|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Small Optics For Sale, Cheap:
The Current Market Value of Classical Cinematic Values
by Alejandro Adams
Toward a Definition of Classical Cinematic Values
Terminology can be criminal in its opacity. Not infrequently, it thwarts comprehension. Often concepts are assigned economical designations which diminish both their force and their clarity. Terms such as "classical values" and "small optics" warrant patient scrutiny if they are intended to have any relevance beyond the stratosphere of academia.
With concise authority, influential philosopher Gilles Deleuze defined classical cinema in terms of the relationship of image to narrative.
The so-called classical cinema works above all through linkage of images, and subordinates cuts to this linkage...rational cuts always determine commensurable relations between series of images and thereby constitute the whole rhythmic system and harmony of classical cinema... [1]
While this passage may be clear to those similarly steeped in film theory, it is hardly decipherable to a neophyte's eye. "Rational cuts," "commensurable relations," "whole rhythmic system and harmony"—such phrases reek of "classical" French sophistry.
In The Cinema Book, however, editor Pam Cook allows a definition which takes more of a liquid than gas form:
[T]he era of classical cinema may be regarded as a period in which the cinematic image remained largely subservient to the requirements of a specific type of narrative structure. [2]
An even more pragmatic delineation of the same principles can be found at http://www.realityfilm.com/resources/terms/c.html:
Classical Cinema Definition: A style of film-making that privileges clarity of narrative. Characters drive the plots, and continuity editing ensures events' seamless progression.
This is little more than a paraphrase of Deleuze's remarks. The emphasis is likewise placed on the ability of editing to determine a "rhythm" or "progression" which ensures a "clarity" of narrative.
More elaborately, but still within the same species of thought, Bordwell and Thompson, in their Film Art: an Introduction, proceed timidly beyond mere abstraction by mentioning a rule which is applied in order to achieve one element of the classical style.
[T]he classical Hollywood mode of narrative subordinates time, motivation, and other effects to the cause-effect sequence, as well as mise-en-scene, camera position and movement...On the basis of the 180-degree principle filmmakers have developed the continuity system as a way to build up a smoothly flowing space which remains subordinate to narrative action. [3]
Deleuze uses the term "subordinate," The Cinema Book uses the term "subservient," and Bordwell and Thompson the term "subordinate" again. Note the emphasis on the eerily hegemonical properties of the "narrative."
At least one agreeable film school synopsis acronymizes these principles as "CHC," or classical Hollywood cinema. [4] This designation is inappropriate simply because the implementation of these principles has never been limited to Hollywood, and only an ethnocentric critical analysis would find them to have been so.
Hence the phrase "classical cinematic values," the terminological variation which rectifies this misnomer.
The Origin of Classical Cinematic Values
While non-Hollywood masters of the form such as Ozu and Antonioni have violated the Draconian 180-degree rule, their language remains clear by classical standards, their syntagms readily decipherable. It is often the case that classical cinema is not achieved merely by the clinical observance of a few tidy rules. It seems to be inherent in the culture; it seems to be a condition of the blood. The explanation for this is not very complicated: cinema inherited its sensibilities from the forms which preceded it.
Researcher and essayist Maria Mourão traces classical cinematic values to veteran modes of narrative which would have influenced cinema despite its best efforts to resist.
At the technical level, production planning was organized to follow a method that was soon to be universally adopted: the classical decoupage, based on well-understood systems—of temporal continuity and spatial contiguity, of respect for the camera angle and on the utilization of action/reaction shot, the master shots and the cover shots. These methods for the organization of production answered the technical and practical demands that were necessary to satisfy the language and narrative models that had become conventional standards. [5]
These conventional standards provided the theoretical ballast for the technological anomaly of cinema—they provided nothing less than a centralized purpose for the new medium. Leonardo Quaresima, editor of Cinema & Cie International Film Studies Journal, concurs:
[T]he role played by the pantomime in the cinema of the early years and in particular of the twenties, in the intense phase of development which led to the hegemony of the stable narrative and communicative model, accepted on an international level... [6]
New media theorist Lev Manovich, rarely as deferential to history as to figments of the future, traces classical cinematic values more generally to "familiar cultural forms."
Users are able to "acquire" new cultural languages, be it cinema a hundred years ago or cultural interfaces today, because these languages are based on previous and already familiar cultural forms. In the case of cinema, it was theater, magic lantern shows and other 19th century forms of public entertainment. [7]
The "narrative models" and "cultural forms" referred to by Mourão, Quaresima, and Manovich had no geographical restrictions, nor, naturally, did the cinema which matured under their tutelage—so why refer to classical parameters as though Hollywood had imposed them?
Even more persuasive in this distinction is the cultural inevitability of cinema: its arrival cannot be understood merely as a matter of technological breakthroughs.
New technologies might only allow for externalizing a language which existed formerly and that throbbed not only in young Godard, in Orson Welles or even Melies, but also in modern romance, in painting, in contemporary dance, in the fantastic stories, and so on. Likewise, Alexander Kluge states that the cinema already existed in men even before the invention of the technical fixings which allowed for its externalization. [8]
Ross Harley, a new media lecturer, wedges his knowledge of early film history into the current imbroglio in order to temper his interpretation of recent events, thereby arguing that cinema is not subject to expiration, only to evolution.
If it is true to say that many of the enabling technologies, spectatorial positions, business strategies and cultural practices of cinema existed well in advance of the Lumieres' first screenings in 1896, perhaps any supposed "twilight of cinema" is better conceived as a radical transformation—and not as an end at all. [9]
If the "spectatorial positions" and "cultural practices" of cinema "existed in men before the invention of the technical fixings," then cinematic values were never exclusively "cinematic" in the first place. They belonged to a composite of expressive modes. They were cultural values. This enables us to understand the phrase "classical cinematic values" as the most effective semantic illustration of the ineradicable presence of these archetypal elements: they were the values which most pertinently suffused that cinema which has come to be known as classical.
Systematic Responses to Classical Cinematic Values
The history of cinema...is a history in which a narrative cinema—heir to the novel and to French melodrama more than to any other communicative, performing or expressive art form—has constituted the central and dominant axis. On the way, there are numerous directions, ambitious and audacious, or some simply ingenuous and reasoned, which have been thought of as different hypothesis of development, for a radical transformation of the system or as a correction of a few of its elements.
— Leonardo Quaresima [10]
The responses elicited by classical cinematic values are vehement, not tepid—they are mostly systematic and usually warrant a manifesto. Thus, it has lent itself more toward the attempted "radical transformation" than a mere "correction of a few of its elements." The classical mode has been the requisite springboard for movements, schools, styles, and types. Its standards have defined all counter-standards.
In "Play It Again Sigmund," psychologists Glen and Krin Gabbard examine the political and social agenda in Casablanca.
According to [Laura] Mulvey and the many writers who have followed in her wake, the patriarchal order of the Hollywood cinema provides two basic solutions to the fear activated in men by women's implied threat of castration: either the woman's lack is part of her punishment for some wrongdoing, usually sexual transgression, or she is fetishized so that a portion of her body (breasts, hair, face, legs, bottom, even the entire body) becomes important enough to compensate for the lack of a penis. Male viewers can then derive voyeuristic pleasure from a cinema that provides fetishized images of women to exorcise male castration anxiety. The most commonly cited example here is Busby Berkeley, who directed all those production numbers of Warner Brothers musicals in which entire armies of women are fetishized, their body parts reduced to geometric patterns. [11]
In her highly influential essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Laura Mulvey herself wrote:
It is helpful to understand what cinema has been, how its magic has worked in the past, while attempting a theory and a practice which will challenge this cinema of the past. Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form. [12]
The Gabbards neatly plug this angle into Casablanca:
The subordination of women in patriarchal cinema has even been extended to situations in which heroines are quite literally deprived of voice...Appropriately, at the end of Casablanca, Ilsa has very little to say to either Rick or Laszlo, her lying silences giving way to a continuing renunciation of voice after the crucial love scene "up a flight" in which she asks Rick to do the thinking—and speaking—for both of them. [13]
"Patriarchal cinema" is a pejorative euphemism for classical cinema. Yet even the active departures from classical cinematic values have embodied what feminist film theory warned against. Bergman, Fellini, and Antonioni among others have "fetishized" the female form.
Mulvey sketched an alternative to classical cinema which would, in the interest of de-programming, yield an unpleasant movie-going experience, one in which "satisfaction" and "pleasure" are "destroyed."
The alternative cinema provides a space for a cinema to be born which is radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic assumptions of the mainstream film...[T]he alternative cinema must start specifically by reacting against these obsessions and assumptions. A politically and aesthetically avant-garde cinema is now possible, but it can still only exist as a counter-point. [14]
This is strong language—nothing less than a call to arms. Classical cinema often seems to inspire this degree of hostility, and the results are mostly counter-productive. The Gabbards point out that
[o]ne of the consequences of feminist film theory is an undermining of "la politique d'auteur"...The auteur theory of cinema—which identifies the director as the true author of a film—can be understood as a means of "centering" the reading of a film around a single artistic vision, giving moving images the same aesthetic legitimacy as, for example, a symphony of Beethoven or a painting of Van Gogh. In this sense, auteurism helped clear room in the academy for film study bringing with it an aesthetics and a canonical list of director/authors. By characterizing classical cinema as fundamentally a transmitter of the dominant (patriarchal) ideology, feminist theory has "decentered" film study, granting less importance to the director's vision. [15]
The only organized theoretical dignification of classical cinematic values has been the auteur theory, formulated by the Hollywood-obsessed critics of Cahiers du cinema—among them Andre Bazin, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard. Auteur theory, like classical cinematic values itself, was the piling on which the barnacles of alternative film theory would grow.
However, in the wake of the New Wave filmmakers' benign dominance of Cahiers, editor Serge Daney derisively reconsidered the auteur theory, proposing
a new definition of auteur: an auteur is an obsessional neurotic...What other kind of personality would it take, after all, to put together everything it takes to put together a thousand pieces of film with any kind of consistent tone or purpose, particularly when the end-product has to have the illusory qualities of "continuity and transparency" (as if the camera weren't there) which characterized classical cinema? And to do it time and time again, in spite of scripts, budgets, producers and changing fashions, so as to leave one's mark, even though it might be invisible to the naked eye? [16]
And yet the very phrase "consistent tone or purpose" is a good working definition of artistic vision. To leave one's mark even though it might be invisible—a tenacity to be celebrated, not mocked.
The influential post-modern writer Jorge Luis Borges had great affection for classical cinematic values: he considered it a refreshing challenge to create within certain confines, recognizing agreed-upon limitations, to educe a unique vision in some minuscule degree, rather than flamboyantly demanding new means or new forms, an approach he considered to have far less integrity. Above all, it seems, he valued craftsmanship and subtlety. [17]
A recent but already-faltering response to classical cinematic values in the United States has been called—often fatuously—"independent film."
An outline of a film course offered at Florida State University asserts "anti-classicism" as the first and main characteristic of independent cinema and defines the term with the following sub-characteristics:
1. Clarity and unity are often sacrificed for ambiguity (Woman under the Influence, Brewster McCloud, Sweetback)
2. The film often deliberately tries to be anti-classical (Woman under the Influence, Stranger than Paradise, Kids, Pi, Drugstore Cowboy, Slacker, Sweetback) [18]
The sub-categories in this outline continue to identify traits which are anti-classical: "non-causality," "ambiguous characters," "fluidity of narrative time," and so forth. Eventually, it offers a firm example of its claims:
Several characteristics of classical Hollywood cinema are evident in Pi. We have a protagonist, Max, with a clearly announced goal...Time is linear...However, there are also many characteristics of the independent mode of cinema...After the opening credits, we see an extreme close-upon Max's face. The image is deliberately grainy. This is not classical space (i.e. space that is constructed to reveal the protagonist as clearly as possible without ambiguities.)...[Director Darren] Aronofsky is more interested in deconstructing several classical conventions than reinforcing them. He wants to give us a world where finding one answer to all life's problems (financial, religious, etc.) just is not possible. The only answer to such seeking in a postmodern world is to put a drill through one's head. The slipperiness of the content organizes the subversive qualities of the form. [19]
"Subversive" refers of course to the implicit dominance of classical cinematic values, to which all other modes and approaches must be subordinate. The relationship is parasitic: these intermittent revolutions of the form take all their value, all their effectiveness, from a conscious and almost invariably tendentious flouting of classical conventions.
In a perceptive 1998 essay, Michael Punt notes that
[e]ven "art cinema" is shaped by the blockbuster logic of Hollywood...[M]any of these films combat blockbuster conservatism by sympathetically portraying disintegrating families, horrific crimes, and pathological criminals as intrinsic features of the social landscape. [20]
For most subversive filmmakers, though, it has been primarily a matter of style, not so much of subject matter. As Cahiers du Cinema correspondent Bill Krohn points out, an earnestness of style is easier to bluff than conviction in regard to content.
[W]henever a hand-held camera wobbles unsteadily toward its target and dialogue is overwhelmed by street noises, wherever improvisation (or its outward signs, which are easy enough to fake) suggests that what we are watching is not a movie, but life caught in the raw, the influence of the New Wave on filmmakers is still in evidence. Perhaps too much. [21]
Remember the definition of classical cinema as propounded by The Cinema Book: "a period in which the cinematic image remained largely subservient to the requirements of a specific type of narrative structure." What we see in these calculated responses—in avant-garde or transcendental film—is an inversion of this formula: narrative becomes subservient to image—and if not to image per se, it is subservient to some other technical process or plastic element such as editing or sound processing (these two elements preoccupied Godard in particular), which overpower and distract from the narrative—or, in some cases, fully take the place of coherent narrative. The so-called Left Bank filmmakers—Resnais, Varda, Marker, and sometimes Duras—showed particular interest in time and notions of time, demonstrating their obsessions in often clinical exercises (though they were, by far, more fruitful and more engaging than Godard's). In the cases of the above filmmakers, the emphasis is shifted—or jolted—away from narrative and placed indulgently on the formal capabilities of the medium itself.
Historically, film at times seems to have had a need to call attention to form itself, the effect for the effect. This exuberance in form that wants to show off as form, can be characterized as neo-Baroque—or, if preferred, a kind of neo-Mannerism. After a period of classicist construction, one may be reaching the other round in the curve once again, a curious post-modernist manifestation, where all refers to what has already been seen. And where imperfection ends up finding a place beside the technically perfect once again, the grotesque beside the Apollonian. A mixture of styles, form meaning form, often with no need for content, the medium being the message: neo-Mannerism, if you will. [22]
Avant-garde filmmaker and theorist Yann Beauvais probes the formalist phenomenon for some ideological dignity.
This is the coherence that a number of experimental filmmakers have questioned in their desire to abolish form and conventions of classical cinema. As if for the majority, theirs was a question of "destroying the memory in art," or "ruining conventions of communication." [23]
Daney saw it as one's need to eliminate all forebears in order to express oneself with adequate originality.
What happens in Contempt? Always the same story: one comes too late, one inherits a game that has already been played...Homer writes The Odyssey and Moravia, Ghost at Noon; Prokosch wants to put it into images and Ponti, to bring it to the screen. They summon famous "artists" (Lang, Godard)...Each new player in this game of Capital and Culture must respect (but not reflect) in his work the traces left by whoever preceded him, which he must undo. [24]
But to "undo" these "traces" is the most self-defeating of all externalized arrogance. Parker Tyler addressed the problem of movements which try to eradicate their creative ancestry.
Unquestionably, at first, the film medium pointed backward, so far as aesthetic values went; this was owing to the fact that at first photography wished merely to emulate painting; hence painters themselves began to feel (even before the movies came along) that photography had climaxed the conquest of reality as naturalism, so there was nothing left for the painter to do in that direction. Here, we encounter the reason why both painters and photographers began to look toward an illusion of movement to expand the plastic means and create new aesthetic sensations. But no new art, no new means of art, can be created simply by the wish or supposed need to be different. The fresh technical impulse in art must have its origin in a new viewpoint toward content. [25]
More tersely, Paul Bowles wrote in a letter, "Some writers try to write like no one has ever written and get lost in the foothills of their effort." [26]
Yet superficial experimentation continues to be an erroneous gauge of authenticity or "vision" in art. Arthur Danto writes: "A memorial exhibition of Cézanne in [1907] sparked a series of radical experiments in modes of representation, which made artistic success increasingly dependent on formal innovation." [27]
Thus formal innovation is often considered a default criterion for "successful" art. This leads to an appreciation for a film's novelty, as in the case of Christopher Nolan's Memento, the sole accomplishment of which is its sustained disruption of chronological coherency, its mannered refusal to issue its banal story directly. An open defiance of classical cinematic values has become a mark of genius. One is reminded of Hemingway's quip that writers who tend to write long, complicated sentences are probably incapable of making a simple statement. Punt says, "If many contemporary viewers have an increasingly distracted relationship with the images that they appropriate in one way or another, today that relationship and those images seem more and more structured to resist legibility." [28] Too often, popular and critical acclaim are given to films which are designed for no other purpose than to "resist legibility."
Godard, like Laura Mulvey, envisioned—and, unlike her, undertook—formal experimentation which would accompany a thorough politicization of the medium. Rohmer and Truffaut, who followed more closely in the footsteps of their patron saint Andre Bazin, were not so implacably interested in political agenda. Not even Bazin's inflated affection for Italian Neo-Realism seemed to appeal to them. They just wanted to tell stories. Rohmer eventually complained in print that he and Truffaut had felt pressured and finally ostracized by the growing political faction at Cahiers.
In "Fabulation: Toward a Minor Cinema," D.N. Rodowick points out that even classical cinematic values have a political orientation, moderate though it may be.
What would it mean, then, to define modern political cinema by the idea that "the people are missing"? The cinematic movement-image undoubtedly has its own image of the collective: the great films of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov,...and even the Nazi propaganda of Leni Reifenstahl. Classical cinema is for the most part social democratic regardless of its nation of origin or its political ideology. Its goals represent the masses or the people. [29]
Krohn mentions Jean Rouch's investigations of infra-cinema, which encompasses "the new cinemas of the Third World, experimental cinema, militant cinema, amateur cinema, video groups, independent filmmakers..." [30] His analyses of these schools and movements were conducted in the pages of Cahiers. Krohn is careful to note that Rouch was eventually fired for being a "petit-bourgeois ideologue who had turned ethnographic cinema into a glass-bead game." [31] Invariably, the groups and schools which are said to inhabit infra-cinema are imbued with heavy political connotations, whether or not they address political issues in every outing. Rouch was fired for being political in the wrong way.
Walter Benjamin, in his much-cited essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," argues:
[T]he film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance to the audience in person. This permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor. The audience's identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera. Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing. This is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed. [32]
This is a more astute analysis than most artists and critics are capable of. Radical movements in cinema will fail to abolish mainstream techniques because the audience position is not a psychological one, as it would be in approaching a novel, but a purely visual one. This is why films that defy classical conventions by demonstrating a unique visual sensibility—as witnessed in the films of Cocteau, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Malick—frequently succeed where other formally "aberrant" cinema fails. We are, as Paul Schrader formidably argues in Transcendental Style in Film, visually engaged by default; our attention is commanded by the fact of the images playing on screen. [33] As a film progresses, its command of our attention can be enhanced or diminished by its techniques, but our initial investment is assured. Techniques such as the interminable repetition of identical sequences (Resnais), or affectedly poor editing and sound mixing (Godard), will diminish the viewer's purely visual engagement. And if these effects—or any others—are used for radical political effect (as is often the case in the films of Resnais, Marker, and Godard in particular), these "cult values" will distance the viewer, will undermine his naturally easy approach to the material. Parker Tyler apparently felt his movie-going experience thus undermined by Godard in particular: he once pointed out that Godard's work consistently exhibited "playful condescension toward its material," due to which Tyler mordantly deemed it "fake intellectual satire for juvenile adults and adult juveniles." [34]
Benjamin's observation is somewhat obliquely seconded by Manovich, who takes a more directly technocentric path to rendering cinematic movements futile:
In identifying fictional films as a "super-genre" of twentieth century cinema, [Christian] Metz did not bother to mention another characteristic of this genre because at that time it was too obvious: fictional films...largely consist of unmodified photographic recordings of real events which took place in real physical space...from the perspective of a future historian of visual culture, the differences between classical Hollywood films, European art films and avant-garde films...may appear less significant than this common feature: that they relied on lens-based recordings of reality. [35]
Retrospectively, this takes much of the wind out of the majority of the sails.
Digital video is capable of perpetuating these "lens-based recordings of reality." It is also capable, as Manovich evangelizes, of doing away altogether with indexical attempts at art and allowing one to create images ex nihilo. One wonders whether, in that scenario, classical values would be dominant for essentially the same reason that Benjamin illustrated: perhaps no visual medium is a suitable vehicle for ideological subversiveness. But Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel, curators of the "Future Cinema" project, envision a future with cult values galore—like revolutionaries vowing liberation for the oppressed.
Despite cinema's heritage of technological and creative diversity, it is Hollywood that has come to define its dominant forms of production and distribution, its technological apparatus and its narrative forms. But the current hegemony of the Hollywood model of movie making is about to be questioned...These new digital contexts are setting an appropriate platform for the further evolution of the traditions of independent, experimental and expanded avant-garde cinema. [36]
If the phrase "appropriate platform" simply means that these new tools and "contexts" are cheaper and more readily available than their predecessors, then this is a reasonable assertion. There is no question that digital technologies have permanently altered the landscape of visual media. It remains to be seen, however, whether they will be the greatest panacea in the history of creative expression.
The New Process
Look, let's face it, the cinema—the classical cinema—is gone. It's over. The cinema as we know it up to now is disappearing...We're witnessing a new cinema being born and that's exciting. However, whatever cinema evolves into, you still need an author...Cinema is not just technology. It's not impersonal. The "author" is not an abstract corporation. It didn't just drop from the sky. It isn't off an assembly line, like you make a car. Film is not factory made, it's a human creation. And so what we're saying is, let's keep the "human" in the creative process.
– Martin Scorsese in 1996 [37]
Whether hysterically or prophetically, or both, Scorsese clearly felt justified in issuing a death certificate for classical cinema as early as 1996. From this vantage point, it seems to have been slightly premature.
The process of movie-making is changing radically, however, and the classical model has been adversely affected—if not exterminated—by technology itself. Geuens observes that
...today "style" can be purchased from day one by activating a switch on a gizmo. However, these electronic filters have already been processed by the culture at large, hence the very real danger that they can displace or eliminate the less visible, more fragile influences that normally compete in one's artistic development. [38]
Digital effects are likely, sooner or later, to decrease our sensitivity to the classical parameters of image-narrative in the same way that, according to Rohmer, "the introduction of speech...weakened the audience's visual sensitivity." [39] The problem is not inherent to the new apparatus; the problem is that this apparatus is difficult to use conscientiously. Geuens provides the most convenient example of technocratic megalomania by describing the approach of George Lucas, whom Geuens compares to "the less savory characters of the Marquis de Sade." [40]
And indeed, George Lucas prides himself on having disconnected the medium from "all that real stuff" that repels him so much. So when he and his team digitally alter, animate, or composite people, objects, and landscapes, more than an aesthetic effect is involved. What we face here rather is a deep distrust of the every day world, the sense that the "real stuff" is no longer good enough to do the job that is now envisioned for the cinema. [41]
A far less technocratic implementation of the same principles can be seen in Rohmer's The Lady and the Duke, which featured analog paintings—"actual" paintings—as backdrops. But Rohmer was opposed to manipulating the image in post-production. "I like to take reality the way it is," he said, "even if it's a reality I created through painting, like here. Truth comes from the painting, not the editing." [42]
Image-manipulation is a growing tendency, and true to the view of technological determinists, its charm is almost impossible to resist. "In the same way that a Moviola feels prehistoric after one has learned editing on an Avid," Geuens has written, "one cannot be expected to go back to an unadorned scene once filmmaking has been experienced through optical options." [43]
But the art of the process begins to fall away as one becomes dependent upon certain technical means as a surrogate for the complete involvement of the imagination. This substitution ignores the fact that the imagination will batter, maim, and reinvent its available means as necessary. It thrives on challenge, on the improbable. Robert Zemeckis believes that filmmakers will soon crave that imaginative challenge again.
If you can do anything, [Zemeckis'] thinking goes, then what's the big deal about crashing a car into a building or crashing a rocket on Mars? That, Zemeckis said, will drive filmmakers away from big effects and back toward storytelling. "I really think that's what's going to happen," [Zemeckis] said. "It's all going to come back to substance. That's the really good news." [44]
To think that these digital filmmakers will exhaust all their gadgetry and return humbly and with renewed vigor and humanity to classical sensibilities is hopeful but naïve.
Elizabeth Daley, dean of the USC film and television program says, "The idea, we hope, is that you're not training students in yesterday's way of doing things, you're training them in tomorrow's way. The kids coming out of here will, for the first time, know more than the people who are actually working in the industry." [45]
This is a frightening prospect. One is reminded of the Khmer Rouge putting teens in charge of labor camps where they were responsible for the "education" of adults—or the Chinese Revolution, during which adolescent nursing students were put in charge of hospitals after the doctors had been condemned by the new government. (Why are these analogies so far-fetched and cloyingly political? One must be willing to answer earnest fire with ironic fire.)
A more reasonable skepticism is expressed by Myrl Schreibman, an administrator at the UCLA film school.
"It's nice to be able to learn the craft of digital effects and digital production, but the content is really the heart and soul of any project. I think creativity flourishes with limitations and restrictions, and if you give schools all the bells and whistles, they stop focusing on content and instead focus on what the bells and whistles can do." [46]
Geuens warns that the production process itself—that is, everything that occurs prior to the momentous invocation of the Computer—is also nearing the precipice of artistic integrity.
Even though the work on the set proceeds in more or less the same manner as before, there is a sense that the shoot is too easy, that digital technology demands very little of you and can now be accomplished even with second-rate personnel...The full intense involvement that is the mark of a film shoot has given way to a dispassionate, half-hearted effort on everybody's part. [47]
Because the filmmaking process is being re-orientated around software, it is far less labor-intensive than it was in the twentieth century. Accomplished analog editor Walter Murch, who won an Academy Award for his work on Apocalypse Now, imagines the
diabolical invention of a black box that could directly convert a single person's thoughts into a viewable cinematic reality...The kind of filmmakers who would reject the offer are interested in above all the collaborative process of filmmaking and in seeing a detailed vision mysteriously emerge out of that process, rather than being imposed from the beginning. [48]
Lost will be the thrill and fulfillment of working intuitively with people who function in creative and technical capacities which differ markedly from those of the director but which are complementary and indispensable.
The very difficulty of shooting a film thus brings pride in one's work...That in a nutshell is what demarcates film work: the sense of magic that permeates the shoot and the sense of accomplishment that comes from working out miracles in the face of incredible odds...By radically simplifying the nature of the shooting process...digital technology pensions off these heroic features of film. [49]
For Geuens, classical cinematic values encompasses work ethic as well as whatever ends up on screen. This is a slight variation on the venerable argument that art should not be too easy to achieve. Determination and struggle flavor the mood and the spirit of the artist, almost invariably providing those ingredients most necessary to the manifestation of genius.
Defying the Indexical Nature of Cinema
Even for Andrei Tarkovsky, film-painter par excellence, cinema's identity lay in its ability to record reality. Once, during a public discussion in Moscow some time in the 1970s he was asked the question as to whether he was interested in making abstract films. He replied that there can be no such thing. Cinema's most basic gesture is to open the shutter and to start the film rolling, recording whatever happens to be in front of the lens. For Tarkovsky, an abstract cinema is thus impossible.
– Lev Manovich [50]
Manovich uses Tarkovsky's logical observation as a platform for disparaging any potential for traditional cinematic art by characterizing it as inherently "indexical." He goes on in the same essay to say that "[c]inema emerged out of the same impulse which engendered naturalism, court stenography and wax museums. Cinema is the art of the index: it is an attempt to make art out of a footprint." [51]
But these footprints are to be preserved. Antonioni once recounted to Jack Nicholson the story of his daily drive to the set of Red Desert. Along the coastal highway, he had the option of looking to his left and seeing the ocean or of looking to his right and seeing decrepit, abandoned, functionless buildings. He chose the buildings because "a man had been there." [52] .
Manovich is, unsurprisingly, a technological determinist. As such, he feels that "...cinema can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation. It is no longer an indexical media technology but, rather, a sub-genre of painting." [53]
Manovich would have us believe that new technologies will allow us to return to the original cinematic values, those which pre-dated the classical style. "The privileged role played by the manual construction of images in digital cinema is one example of a larger trend: the return of pre-cinematic moving images techniques...Digital media returns to us the repressed of the cinema." [54]
This is a convenient argument, but not a very convincing one. The phrase "pre-cinematic moving images techniques" is intended to lend a fresh credibility to animation, to make it sound venerable, respectable, and not simply the copyrighted function of Walt Disney.
But cinema quickly abolished its earliest probational techniques. It hardly seems coincidental that the precarious new form rapidly evolved in the direction most suited to its survival: the photographic reproduction of the human form. A chaste methodology which to our eyes would have been painfully uneventful nonetheless mesmerized the globe.
Manovich's obtusely literal-minded "principles of digital filmmaking" further demean the role of the human in the final image: "digital film = live action material + painting + image processing + compositing + 2-D computer animation + 3-D computer animation." [55]
Thus, according to this hyperbolic model, the indexical element—which includes the natural and the human—inhabits a mere one-sixth of the final image. Of course this is theoretical ballast for the large-scale technological exercises of George Lucas, who makes extensive alterations to his films in post-production, painting and compositing whatever had not existed in his recorded index of reality.
Again, these tools are not thoroughly malignant; they are malignant only in that they enable and encourage the tail to wag the dog rather dramatically.
Cultural Response
Small Optics are based on geometric perspective and shared by human vision, painting and film. It involves distinctions between near and far, between an object and a horizon against which the object stands out. Big optics is real-time electronic transmission of information, "the active optics of time passing at the speed of light." — Lev Manovich [56]
Small Optics for Sale, Cheap.
When Small Optics begins to decay, we are left with the impersonal, the counter-individual. We are no longer permitted to maintain a reasonable proximity to our experience; we do not cohabit on its elusive plane. We are alienated from the impalpable things with which we are compelled to interact, but alienated from the physical world as well, increasingly subjugated to the insidious machinations of technology. We use the phrase "palm-sized electronics," unaware of the irony that the relationship is already inverted: technology has us in its palm. It seems increasingly unlikely that we will be able to sequester it to the role of a tool.
In an essay concerning Marker's Sans Soleil, B.C. Holmes writes:
And this leads us to the fourth failing of the image: official histories don't just inform a culture, but also shape that culture's collective identity. While pondering Tokyo television and comic books, Marker invokes Nietzsche's dilemma of gazing into the abyss: "the more you watch Japanese television, the more you feel that it's watching you." [57]
This calls to mind webcams and streaming media. Manovich writes that
...the Introduction of Quicktime in 1991 can be compared to the introduction of the Kinetoscope in 1892: both were used to present short loops, both featured the images approximately two by three inches in size, both called for private viewing rather than collective exhibition....Thus, exactly a hundred years after cinema was officially "born" it was reinvented on a computer screen. [58]
Wong Kar-Wai's lengthy BMW commercial "The Follow" mimics cinematic storytelling in much the same way Americans might imitate the Chinese or French language by phonetic approximation, by attempting to reproduce certain definitive inflections and cadences. What results is gibberish. And what results in Wong's beautiful, horizontally-correct BMW "movie" is also an approximation of inflections and cadences—those of the classical cinema. Of course, as the BMW marketing executives knew, even illiterate consumers are able to recognize these allusive patterns immediately and make the desired associations. Ultimately, however, there is no substance, just as there is no denotative meaning in the parody of a foreign language. We say, "Oh, that's French," though we know better. And we say, "Oh, that's a movie," though we know better.
To dip into the watered-down nomenclature of semiotics (but only briefly), this practice is the invocation of signs which are meant to signify nothing in themselves but, rather, refer only to what similar signs have signified in the past, canonically. Assume that our universe is one in which reincarnation is the standard mode of being: given that there are more people currently living than have collectively been alive in the past, each of us must contain only a fraction of an original human soul. What is "human" in us now would be only a vague reference to what was originally human—like generational loss in analog video. Eventually, the generational loss of "soul quality" through reincarnation would yield a human being who did not signify the existence of a complete spiritual being but merely referred to the former existence of a complete spiritual being. Eventually, the generational loss of quality in cinema will yield image-narratives in which the images express nothing sovereign, nothing that has not already been established—or at least suggested—by the vault of images known as cinema history. They will be, as Jean-Pierre Oudart said in another context, like "a bicycle assembled, from mismatched parts, by a savage who was ignorant of its function." [59] But, then, we are a culture that accepts televangelism and New Age hooey in lieu of valid spiritual nourishment. We are a culture that values the paraphrastic in all things.
Mourão predicts:
As regards representation however, one will soon tend to set new wishes, since the images produced with the software tend to be pre-determined and soon become clichés. The images produced by modern resources end up upsetting one. They repeat ad nauseam and add nothing...One might be before a new impasse. It is the artists'—the true ones—duty to surmount it. [60]
The Dark Horizon: Technological Determinism
For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.
— Paul Valery [61]
This is the epigraph used by Benjamin in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In the context of new media, this is a rallying cry for technological determinism, the philosophy which informs my step-father's only half-kidding prediction that eventually this interminable nexus of ones and zeroes will generate an exclusive conscious thought, and we will have our insurmountable Accident.
When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution...Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress. [62]
Though reactionary in tone, Virilio's theory of the accident is nonetheless impervious to contradiction. But beyond merely facilitating our collision with very specific misfortune, technology may be capable of forcing certain peripheral outcomes. As Geuens writes, "It should therefore not surprise us that digital moviemaking is not only refashioning our behavior during the entire creative process but also urging us toward certain objectives rather than others." [63] The technocratic oligarchy, a rather conspicuous fifth column, has lacked subtlety and tact in its urgency to dehumanize the process of storytelling through visual media.
In a symposium which took place in Hollywood in the Spring of 1996, one of the participants provocatively referred to movies as "flatties" and to human actors as "organics" and "soft fuzzies"...[W]hen, given enough time and money, almost everything can be simulated in a computer, to film physical reality is just one possibility. [64]
Virilio strips one of his central prophecies to its pith: "[T]here will be two realities: the actual, and the virtual. Thus there is no simulation, but substitution." [65]
But Geuens has less insouciant journalistic neutrality in his tone.
[W]hat happens to our emotional involvement with characters once we know that the "performing" on screen owes everything to the talent of a digital animator? Can simulatory reality ever supply the sense of the soul under the skin? [66]
Manovich is interested in creating a surrogate human element, thus becoming the equivalent of a demiurge. Rather than utilizing some aspect of available reality, the goal is to fabricate reality from the ground up. Thus far, this second reality depends on tools which have been forged in this pre-existing reality.
More esoterically, Virilio claims that "[w]e have lost our points of reference to orient ourselves. The de-realized man is a disoriented man." [67]
The problem seems to be that disorientation is the most potent local palliative. Thus, de-realization is desirable.
In 1936, Benjamin warned:
[T]he aesthetics of today's war appears as follows: If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. [68]
Virilio has written entire books about the employment of video technology in warfare. He cites the example of Iraqis in the middle of the desert surrendering to "pilotless drones" outfitted with video cameras. [69] So does the army with superior technology win? Or does technology itself win?
Conclusion
The new optical impact, I think, is so great that we have to be careful not to be overwhelmed; we must retain an enlightened perspective and keep our values in proportion. One good way of doing this is to bear in mind the basic art of the film as such: the classic art of film. — Parker Tyler [70]
When codified, a political vogue in the arts—or even apolitical experimentalism—becomes a new conservatism, and rebellion against such a trend necessarily takes the form of something which is so out of fashion as to be tiresome in the abstract. In other words, it remains exciting to say, "The film (sic) was shot on digital video," whereas "The film was shot on celluloid" seems to be a superfluous, uninteresting remark—and also rather redundant, since film is celluloid.
Even now, the relationship of celluloid to classical cinematic values is entirely presumptuous. At some future point, it will be a remarkable aesthetic choice to fashion a motion picture from celluloid, just as in the Seventies and Eighties it was a remarkable aesthetic choice to revert to black and white film stock. Atavism can be one of the most sincere forms of artistic boldness.
Elsewhere, Tyler attributed that sort of boldness to the work of Antonioni, noting that he had
achieved his novelty through re-emphasizing an old, and true, trait of the film; if today we can call this trait "advanced," it is because, at an historic moment, the visual strength of the film was adulterated—or at least complicated and theoretically compromised—by the introduction of sound and dialogue as an integral part of the form. Antonioni's style—best visible in the trilogy, L'Avventura, La Notte and L'Eclisse—is a return to the visual as the medium's prime instrument. [71]
Those with cultivated palates for such things will, like Tyler, recognize and appreciate intermittent returns to classical cinematic values, despite the futurist rigidity of certain vocal minorities.
We no longer think of the history of cinema as a linear march towards only one possible language, or as a progression towards more and more accurate verisimilitude. Rather, we have come to see its history as a succession of distinct and equally expressive languages, each with its own aesthetic variables, each new language closing off some of the possibilities of the previous one—a cultural logic not dissimilar to Kuhn's analysis of scientific paradigms. [72]
It is becoming increasingly important, even vital, to determine exactly which "previous possibilities" should be closed off and which should be kept in circulation in case we need them again; in case we neglect certain elements of our cinematic language and allow them to be forgotten; in case our vocabulary of expressive techniques and applicable theory is stripped to a few hundred words, when it could be in the thousands.
Of course, as Geuens parentally notes,
...regardless of how dominant and overwhelming technology appears at first, it inevitably contains within itself the seed that could again make us confront the essential mystery of being in the world. [73]
Rohmer is notorious for similarly blithe rhapsodies.
Cinema instinctively rejects every perilous detour and reveals a beauty that we had ceased to believe was eternal and immediately accessible to all. It surrounds the products of our revolt and destruction with happiness and peace. It shows us that we have not lost our sensitivity to the sea and the sky, to the most common display of great human sentiments. [74]
Instead of closing with a harried injunction, I choose to pass on these two rays of shameless optimism.
1. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: Time-Image. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1989.
2. Cook, Pam, et al. The Cinema Book. London: British Film Institute, 1989.
3. Thompson, Kristin and David Bordwell. Film Art: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003.
4. White, Timothy. "Formulation of the Classical Hollywood Style: The Classical Narrative."
5. Mourão, Maria. "The Influence of New Tools on Contemporary Conceptions of Film Language as a Mode of Expression."
6. Quaresima, Leonardo. "Introduction." Cinema & Cie International Film Studies Journal, No. 2.
7. Manovich, Lev. "Cinema as Cultural Interface."
8. Mourão.
9. Harley, Ross. "Before and After Cinema." Parol, Vol. 5, No. 2, Summer 1999.
10. Quaresima.
11. Gabbard, Glen and Krin. "Play It Again, Sigmund." Journal of Popular Film & Television, Vol. 18, 1990.
12. Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema."
13. Gabbard.
14. Mulvey.
15. Gabbard.
16. Krohn, Bill. "The Tinkerers."
17. Gonzalez, Jose Eduardo. "Borges and the Classical Hollywood Cinema." Style, Fall, 1998.
18. Simmons, David C. "The Independent Mode of Cinema and Pi." Session 12: Independent Films & Overall View, April, 2001.
19. Ibid.
20. Punt, Michael. "Digital Media, Artificial Life and Post-Classical Cinema: Condition, Symptom, or a Rhetoric of Funding?" Leonardo, Vol. 31, No. 5, 1998.
21. Krohn.
22. Mourão.
23. Beauvais, Yann. "Does One Film To Forget?"
24. Daney, Serge. Cahiers du Cinema, No. 222.
25. Tyler, Parker. "Film as a Force in Visual Education." Sex, Psyche, Etcetera, in the Film. New York: Horizon Press, 1969.
26. Bowles, Paul. In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994.
27. Danto, Arthur. "Of Time and the Artist."
28. Punt.
29. Rodowick, D.N. "Fabulation: Toward a Minor Cinema."
30. Krohn.
31. Ibid.
32. Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
33. Schrader, Paul. Transcendental Style in Film. New York: Da Capo Press, 1988
34. Tyler, Parker. "Hollywood Hallucination." Sex, Psyche, Etcetera, in the Film. New York: Horizon Press, 1969
35. Manovich, Lev. "What Is Digital Cinema?"
36. Shaw, Jeffrey and Peter Weibel. "Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film."
37. Scorsese, Martin. Acceptance Speech, John Huston Award for Artists' Rights.
38. Geuens, Jean-Pierre. "The Digital World Picture." Film Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 4, 2002.
39. Rohmer, Eric. "For a Talking Cinema." The Taste for Beauty. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
40. Geuens.
41. Ibid.
42. Firenzi, Aurelien. "Interview with Eric Rohmer." Senses of Cinema Web site.
43. Geuens.
44. Lyman, Rick. "Monument to a Filmless Future."
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Geuens.
48. Murch, Walter. "A Digital Cinema of the Mind? Could Be."
49. Geuens.
50. Manovich, Lev. "What Is Digital Cinema?"
51. Ibid.
52. Nicholson, Jack. Personal anecdote, supplemental to L'Avventura, Criterion Edition DVD.
53. Manovich.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
57. Holmes, B.C. "The Deleuzian Memory of Sans Soleil."
58. Manovich.
59. Oudart, Jean-Pierre. "La suture." Referred to in "The Tutor Code of Classical Cinema" by Daniel Dayan. Film Quarterly, Autumn 1974.
60. Mourão.
61. Valery, Paul. "Pieces sur l'art." Le Conquete de l'ubiquite.
62. Virilio, Paul. Politics of the Very Worst. Semiotext(e). Columbia, 2002.
63. Geuens.
64. Manovich.
65. Wilson, Louise. "Cyberwar, God and Television.: Interview with Paul Virilio."
66. Geuens.
67. Wilson.
68. Benjamin.
69. Virilio, Paul. "Conversation between Paul Virilio and Hans-Ulrich Obrist." Paris, June, 1991.
70. Tyler, Parker. "Film as a Force in Visual Education." Sex, Psyche, Etcetera, in the Film. New York: Horizon Press, 1969.
71. Tyler, Parker. "The Maze of the Modern Sensibility." Sex, Psyche, Etcetera, in the Film. New York: Horizon Press, 1969
72. Manovich.
73. Geuens.
74. Rohmer, Eric. "Such a Vanity Is Painting." The Taste for Beauty. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
