the chutry experiment

Chuck,

Some various thoughts:

First, I think the jury is still very much out on how digitization will change movies, the cinema, the art of cinema, and so on. There have not been many "major" films (i.e. big studio picutres) that have used the technology (Star Wars is one; the recent and much-maligned UltraViolet is another; both are cartoonish in many ways). When digitization does occur, it's very difficult to say at this point how future directors will respond to it. Cheshire might be right that many movies will be more "televisual," but if the movies proceed like they have, and like other art forms have, there may very well be directors who will either find a way to maintain the filmic sensibilities of the cinema or, perhaps, create an entirly new visual vocabulary that is way beyond the "televisual." I suspect the latter is likely to happen.

Also, I don't think that Crash and Syriana, as "televisual" as they might be, necessarily evince an erosion of cinematic values -- in the sense that, like you, I question the use of the term "successful" and also because I, too, think the idea of "televisual" needs to be unpacked more. Plus, it'd be interesting to see many of the other ways in which television and film have influenced each other; there's a whole genre of action movies, and a handful of prominent directors, whose styles have been deeply influenced by television (for good or for bad), and this has happened well before Crash and Syriana came along. I do think that television shortens attention spans, but how that translates to the cinema is a very large, very complex question.

But here's something else: the rise of DVD (which Cheshire discusses) has done wonders for cinema, and for cinephiles. Were Sontag still alive, she'd say that the difference between the theater and DVD isn't really about how a film looks; it's deeper -- it's the fundamental artistic and emotional experiences of a film that change. In other words, the various shifts that we're all looking at here might not just be technological. They might be phenomenological.

I think that my first question is whether directors of digital cinema should privilege "filmic" over "televisual" sensibilities. Perhaps I'm placing too much emphasis on the modernist impulse towards "purity" that seemed implicit, especially in Kipp's comments.

The concept of "televisuality" bothered me, too, for the reasons yu describe, even though I didn't unpack that comment as much as I would like. In fact, in some ways, I felt that Syriana, with its deft use of cross-cutting culminated in some classic montage sequences, especially during the final assassination sequence (I wish I'd written more about this when I reviewed the film, because I don't remember the details as well as I ought to).

I wanted to work in a discussion of Cheshire's discussion of the DVD, with which I generally agree, but was rushing off to teach when I wrote that entry (that'll teach me to blog between classes). And, yes, I think you're right to suggest that these changes are phenomenological. Nick Rombes' writing on the "vanishing screen" is a good example of that kind of reflection (although I think it's important to ask in more detail when and for whom the screen is shrinking).

Chuck, the question of whether directors should privilege "filmic" over "televisual" sensibilities if a very good question -- and I'm not sure what the answer(s) might be (and there are so many things to consider for such a question).

Overall, I think the advent of DVD has been a wonderful thing; without it, my experience of the cinema would be woefully incomplete -- well, it still is, but DVDs help :-) But I think the implications of the DVD for the cinema are extensive and interesting (particlarly the phenomenological ones). I'm not familiar with Rombes' writing -- does his work on the "vanishing screen" appear in articles or in book?

He's written about it in his blog, Digital Poetics. He has several entries in November that deal with this topic, particularly with regards to the video iPod.

First, this Blog software seems to want not to preserve my formatting. Let's hope this is just my browser.

I would like to make two points, first regarding a decade of predictions as to how digital technology would film industry and the second regarding 'televisualism.'


My first year in film school I remember hearing over and over about how much of what we were learning would be irrelevant by the time we graduated because the entire world of film making was going to change. The Kino Eye was going cyborg and every aspect of the industry was going to be revolutionized.


That simply didn't happen.


Most of the major changes wrought by digital technology have been industrial in nature, of little consequence to the film viewer. The possibilities of film making widened but have really gotten about as wide as they're going to get. Terminator 2 made everyone gawk with fantastic use of digital effects, as did Matrix, in its own time and then finally Sin City brought the digital aspect of film making to a summit, a film that is as much animated as shot and that would have been functionally impossible without computer technology. All of this is only barely relevant to the actual art of film making. The questions a narrative film maker must ask remain unchanged. He or she must tell an actualized story, must coach their actors, must frame shots, construct lens plots and create an audio/visual experience through the same acts of imagination as before the advent of digital film making. Put more succinctly, the craft of film making has changed but the art has expanded only slightly. I liken this to a new kind of paint being invented, it may alter the way that painters go about applying color to canvas but not the essential art itself.


Also, many of the predicted changes have been slow to take root for two reasons, first, film making has been a massive industry for nearly a century and any industrial change must take time. Digital equipment has become so pervasive and so varied so quickly that there, as yet, has been no real impetus for the industry to change over. This may change in a few years with some standardization, as has already been mentioned. The flip side of this is that, while digitization has been revolutionizing many aspects of post production, actual shooting remains largely unchanged. First, the foretold drop in equipment prices never happened, or rather happened in step with a drop in the price of all such equipment. The kind of >HD cameras needed to producer a studio quality motion picture are not functionally cheaper than their celluloid counterparts. Second, the skill set needed to operate such a camera is rare, and thus incurs greater labor costs making digital production more expensive, or (depending on the design of the camera) virtually identical to the skillset for a Arriflex or Panivision camera that would be easier to acquire anyway.


Digital production has, and is still, revolutionizing independent film making but that's a discussion for another time.


Addressing my other point. I find the argument that Crash and Syriana are "televisual" a bit weak. Moreover,to posit that they cater to the short attention span is a bit short sighted. While swaths of both are shot in a verite style with constant camera motion that keeps visual attention, this is not a televisual style but rather a cinematic style dating back to European cinema in the sixties, which in turn influenced and reciprocally influenced by thirty years of documentary film making, Titticutt Follies comes to mind.


Additionally, while both films seem a bit MTV-ish, visually, (Videoistic is the term Dr. Smith Shomade once used) they both have a number of traits that are decidedly un-televisual and that do not cater to the lazy viewer. Both films are hard to follow with plots and character motivations that are not self evident. Much of the editing in both films is designed to interrupt story flow. Additionally, especially in Syriana while the visual style is deliberately rough, the pacing is almost constipated, the camera lingering much longer than in a conventional American film, unnecessary shots added to draw out time while keeping the pace of editing. Long sequences pass without meaningful audio stimulation. These are not the hallmarks of 'televisualism.'


I had a point about purity of art and how it relates to presence as per Benjamin but I've taken up enough of your time.

Ah, many thanks. I shall check it out.

Thomas, the comments accept line breaks automatically, but your comment came across fine. I was also in grad school when "the Kino Eye was going cyborg," and in retrospect, cinema or movie making went in a very different direction. I think we're just about ready to read those comments as "historical," representing what were often techno-libertarian desires about the body, definitions of the human, and of cinema.

And, yes, I think the changes are measured primarily in special effects (your "painting" metaphor work quite well). Films such as T2, The Matrix, and Sin City are the exceptions rather than the rule when it comes to visual entertainment.

In many of the entries here, you'll not my interest in indie and documentary cinema, and that is where digital cameras and digital post-production tools have been more valuable, though I'm cautious about using words such as "revolutionizing." There is certainly a continuity with earlier experiments with video in the 1970s and '80s, and documentary filmmakers often managed to make use of cheaper equipment. Still, it's clear that digital has changed independent production and has liekley eben changed what we mean when we talk about indie.

Intersting point about how Crash and Syriana use editing to disrupt narrative flow (thus making them anything but televisual). My only beef with Crash is that the montage of ideas seemed a bit weak. I do think the film was well-intentioned, and I think race and racism are still not addressed very effectively in the public sphere. But Crash's microfocuses on the accidental "crashes" between people of different ethnic groups seemed inadequate.

I liken this to a new kind of paint being invented, it may alter the way that painters go about applying color to canvas but not the essential art itself.

Maybe...

I'm reminded of an article than ran in Slate last year, Star Wars: Episodes I-VI - The greatest postmodern art film ever" by Aidan Wasley (1 November 2005), specifically:

"Amid a riotous and panoramic battle-scene on a desert planet, the film frame suddenly starts to shudder as it zooms in on a close-up of a clone-filled combat vehicle. As viewers, we recognize the jerky camera movement as that of a hand-held camera, familiar to us from news footage and war movies, and the shot gives a kinetic, you-are-there edge to the chaotic scene. Until, that is, we realize that the entire scene exists only in a computer hard-drive, that there is no hand-held camera, and that Lucas is using a computer program to mimic the authentic touch of the unsteady human hand. It's a startling moment, where the film calls our attention to its own technological artifice."

The "hand-held" effect is a "realistic" effect, intended to draw us into the narrative. It mimics, say, a news cameraman documenting this battle (and thus puts us in the position of an actual observer or even a participant in the battle). But if our knowledge of the fact that this is a digital effect draws us out of the narrative, draws attention to the film's artifice, that strikes me as considerably more significant than the [relatively] trivial choice of one kind of paint over another.

Maybe I should have had one more cup of coffee before I responded to Thomas' comment because this is slightly closer to my position on digitization in film.

This sounds a lot like an argument I made (warning, the formatting of the entry is a bit wonky) in an article on Dark City for the journal, film Criticism, in which I argued that the digiatl F/X actually make us aware of the medium and the applicaton of digital to film itself.

The effects, while unrealistic to our world, are "realistic" within the sci-fi world of the film, but at the same time, the sequences--in my read at least--"draw [...] attention to the film's artifice."