Reverse Shot. 22.

"For this issue, we attempted a unique approach by asking our writers to select a filmmaker who's traditionally worked in film and has moved to digital video, as a brief sidestep or a career-changing ideological statement," announce Reverse Shot editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert. "Then we asked them to contrast and compare this digital foray with their earlier cinematic style (unfortunately no one picked up the offered gauntlet of The Godfather vs Youth Without Youth).... Do we see differences in shooting style? Has digital editing had an impact? What does this all mean in terms of aesthetics? Or storytelling?"

Eric Hynes: "Coppola and De Palma went video in 2007. Lynch went video in 2006, Michael Mann in 2004. Eric Rohmer did it in 2001. Following technological strides in the late 90s, the above projects by established masters would seem to provide an historical time frame for an above-mentioned sea change. Except, when did Jean-Luc Godard first make a feature with video? That would be 1975, thank you very much.... By 1975 and Numero Deux (in the time it takes many filmmakers to complete a single film) he was through with propagandistic projects and pronouncements, and ready to address video not as an arm of the proletariat but as a vocational option, with benefits and drawbacks, as well as an aesthetic and mechanical tool to be pondered, tested, used, and abused."

"As the aesthetic-material history of cinematography goes, [David] Fincher's 2007 feature, Zodiac, shot by Harris Savides just might prove to be the turning point for rethinking the way the night is photographed, a revolution that comes about because of Savides's beautifully, ineluctably alien experiment with digital video," writes James Crawford.

"Contempt had bred familiarity." Kevin B Lee on how a 2004 screening of Saraband caused him to lay to rest "a decade of personal misgivings and outright scorn I had harbored against Ingmar Bergman." Why? "In a word, digital. Startling as it was to see [Erland] Josephson and [Liv] Ullmann together after three decades - like encountering one's high school enemies after years of separation - their appearance on HD doubled this perverse nostalgia effect. The sight of them awash in a strange new palette of colors and textures - drawn in hard contours but brushed in soft metallic pastels - suggested classic Bergman being beamed from a digital afterworld."

"To set a movie like Days of Heaven next to something like The New World is to compare two films that have been assembled with completely different technologies, products of two different filmmaking eras." And Chris Wisniewski concentrates specifically on editing - cautiously: "To speak of 'going digital' in the context of editing takes a conceptual leap of faith predicated on tenuous counterfactual speculation, a guess - that the tools and the process have impacted the final result in ways we can more or less deduce, even though we can never know with certainty that the film we're watching would have been different if the tools used to edit it were different."

Leah Churner opens up an interesting case: "Mike and George Kuchar have proudly marched in step with the consumer-grade vanguard for over 50 years. Their filmography, which covers big-ticket issues of the second half of the twentieth century (the atom bomb, thalidomide pregnancies, UFOs, the sexual revolution, AIDS, and F-4 tornados) is a tour of the 'puny' formats: 8mm, 16mm, Video-8, Hi-8, and now MiniDV. Their story helps to sully the film/digital divide. When they switched from Bolex to camcorder in 1985, it was a paradigm shift; when they switched from analog to digital video in the 90s, the difference was hardly discernable."

"The equipment is always improving, always refining, and will certainly overtake celluloid as the defining capture and delivery tool for movies, even if it retains a certain level of imperfection. If little of the audience can note the difference, does it even matter?" asks Jeff Reichert. "A generally disrespected figure like Robert Zemeckis may well prove to be a flashpoint for unlocking this moment."

"Like many directors (Hitchcock being only the most psychoanalyzed), Lynch is obsessive, even anal, about each aspect of his films," writes Leo Goldsmith. And Inland Empire "is all about self-control.... But if this is true, why is Inland Empire such a mess? Why is it a film that, unlike any previous Lynch film, seems to lack control entirely, that flits from scene to scene - indeed into and out of various diegeses - almost at random? Has Lynch in fact lost, rather than gained, control with this new medium?"

"[I]s there any 'filmmaker' who faces the shifts within his chosen medium with such blissful unconcern as Chris Marker?" asks Andrew Tracy. "Though Marker has been supplanted from his own experiences by the record he's kept of them, pushed even further away by the interpolation of the filmed records of others, it can be said that his aesthetic is founded precisely upon losing images - losing proprietorship over them, seeing them taken away and transformed by each successive incarnation.... Like his fellow recluse Godard, Marker is forever concerned with the meaning of the image, but where Godard's palimpsests overload those images with meaning both visual and aural, the meaning of Marker's images is being forever stripped away, and any trace of his 'authorship' with it."

"In his last two films, [Michael] Mann has used video to enrich and make palpable his earlier works' angular sheen," writes Ryland Walker Knight. "The familiar is foreign, the margin is focused, and action takes on a new weight in tandem with its new speed."

"Is it the use of video - its mobility, the allowance of endless takes and pickup shots, the cheapness of the tape - that has permitted [William] Greaves to construct [Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take 2 ½] with more traditional images?" asks Michael Koresky. "In other words, had the burden and cost of shooting on film in [Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One] forced him to forgo these familiar tropes, relying instead on whatever captured images he could assemble into a somewhat chronological whole? The answers aren't easy, but that the questions remain testifies to the thin line between invention and pragmatism in experimental filmmaking, as well as the fortuitousness that contributed to Take One's brilliance and the lack of spontaneity that makes Take 2 ½ more of an interesting oddity than an equally valuable work."

Benjamin Mercer notes that, all these long years after his 1989 debut, sex, lies and videotape, "Soderbergh still uses video as a medium of unbridled confession, a unique outlet for furtive unburdening. Full Frontal was even heralded as a kind of spiritual sequel to sex, lies, and videotape, and while it didn't come close to duplicating that film's immense financial (or critical) success, the claim is certainly more than a disingenuous sales pitch. Soderbergh still delights in playing the voyeur, and a look at his body of work suggests it's video that allows him to do so most freely."

"If we don't herald or appreciate [Robert Altman's] The Company as a revelation on the same level of In Praise of Love or Inland Empire it's because the film's innovation is so much absorbed into the process of the filmmaking that we can't immediately know its technical import," argues Michael Joshua Rowin. "But that process is the secret treasure which when once discovered makes us fully appreciate just what a miracle - a minor one perhaps, but a miracle - it really is."

"Writing in his film column for the Village Voice in 1963, [Jonas] Mekas predicted that 'the day is close when the 8mm home movie footage will be collected and appreciated as beautiful folk art, like songs and the lyrical poetry that was created by the people,'" notes Eric Kohn. "More than a prophetic statement, it was a declaration of aesthetic intent. Ever the fierce guardian of independent cinema, shielding it from the deleterious pressures of studio product, Mekas recognized cinematic redemption in the formal properties of thriftiness."

Posted by dwhudson at April 28, 2008 4:12 PM