Against film

It's not even about the dead lambs, although it's about them too. Film here should be understood not as a filming format, but as a paradigm of thinking that turns cinema into a myth of the golden age. The strong association of cinema with a certain type of audiovisual experience in the popular consciousness quickly dashed the hopes of the digital wave, giving rise to film cinema shot on a digital camera. The film is richly decorated and made in a good way, but remains timeless as a sterile artifact. Elements of modernity are present in it like alien pixels on film silver. Without diving into the underwater processes of this timelessness and the ideologies that feed it, I would like to point out the visible part of the iceberg - the automatism of technological solutions. Exaggerating the observation: a courier with a smartphone in the role of the hero of the story does not in any way affect the Author’s desire to think of the film with economical scenes, frames with stilted perspective, and the relationships between characters with technical panning. You can continue this line for a long time, down to the “little things” such as applicable remuneration models, search for financing and distribution strategy. Automatic decisions also predetermine the fate of the character - in the best case, it will differ little from the fate of the courier from the Soviet film, but in the rest, everyone will become a little embarrassed - the audience from the on-screen falsehood, the Authors from the impossibility of hiding it. Out of noble desire or smuggling, the world outside the set will penetrate into the frame, but instead of authenticity it will show the “dirt” of faces without types or backdrops without textures, exacerbating the awkwardness in front of the aesthetic sense of the fictional viewer. The material will seem insufficiently cinematic to the Author , his film wants to be film and grows out of fear of not meeting expectations, which entails indifference to the real film material and inappropriate (due to the resistance of the material itself) reproduction of cliches of film language. Having accustomed himself to see cinema through the optical filter of film, the Author dreams of a personal chair, a megaphone and a whip, thinking of the film through the design of the scenery, the paths of commutations and the connected world thrown onto the dolly rails.

But cinema can be thought of differently than as a historical reality or as a craft of reconstruction of emotions and combinatorics of techniques; it has the potential to construct new connections and events and to free one’s hands. This potential is a priori inherent in visuality and is now preserved in digital, although its promises did not come true revolutionary in the 2000s. The timing of such changes is heterogeneous and involves contextual lags; it is important not to forget to check it with questions: what is cinema, why make it, what does it mean to be its conscious consumer? The truism of questioning melts away when you realize yourself as a subject of relationships within a changed world, already with a camera in your hand. She sees in the night as well as a cat, she doesn’t need fifty assistants and five-kilowatt metal halide devices, she doesn’t blow up landscapes, destroy nests, paint the grass, don’t blind actresses, don’t line up extras in lines of depth of field. It has already changed the cinema: the general plan of city cameras nails to the ground with a machine gaze, the smartphone trembles and talks about its underside, and for the figure eight and changing the size in the dialogue, a third person is no longer needed, as a rule, the only sighted one - a screencast of a video call will suffice. The paradigm of thinking can change not only following major socio-cultural changes, but also through reflection on the possibilities of building alternative technological processes. While the logic of film works, the tools available to everyone for creating films remain out of sight, supposedly cinema, by definition, cannot exist outside the industrial ring. Limiting the palette of solutions applicable to cinema, the “film” protects the dummy door.

Digital is a different, freer and ultimately no less artisanal form of cinematic life. Its differences are manifested in the movement of time through the material and the special form of physicality inherent in the wasteful existence of the digital image. The syntactic-semantic agency of the film made the beetle on the sand simply a thing in the world and a connection of things - a designation of movement from point A to point B. It is always a series of things: a porch - a mailbox - a wave of a hand - a taxi - transfer of money - the eyes of the hero - what he sees. The scheme can be complicated many times, but the essence will remain a reconstruction of the world of things and their speculative connections. Such a dramaturgy of facts makes movement from point to point strictly functional: unnecessary movements that deviate from the direct route are cut out. The film tirelessly indicates where to look - it exists in one viewing modality. The digital beetle on the pixel sand exists more intensely, the digital is naked - the desert of the digital path is uncertain, and the beetle does not serve as a guide on the path of events. A slight movement of the camera in the intended direction of its movement does not tell us point B, but creates an affirmation of physicality, on both sides - the shooter and the subject. This form of intensity includes not only the shadows on the wall, but also the spaces around it. As an illustration of the thesis, an extremely long (more than an hour) shot from Lav Diaz’s film “Heremias: Unang aklat - Ang alamat ng prinsesang bayawak” (2006) is built: in the frame there is an abandoned building, through the window openings a fire and the shadows of drunken teenagers are visible, their aggressive cries, music and dull blows against the walls can be heard - the camera is hiding outside in the bushes, squatting and looking slightly below up - the operator's numb limbs, the vague anxiety of the “wrongness” of this frame and his own breathing are seamlessly included in the space (around) the film. A space of digital physicality that manifests itself in micro-movements between takes, dissolving into a landscape in a wide shot or a landscape without a body, but with the keen sensation of fingers on the other side zooming in on the video with an expansive motion to indicate the movement itself and add nothing more to it.

I note that this specificity is related to the technological, logistical and economic aspects of the digital process, and not to the characteristics of the image itself. The film avant-garde and the dawn of video art were more digital than the modern digital mainstream. For a long time, the aura and transcendence of film was questioned only by looking at the camera, but in the seventies, video artists like Vito Acconci and Chris Burden and filmmakers like Želimír Žilnik and Marcel Anun opened up new channels for the diffusion of image, viewer and director. It turned out that their relationship can be built not only through the opposition of the transcendental film and the immanent viewer, and that the matter of the film image is more tangible than the play of light on the wall. She can speak herself through the circumstances of shooting and the film situation itself, the change in the modality of spectator perception, the agency of a specific camera and the off-screen space - the internal mise-en-scene that separates the film from the projection screen.

The same image, be it a panning view of a bridge, or the shadow of a grate falling on the heroine’s face, or a dying log in the fireplace of an impotent director, have equal connotations for both film and digital thinking, but are sensually different. For thinking with film, it is a seme and part of a larger structure; for thinking with numbers, it is also a manifested physicality, an accident of the living world. A characteristic feature of this kind of thinking is attention to what the film actually creates - actors, trees, landscapes, wind, camera, your feelings - attention in this case is opposed to control. You can resist this element by mastering the high craft of classical directing, or you can think of cinema as the art of process - trust the situation and listen to the clues of the material. Both strategies are not new and have their own tradition, it is important to note something else: the changed world requires drawing a line of demarcation between cinema connections and cinema networks. While cinema lies on the cutting line, there is an opportunity to safely survive borderline experiments, the tongue-tiedness of new forms and visionary pathos, but through the refusal of security to find a syntax relevant to the digital world.

Against film is a political statement. It is directed not against the medium, but against the paradigm of thinking, against the cliches of cinema perception, against the institutions of its financing, against distribution certificates, against the selection criteria for film festivals. The paradigm works comprehensively; the already accomplished economic transition to digital does not abolish thinking in outdated categories. Drama, shot composition, editing phrases, angles, tempo, sound, compositing, premieres, financial relations, forms of interaction within the film crew, the actor’s existence, names in the credits, our tastes - everything can be revised.