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From
Breathless to Blair Witch
Somehow, we are caught in cinematic cross currents so varied, so overlapping and so whirling that tracking its flow is difficult. I'm not savvy enough to presume to be anyone's Vergil crossing the Stygian waters of film's future. But I would like to offer up a few thoughts - personal and idiosyncratic - in a spirit totally against the schematic methodology of my Jesuit training. What I want to explore with you today is not systematic, but the ebb and flow of an ocean print that has swamped me the past several months. The impetus was Godfrey Cheshire's two-part article entitled "The Death of Film" that headlined the arts section of New York Press last August. TV or Not TV In Hollywood's "halycon days of supremacy," it seemed that beneath an often-tranquil subject matter, American film was experiencing a period of challenging technical innovation, much as the artform is today. Television was not perceived to be a new marketing venue for the studios nor an outlet to advertise and pre-sell current releases. Television was the enemy, a new evil empire with the potential to destroy an industry which had had hegemony, if not a veritable monopoly, on America's entertainment dollars. This perception lasted into the Sixties and finally gave up the ghost with a last ditch assault against the demons of pay-TV. Today, of course, we embrace cable TV as a source of crucial secondary revenue for the same studios that a generation ago sought to destroy it. The studio response to television was extraordinary. Fox introduced Cinemascope, and Paramount developed Vistavision. All "A" movies were photographed in color. Three-D moviemaking was everywhere. Thirty-five millimeter magnetic sound on six-track stereo was unfurled and a non-anamorphic wide-screen ratio of 1:85:1 became standard. Interlocked three-camera Cinerama and Cinemiracle processes appeared. Sixty-five millimeter became de rigeur for big roadshow movies. Todd-A-O and Panavision were born, along with a host of proprietary systems. Going to the movies became an event that you could not experience on television. A decade later I entered film school at USC at the crest of France's Nouvelle Vague movement. Our generation represented an anti-technology moment that wanted to take film to the neighboring streets, not studio backlots. We displayed a predictable disdain for the Hollywood factory with its stultifying technical perfection. Gallic cineastes Jean Rouch, Chris Marker and Francois Reichenbach stalked the streets of Paris with 16mm handheld Éclair NPRs - cinema-verité was the buzzword. It took our resident curmudgeon at USC, an Ichibod Crane-looking grad student of uncertain pallor named Harvey Deneroff, to set us straight. Harvey quoted chapter and verse on the myth of new technology, both ours of Godardian jump cuts and that of Hollywood's new gloss and grandeur. We couldn't cite a single thing - color, large-format, 3-D, stereo, split, and multiple screens or handheld available light improvisation - that had not been developed by the end of World War I. According to Harvey, even the zoom lens and sync sound had been developed in cinema's early decades. And you know, he was right. So here we sit today, just past the cinema's centennial celebration and the excitement of new technology is again leaving us ever-intoxicated. Wisdom, however, heeds us to pause, cast a look back at the recent history of our magical art and ask ourselves, "What really is new, after all?" I am reminded of a wonderful moment in Contempt (1963), a meditation on cinema and Homeric classicism that marked Jean-Luc Godard's first and only flirtation with mainstream international film. What a cast he had: Michel Piccoli as screenwriter/script doctor Paul; Brigitte Bardot as Camille, his wife; Jack Palance as Prokosch, the soulless American producer; and the monocled Fritz Lang as himself. They are sitting in a screening room watching dailies for what is supposed to be a Joe Levine-type, sex-and-swordplay epic. (Levine, in fact, produced Contempt - in collaboration with Georges de Beauregard and Carlo Ponti - allegedly because he wanted to see Bardot naked.) The houselights come up, and Prokosch leaps to his feet, ranting about the crap he has just seen - endless tracking shots of Greek statues with painted heads and painted pudenda. Fritz Lang looks on dispassionately: his main contribution is to say that he doesn't like the anamorphic format anyway - it's only good for photographing funerals and snakes. Prokosch is standing in front of the white projection screen, which is bordered in a band of blue. Across the bottom - in white letters - reads the ironic legend "Le cinema e un'invenzione senza avvenire" or "The cinema is an invention without a future," as once said by French film pioneer Louis Lumière. New Wave Squared The period of Hollywood's hegemony referred to earlier ended in the United States with the tsunami of the French New Wave, which began in Europe in the annus mirabilus of 1959-60 with the release of Hiroshima, Mon Amour, The 400 Blows, Breathless, La Dolce Vita and L'Avventura. A few years later, these seminal films found their way to New York and Hollywood. Their artistry became the cinematic textbooks for a generation of film school brats who burst onto the scene in the early Seventies, and who had largely self-immolated within the decade. At least, that's the case according to Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, a between-the-sheets and up-the-nose history of the American Maverick from film journalist Peter Biskind. The energy and experimentation of cinema verité that fueled the New Wave influenced not only the American film school generation but left a vital legacy. Many techniques we witness today are powered by more than the machine-age technology of digital Avid editing and CGI image manipulation. The much heralded non-linear storytelling of films like Pulp Fiction (1994), Go, Election, the first person camera of The Blair Witch Project and the frenetic street action of Run Lola Run (all produced in 1999) have strong antecedents in the New Wave. It is more than a catchy phrase that has led movie journalist Patrick Goldstein in a recent LA Times Calendar piece to speak of the New, New Wave in America. What distinguishes the varied visions of these emerging directors - such as Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia), Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for A Dream), Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich), Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don't Cry), David O. Russell (Three Kings) and Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects) - is that many are not the product of film schools. Most bring other life experiences to the table. "Directors are the rock stars of the end of this century. You can see the burst of new energy everywhere," says Jersey Films co-chairman Stacey Sher. "Kids now think they can pick up a camera and express themselves in the same way that they used to pick up a guitar and start a band. What has changed is that Hollywood has finally taken notice of amateur digital video cameras, I-Mac DVs and the Internet because a proverbial, 800-pound gorilla has jumped on it. This fin-de-siecle media swamp is not at all subtle. The $180 million gross of The Blair Witch Project was a rude wake-up call to an industry bloated on $20 million plus salaries for actors, non-stop pyrotechnics and firepower. Meanwhile mainstream directors Spike Lee (Bamboozled) and Mike Figgis (Timecode) are shooting films with consumer digital camcorders and skeleton crews. Whether this suggests a Dogma '95 aesthetic (a sort of digital New Wave in itself) breaching studio gates or just a stylistic exercise by two noted experimentalists, is anybody's guess. Theorems of Light As cinematographers, we are privileged to be living in an age of intense interest in democratization of the image. It has not always been so. A millennium series issue of The New York Times Magazine (September 19, 1999) entitled "New Eyes" engages a number of artists and critics to re-imagine milestone moments of the past 1000 years. Luc Sante's essay "Triumph of the Image" reminds us that the cave paintings of Lascaux - humanity's oldest record of figural representation - is evidence that pictorial representation (the creation of images) is as basic as language to the development of the human species. But until the modern era, access to artistic images was a privilege owned by the wealthy. For the millennium's first half, churches and temples were the principal repositories of images, and those depicted icons of worship. The story of Western art is a record of how the pictorial plane evolved from a hierarchic, Byzantine gold field, through the discovery of single-point perspective in the Italian Renaissance and the Dutch School's detailed recording of quotidian life. Use of the camera obscura and the development of light sensitive paper created reproducible photography such as the calotype. Muybridge and Marey's time-motion photos (circa the late 19th century) led directly to motion pictures. Each of these inventions created the inevitable proliferation and democratization of images. Television, personal video cameras and the Internet are merely the next stages in an ongoing dialogue of discovery between the human mind and the human eye. Today, still and moving images wash over our consciousness every waking moment. In this sea of images how do our jaded sensibilities establish order, priority and aesthetic pleasure? Maybe they don't or can't. Maybe, as suggested by the world of music videos, no hierarchy of meaning exists, and maybe there is just an accumulation of images. Perhaps images are not meant to be discrete but just part of a larger data field. According to Luc Sante, "In the 20th century, imagery exploded. The improvement and simplification of photography and the development of high-speed, accurate full-color printing processes made it possible for pictures to appear everywhere. The image passed from a carefully tended hothouse plant to a weed, burgeoning on every corner of every street and in every corner of every room. By 1920, it was already impossible to escape the proliferation, from the giant billboards outside to the printed ephemera that collected in drawers. Movies ruled, then a bit later 3-D movies, widescreen movies, television, color television, cable television, video, home video, video billboards, computer imaging, CD-ROMs, virtual reality and so on." What intrigues me about this extended quote is the final phrase "and so on," a clever verbal fillip. The sheer speed of change in visual technology this century, even this decade, has humbled even the futurists - much less an astute critic like Sante - as effective prognosticators of what happens next. At this point, it is almost axiomatic to connect recent stylistic changes in narrative filmmaking to influences from the sphere of interactive computer games and the fascination of net cruising. An ever-shortened attention span is creating a new paradigm for films. Non-linear digital editing has given editors and directors unparalleled freedom to explore new modes of cinematic structure. This tool has also made it too easy to simply eliminate any credible character development. Non-special effect films are using CGI technology simply to create a multi-layered and transparent visual landscape while others - the relentless pursuers of hipness - bounce our eyeballs about like ping-pong balls. Traditional rules of narrative and drama are experiencing a not always happy metamorphosis. Back to the Future What I find compelling about The Blair Witch Project, and why I believe it earned its $180 million in box office revenue, is its intense and insistent first person point-of-view. Hitchcock was a master of cranking up suspense and anxiety by not letting the central characters become aware of the source of their threat (á la Cary Grant in the first half of North by Northwest), and by not having the demons explicitly unleashed. Both of these Hitchcockian conceits are evident in The Blair Witch Project. By using the video camera as an informal diary of unfolding events, and the film camera as the formal recorder of the documentary being made by characters Josh, Mike and Heather, the audience focuses on a relentless, first person POV. The frame may be shakily handheld and haphazardly composed, but you are kept square in the action - much like a video game. Its artless technique is one that a whole generation of "camcorder kids" can recognize and love. This, I believe, is what makes this film so groundbreaking. What gives it such dramatic resonance is Heather's very artless, tent-bound, nighttime confession where she turns the video camera on herself and unburdens her soul in a tearful catharsis. In so doing, she exposes the tentative and uncertain young woman hiding behind the aggressive and foul-mouthed narrator, a harpy who so carelessly dooms her two friends, and traps them in a primitive world where technology and on-line skills offer no salvation. Though many have seen The Blair Witch Project as an all out assault on the traditional guidelines and techniques of moviemaking, to me, it is simply a case of new wine in an old bottle, quite traditional in its narrative style. It has, however, been cleverly marketed in cyberspace. Soon, as some pundits argue, films such as The Blair Witch Project will not even need a theatrical release. Instead, they will just stream over the Internet. The new cybercafe on the lower level of the Museum of Modern Art's current "Modern Starts 2000" installation features two Edison Kinetoscopes installed in a spotlit corner. After inserting a quarter into one, I watched the 1895 film Butterfly Dance. Eyes pressed close to the viewer, the flickering, stamp-size image of the flipping cards reminded me of nothing as much as trying to watch a webfilm on your computer. Truly, this is the very birth of a new medium. In the "Outlook" issue of the New York Times (dated December 20th), journalist Rick Lyman interviews Roger Raderman who, along with Skip Paul are the brains behind the website!Film.com which, with rival sites such as AtomFilms.com, have the potential to become new platforms to exhibit and distribute digital films. Wave upon wave of new technology - exploiting compression software, streaming video and broadband- present tantalizing possibilities for a generation of alternative filmmakers. In the ever-accelerating phenomenon of Andy Warhol's "15 minutes of fame," these upstarts could leave the emerging New Wave of Hollywood directors beached on a desolate sand dune, scanning the horizon for their retreating ship of repute. With Hollywood studios aggressively exploring digital cameras in the production, post-production, distribution and exhibition levels, it is doubtful that they perceive any Internet cinema as a threat to their primacy. The proliferation of webfilm sites could become the world's largest draft pool for the studios, leaving the existing film schools and faculty in the same dustbin as celluloid. On the other hand, the recent AOL-Time Warner merger seems to be the harbinger of a new world media synergy. In the past few months, I have seen several feature-length films in digital projection - movies photographed with all the subtlety and range of which Kodak film is capable - and I find the results disquieting. Digital projection can be quite good considering how new the process is, but it isn't film resolution. The most compelling reasons that studios seem to be pushing it so hard and so fast have to do with marketing, not artistry. In an article in last August's issue of Film and Video, Leon Silverman, executive vice-president at Laser-Pacific, complains that these public demonstrations of digital projection in commercial theaters are causing confusion. "People think digital cinema is here. It's not - only the promise of what might be" To make matters worse, summertime releases in digital projection, such as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, An Ideal Husband and Tarzan, created a media frenzy and put many cinematographers including me, in a defensive if not contrarian, posture. In the same Film and Video piece, Disney's Phil Barlow notes, "The opportunity for the quality of the picture in digital exceeds the improvement in film. That's not to say Kodak and Technicolor haven't done a brilliant job and I truly hope they continue to go forward. But we are limited by how quickly film can be improved." I don't mean to contradict my colleague Phil Barlow, but I guess the target word here is "opportunity." Opportunity represents potential not reality and, as Digital Domain's Rob Hummel so fondly points out, film is 100 years of proven medium, and an archival one at that. Meanwhile, adherents of improved film projection systems such as Dean Goodhill with his promising Maxivision 500 system, struggle to be heard above babble. What finally matters to cinematographers is the quality of the image. Though Technicolor's demonstration of its revitalized dye transfer release printing process was compelling, the benchmark will be a side-by-side comparison of digital with film, in phases of capture, manipulation, rendering and projection. I can only speak for myself by relating my most recent experience with digital. Seventy odd shots in For Love of the Game had CGI work for crowd enhancement, digital baseballs and sign replacement. These were rendering back to film at 2K resolution, which seems to be the working standard for the present. I don't need to tell you that 2K digital rendering is not equal to that of full-frame 35mm Kodak 5245 negative film, captured with an anamorphic Panavision Primo lens with no diffusion. Images Worth Killing For? Last May, I spoke before SMPTE - in the wake of the Columbine killings - and tried to address my personal concerns about our responsibilities as adults, and even as filmmakers in the molding of youthful values. I don't need to reexamine the soul-searching that all of us having experienced since then regarding violence in the media, "shooter" style video games and violence in the very films that we photograph. Film, and increasingly video, have become powerful tools of influence on the minds and hearts of our children. More and more, they will use these tools casually and confidently to express hopes, anxieties and anger. Imagemaking will become a powerful tool for creation of social integration or of solipsistic fantasies of rage. We must listen and we must watch and, above all, we must use our skills to help guide them: for we are gatekeepers to a brave new world of images that will have the power to transform their very lives. The author delivered an expanded version of this paper at "Cinematographer's
Day," a three-day seminar held at the Palm Springs Film Festival
in January |
