back to being an art form

"I have lost count of the number of articles proclaiming the imminent or actual death of the music industry. Does this mean that music can now go back to being an art form again? & If so, is it the first art form to begin adapting itself to the post-capitalist society we now find ourselves living in? Or is it just something you get free when you buy a mobile phone?"
- Jarvis Cocker

Futures of Film in the Age of Digitally Infinite Reproduction (#1)

Roger Erik Tinch of CineVegas has a great post today on 'Distribution & Consumption in 2009.'

Here's a salient tidbit:

Short form content is online king

Duh, right? Then why are companies still trying to push for feature film distribution through widgets and the like? Who wants to watch a two hour movie on a 2-inch by 2-inch size player? Go to what’s this year’s success story, Hulu, and see what the top 20 viewed videos are. Most are between 10 - 20 minutes with a smattering of 44 minute episodes. The first feature film doesn’t show up until #27 with the THE FIFTH ELEMENT. The fact that a big Hollywood film on a popular video site that’s being shown for free can’t even break into the top 20 reveals a lot about our viewing habits.

(via)
(thanks to Harry for sending this along)


The feature film's market dominance was a historical contingency, a result of combining the facts of distribution and production with the facts of the market. We're often fooled by this dominance. This dominance covers the majority of cinema-time, but an eye-blink in human time. Human narrative forms long predate even the novel.

The future of cinema online is closest in format to advertiser-interrupted television. Think of any tv show - any show at all - and format it for air with advertisements, and you get neat little 8-minute segments, each with a narrative arc all its own. The relationship between segment and show is something like the relationship between one episode of Mad Men and the season in which it appears. What online content does is increase the importance of the miniature narrative arc.

One of the brilliances of The Da Vinci Code is the way in which it creates another cliffhanger on every third or forth page before breaking away to another portion of the narrative, changing perspectives or introducing new information. Dan Brown's chapters are perfectly suited to the reading format of the present age. A cinema of the future will need to embrace this format to be (financially) successful.

This comparison to The Da Vinci Code should not be mistaken for pessimism. This format of the future, this future of cinema, can also be thought of as a variation on the structure of Out 1.

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."

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