sob or cheer, but I have a small sentimental streak that I’m not ashamed of).
So… my simple answer to some of this screen size stuff is: it depends on the film.
And I started this off talking about sound and then segued into thinking of film as a collection of important elements, in different mixes. The main undervalued (or at least less officially recognized) powerful element in cinema is sound. And I will say I thought of this a LOT while making ToW. In fact, as an experiment (while editing), I challenged myself by asking, “what would I do if all of these elements I’m mixing were different instruments in a musical composition (or group), including the moving image, how would that alter my process and the outcome?”
I tried to see the editing interface as a musical score (vertical + horizontal). In the end, I decided it was easier to think of the visuals as a whole “musical section,” which struck the balance I needed.
I think I mentioned “the habitual” somewhere above this too. Some habits are good and necessary, but we should also challenge them regularly, in every walk of life, to stay alive.
Alley PB
Beginning, December 9th, 2009, The Auteurs + Garage are hosting this on-line, round table discussion between nine expert panelists who will talk about the film Trains of Winnipeg (2004, 35mm, 87 min.) by Canadian director Clive Holden, and the implications of its recent inclusion in The Auteurs. What does this mean for avant garde cinema (also known as “experimental” or “non-linear” filmmaking)? Will web-based distribution open up the treasure chest of artist-made, non-dramatic narrative, filmmaking from throughout the last century, finally making it available for all to see? What’s the future for The Auteurs in terms of additions to its film library, or its format choices and other plans? And about the film itself, where does Trains of Winnipeg fit in, in the history or cinema? Is there such a thing as 21st century filmmaking?
After one week (on Wednesday morning, December 16), the discussion will be opened up to “questions from the floor.” In other words, to all The Auteurs members who can then contribute as they like, including asking questions of the panelists or the filmmaker.
Round Table Discussion Participants: Chris Gehman (filmmaker, writer, former Toronto International Film Festival “Wavelengths” programmer, and former Artistic Director of Images Festival, i.e. the first Trains of Winnipeg programmer); Brenda Longfellow (filmmaker, writer, film theorist, and Associate Professor in the Department of Film at York University); Dave Barber (Winnipeg Film Group’s Cinematheque programmer for over 25 years); Michael Sicinski (Houston-based teacher and writer in Cinema Scope Magazine, indiewire.com, Cineaste Magazine, and Cargo Magazine); Jason Anderson (novelist and film critic in Eye Weekly, artforum.com, Globe & Mail, Village Voice, and Cinema Scope Magazine); Alex Rogalski (Toronto International Film Festival programmer, and founder of the Take One Super 8 traveling film project); Tobias Morgan (Paris-based film director, and producer of The Auteurs’ Garage project engine); Alley Pezanoski-Browne (San Francisco-based film producer, and Producer for The Auteurs & The Auteurs’ Scratchpad on-line magazine); and Clive Holden (filmmaker and artist).
Q: what does it mean that people from around the world who’ve never seen a film like Trains of Winnipeg before, can now see it so easily, AND talk about it along with all the other films in The Auteurs’ offerings in an international community of film lovers––stretching their very idea of what a “film” is––could this change the history of cinema?