Mistakist Cinema

Director Harmony Korine has called his work "mistakist" cinema--cinema that reveals, rather than hides, its own imperfections. One of the strange things about digital cinema is that even as it succeeds in masking and erasing errors with CGI, post-imaging technologies, etc., there is at the same time a tendency among certain filmmakers and artists to deliberately preserve, rather than eliminate, error.

Jean Baudrillard has written that, in the face of the cold logic of the computer code, the errors that humans make are precisely what make us human. He suggests that while the binary code language (ones and zeros) is literal, then human language is figurative: our language never really corresponds to the so-called real precisely because it is language--it is symbolic. It's interesting that some of the first digital films--such as the Dogma 95 films The Celebration and The Idiots--are examples of mistakist cinema, as are films like The Blair Witch Project, Tape, and Gummo. While the digital image is often the subject of nostalgic critiques that lament its cold, hyper-real logic in the face of celluloid warmth, the first wave of self-consciously digital films are precisely about errors, messiness, and mistakes.

A colleague of mine here at UDM--Marcel O'Gorman, Director of the Electronic Critique Program--and I were recently watching a short film (a music video) by Nagi Noda, for a song by the Japanese pop star Yuki. (The film is included on the RES DVD that comes with Volume 8, issue 2.) The film is one long take (about 3 minutes) that follows Yuki through a series of events. Yuki, however, never moves: what we see instead are hundreds of body doubles, each one frozen in position. Rather than using CGI, Noda used real people--we see them trying to hold perfectly still as the camera slowly tracks by them. But inevitably they blink, or sway slightly. And it is heartbreakingly human. In fact, it is almost thrilling to see this unfold, and we are shocked that there are "mistakes" in the film--that the people are real and not digitally reproduced. As the camera tracks from right to left across the screen--in the manner of manga books--we are confronted with the radical possibilities of digital cinema: not the elimination of error, but its embrace.

Here are a few screen shots from the video: