Film After Film. J. Hoberman
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essence of the first motion pictures. (Pace Bazin, there are passages where In Praise of Love appears like a fact of nature while Hollywood movies, exemplified by Schindler’s List and The Matrix—which are, at least by association, digital—are rather, Godard insists, a substitute for history.)
Such cinematic eulogies were not uncommon in the early twenty-first century. These twilight movies include Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), a lament for vanished popular cinema, its audience, and its means of presentation, in a specifically Taiwanese context, as well as several notable avant-garde films such as Pat O’Neill’s Decay of Fiction, Bill Morrison’s Decasia, and Ernie Gehr’s Cotton Candy (all released in 2002). As Tsai presented the ghost-ridden movie theater, so Decay of Fiction evokes a haunted movie set. O’Neill spectrally populated the abandoned Ambassador Hotel, an old-time movie-star hangout and frequent movie location, with transparent actors dressed according to period styles.3
In a 2011 roundtable on experimental digital cinema, filmmaker Lynne Sachs identified a nostalgic “fetishism of decay,” noting digital effects designed to simulate film scratches and dust: “We don’t want things to age. Nevertheless, we miss the chemical reactions, the fact that physical things change, so we simulate decay.” Each in its way, Decasia and Cotton Candy savor photographic disintegration even as they are overtly preservationist in intent. Rather than a moldering hotel, Morrison documents decomposing 35mm nitrate footage culled from a number of film archives, while Gehr records the ancient pre-cinematic toys in San Francisco’s Musée Mécanique, notably the sort of hand-cranked photographic flip-book known as mutoscopes and most particularly (so it seems) those with photographs that are torn, faded or damaged.4
We may not, per Babette Mangolte, experience time according to the rhythm of twenty-four frames per second, but we are watching change. That Decasia and The Decay of Fiction have been largely exhibited in digital form while Cotton Candy was digitally produced infuses their pragmatism with a measure of rueful, guilty digital ambivalence. (The abandonment of the old medium is similarly acknowledged in Linkletter’s Waking Life which, shot and edited as an ordinary motion picture, yet proposes a new sort of indexicality.) At the same time, however, several distinguished film artists created digital works which in their use of real time and duration, could be said to make the motion picture medium more itself. However dissimilar, Abbas Kiarostami’s “undirected” Warholian tracking film and acting vehicle Ten and Aleksandr Sokurov’s ninety-five-minute single take Russian Ark amplified each other for both premiering in competition at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. (Neither won any awards.)
Russian Ark, in which Sokurov’s camera tours Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum in one choreographed movement, was distinguished by a number of historical achievements—as the first unedited single-screen, single-take full-length feature film; as the longest single SteadiCam sequence; and as the first uncompressed High Definition movie recorded onto a portable hard disc. And yet, as pointed out by Rodowick, who insists that “digitally acquired information has no ontological distinctiveness from digitally synthesized outputs that construct virtual worlds,” the certainty of watching absolute, unmediated continuity is gone. Rodowick does not address the possibility of an automatically printed time code, assuming perhaps that it could be easily forged. Russian Ark has significant post-production manipulation. In some instances, the frame has been resized to eliminate unwanted objects, the camera speed adjusted, the lighting modified, and the color temperatures conformed. In one scene the perspective of a wide-angle lens is simulated, while the movie ends with a swirl of digitally-created snow and fog. No less than The Matrix, then, Russian Ark is an animated movie created from photographic material.5
And yet, Russian Ark’s single take is what Tarkovsky would have called the “impression of time” and the movie is essentially Bazinian, most radically in its performative aspect—that is, in the orchestration of the camera and profilmic event. The same is true for Ten, for which the filmmaker placed his mini-camera on an automobile dashboard to document the conversations of the car’s driver and passengers as they drove through Tehran. Each in its own way, these digitally created “film objects” confound the distinction between staged fiction and documented “truth.” In both cases, the directors have made something happen in life. While these motion pictures may be considered as a form of canned theater, both employ digital technology in order make quintessential motion pictures.
Elsewhere, the loss of indexicality has promoted a new, compensatory “real-ness,” emphasizing film as an object (if only an object in decay). In Praise of Love, which begins in media res and ends with a prolonged flashback, can be understood as a continuous loop—and hence, as a film installation. Goodbye, Dragon Inn—a sort of superimposed double-feature with the older movie “inserted” inside or framed by the newer one—also suggests an installation, perhaps one designed to be projected in the since-demolished Taipei theater where the movie is set. Both Decay of Fiction and Michael Snow’s 2002 perceptual vaudeville show *Corpus Callosum (which, like Decay of Fiction or Eric Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke, is a twenty-first-century Méliès trick-film to Kiarostami and Sokurov’s digital actualités) were exhibited as gallery installations.
History doubles back on itself. *Corpus Callosum ends in a screening room with the presentation of Snow’s crude cartoon of a weirdly elastic, waving human with a twisty foot kick. Rigorously predicated on irreducible cinematic facts, Snow’s structuralist epics—Wavelength (1967) and La Région Centrale (1971)—announced the imminent passing of the film era. Rich with new possibilities, *Corpus Callosum’s self-described “tableau of transformation,” largely set in a generic fun-house office and featuring wackily distorted “information workers,” heralds the advent of the next. Snow and Gehr were at one point in the late 1960s and early 70s considered to be part of the “structural” tendency in avant-garde filmmaking, heavily invested in the specific properties of the film medium. In switching to digital technology, they had demonstrated a comparable concern with the nature of this new medium.
So too, Guy Maddin’s confessional narrative Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), which was initially shown as a ten-part peep show installed on a battery of mutoscopes. Cowards Bend the Knee employed the conventions of silent cinema with transitions marked by irises and intertitles standing in for dialogue; when projected, the action was accompanied by a combination of classical and program music, as well as sound effects. Such gratuitous anachronism is something other (and nuttier) than mere nostalgia. Artisanal puppet animations like Trey Parker’s Team America: World Police (2004) and particularly Henry Selick’s 3-D Coraline (2009), with its perverse, although not absolute, refusal of CGI, are further instances of what might be called the New Realness; related, albeit disparate, examples of willful, neo-retro primitivism would include Maddin’s deliberately silent feature Brand Upon the Brain! (2006), Neil Young’s post-dubbed super-8 protest opera Greendale (2003), and Ken Jacob’s reworked 1903 actualité Razzle Dazzle (2006) which, like Gehr’s Cotton Candy, programmatically fuses ancient photographic and modern digital technology.
The cinema of international film festivals has showcased many successors to the short-lived Dogma movement in the form of modestly produced motion pictures, digital or analog, which, like Kiarostami’s Ten, purposefully blur the distinction between staged fiction and recorded reality. Neither pseudo nor mock documentaries, these movies might be characterized as “situation documentaries,” asserting their media specific realness through the use of long takes, minimal editing, behavioral performances, and leisurely contemplation of their subjects or setting. Drama is subsumed in observation. Landscape trumps performance.
Pedro Costa’s Ossos (1997), In Vanda’s Room (2000), and Colossal Youth (2006) allow Lisbon slum-dwellers to dramatize their lives or, at least, play themselves talking before the camera. With their deliberate compositions and purposeful lighting, Costa’s features have the feel of staged documentaries—as do certain works by China’s Jia Zhangke or the Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl. More radical and less stylized are those unprepossessing, minimalist narratives which are shot like documentaries, notably Kiarostami’s Ten and those of Argentine director Lisandro Alonso—La Libertad (2000), Los Muertos (2004), and Liverpool (2008). Related artists include Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra and the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes; a quintessential example of this rudimentary, rock-hard ultra-literalism is Paz Encina’s Paraguayan Hammock (2006) in which, rather than coaxing