The Cinema of Tomorrow

Scanning today through the Makhmalbaf family website, I stumbled across an (old?) article on the cultural and artistic ramifications of the democratization of the tools of cinema. Highly recommended (and brief): The Cinema of Tomorrow.

Excerpts:

"If the camera is turned into a pen, the filmmaker into an auteur, and the intervening harassments of power, capital, and the means of production are all eliminated, or at least radically compromised, are we not then at the threshold of a whole new technological change in the very essence of cinema as a public media? I tend to believe that because of the increasingly individual nature of cinematic production, as well as spectatorship, the cinema of the 20th century will become the literature of the 21st century."

***

"By the end of the 20th century, the filmmakers were in a position of power and choice. Would the digital revolution and its ancillary consequence of a massive increase in film production result in a stalemate where there are more people to make films than those who are willing to sit quiet in a dark room for a sustained period of time and actually watch a film? What if buying and operating a camera is as easy as buying a pen and writing with it? Certainly there has never been as many great creative writers as there have been pens in the world. Nor would the inexpensive availability of digital camera mean the disappearance of the creative filmmaker. But cinema as an art will certainly lose its multitudinous audience. The general appeal of cinema may thus be fractured into more specific attractions, and a division of labor and market may take place in world cinema. Gradually, in fact, the audience, as consumers, may begin to dictate the terms of its expectations, and cinematic narrative may begin to be deeply affected by the expectations of its viewers."

***

"When books were not too many, people considered what was written superior truth and if a book was found in a remote village they would attribute its origin to heavenly sources. When books became abundant, this absolute and sacred assumption was broken and earthly authors lost their heavenly presumptions. In the age of the scarcity of cinematic productions, "Titanic" has the function of that heavenly book, and our world very much like that small village."

Pedro Costa is just like Michael Bay

Juventude em marcha / Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, 2006)

I need to see this film again. Costa's project (and perhaps his career) is sui generis, and I wasn't able to fully appreciate the film on a first viewing because I didn't know the rules by which he was playing. My reflections, then, are mainly on those rules, and how they interact with the processes of spectatorship.


"So if the film is based on understanding, not decipherment, will this give any solace to those hostile or dismissive of it?" - Andy Rector

Understanding stands apart from decipherment in that understanding is a deeper experience. Decipherment is nothing more than the registration of information as it is presented, than the cutting through of obfuscation in favor of clarity.

Understanding beyond decipherment is rarely present in movies, even those that posit themselves as artistic statements. Yet a few are successful enough to encourage - or even demand - understanding.

Pedro Costa is demanding. Pedro Costa is demanding understanding. A demanding, more forceful than an asking, and requiring reciprocal effort.

In Colossal Youth, there isn't that much decipherment even made possible. The narrative confusions are few, because the narrative itself is little.

The frame in Colossal Youth transmits oppression. Beyond its limits might be freedom - if only we could get there. Then, we might know.

Costa's characters are trapped in the frame. Not by something as simple as bars or even framelines, but instead by exterior space, which seems to press inward even as they gaze outward. Characters are frozen inside.

If the body perceives something before the mind, does it necessarily follow that the mind will understand? No, but Costa isn't worried about the stragglers.

Silence, observation, statis. These are the components of action.

An economy of shots for a poverty of economy. Showing things without saying things.


Expansion:

The presentation of information is a giant part of how we register film artistry. Mostly, this means that discrete details are given, which later add up to a whole story. This story can be convoluted or simple. Through the understanding of the story, we can come to understand a greater truth. In these films understanding is a progression of fact and logic. A + B = C. In one story a geisha is taken advantage of and loses her chance at happiness. Therefore, we experience human sadness and loss, and also a social critique of the Geisha system.
Information presented by other means is often lost in the shuffle. As a filmmaker, though, I know that information presented secretly is also secretly preserved, subconsciously eliciting responses in the audience. In most movies, this additive information encourages the perception of the plot in order to facilitate the mathematical process of plot perception and meaning.
Occasionally an artist arises who carries such incredible meaning in his/her formal choices that they becomes the main conduits for meaning in a film. Pedro Costa is just such an artist.
Costa's observational, static shots close off all but a very small portion of the world. But the most interesting thing to me is the mindset you're put in as an audience member: frames do not move. space is rarely established beyond the frame. little action occurs. Trapped in these long-duration shots, you can only tolerate or walk out. Either one is a statement on our freedoms to decide our own level of investment in the world we are shown. We have more agency than Ventura. In staying, a gulf opens up between Ventura and you the viewer. In those long takes of limited space, Ventura remains in his world. Your presence is optional. [Is it often that Ventura enters or leaves the frame? I recollect that its rare.]
Colossal Youth demands an intense level of attention/concentration. As very little "happens," it takes a dedicated investment to decipher the details of the plot. But Colossal Youth also demands a physical concentration. The body grows accustomed to stasis, to silence. If given over to it, watching the film can approach a meditative state. Or, it can be a battle (to stay awake, to stay in your seat). Both the battle and the submission earn us greater knowledge of Ventura and the poverty of his social and economic concerns.
In watching Costa's movie, then, presentation of information is given mainly through the use of formally rigorous stylistic cues, notably the use of silence, the absence of camera movement, and the narrow (lack of) construction of space. But much of this information is presented so subtly that I responded to it physically before recognizing it intellectually. Which brings me to my post's title:

Pedro Costa is just like Michael Bay

Why?
Because Michael Bay is if nothing else, an auteur of the visceral. Quick shots that make you feel a sense of motion are his M.O. Watch an action scene from, say, Pearl Harbor in super slow motion. Note that adjacent shots will often contain contradictory visual information. The direction of a plane's flight path or the direction of shrapnel after an explosion might change from one shot to the next, but at full speed as an audience member what's most important is the sense of kinesis. Michael Bay is literally a director of action.
Pedro Costa is the opposite. Colossal Youth relies on stillness and the near-inability to move. But like Michael Bay, it has the effect of causing a visceral response before (above? in lieu of?) an intellectual one. Both work with the physical effects of cinema, in the same way a composer of music might choose certain frequencies for their physiological effects.
Like Michael Bay, Costa's formal choices are an agenda unto themselves. But Costa's choices are also an implicit politics - of identification and social mobility. These politics, and their physiological underpinning, are one piece of what makes Colossal Youth a spectacular work of art.


did i really get through an entire post on Colossal Youth without mentioning Bresson? how?

Notes on INLAND EMPIRE, Part 3

This is the third segment in the "Notes on INLAND EMPIRE" series. More may follow if indeed I see it for a second time this coming week. This brief reflection deals with IE's narrative structure. It's little more than the jumping-off point for an article-in-progress, but I hope it will be enough of a key to allow for at least a partial decryption of IE's narrative logic.

Read the previous segments:
Part 1: Creating a New Folk Culture: Future Cinema Aesthetics and the Rise of the Backyard Filmmaker

Part 2: Going Inland: Inland Empire and Transcendental Meditation


Part 3:
Memory, Identity, Confusion, Recursion: Narrative Structure in Inland Empire - A Primer

Chris Marker, cinema’s great essayist, makes the experience of memory one of his primary topics. La Jetee, Sans Soleil, and his CD-ROM Immemory are perhaps his most poetic works on how the human mind incorporates the past into the present. Sans Soleil includes the following meditation on identity and memory in Hitchock’s Vertigo:

“From this fake tower—the only thing that Hitchcock had added—he imagined Scotty as time’s fool of love, finding it impossible to live with memory without falsifying it. Inventing a double for Madeline in another dimension of time, a zone that would belong only to him and from which he could decipher the indecipherable story that had begun at Golden Gate when he had pulled Madeline out of San Francisco Bay, when he had saved her from death before casting her back to death. Or was it the other way around?”

So far I’ve only seen Inland Empire once, so I haven’t had the time to finish the work of narrative unpacking and establish a chronology or cause-effect structure. The structural complexities are immense, unlike the relatively simple Mulholland Drive, which has essentially a single narrative-structural conceit that inverts and de-realizes what we think we’ve seen. IE, on the other hand, doubles back on itself recursively. Inland Empire takes the already existent narrative fracturing, recursion, and de-cue-ification of modern filmmaking and ups the ante significantly. The film is structured like an MC Escher painting, with one hand drawing the other – as when Susan interrupts Nikki’s rehearsal, an interruption that happens both early and late in the chronology of IE. IE even exemplifies Droste Effect visual recursion when Laura Dern’s character (Susan? Nikki? Laura?) meets the girl who’s been watching her on the television. Certainly J.S. Bach’s fugal compositions share something with Lynch’s placement of Laura Dern’s mirror-image characters in isomorphic scenarios (and scenery). Lynch’s brand of “mise en abyme” is the strangest of ‘strange loops,’ and Hofstadter’s Law seems to apply both to watching the film and to its creation.

“We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.” – Chris Marker, Sans Soleil
“I think of a world where each memory could create its own legend.” – Chris Marker, Sans Soleil

One notable structural element of IE is it’s blurred lines between Past, Present, and Future. Huge sections of the film exist as flashbacks or flashforwards, and much of the narrative confusion experienced by viewers is due to an inadequate presence of clue-giving on Lynch’s part as to when we are jumping and in which direction, and especially upon our return to the previously left scene. [“Inadequate” only for conventional narrative clarity, a principle DL has left behind for the murky territory of Art]. Adding to this confusion is the presence of flashforwards inside flashbacks inside flashforwards, and Lynch’s jumping between VERY disparate worlds with much of his crosscutting. Often from one frame to the next we will be at a different point in the (linear) story, where actors are playing different characters and we are thrust into new events in medias res. Lynch’s near-total absence of narrative and temporal clues makes this a “mystery” in the sense that we as viewers have a puzzle to piece together, and much of the information is obscured on first viewing.

“The big self is mondo stable. But the small self — we’re blowing about like dry leaves in the wind.” – David Lynch

“And beneath each of these faces a memory. And in place of what we were told had been forged into a collective memory, a thousand memories of men who parade their personal laceration in the great wound of history.” – Chris Marker, Sans Soleil

The danger of an actor’s performance and the process of role-playing are a narrative engine as well as a theme. In the first rehearsal for On High in Blue Tomorrows, the actors and director are spooked the appearance of a figure who disappears before being discovered, in a way not humanly possible (“where no person can disappear,” if I recall the quote correctly). We later discover that this figure was Susan Blue, the character that Nikki is rehearsing in the interrupted read-through. Susan’s arrival frightens those at the rehearsal – calling to mind Naomi Watt’s audition scene in Mulholland Drive (among other female-in-Hollywood isomorphisms with MD). That audition scene is one key to unlocking the (blue?) box of IE’s attitude toward performance as a component of an actor’s art. As in MD, the female performance literally frightens those around her, and actually convinces those others of the reality of her performance. In IE, however, the ‘reality’ believed is a physical manifestation of Susan, a reality that later takes over Nikki so completely that she is no longer Nikki (or was it the other way around?). At this point in the film Susan’s interruption of the audition is only a spectre, just as it is for Nikki only a hint of things to come. It happens just at the moment when Nikki begins to connect with Susan, as the scene approaches emotional climax. In another example of Lynch’s denial of cues for audience understanding, the spectre interrupts the rehearsal before Nikki is able to perform Susan as Susan in the decisive moment; that is, the realization goes from internal (in Nikki’s mind) to external (a noise in the set) before Nikki completes her transformation to Susan within the rehearsal scene.

What’s most significant about this divorce of cause from effect is Lynch’s commitment to creating a work that feels like the work of the mind left to its own devices. Lynch’s adoption of dream logic has been present from his early short films, often becoming itself the subject of his work, from the discovery of the severed hand in Blue Velvet to the moment-of-death dream that makes up the first half of Mulholland Drive. IE extends this logic, using narrative disjunction, temporal shuffling, and recursion as organizing principles. In doing so, Lynch pushes the boundaries of even his intense audience and creates a new kind of viewership, one that is at once less dependent on causality and more engaged in the process of discovering causality. Like his unspoken theses on the futures of digital media, it remains to be seen if others will follow, but we should appreciate that Lynch is willing to blaze the trail.

Notes on INLAND EMPIRE, Part 2

The "Notes on INLAND EMPIRE" series continues, this time with a glimpse into the Hindu philosophic school that inspired the Transcendental Meditation movement. David Lynch is a strong proponent of TM, spending significantly to publicize its virtues to the general public. Below I address some themes of IE along with some possible connections between those themes and philosophies relating to the practice of TM. This is part 2 of what will be at least a 3 part series; Part 3 should be up this weekend or early next week. I'd like to note the Jürgen Fauth makes some points that deal more strictly with the practice of TM as it relates to the narrative experience of IE in this post.

Click here for Part 1:
Creating a New Folk Culture: Future Cinema Aesthetics and the Rise of the Backyard Filmmaker


And now for Part 2:
Going Inland: Inland Empire and Transcendental Meditation

“I have been “diving within” through the Transcendental Meditation technique for over 30 years… Someday, hopefully very soon, “diving within” as a preparation for learning and as a tool for developing the creative potential of the mind will be a standard part of every school’s curriculum.” – David Lynch

Transcendental Meditation is, among other things, a way to tap into the untapped power of the unconscious mind. TM acolytes believe that if the square root of 1% of the world’s population practices an advanced form of TM simultaneously, then world peace will result, and that if just one percent of the world’s population practiced the Transcendental Meditation technique, there would be an end to war.
It should be clear that the film’s title refers to this untapped potential as much as to the geographic location. Maybe more so, as Lynch never applied for any of the permits necessary to shoot in Inland Empire cities. [Another possible reason for his lack of permits might be the use of IE as an example of the potentials of amateur filmmaking; for more reflections on this, please see Part 1.]
One of the hallmarks of Lynch’s filmmaking has always been to imbue everyday objects with a decidedly sinister presence. A pan across an empty bedroom is given a sense of dark foreboding through Lynch's selections of music and lighting. This is especially true of Inland Empire, as the narrative fractures and multiplied personae exist in different spaces that are at once strange and familiar. For they are “normal” spaces – often like the ones we might see in our own homes – but they are foreign to Laura Dern’s character(s) at the moments of transmogrification. These physical spaces are often as strange as the new selves that she finds herself in (strange both to her and to us).
This disorientation and fear associated with everyday objects relates to the principles of Transcendental Meditation and it’s relationship to the physical world. If TM is capable of influencing war and traffic accidents, then it must work on some level above the substrate of the physical world. And though the practice of TM itself is now marketed as a religion-free practice, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi states that his teachings are based on the principles espoused by the Adi Shankara. Adi Shankara consolidated the principles of the Advaita Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy, best defined through his statement “Brahman is the only truth, the world is unreal, and there is ultimately no difference between Brahman and individual self.” Brahman is the truth of existence, an idea of God that includes all things that exists as components of Brahman.
Adi Shankara also contributed the concept of “maya” to Advaita Vedanta. Maya is that which covers up the reality of the unified Brahman-nature of the world, cloaking it in our experience of the physical world (including our own illusion of being an individual self). Brahman is hidden behind our experience of the world as a series of discrete physical realities. We could also say the same about the illusory distinctions between past, present, and future.
The illusions of maya, like the illusions of cinema, only serve to separate us further from truth, a separation that inevitably (according to Adi Shankara) causes suffering. The obstacles to our self-actualization (a goal of TM practice) are twofold: the object-nature of the physical world and, especially in IE, our investments in fictions.¹
For this reason Lynch is skeptical both about the objects we encounter and the roles we play, and encourages us to be aware of the pitfalls of both. “Nikki Grace,” the actress who both portrays and becomes “Susan Blue,” suffers extensively because of her investment in fictions. The dangers that she experiences are due entirely to her taking on the actor’s project of inhabiting another (false?) skin, which then becomes truer than “Nikki,” even inside her own head. As she dives within her new character, that’s when the trouble begins…

¹ These two concepts, which I separate here to emphasize the problem of fictions in particular, are two aspects of the logic that the physical nature of the world is itself a fiction. By "fiction," I mean specifically the act of role-playing and the inherent lies told in the process of creating/distributing art. Might these lies actually serve the service of greater truth? That may be one of the philosophical ramifications of the film's final minutes - including the song "Sinner Man" playing over the credits accompanied by the presence of Lynch actors from other films.



Click here for Part 3: Memory, Identity, Confusion, Recursion: Narrative Structure in Inland Empire - A Primer

Notes on INLAND EMPIRE, Part 1

The first in a series of selections from my work-in-progress on David Lynch's Inland Empire. Among other concepts, the piece uses the work and theories of Chris Marker as a partial guide to understanding IE in its aesthetic and structural contexts.
First I'll address Lynch's efforts to become the Griffith of our new media era.
Please email feedback or comment below. Though the article does not currently have a publication venue, I'm considering my blogging as the presentation of a work-in-progress, presented in sections. Waiting for the pieces to fit together as a coherent whole would do a great disservice to my subject.
Though this section is largely without spoilers, it is aimed at those who have already seen the film.


Creating a New Folk Culture: Future Cinema Aesthetics and the Rise of the Backyard Filmmaker

Inland Empire is not universally ugly. It is often intentionally ugly, and very often intentionally amateurish. But why? David Lynch has vowed never again to shoot on film, in spite of his avowed love of the look of film. What effects might this have on Lynch’s work? And what does this decision mean for the future of motion pictures?
Chris Marker has stated that “film won’t have a second century.” Cinema culture is moving irrevocably to hobbyist-produced small-screen filmmaking, and David Lynch has chosen to abandon traditional filmmaking tools in favor of the tools of the amateur. Just as Dante invented modern Italian by writing his Divine Comedy in the Tuscan dialect, so Lynch is creating a new vernacular language of filmmaking by combining his control of the medium with the tools of the masses and the realities of cinematic production in the (still developing) age of full cultural democracy.
Lynch’s aesthetic devotion to this new cinematic language extends from his choice of camera to his use of framing, choreography, actors, and music to mimic amateurism. IE was shot on the PD150, an affordable prosumer camera with the identifiable look of digital video. DV’s technical freedoms (low-light shooting, freer camera movement, and the elimination of shooting costs) allowed Lynch to work without a script and improvise during takes. Like YouTube serialism or Chris Marker’s Immemory CD-Rom, IE explores narrative fracture as a component of the new dominant viewing experience of the masses – the aggregation of discrete multimedia events.
At various moments in IE, Lynch frames his actors in ways that mimic internet video, or poor student filmmaking (the extreme closeups of Nikki’s first conversation with her new neighbor set this precedent in the first scene). In another mimic of YouTube aesthetics, Lynch incorporates poorly rehearsed choreography routines to pop songs, and uses amateurish (“bad”) actors in some of the film’s smaller roles. There are even moments where his use of music feels like this new digital auteurism; his use of a Beck song is too loud vis-a-vis the scene, too extensive a sample to smoothly fit into the story, and too obviously placeable without reflecting on the narrative to serve as an effective emotional cue.
Lynch draws connections between this new aesthetics and previous folk cultures. By establishing a folk tradition of subverting Hollywood narrative presentation (the curse on On High in Blue Tomorrows), Lynch implies the demolition of Hollywood storytelling strategies at the hands of a new set of digital auteurs – amateur and backyard filmmakers. “Rabbits,” the ‘sitcom’ populated three human-sized rabbits, was shot literally in Lynch’s backyard, and picks apart the conventions of sitcom as a cause-effect simple narrative (misplaced laugh tracks and dialogue that gives no clues as to meaning or content). Like most of Lynch’s recent output (self-distributed on his website) it began as a series of short episodes in serial form. David Lynch, like Chris Marker before him, suggests that the age of narrative cohesion in longform storytelling has passed.



I won't make any promises on which section I'll excerpt next, but I'm leaning towards my section on IE's relation to Transcendental Meditation.

Click here for Part 2: Going Inland: Inland Empire and Transcendental Meditation
Click here for Part 3: Memory, Identity, Confusion, Recursion: Narrative Structure in Inland Empire - A Primer