Kino-Eye.com » Writing

Cinema will eventually become a flexible means of writing

David Tames — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 05:26:35 +0000

In 1948 Alexandre Astruc, a filmmaker and theorist, suggested the notion of caméra-stylo (camera pen) in his essay, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo,” which appears in the book, The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks (Edited by Ginette Vincendeau and Peter Graham, British Film Institute, 2009). This essay has become a classic among students and scholars of cinema. He imagines that cinema will eventually break free of the demands of classical narrative and images will become a flexible means of writing with the same expressive power, complexity, and subtly, of written language. Astruc also envisions a distribution system with “projectors for everyone,” anticipating video stores, NetFlix, and YouTube.

Today, writing with a camera has yet to achieve the expressiveness Astruc envisioned. Astruc would have loved MTV (at least back when they actually showed lots of music videos, I fondly remember watching MTV during its first three years, I thought I was witnessing the cinematic avant-garde going mainstream), anything that challenges mainstream film practice. Astruc writes the future of cinema will revolve around the director as auteur, which was an important idea behind the French New Wave. Fast forwarding to the present, personal documentaries–for example, Sink or Swim (Su Friedrich, 1990), Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette, 2003), and Sherman’s March (Ross McElwee, 1986)–demonstrate how cinema might very well have surpassed the novel as the dominant narrative form of a new generation.

Astruc’s idea of film as a language independent of literature provides a theoretical and historical tie-in to what is happening today, as cinema is becoming more personal, a form of visual writing, perhaps (dare I say) even eclipsing the novel, as our current generation seems to be returning to a new form of visual orality, and possibly, eventually, abandoning (perhaps too strong a word) the written word. I shudder as I write this, for I love to read and value the written word, there are reasons this blog post is in the form of words, not a visual essay, I strive for a balance between written/verbal and visual communication, for they represent two modes of knowing, each with unique strengths and weaknesses (is a topic best covered in a book or a movie?), however, I observe with anxiety the decline in reading, and I wonder if it is inevitable, as our modes of communication become more visual, perhaps it is evolution and not decline I’m not sure, but Astruc’s essay helps to assuage my anxiety. For better or worse, we are rapidly moving into an age of visuality.

Photo from The New Wave (Edited by Peter Graham, Doubleday & Company, 1968, p. 17).

Memory and the end of reality

David Tames — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 00:49:10 +0000

The transformation from media as a form of cultural production to media as entertainment has lead us into a crisis as we enter the fifth phase of history. Marshall McLuhan (1962, 2005) divided history in four phases:

1. culture of oral communication,

2. manuscript culture,

3. the Gutenberg galaxy, and

4. the electronic age.

The start of each phase is marked by the emergence of a new medium. Writing enabled manuscript culture, printing enabled what McLuhan called the Gutenberg galaxy, electronic media enabled the electronic age of broadcast communication. What has electronic media brought forth?

We have now entered the fifth era of history: the era of communication, simulation, and the end of reality. In previous ages we communicated in order to preserve and pass on memories. We lived in a world in which we believed there was a reality we wanted to share, so we communicated. But the signs we use are tricky and layered, they are deceptive, and the more we used signs the more we became removed from day-to-day, one-on-one interaction, we lost sight of the real.

The principle of reality ended in 1983 with the publication of Simulations, Baudrillard’s most influential work. At first only a small number of cultural and media critics were aware of the end, as the world continued to function under the illusion of reality. Sixteen years later the concept went mainstream with the release of the film The Matrix (Larry and Andy Wachowski, 1999). This blockbuster turned Baudrillard’s esoteric notion into a meme of apocalyptic proportions. Baudrillard wrote,

“Simulation is no longer that of a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory” (Baudrillard, 1983).

If the Matrix didn’t exist, Baudrillard would have invented it.

Simulations became a prescient handbook for the end of Renaissance ideals, fast-forwarding us through modernism, and throwing us straight into the eternal simulated present of post-modernism, post-capitalism, post-history, post-reality, post-memory, post-insert-your-favorite-concept-here. We no longer need to remember, we no longer can remember, for there is no reality, only information at out fingertips. And what we do remember is not even real in the sense of reality before 1983. Perhaps it never was. We are wired into the Matrix. Connected. In a wired eternal present without history, there can be no memory. Only desire fulfilled through consumption.

How did we get here? We learned how to write. Socrates tried to warn us of the dangers:

“If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom” (Plato, quoted in Kabitoglou (1990)).

Like Adam and Eve eating from the tree of knowledge, we chose to write, we chose to read, we chose “external marks,” and thus we chose to put our reality outside of ourselves, and thus, we created the Matrix, and with the Matrix, the principle of reality came to its untimely end. As Neo says in The Matrix, “All these memories I have, these places I went…. None of it ever happened. What does that mean?” Welcome to the simulacrum. We are happy to serve you.

References

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations, Trans. by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Phillip Beitchman, Foreign Agents Series, Semiotext(e), 1983.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, University of Toronto Press, 1962.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, The MIT Press, 1994 (originally published in 1964).

Kabitoglou, E. Douka. Plato and the English Romantics, Routledge, 1990.

Image Credits

Note: This essay was originally written February 16, 2009 as part of an assignment for Design Seminar II  at MassArt. Some minor editorial changes were made for the blog version.

John Stimpson

David Tames — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 04:03:12 +0000

On July 21st I spoke with writer/director John Stimpson about his new film, The Legend of Lucy Keyes, currently in post production. The film is a contemporary thriller that draws on the true story of the disappearance of a young girl from the woods of Wachusett Mountain in 1755, and the stories told by townspeople to this day of the roaming spirits of the lost child and her grief stricken mother. I spoke with Stimpson about the process of bringing the story to the screen, shooting in High Definition, casting Julie Delpy, and working with actors. The interview appears in the August issue of NEFilm.com.

Cinematic Storytelling

David Tames — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 06:25:42 +0000

One of my favorite phrases is “Cinematic Storytelling,” and imagine my delight when earlier this year Jennifer Van Sijll asked me if I’d read a new book she had just finished writing that would be published later this summer (now, actually) with the title “Cinematic Storytelling.” So what’s this new book about?

Van Sijll has put together in this nify volume 100 of the most used cinematic stortelling conventions with lots of references to moves and excerpts from scripts. She challenges the notion of writing as limited to the Aristotelian staples of character, structure, and plot. This book builds upon classic approaches to screenwriting adding the language of the image and the process of visualization that traditionaly has been excluded from most writing classes, but writing with an awareness of the visualizaton process is becoming an essential components of our evolving language of cinema, think of it as a new form of literacy, as important as reading and writing with words.

We often start with dialogue, but contemporary scripts are becoming more sophisticated, going beyond dialog and adding cinematic devices to develop characters, convey action, and move the plot along. This book provides the essential visualization companion to your favorite screenwriting book. You’ll find this to be a good reference of cinematic devices. The language of light, sound, and motion breath life into a screenplay and this book is a good start.

A Cinematic Storytelling Bibliography is available.