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SurfingAccident
Tony Keily pushes a board tentatively out
into the storm-tossed question of whether there is anything
we could typically call DV filmmaking.
Let's start with the crypto-philosophical Power to the People
(AKA The Democratising Influence of DV) school, which sees
the fact of access of non-professionals to previously privileged
areas of cultural production as more important than what they
do with it. PTP drags in its wake that old question of who'll
watch the innumerable products of the DV-enfranchised masses.
Answer: the same masses, in a hellish world of inanity where
we are all filmmakers and, hey dudes, anything goes.
There's more though: Film Ireland 83
saw how Hi8 and mini-DV meant that at the Genoa G8 Summit
it was easy to get lot of people onto the ground (sometimes
all too literally) to provide alternatives to mainstream media
accounts. And in feature filmmaking, while more access may
not mean you want to watch everything that's made, it does
translate as a greater quantity of visible talent emerging
from the low and ultra-low budget sector. Let's say emerging
filmmaking talent as opposed to emerging deal-making talent.
Likewise, if your doc isn't approved by some somnolent commissioning
editor at your broadcaster of choice, you can go out and shoot
it anyway. Downside is said broadcaster can pick it up later
for a fraction of what you asked to make it!
The least excitable strand of tape thinking is the Squint
And It's Film school, interested in DV in so far as it can
stand in cheaply for celluloid. As technology races to close
the 'image quality' gap, filmmakers operating on low but not
ultra-low budgets can make a feature film at reduced cost
by saving in certain areas, mainly by eliminating film stock,
large crews, processing and insurance of rushes, maybe also
prints. Obviously, with larger budgets, SAIF savings make
less sense as these items make up a smaller proportion of
total expenditure. Currently cost reduction still has to be
written off against nasty resolution, deeper focus planes,
or the absence of that ineffable film look, not to
mention mind-numbing pub quarrels with DPs in the grip of
celluloid dependency habits. At which point quote Jerome Poyton
of Swiss Effects: "Asking someone to compare celluloid
to digital is like asking someone in 1905 if they preferred
the smell of a horse or the smell of a car."1
All of the above approaches see DV essentially as low-cost
film substitute. Low and ultra-low budget feature filmmakers
are looking for a leg up to 'real' film making. Even in the
Real Indie sector (see our companies feature in this issue),
the debate has less to do with DV in itself than the fight
to break the stranglehold of finance and make vocational
anti-mainstream filmmaking viable. One undoubtedly DV-centric
approach is that used by The Blair Witch Project,
The Last Broadcast, or Series 7, for example. These
films absorb the shortcomings of DV by building into their
plots justifications for familiar visual languages (amateur
video, cheap on-the-hoof TV) normally alien to cinema. Although
highly successful to date in terms of visible titles, this
approach has obvious limitations. If we want to hint at anything
like a digital aesthetic we have to look at the tendencies
the use of DV naturally promotes or facilitates.
On the one hand these might involve 'native'
DV visuals, and making virtues of what are often seen as drawbacks:
searching out the distorting effects of certain colours or
high and low light conditions for flare or decomposition,
then manipulating the image further if and when a tape to
film transfer takes place. In line with this approach, the
opening handheld extreme long shots of Festen are a
statement of intent, as the film went on to demonstrate. And
as DP Anthony Dod Mantle explained, "You're talking words
like 'disintegration' and 'destruction'... I converted the
video to a very high-speed pushed film stock. That way the
digital noise starts to talk to the film grain. I wanted this...
organic mass to bubble up there on the screen."2
Festen is cinema's Velvet Underground
and Nico not just because it spurred ten thousand leftfielders
to go out and try it themselves, but because Dod Mantle (Cale
on the current metaphoric tightrope) so openly embraced distortion.
Another well known low budget DV tendency is the shooting
of 'whole performances', facilitated by the low cost of tape
stock. Festen proved the value of this, while also
underlining the advantages of using a small camera and little
or no lighting. According to director Thomas Vinterberg, "Suddenly
something happened-[the actors] started reacting to each other
rather than the camera. Anthony [Dod Mantle] literally was
climbing over the furniture, or hiding away. And they kind
of forgot it." Dogme's sound-to-image rule helped: "If
we had an image of one extra, all fifty other extras had to
be there too, to create the right sound. So they were on-stage
all the time." Dod Mantle comments on camera size were
equally significant: "What I gained was agility, mobility,
accessibility - what I call the 'emotional movement' of these
small cameras, as opposed to the more premeditated movement
you have to do when you have a heavy film camera on the shoulder.
Coming from documentary, I've learned that... very often you
have to move before your brain really registers what you're
doing."
Dod Mantle's mention of documentary is interesting,
because it's increasingly evident that the obvious benefits
of DV for documentary (mobility, intimacy) can be and have
been carried over into drama. The camera begins to capture
or document unfolding action, rather than accumulate
pre-defined and numbered components for the assembly of a
drama which is fictional in every sense. This was the defining
element in Festen (capturing of the confusion and embarrassment
the extras/guests at the revelation of abuse) or The Idiots
(capturing the emotional overload generated by prolonged
suppression of personality in 'spassing').
In such DV filmmaking with small crews, there
is an inevitable breakdown of distinctions between set and
non-set, between filmable and unfilmable. The actors are not
inhabiting a lit 180° space. And they're 'live' for more
than that pressurised moment between Action and Cut when they
repeat fragments of dictated speech sequences. This is a redefinition
of the quality of the film production space in more than simply
dramatic terms: DV allows the possibility of an event to take
place which is 'filmed at', captured. Harmony Korine's statement
that with Julien Donkey-Boy he was "making some
kind of artefact that documented some kind of action"
takes this tendency one step further. Watching his film, there
is the feeling that we are seeing the drama of a production
rather than the production of a drama: a non-fictional account
of an invented story.
If a certain kind of DV filmmaking reduces the
need for predefinition (in the form of shot lists, story boards,
adherence to the script, or in some cases a script at all),
it's interesting to ask how much of the traditional language
of cinema derives from the financial need for a controlled
production process that can be broken down into pre-fab units.
Of course there have been many celluloid filmmakers with similar
preferences, Cassavetes being the most often quoted example.
Alan Clarke's tendency to light and dress for 360° and
to film long unbroken takes on steadicam created a new dynamic
between the camera and the actor (see Film Ireland 83).
Robert Altman also has a preference for sets that are dressed
and lit 360° and which allow a roaming camera, especially
in scenes featuring groups of actors, all of whom are miked
up (notable in The Long Goodbye and his latest work
Gosford Park). In the cases of Altman or Cassavetes
this means that a greater than normal amount of the process
of image selection is postponed to post-production. The point
here is that although all of this may be possible with a cumbersome
film camera and rolling celluloid, it seems natural with a
small DV camera rolling hours of cheap tape.
Harmony Korine's Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy promote
production as a controlled generation of accidental material,
followed by a studied selection and rearrangement of the images
captured: "Even if it's chaos, there has to be a way
to anticipate the chaos, to reorganise it, to make sense of
it."3 Surfing
the wave of accident is a long-established sport across all
artistic media, and Korine's branding of his take on the process
as 'Mistakeism' would be just NYC high -art guff if it wasn't
so specific and didn't work so well within a rigorous timeframe
and budgetary context. It should immediately be pointed out
that Gummo was mostly shot on film and that Korine
has gone out of his way to divorce his use of video in Julien
Donkey-Boy from any budgetary considerations. But both
titles fertilise tendencies which are once again natural to
low budget DV filmmaking: the reduction of a border between
off and on, between rolling and not rolling, between taking
and not taking which inevitably leads to an erosion of traditional
insistence on pre-fabrication and control. If conventional
filmmaking produces fragments of a defined sequence, within
a defined space, to be reassembled in editing, some DV filmmakers
are beginning to understand how to capture images of complete
events in a newly generated temporal and spatial playground,
which can then be broken down or fragmented for re-interpretation,
for a representation which isn't afraid to make virtues of
the sins of new technology.
If surfing the accidental often involves
ignoring at the post phase whatever intentions lurked behind
the camera, this in turn involves filming from a 'provisional'
position, with 'temporary' or 'strategic' intentions. Taken
to its extreme, this relegates images generated in production
to something like the status of found footage, the latter
building as it does mosaics from the celluloid rubble of amateur,
documentary, or propaganda films, freeing up captured images
by recycling the hopes, fears, needs and loves of long ago.
The Genoa G8 documentary, covered in this issue of Film
Ireland and in issue 83, is the most striking Irish example
of these tendencies, with its cheerful debunking of ideas
of ownership and authorship. Not only was its 'swarm' approach
to the capturing phase necessarily anti-subjective because
executed by almost a dozen individuals with varying camera
abilities and 'personal missions', but its post phase allowed
for the feeding of material to projects in various
genres (documentary, indy and mainstream news, music video),
to be distributed through a variety of media (DVD, on-line
viewing, theatrical exhibition), with different cuts of individual
projects available. Imagine this imported into feature filmmaking?
Build your feature out of three shorts and some documentary
footage shot in the Depression Hole in a Belgrade nightclub!
Meet with your friends and barter footage for use in each
other's projects! In the words of the Velvets, the possibilities
are endless. Of course by that point Cale had left them.
Note:
1.Swiss Effects
are currently favoured for transfers by many US projects,
while Denmark's Hokus Bogus are the Dogme-favoured option.
Both have excellent websites (find them!). Lukkien, Duart,
and the Sony High Definition Center are other common options.
Most houses specialising in transfers will quote rates, maybe
offer free tests, and will often give advice in regard to
cameras and camera operation (rations, what to keep switched
on or off, etc.). A useful list of DV features including transfer
houses is available on nextwavefilms.com/ulbp/bullfront.html.
Back to article
2. These and the following
quotes come form Richard Kelly's excellent The Name of
this Book is Dogme 95 (Faber). Back
to article
3. Quoted from Shari
Roman's Digital Babylon (IFilm Publishing - ifilmpro.com).
Back to article
This article was printed
in Film Ireland 86(May/June 2002).
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