YES! YES! YES!
At various points in the history of cinema, movements and groups have emerged that push boundaries and become the shoulders upon which all that follows stand: from Eisenstein’s first experiments with cross-cutting and montage, to German Expressionism, Italian Futurism and then Neo-Realism, French, Czech and Japanese New Wave, Third Cinema (born out of the Grupo Cine Liberación), Dogme 95, all the way down to the Plug-in manifesto (originally by Ana Kronschnabl, an open source document which I have attempted to re-write several times, but in truth doesn’t work for me – yet).
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). Within 20 years a new movement of women speaking openly (and getting spat on for doing so) changed the very way in which we now approach and use language, understand sexuality, experience the experience of the other: and this in turn has had a massive but little discussed impact on the grammar of film. Anti-colonial writings and civil protest manifestos at abuses of human rights touched nerves long buried under the flesh of supremacy. In the midst of all this thrust and activity, cinema was born and grew up, and a criticism of it developed.
The years 00-08 don’t seem to have thrown up any consistent argument or movement in film (obviously we have two years left to go before the decade gets nailed: and also, I may have missed something). A world has been born filled with information blips, stupid-is-cool culture, a massive increase in invasive surveillance technologies, new propagandas and soundbite reductionism (I am as guilty of this as anyone, with my three line reviews/condemnations of other people’s work). What first drew me to “The Auteurs” was an instinct that it might become something akin to the Cahiers du Cinéma, and throw open the doors to a new thinking about cinema for a modern world.
So, as the first decade of the 21st century draws near to a close, I do not know if it will be possible to look back and name the ideas that defined it. I think this is why I am increasingly obsessed with memory, imagined histories, false identities, entropy, and auteurs who approach that horizon, blur lines between genres. What has been lost? An innocence about film, perhaps. YouTube and its spawn, the accessibility of camera technology (in certain zones of the world at least) and the rapid advancement of computer power has allowed a multitude to make a visual impression. And yet at the same time, amidst all this regurgitation and white noise and xerox machining of dead people’s work, a new level of coherent debate and communication seems strangely absent. It is as if we are living in a perpetual loop, moments after The Tower of Babel collapsed, shot 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.
With dropping attention spans, short films such as those of Stan Brakhage and Ian Helliwell and Kurt Kren draw my eyes. They seem to have more weight, ironically. And others on the margins: the brainwave/audio work of Alvin Lucier points at a future interaction between the human being and the screen that makes the cinema we know an anachronism. Is it not, to quote Ute Holl (re:Maya Deren), the case 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”? Or are we all still floundering in the shadows of the past, playing with three acts and methods and pissy little emotive musics? (-) Is the story of film now not one of storytelling, but of human interaction with the idea of film itself?
At the same time, as established studios fear the shadow of economic failure and become little more than clone laboratories, we see a new cinema from Asia, the Middle East, South America, Africa (in particular Nigeria)- cultures with (re)emerging voices, fresh eyes and other perspectives. In its wake, what becomes of the old world? What lessons do we learn from Hollywood and its children, if any?
(-)I don’t think narrative cinema is dead – it just feels like it’s hit a brick wall.
“Any change in form produces a fear of change, and that has accelerated.” Nicolas Roeg
What interests me most at this point in the history of cinema is the idea of change. What I’m trying to pinpoint (and maybe predict) is where that evolution is most fertile.
I speak, I suppose, from a perspective of making films, and dealing with studio execs and so forth, and my frustrations are palpable. As people say, “…what’s new?”. But resistance is fierce, despite the few beacons of light on the horizon. It’s easier to write the words “creatively sterile studio exec” than to sit across a table from one and smell their breath.
I had an encounter with Alvin Lucier a few years back, and I became fascinated by his work. He’s a composer: he’s written a lot of different kinds of work, but here I’m referring to the following pieces:
Solar Sounder I (1979) – a sound installation powered and controlled by sunlight.
Clocker (1978) – for performer with galvanic skin response sensor, audio digital delay system, amplified clock and small loudspeakers.
Music for Solo Performer (1965) – for enormously amplified brain waves and percussion.
The last two of these pieces involve direct interaction of the human body with technology to create a sensory experience. The last is astounding, and involves a “performer” with electrodes attached to the temples meditating until their brain reaches a wave state close to Delta, at which point a series of feedback triggers are activated, and we can hear the music of pure thought. To witness this is to question on every level where technology will lead us in the next 20-50 years. Given massive advances in micro-computer sciences (and interactivity is one of the hallmarks of this), it feels as though a new world beckons, one where we can no longer sit back in Lacan’s mirror and experience idealized psychological projections (aka hero identification), but have to involve ourselves directly with a medium in order to create an experience, a feedback loop.
Which brings me to another point: the collective experience of the cinema. As it often said, DVD release allows individuals to watch in the comfort of a private space, and even goes so far as to include the tiny world of the I-pod and its kin. What is maybe lost in this is a common audience sharing a film, which was one of its great strengths, and one of the primary reasons film became the huge cultural phenomenon it is (all those people in a darkened room, caught in the momentum of spectacle) – not unlike theater in this respect. The emotive power of a crowd reacting to a screen is different to the home alone viewer. Different, not better.
But it changes things. It changes the way in which we have to create for the medium: spectacle becomes perhaps diminished in importance in a world of personal space. It asks a question of filmmaking, and maybe calls for an approach that is more intimate, with less thrust, drama and grind. I don’t have an absolute answer: but it’s something that I think about a lot.
Meanwhile, looking at the new mediums of audio-visual broadcast…
The I-pod itself is interesting: a new medium, no? Creating work for the tiny screen: a separate visual art form needs to be born, where traditional cinematic concerns and approaches do not apply. Close-ups and medium shots dictate. And in this change of visual language, will there not become a need for a different approach to storytelling? The I-pod isn’t going away. In fact, the tiny screen grows minute to minute in popularity.
On the other hand: in a world where a corporation can buy the rights to almost anything and distill it to nothing in nanoseconds, what becomes of stylistic innovation? We find Picasso’s blue phase paintings decorating a chocolate box, and Stravinsky (or whoever, just name a musician you respect) selling cars. Nothing has any value. Everything is equally for sale.
Storytelling as a linear form (the classical Hollywood model) is getting tired. The world is a wash of media and noise and melting time zones. I don’t feel as if my life is particularly linear. Of course this is again just a personal perspective: I don’t claim to speak for anyone else, but I sense we are living in a decade of suspended ideas, a circularity of meanings. Other people say they concur, and although I can’t be sure, I suspect I am not alone in this. Hence my point about the Tower of Babel.
So, will the form of narrative change to meet this very ancient/new experience of time? because it is just a form, and ironically it was the Greeks and later the Romans who invented/cemented that form. The line as ideology: “story goes from A to B to Z. Such and such happens. Time is a straight line.” Not so: if you look into Aboriginal folktales, or early Celtic stories, or any other culture that existed before Greek culture achieved dominance through war, you find no such sense of the linear: in fact, everything is described and unfolds as either a spiral or a circle.
Time is not a straight line. Time isn’t a line at all. I can write some physics here to back this up, but it feels out of place. Maybe later: I’m happy to argue this point.
There have already been serious movements against this linear storytelling, and you find them where you might expect to, in novels. James Joyce. Virginia Woolf. William S Burroughs, to name but a few (there are many, many). Where is the ‘Finnegans Wake’ of film? Of course it’s all over art house cinema and surrealism. Recently, mainstream films like “Memento”, “Irreversible”, “21 Grams” and almost anything by Lynch take the idea that a non-linear approach is mass-accessible to a new level, and prove that human consciousness doesn’t necessarily perceive in a straight line/causality and nor will it be a box office suicide. Each of these films demanded a different kind of attention from the audience, and the audience by and large responded with an open mind. Decades after her own work first surfaced (and was almost immediately labelled, boxed and marginalized), the influence of Maya Deren is now resonating through the mind of DL. Bela Tarr’s “Werckmeister Harmóniák” stands out as a serious attempt to disrupt the cinematic status quo, as do many things in the approach of Lars Von Trier. “2046” (Wong Kar-wai) plays with a similar idea of time, but in a different way: the idea of narrative as incomplete, and as Efe wrote somewhere on this forum, asks you to finish the film in your own life.
Your approach of the question is the most clear I have ever read.
The Brick Wall ; maybe we’ll need to destroy everything we’ve learned since the very beginning of Filmmaking and Cinema in order to progress and pass through that wall. Reconstructing and deconstructing what have been teached. Rediscover the purposes and efficacity of esthetics and story-telling.
I remember a quote from Ingmar Bergman, saying that he felt very bad about the fact the he was playing with the human’s eye imperfection. We cannot separate the flying pictures passing at a certain speed, we create the movement with our own eyes. It’s the art of illusion.
Maybe we need to go back to the roots in order to rewrite the principles of filmmaking.
Audience expectation is a major factor in understanding where we are heading with cinema. Society is evolving at breakneck speed, and in its blind charge towards the horizon it makes obsolete many forms and ideas previously held to be sacred in art. The question is: how has the audience changed and what do they expect from film (the experience, the visceral experience)— and why? The history of film is intimately bound up with the history of social change: and the history of social change in the last 100 years has in turn been deeply affected (in many countries anyway) by the work of filmmakers, in all forms and genres. Chickens and eggs.
What worlds will come, when 35mm has shuffled off this mortal coil?
/Tobias
“Maybe we need to go back to the roots in order to rewrite the principles of filmmaking”
Yes, which is why I am hellbent on using improvisation as a method: because it can take you out of patterns. Inch by motherfucking inch, as Oliver Stone once said, we must take it back. Spontaneous filmmaking. Blind cinema, hurtling down a rickety staircase in the dark of an old house. A cinema of acute subjective realities.
I said this somewhere else, but I’ll repeat it here for the sake of clarifying my position.
I make films, but I make them raw, sandpaper on an open wound. I prefer working the actors hard and then finding the shot that works best with their performance to talking bullshit about theory and spending hours on a storyboard, planning it all out. In this way I seek to avoid copying the shots and work of others. In fact, it’s the only way I can see to do that —to be yourself, original, you cannot focus on what has been —my own vision is what I see in the given moment. Although I still write, and will most probably always produce screenplays (because I still believe in the power of words, especially spoken word, uterrance, primal human noise), I am moving towards an improvised school that does not yet exist in film-making —ultimately seeking the freedom of an Alice Coltrane or an Ornette Coleman, existing in the moment with the camera and the narrative —being absolutely present, capturing what is, as it is. I seek realism, pure realism, because that’s the most unreal space for me —as Burroughs once said: ‘the moment when everyone can see what is quivering on the end of their forks’. This is not the realism of European socialism, or documentary. I’m looking for the actual experience of existence, human existence —which frequencies get filtered through the eye, how sound and image jar against each other, and memory, dying as it is born, burning itself into the grey spaces of consciousness.
« How have they changed, what does the new audience expect from film (experience, the visceral experience), and why? The history of film is intimately bound up with the history of social change: and the history of social change in the last 100 years has in turn been deeply affected (in many countries anyway) by the work of filmmakers, in all forms and genres »
What is the new audience ? Are we talking about the hungry and brainless audience that is expecting the next Michael Bay film? (* funny exemple, because nobody expects the next Michael Bay film… )
So, considering the high accessibility in this decade of high-tech entertaining… is the NEW AUDIENCE TAKING A ROLE IN THE EVOLUTION OF CINEMA? We should define that new audience, because what are people expecting ? What are the problematics that inspires the young filmmaking around the world ? We haven’t seen much social changes this decades, in comparaison to the last 90 years (it’s a large scale, I’m aware). Individualitsm seems to take an important place in our society.
Is there a lack of inspiration ? Should we turn our back to…. ourselves, into a miroir, making films about, us.
just to correct a few thoughts, since it seems like there’s some serious dialogue going on here which needs straight talk to support it.
bresson, fassbinder, and leone arent so much classical directors (in the sense of belonging to the classical period).
neorealism isn’t so much modernist (it belongs to the classical period).
i’m not sure that “sovietic” is a word.
Broad strokes, that’s how we cut the head off this animal. We are not discussing the past. We are breaking the glass wall that suffocates our future.
thats cool. i’m with you. just dont cut the head off logic, and the true versus the false.
The discussion isn’t much about the directors that were originaly in the first post, so I just decided to remove them, since it’s seems pretty subjective to classify some directors, especially when we talk about artistic work here.
We are discussing about NOW and the FUTURE…
( You’ll have to forgive me, I’m originaly french-speaking, so I may translate some words that doesn’t exists in english! Sorry for the mistakes)
Let’s focus on the question.
Sovietic — yes, not a word. It’s a typo, most probably.
Exactly.
Colin, you and I should talk about 05:00. You can use the chat application on the site. I’m around most of tomorrow online, as I’ll be finishing some stuff onsite. There’s things I need to explain to you. I keep meaning to write to you, mais mon francais c’est pire, et je veux expliquer mes idees plus exactement…
The future of cinema will be like its past: a mix of forms unified only under the broadest of categories. Under the world’s omnipresence of screens, cinema is hard to separate from visuality itself. Moving pictures will exist in many modes, and none of those are likely to be a dominant one.
Yet despite competition from video games (neurological feedback-based versions of which are surely in our future), and despite Hollywood’s creative dead-ends, it seems to me quite certain that there will be enduring demand for controlled visual narratives, both in episodic and self-contained (feature) forms.
Last night I attended a double feature of Casablanca and Citizen Kane in Los Angeles. Two films anyone can easily watch online or on DVD, and yet around 200 people, most of them young, were willing to shell out ten dollars to see it on the big screen. And they drank up every scene.
There is a lesson here that should offer comfort to anyone concerned with story in cinema: a library of good films many decades old will still generate revenue: Casablancas and Citizen Kanes will still hold any audience rapt through their entire runtimes. How much money will Grand Theft Auto 4, or Resident Evil 5 be generating in 30 years, or even in 5 years? In interactive media, the appeal is far more technologically dependent than the appeal of feature films. Video games not even ten years old seem painfully dated to us now, and not worth playing, let alone purchasing. This is because interactive media offer sensation, but they fundamentally do not satisfy the demand for narrative.
The strength of cinema was always story, and that will continue. Over a long enough timeframe, all good films (good meaning narratively strong) will make money. Eleven years later, a DVD of Boogie Nights can still be bought in any Walmart or Target in the country because its narrative strength assures that it will remain in demand. How likely is it that you’ll see copies of “300” or “Punisher: War Zone” in stores ten years from now?
Independent filmmaking certainly has a future: it is merely afflicted at present by mediocre talents who are deficient in narrative sense and seem unable to walk a rigorous line between the twin pits on either side of good filmmaking: on one side, the comforts of conventionality and lazy assumptions about the audience’s emotional involvement; and on the other, breezy arbitrariness and whimsy which tries to pass itself off as originality and daring, but is in fact only the failure to establish a frame of meaning.
Colin mentioned the “need to destroy everything we’ve learned since the very beginning of Filmmaking and Cinema in order to progress and pass through that wall. Reconstructing and deconstructing what have been teached” and i couldn’t agree more.
I feel like there’s such a global movement that technologically advanced itself to, to the point where the metaphorical cart has been placed in front of the horse. Narrative filmmaking from yesterday is near impossible to replicate today; the golden era of cinema from the late 20’s to the mid 50’s showed the world something it had never seen before, juxtaposed with directors and actors that shared a vision and a sense of style that came as a total mind-fuck to american, french, german, and virtually every bit of international cinema. everything people could ever imagine played out on screen and i’m sure the boundaries at that time seemed limitless.
Tobias: i know contemporary narrative filmmakers are getting the papercuts you mentioned. the exploitation of contemporary cinema has become something of the textbooks; how often can you analyze the mise en scene of today’s films? without a raw style, cinema will go sterile; without analog, film will get shuffled in with the discard pile of what used to make cinema a fucking work of art, replaced by digital dreariness and false acclaim.
Cinema will eventually split in two; the status of Hollywood will eventually be to cinephiles and thinkers alike as a cultural wasteland; a representation of something glamourous and beguiling that got sucked into the wrong 5-step-marketing-pyramid-scheme and came out looking like monica bellucci after the rape scene in irreversible. colin: i was going to add michael bay to this analogy, but you already beat me to him… The majority of what it is that we (meaning the people who come to some agreement over the loss of true narrative in recent times) stand for will most likely become a small faction of cinema. I can’t see it ever completely becoming a lost art, simply due to the need for something real above all else. I think 05:00 is a perfect example of what we can still do to keep this real narrative alive. If you watch the collective of films that Tobias has organized for the 05:00 project so far, you can blatantly see that none of it is scripted or planned; but simply organized into pieces of a story that represent who we are as people.
Going back to my aforementioned reference to colin’s theoretical ‘tearing down’ of this brick wall narrative filmmaking has come to: you can’t script it; you can’t prepare it, or practice it— real narrative comes from real emotions and raw filming of the way that life unravels itself. But we’ve come to a point where the general population of people aren’t as interested in seeing it as they are to rubbernecking for drama, and blood, and terror, and tragedy. People are looking for tragedy, but they just don’t know where to find it. and that’s where projects like 05:00 step in and deliver.
i vote that we should make sovietic a word. and we should put it in a film about two brothers that were separated at birth and live paralleled lives. but they never meet. their lives will just run along the same tracks; the same wavelengths; the same subtleties occur at the same times; the coincidences that people dismiss as… coincidences. sovietic.
“I know contemporary narrative filmmakers are getting the papercuts you mentioned. the exploitation of contemporary cinema has become something of the textbooks; how often can you analyze the mise en scene of today’s films? without a raw style, cinema will go sterile; without analog, film will get shuffled in with the discard pile of what used to make cinema a fucking work of art, replaced by digital dreariness and false acclaim.”
Papercuts and budget sheets. I hate the film industry (Hollywood). They talk in units, and suck most of it up their right nostril. Excellent points.
“Cinema will eventually split in two; the status of Hollywood will eventually be to cinephiles and thinkers alike as a cultural wasteland; a representation of something glamourous and beguiling that got sucked into the wrong 5-step-marketing-pyramid-scheme and came out looking like monica bellucci after the rape scene in irreversible.”
That’s just an awesome comment. Brilliant.
“I think 05:00 is a perfect example of what we can still do to keep this real narrative alive. If you watch the collective of films that Tobias has organized for the 05:00 project so far, you can blatantly see that none of it is scripted or planned; but simply organized into pieces of a story that represent who we are as people.”
Thank you. That’s the idea exactly. Although, it’s going to get much deeper at later stages, and I have hopes that it might contribute to a model for a new direction in web filmmaking. Like I say, it’s really all about what you actually filmed when you thought you were looking at something else. The details. The dialectic between tiny nuances.
“…real narrative comes from real emotions and raw filming of the way that life unravels itself. But we’ve come to a point where the general population of people aren’t as interested in seeing it as they are to rubbernecking for drama, and blood, and terror, and tragedy.”
Torture porn is dead. Please let it be dead. Or at least, let the horror of modern life speak for itself. There’s more terror in a film like “Death in Gaza” than anything produced in Hollywood in the past ten years.
“I vote that we should make sovietic a word.”
Consider it done. It’s an Auteurs first. I propose a definition of this new word as meaning (adjective) -" of juxtaposed, disconnected but parallel reality." As a concept it encompasses all ideas of coincidence, synchronicity and parallel existence, and implies that the world in which we live is forged from polarities which can never touch, but without which there is no balance, no equilibrium.
thanks, t. let’s start the second, and sovietic golden age of cinema.
Long live the new Sovietics !
“…on one side, the comforts of conventionality and lazy assumptions about the audience’s emotional involvement; and on the other, breezy arbitrariness and whimsy which tries to pass itself off as originality and daring, but is in fact only the failure to establish a frame of meaning.”
Orpheus makes a key point. but again, you see we are now in the realms of form and tradition— and audience expectation.
what is it, this thing we call film? is it an artform? an entertainment spectacle? a creative process? the action of light on silver nitrate? the pixel mixing of digital studios? many things. but what will it be in 30 years?
i’m looking forward to hearing more about the poetics of sovietics! i’m interested in how it relates to montage.
I’m interested in how it relates to 05:00.
…first thoughts: montage of course is one of the keys to an understanding of sovietics.
leaping out of Eisenstein’s “tertium quid” (we seek a fourth and then ultimately fifth meaning, so a dialectic model is inadequate for our purposes) and rapidly accelerating past Vertov’s litany of techniques (which only go so far as the creation of third meanings)— but keeping his idea of meta-film— the first serious point of debate in the new sovietic cinema is a re-examining of Kuleshov – because his “effect” directly relates to the creation of emotive reaction in an audience by the subtle movement of cuts— and it is the emotive content/context that first concerns us, especially considering that at this point we are creating using random footage.
With 05:00 the ultimate goal is to create a decateron effect, a prism of possible meanings by juxtaposition and intercutting between nuances. Sovietics can be a fundamental science in this.
Maybe.
Or maybe not.
Let’s get back to roots.
All 05:00 filmmakers are called to this table, and any other interested parties.
I agree with Orpheus. In my lifetime people have continued to tell one another stories in pretty much the same way they’ve been doing so for millennia. Sometimes they’ll tell them in a non-linear way; they jump in at a too advanced point in the story then go back to explain prior events. Sometimes they go forwards too fast then retreat to fill in missing and essential detail. Mostly, they deliver their stories in a linear way. They begin somewhere, then this happened and this is how things ended. While that oral story-telling tradition continues – I don’t see it waning any time soon – the paradigm will be reflected in the way that the majority of cinematic narratives – both mainstream and non-mainstream – are structured.
Many of the films I love are linear. But just as I would be mortified if I arrived at the greengrocers and found apples the only fruit on display, so too would I feel a great loss if all but linear narratives suddenly disappeared. And I think that’s very much the point here. Choice. Speaking for myself, I like as wide-ranging a variety of “quality” as possible. I like to dip into Last Year in Marienbad one day and look at how Resnais is referencing Bergson. The next, I like to watch an experimental short by Brakhage or Baillie and appreciate colour combinations or textures or consider the way the film evokes a particular emotion in me and maintains it. The next, I like to look at how mainstream filmmakers are exploring non-linear structures like the hyperlink narratives of Babel, 21 Grams et al. Television dramas are becoming increasingly comfortable with non-linear structures (we shouldn’t neglect the interplay between television and film; it’s there even if we would sometimes like to disavow it). Audiences are steeped in both. What’s lovely is that “linear” isn’t the only way. What’s also lovely is that non-linear and experimental and non-mainstream aren’t the only ways.
I teach film theory and filmmaking to 16-19 year olds. And you know what? They’re exactly the same. They want to watch a British art house movie like This is England one night. They want to watch a variety of online shorts on BBCs Film Network the next. Another night they’ll go to the cinema and watch the latest Bond film. Their tastes are eclectic. They’ll come back from the Bond film and slate the elements they didn’t like. They’re very articulate when it comes to explaining where they feel they’ve been cheated in terms of poor character development or stolid plot. Another night they’ll watch a Russian blockbuster they’ve downloaded and managed to find the right subtitles for. And yes, they’ll also cruise the morass of kitch that comprises the bulk of Youtube. Youtube has it’s good points. Where film courses do not deal with an Abdykalykov or a Pelechian, independent filmmakers and cinephiles hungry for new inspiration can find excerpts of their works on the much blighted Youtube. Okay, the image quality sucks. But sometimes it’s just an idea or a change in the way we look at things that they’re after.
In response to the point about movements. Have they really given us as much as is claimed? The French New Wave is (deep breath) one of the most over-rated movements in the arts. The true visionaries either went against the grain of contextual movements (Eisenstein) or were simply working aside from a movement (Bresson, Tarkovsky, Bergman, Haneke, Costa etc.). Movements and visionaries do sometimes coincide – von Trier is a good example. Although I think von Trier would have been von Trier without Dogme 95.
Film hasn’t exhausted its form. Far from it. Film is an evolving medium. It worked out very quickly how it could successfully borrow from the narrative and stylistic elements already tried and tested by literature; it then went on to explore itself as a wholly different art form, one which has more in common with the plastic arts. It also explored itself as a time-based art form quite different from all the other arts. Considering it’s barely more than a century old, it’s doing fairly well I think. I yawn when I hear pseudo-intellectuals deploring the lack of progress in the medium and heralding its current demise. I can only assume they aren’t finding the films that are out there. I see new innovative and thought-provoking films all the time. In terms of distribution, the last decade has seen a much wider range of international titles become available. When I was younger it just wasn’t as easy to watch a social realist text by Hsiao-Hsien one night and enjoy the aesthetic paradoxes of Tony Takitani the next.
Another revolution is upon us. If you are a filmmaker, as I am, then Jim Jannard’s crusade to bring RED to the masses (well the masses of independent filmmakers not fortunate enough to have big production money behind them) is exciting. Bringing film technology that is capable of achieving the quality you need down to a price that is affordable is incredibly exciting. And yes, it will lead to an even greater number of cine-illiterates mass producing and uploading more kitsch. But it will also lead to more serious independent filmmakers who until now haven’t been able to practice their craft regularly enough because of the cost, being able to develop and hone their skills with more continuity. It will additionally lead to more very low budget, small crew productions which might try to find their way straight from the edit suite to the viewer. We’re at the dawn of an era where low budget does not have to equal low image quality. I’m glad I’ve lived to see that reality.
Thus we come to audience. I don’t know anyone who is exclusively satisfied with watching visual material on a screen two by three inches in size. Perhaps we will gradually move away from the extraordinary pleasure and experience that is the black box (the traditional cinema). But I think it will be towards bigger screens in our own domestic environments. We will simply re-create the big screen cinematic experience (on an albeit slightly smaller scale) in our living room and bedroom. Digital projection now means that a two metre wide image on a hang down screen in the living room isn’t out of the question financially. And when bandwidth and transfer rates allow films to be piped to us at the same quality as our music and with comparable download times it’s distribution companies that I fear for. We could be on the cusp of a filmmaker direct to viewer era. There will be a teething period, sure. In music, Radiohead and friends have kindly tested the waters for us. But when people realise that film art has to be paid for just like any other art, or you just get rubbish, they’ll pay. Pandora and Last.fm are good guides. I’ve bought more music since starting to listen to artists on those two sites than I ever did before. I think my tendencies as far as I’ve been able to find out are pretty much the norm. I try a load of stuff for free (either via Last.fm or by downloading mp3s from trusted blog DJs) – I listen to it all for a while, then discard a lot of it, then listen some more. It comes down to a handful of tracks that really move or inspire me. That handful I purchase via the NET. Those and only those artists benefit. The ones who gave me something special. I think that’s cute. If we’re moving away from remunerating en masse to remunerating more particularly it might be a huge shift in market culture, but I think it’s a good thing on the whole. As production costs plummet and we get closer to the possibility of an online edit happening on a laptop I don’t see why film couldn’t go pretty much the same way. People know that an artist just like any other worker needs to subsist that’s why in the case of artists they care about, artists who have inspired them intellectually or moved them emotionally, people usually remunerate willingly.
Think of how many CDs we had to buy not so long ago without having heard every track on the album. Thank fuck that kind of exploitation is over!
We are undergoing a revolution in filmmaking. Power is shifting. It’s gradual, but it’s happening. Look at the explosion in short features since DV. Yes, there are thousands upon thousands of short films made that could all be placed in one basket labelled “puerile”. But there are also a lot of very good films made. It’s harder and harder to get a short feature into one of the really prestigious festivals such as Clermont-F, Encounters or Berlinale because the quota of high quality product is growing. Go back twenty years and there were a lot of tired old narratives being shot for much bigger budgets on celluloid. I call that progression.
There will always be dross and there will always be quality. Just as we will always have MacDonalds and haute cuisine. There will be intelligent and non-intelligent mainstream and there will be intelligent and non-intelligent non-mainstream, just as there are up-market and down-market supermarkets and good and bad home cooking. Human beings like choice is what they like. Those that have tasted quality never forget that taste. They may surfeit on sugar for a while because they’re a bit wearied by life, but as soon as they’ve got their energy levels up they’re back on the good stuff.
“If you are a filmmaker, as I am, then Jim Jannard’s crusade to bring RED to the masses (well the masses of independent filmmakers not fortunate enough to have big production money behind them) is exciting. Bringing film technology that is capable of achieving the quality you need down to a price that is affordable is incredibly exciting. And yes, it will lead to an even greater number of cine-illiterates mass producing and uploading more kitsch. But it will also lead to more serious independent filmmakers who until now haven’t been able to practice their craft regularly enough because of the cost, being able to develop and hone their skills with more continuity. It will additionally lead to more very low budget, small crew productions which might try to find their way straight from the edit suite to the viewer. We’re at the dawn of an era where low budget does not have to equal low image quality. I’m glad I’ve lived to see that reality.”
YES. The RED is a massive revolution. And I agree completely, it’s actually been one of the most amazing things to have witnessed in my lifetime. Using one has been near transcendent, almost spiritual, for me. But it’s not the entirely democratic camera for the masses just yet —still the price of a film school education last time I looked at their website. The SCARLET apparently isn’t half bad either (and a fraction of the cost) but I haven’t tried one out yet.
So you are saying: calm thyself, there will always be dross, and such is the way of the world, basically?
My problem is I’m politically opposed to certain models of economics upon which your appeal to calm is based. And also I believe the West is too complacent, and political upheaval/rapid evolution is inevitable. And that will change art.
Which models of economics would they be?
Wow, this took a real sit down to get through. You all did a lot better at keeping me alert than my college professors. I can tell you that.
The deconstruction of film down to the basics isn’t some kind of enormous trial we’re hurtling towards. I don’t know why that’s being brought up like that. Like if it’s this massive castle that hasn’t been bombarded. I deconstruct film every day. It’s the only way to learn anything. Try building a radio without having taken one apart first.
I raise my fist in protest against many mainstream American films (Big budget and Independent) all the time yet I agree with Carl Cross that there’s nothing wrong with the way contemporary cinema is when it’s in being made by the right contemporary filmmakers. Doomsayer comments about how stale movies are sound like nothing more than cute throwbacks to the ‘Cahiers’ boys and their contempt for the ‘cinema of their fathers’. In retrospect, their ‘fathers’ were brilliant.
There is no right or wrong path that filmmakers are walking down. Yes boys, we have choices. Linear or not, raw or not, all that translates to is a stylistic choice. Our choice as the new generation of filmmakers is to do things the way they’re being done, or to whip up something new that evolves our tastes and understandings, or more importantly to do things the way we want to do it!
Toby’s right when he said people (or specifically aspiring artists) for the most part are complacent. They have all this technology and they’re using it to do the same old stale shit. It’s a bummer but what can you do? When Picasso was doing his thing not everyone was cubist. Again, these are stylistic choices. There was a lot of good work done outside of the movements. The current movement if anything is to push the status quo. Let’s work outside of it for now.
The Revolution I’m rooting for is one of comprehension. It has nothing to do with evolving cinema to a new bold language of fancy jargon and magician’s lingo. To be frank, I think theoretic obsessions over visual use is for critics and not artists (even though I Love the combination of the two). It has to with a comprehension of new technology and all that film history and theory has repeatedly taught us and then using that knowledge in new exciting ways outside of a ‘collective school of thought’. It’s not the 50’s. We don’t have to kill our brains thinking about what’s wrong and why we have to change it. Bluntly, all that gobbledygook has been thought out for us.
Formalist revolutions aren’t going to do shit to society if that’s what we’re aiming for as new artists. We can make a movie where the characters are giant beings of pulsating light playing on split screen with all the ‘hooray for my brilliance’ symbolism we want and it won’t do a damn thing. Only revolutionary social ideas can do that. Jump cuts didn’t shift the culture or drive girls and boys wild in Truffaut’s day. It was new ideas about sexuality and economy and humanity that challenged social norms. Something I’m all about. Now that’s exciting.
The Revolution is in a comprehension of this! What kind of paint or format you use to make a movie isn’t art unless you think it’s purely about aesthetics. What’s that about? The idea behind projects like TA and 0500 is more along the lines of what I think is truly revolutionary because it’s not about form, it’s about how to get our message to people. Now that’s something that isn’t stale.
The industry is going insane trying to figure out what to do with this new technology. To capitalize and subsidize it and bog it down of course. Let’s strike before they do if we can. We can figure out a revolutionary way to get art to people around the world and through these efforts mobilize them to create art themselves. Then we can worry about style as it suits us. Then we can start shifting the culture through ideas that matter.
It’s this easy: look at what you don’t like and do it differently. “The best way to critique a film is to make one yourself.” Godard said something in that respect right?
I haven’t the time to read all of these posts, i will eventually,
but i’ve got a grinding headcold & typing is easier than reading…
.
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the Future
From the little bit i’ve culled from this thread, i ask myself the following:
How do we increase interactivity?
What has been left undone?
Are there boundaries?
I have long desired a sort of 5-senses cinema. Complete immersion. Sight & sound, check. What I want is smell-o-vision, taste-o-vision, & touch-o-vision. These are not some hokey blue-red 3D glasses gimmick. These are respectable forms of escapist delight. And i think in the future we will have full-frontal-lobe cinematic experiences.
Imagine a theatre (or even a home entertainment system) playing a film & everytime the female character lolls into the screen we are delighted with a scent of roses, or even female pheromones, more aptly. During a scene at Thanksgiving dinner we are asked by our compuTV if we would like a slice of pumpkin pie. If palettes of fabric were printed out so that we could feel the suit or dresses or softskin of the main characters. This maybe be thinking too functionally. Perhaps a fullbody virtual reality suit could administer all these aspects & more.
For me, what i’ve always wanted to experiment with, narrative-wise, is both first-person & second-person perspectives. I want to make films that put the audience (member) inside the film, quite literally, as a character interacting with these actors. There have been a couple attempts at first-person narrative (i found a filmnoir at the library where the audience is the detective). But I can assure you the type of situations I would put a moviegoer in are far beyond what any other first-person narrative has dare tried. I think imitators would flock in rapid succession & first-person films would become a major trend in Hollywood pictures. Imagine what this could do to the star system!
This leads me to an idea I became obsessed with back in 2004 when I worked at Borders bookstore. I was shelving in the kids section, a whole row of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books stacked before me, & I became overwhelmed with the possibilities of an audience-controlled film. Of course this would be easy to do on DVD, but imagine an audience taking part in a democratic process of where they want the film to go, with 4 or 5 possible outcomes. The first experiment alone, in this democratic-genre, could create a cultfilm to defy all cultfilms, because people would continually rewatch it to see the other possible outcomes. Imagine groups of well-organized nerds renting out the theatre for a showing so that they can collectively see the versions they haven’t voted on yet.
To let you all know I’m not completely off my rocker,
I’m quite sure all of this sounds highly improbable.
Financially & technologically.
Though I firmly believe…
There are no boundaries.
Impossible is illusion.
Let’s invent a new color.
Colin Ludvic Racicot
We’ve seen «les frères Lumières» with there invention, a form of documentary filmmaking that amazed and impressed the world of art and representation. Then Méliès came out of nowhere and introduced a different approach of Cinema : fiction, mise en scène, stylistic representation. (Voyage dans la Lune). He developed marginal and unique techniques to enhance the Visual Illusion.
Considering all the progressive and innovating waves/tendancies of Cinema since it’s beginning… (Originaly I’ve spoke of waves and tendancies such as Classical Cinema (sub-categories such as Impressionism, Expressionism), Sovietic (Eisenstein, Verthov) New Wave, Interiorisation, Post-Modernism, Manierism)
WHERE ARE WE NOW ?
Knowing that the medium of Filmmaking is reaching a possible limit in his form, that auteurs and geniuses around the world developed new ways of telling stories – either on a poetic approach and and realistic approaches; being aware that technology is in a constant evolution, a constant and exponential progression, in a world where technology itself is taking over the spirituality, what are the new boundaries of Filmmaking and Cinema, are there boundaries at all?
I know one thing, we’re on a cyber-community that offers great vision of Cinema, we’ve seen it with Tobias and Garage. I just want to diversify the Forum, which actually doesn’t offer many argumentative topics concerning Cinema itself.