serial consign

The last week has been quite hectic! I'm in the midst of rebuilding Vague Terrain in Drupal, exploring some exciting new opportunities and knuckling down for an impending crunch at my day job. Despite all this activity, I've been diligently working through some great writing and media. Please note the following:

• _Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_, a new blogging project by the prolific poet/theorist Mez Breeze. Mez launched Augmentology this past April and she has quickly amassed an (expectedly) idiosyncratic series of posts which explore notions of presence, identity and play across a variety of gaming and social media platforms. Mez is in the midst of expanding the scope of Augmentology by inviting a number of guest contributors to provide content for the project - these will tentatively include: Joseph Delappe, Howard Rheingold, Azdel Slade, Trevor Dodge and Shane Hilton. I've also been invited into the fold, and I am excited at the prospect of further exploring some of the themes I've touched on in my previous posts on gaming.
• Last week Mitchell Whitelaw tipped me off about Strange Ontologies in Digital Culture, a paper that he recently co-authored with Troy Innocent and Mark Guglielmetti. The essay explores the implications of social software (facebook, del.icio.us, etc.) and some of the counterintuitive percepts and phenomena made possible by immersion in digital space. I found the discussions on death in gaming and character deletion particularly engaging.
• The video archives of the recent Software Studies workshop/symposium at UCSD have been posted. The two dozen or so pecha kucha-style presentations provide an incredible window into the current research projects of numerous top shelf digital theorists and practitioners including Jordan Crandall, Warren Sack, Nick Montfort, and many others. I've only watched a few videos thus far, but I found Ian Bogost's presentation on the forthcoming Platform Studies project quite fascinating.

I first encountered the writing of Alex Munt while doing research for a post on David Lynch last summer. While googling various ephemera related to Lynch's recent work I came across the article Inland Empire: The Cinema in Trouble?, which stopped me dead in my tracks. This text, which Munt penned for Flow TV, is indicative of his dynamic reading of cinema and related analysis of emerging methods of production and distribution. Alex is a Lecturer in the Media Department at Macquarie University (in Australia) and his focus is on digital low-budget cinema and new directions in screenwriting and feature filmmaking. Alex and I have been emailing back and forth for the last several weeks and the transcript that follows provides a fascinating window into his research.

One of the most recognizable characteristics of your writing about film is that you spend quite a bit of time "off the screen" addressing new means of distribution (i.e. YouTube) and production techniques (i.e. pro-am gear). A binary that turns up in your Feature Film: A ‘You Tube Narrative Model’? article is the divide between 'Elite Digital' and 'Democratic Digital'. Could you discuss the difference between these paradigms and speculate as to what commercial cinema can learn from YouTube?

In terms of staying ‘off the screen’ (at least part of the time) – I think it is important space to occupy, in order to think about ‘the digital’. The digital is a quantity that needs to be situated for each particular medium. For the cinema, there has been two main digital forces – and in opposite directions. That is, the evolution of high-end digital visual effects (as CGI) in Hollywood and the experiments in digital low-budget cinema, since the mid 1990s. (This is not a new idea in itself, one noted by Lev Manovich, who uses the term ‘Digital Realism’ to situate the work of the Dogme95 brethren, and their ‘lo-fi’ approach to digital feature filmmaking). In each case, via altogether different digital production and post-production pathways, we arrive at the long-form narrative feature film. So the digital, for the cinema, is less a revolution, and more of a remediation, or mutation, often subtle – so we need to pay particular attention to what’s going on with the scripts, behind the camera, with the crews and digital kit and then in the edit suite. Hollywood CGI is not a big part of my own research, but there is a lot of interesting work here. Shilo McClean in her book Digital Storytelling argues that digital visual effects (she calls DVFx) far from being extraneous - are actually having a decisive impact on Hollywood narration, scripts, story and style, for CGI Hollywood cinema. And by the same token, for new low-budget cinema – I see the digital as a real catalyst for a reconsideration, and opportunity for innovation, in narrative, film form and aesthetics of the moving image. In this domain, transformations are evident in film-practice: from ‘open’ scriptwriting, to the use of micro-crews and the shift to HD digital cinematography and affordable digital colour-grading, with software like After Effects. I’ve referred to this digital as ‘democratic’ since as film-practice, it is relatively accessible. And what I think is new here, is the evolution of the digital aesthetic for the moving image, at the low-budget end. In the first Dogme wave, the digital aesthetic got harnessed to a polemical, and rather limiting, single aesthetic dictated by the Dogme95 manifesto, and realised as grainy, shaky cinematography cut to abrupt editing patterns, with minor post production treatment. However, in the current wave of micro/low-budget, small-scale digital cinema, since around 2000, ‘the digital’ is given more room to move. For example, iconic directors like Kiarostami and Lynch both rework their distinctive brand of cinema, the Indie movment goes digital – with Mumblecorps in the US or WarpX in the UK, together with the impact of a wider digital culture on cinema - Web 2.0, social-networking and of course the video explosion, synonymous with YouTube. And for me, this is all really exciting stuff.

[jason eisener / hobo with a shotgun (faux grindhouse trailer) / 2007]

Which gets me to the second part of your question – what can commercial cinema learn from YouTube?, which I would re-phrase this ‘what can narrative cinema learn from YouTube?’, since it casts a wider net. For me, there are three main lessons. The first lesson is at the level of film form, or cinematic form, there is an opportunity to (productively) explore the fragmentation of the long-form feature. This could work, for example, as a reconsideration of a modular, or tableaux, approach to the feature film - something explored by Jean-Luc Godard (among others) in the 1960s. And using fragmentation as part of a low-budget filmmaking process. Then, this idea lends itself to questions about the distribution of features. Once you have a feature, accumulated in parts, in a rigorous cinematic experiment, then film collides with an array of new, and presently immature, narrative models such as webisodes and mobisodes, deployed within a clip-based culture. The second lesson is to engage with the YouTube aesthetic. As audiences become more and more conditioned to an uncontrolled aesthetic of the moving image – then film can be remediated in interesting ways. This is evident in the surge of ‘proteur’ productions, where film professionals exploit the amateur process/aesthetic. Be Kind Rewind, Look or Cloverfield are but a few recent examples. The third ‘learning from YouTube’ lesson for the cinema is to rethink the feature film theatrical experience. In particular - how it ties in with the ‘participatory culture’ (Jenkins) spawned by Web 2.0. One interesting case here, is the original (double-feature) Grindhouse from Tarantino/Rodriguez. For the SXSW Film Festival, Grindhouse engaged with clip culture/participatory culture by seeking to splice a series of faux-trailers inbetween the two features (essentially YouTube clips sandwiched in a theatrical feature experience). And I think that this kind of thinking (whilst of course, being part-marketing) is also innovative in looking at a crossover between the very big screen and the very small….

[david lynch on the iphone (on the iphone) / via damien mully]

In S, M, L, XL: The Question of Scale in Screen Media, you talk about screen-anxiety, which speaks to the shifting sands of aspect ratios and the multiplicity of screen sizes we engage on a daily basis. In reading this article, I couldn't help but think of David Lynch's recent freak out over the idea of the iphone as a device on which one could view a film. To get even smaller than the 11 x 8 cm size of a youtube screen do you have any thoughts on the screen space of mobile devices as an arena for a personal cinema?

The Lynch clip gained a lot of hits, but I do think that as it was taken out of context (as I understand it was remixed from one of the DVD extras from the Mulholland Drive disc) it is not representative of Lynch’s engagement with the digital. For Inland Empire, Lynch risked it all: no-script, got behind the camera and acted as self-distributor (in the US) – which is pretty bold. Also, in his book Catching the Big Fish – while Lynch does give his reservations about the precession of the tiny screen - he also engages: “But digital is here; the video iPod is here; we’ve just got to get real and roll with the flow”. Here, he makes some strong points – that sound (as the repressed element of the cinema) will challenge image on the small screen. He also raises a concern for the successful creation of screen ‘worlds’ on such a small canvas.

To my mind, the central issue for mobile media, and personal cinema, is the issue of scale – where scale is taken to mean both narrative scale and the size of the moving image/sound design. In think the challenge will be to get both these things right. The 4th screen, of mobile media, needs some time to find its own space, within the constraints - and the webisodes, mobisodes and precession of clip-culture will see to this. I often find the direct comparisons to the big-screen cinema odd - since I really think it will be a question of both/and and not either/or. That is, new mobile media should steal, borrow, remix and remediate the language of cinema: using a range of shot sizes, framings, ideas on screen space, performance and mise-en-scene – but not replicate it. The most interesting work will be the result of media mutations. I am of the opinion that our 100 plus years of cinema (silent audiences in a dark room, watching a projection of light) will not vanish in a hurry. Certainly, celluloid will disappear (from the mainstream) when the theatres go digital. But in terms of narrative, feature-form and cinema-going (as a cultural activity) the big screen will hold its allure. One interesting crossover – is the migration of the extras bundled with a feature film – to the mobile media screens: the interviews, trailers, remixes, social-networking portals etc. This is part of the ‘cinema of complexity’ (Harper) where a plethora of supplementary media are consumed alongside the feature itself and obviously lends itself to clip-culture. In terms of movement between the small to medium (television) screen – I think the Quarterlife webisodes provide a good example. While this 8-minute drama worked on the small screen (on Quarterlife.com and MySpace TV) when transplanted to NBC - it got the worst ratings for the network in 17 years. And this takes producers/distributors for new and old media back to the drawing board and signals that distribution across the screenscape will not be a mere roll-out of content.

To turn back to Lynch, could you expand on your comments about Inland Empire and his engagement with the digital? In your essay Inland Empire: The Cinema in Trouble? you touch on Lynch's transition from the "picture perfect" cinematography of Mulholland Drive to some of the wonky, overexposed shots in Inland Empire. Could you contextualize a specific shot or sequence from this film that embodies the essence of the "digital" David Lynch?

Inland Empire works as an ‘all at once’ kind of approach by Lynch –its alternative scriptwriting, digital production basis and model of self-distribution (I think this explains the very instability of the film itself). Lynch worked as writer, cinematographer and editor. Saying this, Inland Empire is not an entirely DIY ethos – since it was partly funded by French production company StudioCanal. But in the US, the marketing and distribution has been undertaken by Lynch himself (apparently funded by proceeds from davidlynch.com and sales of his Lynch coffee). Here, Lynch has been visiting individual theatres across the States, introducing himself, then checking his picture/sound on each screen. Given the strength of the Lynch ‘brand’ - I imagine this will be prove a profitable experiment in self-distribution.

In terms of specific shots or sequences – let me answer this in two parts. At the level of the shot: Lynch is always keen to remind us of his start as a painter, and art-school training, prior to his transition to ‘moving paintings’ (his term). Lynch has manipulated the texture, grain, contrast of celluloid in his move from canvas to screen. Think of: the high contrast black and white chiascurro of Eraserhead, or the voluptuous, decadent textures in his subsequent films (those deep, colour saturated, heavy curtains come to mind – which surface in multiple films). But Lynch’s new leap - to the grainy and pixelated images of handheld DV in Inland Empire is a big one. And for consumers of analogue-Lynch, is one that requires some effort, and perhaps patience. The type of shots which I think represents digital-Lynch are the portraits of the characters of Inland Empire captured with a Sony PD150, using a wide-angle lens, up-close to the actors: the lighting is harsh and unforgiving, the background rendered in auto-focus, and the colour palette muted, flat and low-contrast. But the images remain distinctively Lynch – in the extreme camera angles (which come closer to his canvas portraits) and because of the consistency in Lynch’s focus on design/set-construction in the film. This is interesting, since it places Lynch, as artist/auteur, in proximity to other amateur image makers – in that, the limitations of prosumer digital technology ensure a consistent digital image aesthetic: from our digital home photos to the cinema screen. I would love to see Lynch take the next step, towards HD digital video for his next project where I think the capacity of the digital as a painterly medium is enhanced, particularly with DIY colour-grading software. And his comments point towards an evolution of his digital cinema when he states “I’m totally embracing the digital world in sound and picture, and I just can’t believe how much control and how many tools are available to us. It’s really beautiful” (Interview with David Lynch by Michael Joshua Rowin).

But for Inland Empire - I don’t think that it is the images/sounds that are most radical – it is the form of the film itself. This gets me to the second part of your question on the identification of particular sequences in the film. Inland Empire is an unwieldy object, one might say ‘masquerading’ as a feature film. In the past, Lynch has actually worked (however idiosyncratically) within reasonably tight parameters of cinematic scriptwriting and narration (see J.J. Murphy’s reading of Mulholland Drive in his book Me and You and Memento and Fargo as evidence of this). But the Lynchian worlds of Inland Empire are something different – they almost seem assembled at random. In my article in FlowTV, I said that it’s a futile exercise to attempt to represent the narrative structure of the film. The closest thing I end up in providing is the metaphor of the wormhole – to connect the worlds/spaces of the film. In fact, it is precisely the radical film form of Inland Empire that has been confronting for some viewers (that is, not the DIY-digital production aesthetic). For my part, I think it the film is very liberating – since it moves narrative cinema towards a condition where the feature film (form) becomes a kind of ‘container’ for moving image media. And it is precisely the extreme episodic cinematic form of Inland Empire that produces some fantastic sequences: when the whores do the locomotion (embedded above) or the LA street scene set to Beck’s Black Tambourine, to name just two. The idea of the feature film as a narrative container – allows a loose assembly of sequences that mimic other contemporary media: the music video, sitcom (the rabbits) and daytime tv. It also makes for a very entertaining theatrical experience – I saw the film at a midnight session at the Sydney Film Festival where it received an enthusiastic reception.

I also want to quickly discuss the script. It was initially reported that Inland Empire was produced without a script – but in a recent interview with Lynch at ReverseShot.com he provides an account of an alternative scriptwriting process used for the film: “So I would script a scene and then go shoot that scene, then write another scene and go and shoot that scene, not knowing if there was going to be anything more than just that scene, or those scenes’ (Lynch interviewed by Rowin). And this is interesting – since it reveals a logic to the distinct ‘container’ form of Inland Empire, as a collection, or assemblage, of random sequences. It also seems to have currency in a digital culture of competing, colliding and intersecting media forms.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I noticed in your writing about Abbas Kiarostami's Ten you accompanied that text with a diagram (detail above) to aid in mapping out the structure of that narrative. Have you worked with graphics to represent any other film narratives? Is this practice common in film writing? Could point us in the direction of any other work along these lines?

This is a kind of David Bordwell-esque mode of thinking about the cinema – as an anatomical breakdown of film narration and structure. My own interests in new digital cinema fuelled the ‘cinematic diagram’ of Kiarostami’s Ten - as way to understand the film. And in Ten (and with Lynch) two of my instincts have been confirmed – firstly, that digital filmmaking allows a rethinking of narrative and cinematic form and secondly, that scriptwriting remains central to the process – for a digital cinema beyond a simple engagement with the latest, smallest prosumer digital camcorder. At present I am working on another cinematic diagram - of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 film Masculine Feminine – again, to understand its peculiar form - caught between oppositional documentary and fictional patterns of narration. This is based on a paper given at the Telling Stories conference in the UK in 2007 and suggest that a good idea for new cinema may be to look backwards to (what I term) ‘retro-modular’ narratives of International Art House cinema.

A key interest in graphic representation of cinema is: if you can understand film form by a visual mapping process – then this may also become a generative device for feature film scriptwriting/form. In terms of others doing similar things – there are the narrative diagrams in Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You (mostly for television). Also, I recently came across a site on Cinemetrics (a link from Bordwell’s) which is free software that you can download which allows you to gather data (in real-time) whilst (re)watching a film – it accounts for the number of shots, average shot length etc. Cinemetrics would create a database for a particular film and provide data for and in-depth anlaysis of the film, and more interestingly, may point to new ways to consider film form/narration.

The other influence on my thinking on the cinema comes from the design world. I was fascinated by Rem Koolhaas’ diagrams for the OMA Seattle Central Library project. These revealed a design-by-diagram approach with direct correspondence in built form – the result being an unwieldy architectural object (recently seen as the backdrop in TVC advertising for European car brands). I was also attracted to one of your own recent posts at Serial Consign about Ritwik Dey's Lifemaps. These kind of things already have a big impact on more experimental modes of screen media, such as media arts projects, VJing, database cinema, video installations etc – but I am most interested in how this new info-culture will effect the cinema, within the boundaries of narrative, feature film. For example, the Lifemaps suggest a potential to meld narrative (in this case autobiographical) and cinematic form – as a new, generative approach to screenwriting/screen media. This could also work across the documentary/fiction divide. Also, these diagrams/maps also reveal the precession of a new aesthetic of information. Lev Manovich has his new book on ‘Info-Aesthetics’ in process – which details the cultural impact of generative, parameter-based software: across new media arts, music-video, advertising, design, architecture and the cinema. Manovich provides the term ‘hybrid media’ to reveal how the old media is today remixed/transformed/mutated towards dynamic forms. This points to an exciting future for cross/inter/hybrid modes of cultural production in a digital environment.

[harun farocki / deep play / photo: juan freire]

Your response is making me kick myself (once again) for missing out on an opportunity to see Harun Farocki’s Deep Play earlier this spring. One of the things I find so interesting about media theory right now is that the word “convergence” which was being tossed around so freely within net culture in the late 1990s feels not only plausible, but pervasive. To get hyper-specific in regards to an “info-aestheticized cinema”, can you recommend any specific work or sequences which hint at what might loom on the horizon?

I’ve only seen excerpts of Deep Play on YouTube. In a wider context it is part of the currency of the video medium – not only due to the explosion of online video portals but also in a media arts context. It seems to me that video (in particular the digital moving image) is the medium of the moment. In answer to your question on the info-aesthetic I’m going to limit myself to the object of my own research at present – the feature film – in an age of media convergence. Here, Deep Play resonates with that idea in new digital cinema that there is a spatial reconfiguration underway – an idea from film theorists Adam Ganz and Lina Khatib. This transition represents a shift from a traditional 2D mode of ‘coverage’ of cinematic space to the mapping of 3D cinematic ‘zones’. I have cited the Beastie Boys’ concert film Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That! as a good example of cinematic space as ‘zone’. The film is introduced as ‘An Authorized Bootleg’. In one interview Adam Yauch/MCA talks about how the film was inspired by a fan’s mobile phone clip taken from one of their live performances and uploaded to the message board on the band’s official web site. The concert is generated from DIY, amateur recording of the event shot simultaneously by fifty fans. It exploits the low-light, unobtrusive/ lightweight and long-take recording functions of consumer cameras. Similar to the mapping of the stadium by the surveillance cameras in Deep Play – the Beastie Boys exploit Madison Square Garden as a cinematic zone: where the ‘story’ of the live concert unfolds not only on stage – but backstage, in the mosh-pit, the bars and (even) bathrooms of the venue. The shift from filmic planes to filmic zones is also evident in the work of UK director Paul Greengrass in his Bourne films – he exploits handheld, run and gun cinematography and rapid-cutting to effect. In his use of ‘live’ locations Greengrass mode of working also represents the hijack of guerrilla filmmaking aesthetics for big-budget cinema. Cloverfield (produced by J.J. Abrams) is another example – where the handheld mapping of a fictional story space (a post-apocalyptic NYC) drove audiences from the theatre with nauseousness. It is important to note that the spatial configuration is not entirely medium dependent: the Beastie Boys opted for Hi-8 ‘retro’ camcorders; Greengrass uses 35mm; and Cloverfield doubles 35mm production for a handheld digital video cameras built into the story. So – the convergence here is one between the broader digital culture (not just the digital medium) and new approaches to filmmaking and film aesthetics. It is interesting to speculate whether the ‘zone’ approach and the mapping of 3D cinematic space will simply be a trend for the cinema or perhaps become the dominant mode of production/aesthetic - and relegate the traditional 2D filmic zones of classical cinema as a twentieth century concern.

Throughout this discussion you’ve mentioned a few online sources for film writing. Can you consolidate a hotlist of media theory blogs or online journals for interested readers?

That’s a big question, but recently I’ve been returning to these sites to (re)consider some of the things we have discussed here:

• J.J. Murphy Blog
• David Bordwell Blog
• Senses of Cinema
• Flow TV
• SCAN
• Bright Lights
• Rouge
• Reverse Shot
• FilmMaker Magazine