Real Time

The past few days have been more than busy, so this is a short one. What are the aesthetic consequences of a cinema that achieve a one-to-one correspondence with real time, or natural time? Leaving aside (for now) all the problems with the very concept of real time, we can see that cinema has been haunted by this question from the beginning. In their own way, Muybridge, the Lumiere bros., Vertov, Warhol and others made objects that foregrounded time. Recent digital cinema--ranging from Mike Figgis's Time Code to  Sokurov's Russian Ark--push this even further.

And surveillance cameras that could potentially capture reality for weeks, months, or years at a time, are perhaps the most avant-garde form of cinema yet. The surveillance camera is "directed" to gaze at something; the image it captures is framed by a screen. Who are the directors of the "movies" made of us in department stores, in parking lots, at traffic lights? In these films, real time innovation is not an experiment, but part of the fundamental grammar of the film itself. Although our postmodern era is often critiqued for churning out nothing but bits, fragments, smaller and smaller units of surface information, here we have in our midst the radical beauty of the long take. Imagine: a digital film with a running time of seven months, three days, four hours, 23 seconds, and counting. The storage of real time in this new digital cinema is yet another genre that remains largely invisible, unmapped, unnamed.

Comments

[Chuck]

I'm really fascinated by thse questions. My current book project focuses on time-travel films, building from the notion that cinema is a kind of time machine. Webcams are another (obvious) alternative here, especially things like Jennicam that run (ran, in her case) nonstop 24/7, filming whatever happens in front of the camera.

What's interesting about Time Code, of course, is the implied editing via sound to direct our attention to one quadrant over the other three. Sound doesn't play quite the same role in department store cameras, though presumably one's attention could be equally divided bewteen several cameras/shots....

[laura]

Hello. I like your blog. (Chuck directed me here, btw.)
About Russian Ark: do you think it's at all important that RA occupies a physical & cultural space that's just about the antithesis of the postmodern non-places you point out as the more usual sites of real time streaming digital video?

[McChris]

Have you read The Maximum Surveillance Society : The Rise of CCTV by Norris and Armstong? It's not film studies per se, but I did read it for a Radio-TV-Film seminar. The authors do an ethnography of surveillance camera operators and discover how the operators choose their subject matter and why.

Another project along these lines was "We Live in Public," which I toured while it was still in operation. Even at the time, it seemed more to do with dot-com hubris than experimental film.

[Nick]

Many thanks for the comments from Chuck, Laura, and McChris. It's great to find kindred spirits out there.
Chuck, your book project on time-travel films and cinema as a sort of time machine sounds fascinating. Do you think that things like Jennicam, surveillance systems, etc. have the equivalent of what we would call a director? This is something I've been wondering a lot about lately. In what sense were some of the "actualities" of early cinema (even some of the Lumiere Bros. films) directed by anyone? Does this new form of hyper-long take cinema (a surveillance camera running 24 hour per day) destroy the old concept of the auteur? I'm very glad to hear that you are exploring this and other topics, and look forward to your book and further postings.

Laura: I had never thought of that question in reference to Russian Ark, but you're right: Sokurov's digital, postmodern experiment happens in such a place of history. In many ways, his film his radically traditional (even reactionary?), but formally avant-garde. (On a personal note, I've always been sort of disappointed in that Sokurov decided to do this bold experiment embedded in a film that is so anti-genre, as if his experiment needed to be above the level of genre--but this is, I know, kind of petty objection.)

McChris, I've not read The Maximum Surveillance Society--I'll have to check it out. It sounds like it directly addresses the question of "intention" and the auteur. Thanks for mentioning this title.

[laura]

I don't see Russian Ark as operating outside genre: it was explicitly marketed (in Australia, at least) to the audience that enjoys heritage cinema, which makes sense. It resembles things like Orlando, generically. A couple years ago I saw a work of Sokurov's that consisted of five screens playing 5 different looped videos of Russian sailors on a submarine going about their daily routine. He's interested in boats, it seems...

[Chuck]

Nick, I see the Lumiere films as pretty stylized. After all, the film of the workers leaving the factory took several takes. But I think your larger questions about "direction," or authorship, is an interesting one. Because of Jennicam's unique formal features (still phots taken every thirty seconds rather than a continuous stream) and the placement of the camera, Jennifer Ringely seems very much like a "director" to me, even if the avant-garde effects that people like Vitcor Burgin admired weren't completely intentional.

I'd be curious to read the book that McChris suggests because it might provide an interesting take on this question. And like Laura, I see Russian Ark vry much in the art film/costume drama genres. While the trailers for the film billed it as "experimental" and forgrounded that element, the visuals all emphasized the visuals--flowing costumes, fantastic settings, etc.

[Stu Willis]

Why does something need an author to be valid? How can we tell who the author really is anyway? Why do we insist that films are the work of one or two authors? Why can't filmmaking be a kind of collective authorship - the same way that 'Radiohead' is the author of their music, rather than just, say Thom York? Who defines the author - and what ideologies does that act of defining reflect?

[Hey, I am biased. I have serious problems with the auteur theory. I particularly have a problem in how its used to create a hierarchy in the canon of cinema. If you want to smash the dominant ideology of cinema then renounce auteurism! Hehehe.]

Why do we need to find authors in 'CCTV' and 'Survillenace' footage in order to study it? Don't you think the lack of authorship is what makes it interesting... and also, kind of, scary in the who-is-accountable-for-this kind of way? e.g. Big Brother. This bother's heavily from the 'reality' aesthetic of CCTV but is heavily edited to construct drama.

[Nick]

I think these questions of authorship that Chuck and Stu raise get to the heart of perhaps a newly emerging digital aesthetics. It's interesting that Rule No. 10 of the Dogma 95 "Vow of Chastity" states that "The director must not be credited." I've been reading Tom Gunning's book on early cinema, D.W. Griffith and the Origin of American Narrative Film, where he touches on the emergence of the concept of the "director" in cinema. Gunning writes that "In film, the director was an even more recent concept" (45); instead, Gunning and others suggest, in early cinema it was often the cameraman and the production company that were associated with authorship of a film. Gunning notes that in early production companies--Vitagraph, Essany, and Biograph--"The concept of the director as a unifying force was not a factor" (46).

In some ways, I think the distributed, networked systems that characterize digital media hearkens back to early models of cinematic authorship. An auteur theory shot through with knowledge of its own obsolescence?

[Stu Willis]

Thanks for joining in Nick. I don't know if you read Millimeter - its a decent magazine - but there was a quote from Alexander Payne where he says: "More and more with experience, I'm understanding that director really is director - directing the energies of othes, rather than so much creating or imposing" (October, 2004, p. 60). Here's the full article: http://millimeter.com/mag/video_fade_black_32/index.html

I think there's a lot of truth to that statement and as someone who has come from a 'hands on' background in filmmaking (cinematography, editing) - I feel a little... weird... about directing. I like being involved in design and doing stuff on set cause then I actually feel like I'm MAKING something as opposed to being a conductor.

To raise the point about early cinematic authorship.. well (apparently) the assumption in American copyright is that the *operator* of the camera is the author of an image. I assume that comes from that 'early' cinematic time. Most directors - griffith is an exception - during that period seemed to be little more than foremen. The styles were often imposed by the studio e.g. Warner Brothers' grittiness. The DoPs usually with the Art Directors (!) designed the camera coverage. Writer's wrote 300 pages treatments which were meticulously detailed in action, emotion, and design... and the Producer was the unifying force. The Director just said 'action' and 'cut'.

Even on modern films, that STILL can happen. DoPs set coverage, actors give their own self-direction, writers give detailed 'business' in the script... and the director just kind of watches what happens.... Unless you -really- know whats happened on a movie, I think in most cases its a guess to what extent someone is an auteur. Mira Nair has made nine (I think) movies with the same DoP and its HIM (not her) that designs the coverage. To the casual observer, she has a consistent visual style - but its actually his!

What about Jack Fisk? He has done the mise en scene for everyone of Terrence Mallick's movies. Mallick's "consistent style" is heavily influenced by one of his regular, frequent, collaborators. Based on own experience, the more you work with someone the less and less you actually need to talk to each other about what you're doing. Its an organic creative relationship.

My beef with auteur theory is that it belittles all the wonderful creative influences of - lets face it - a spectrum of artistic geniuses.

But what about digital cinema? I don't think its a networked system. I think what digital cinema does - for better or worse - is enables directors to disassociate from the industralised cinematic process. You don't have to understand film and exposure to shoot something. You don't have to know how to cut on a steenbeck or how to drive an Avid Symphony to cut something. As a Director you can be MORE of a hand's on artist - MORE involved in a creative process than merely talking. Doesn't mean its a good thing, or produces better art, but you can do it far more easily than it was when shooting film.

[Matt]

"If you want to smash the dominant ideology of cinema then renounce auteurism!"

I don't think that's the case as much nowadays as it was back in the days of Cahiers and the like, though, Stu. The dominant school in cinematic theory now isn't auteurism; if anything, it's probably still post-structuralism. The word "auteur" has really just become a buzz word and marketing hook, even if a number of old school auteurists do still work and write from a very director-centric point of view.