Post Modern

A friend of mine who works tangentially in the animation industry expressed recently how nervous the studios and other "old media" types are about the whole Internet business - about how films and clips should not be put online because people will steal them.

Putting shows, movies, or entire catalog of shorts (the National Film Board of Canada recently put their entire collection up online - here - a boon to researchers and students, but unlikely to drive DVD sales except to those dinosaurs who like to "hold" their films in their hands) on NBC.com or YouTube or Hulu, without figuring out how to get people to pay at least a little each time, is to basically give them away.

It seems somehow irresponsible.

What people that believe this are missing is that we're in a whole new world, with a wholy modern business model. "Things" like copies of films can't meaningfully be sold across the board - we're quickly moving beyond the sell-a-widget part of the industrial revolution. (Those who doubt that the barn not only has open doors but also no more sides may be directed to an earlier entry, about Internet thievery, here.) We've already seen this in the music industry.

There's so much material of all flavors out there now on the Internet, in every corner for every taste, professional and amateur and mixes of both, that for all practical purposes anyone can get (almost) anything they want with a little search and guidance. And because of the digital tools at their disposal, they can often get (exactly) what they want. Including full copies of DVDs, movies currently in your local theatre, any music, and any other object of intellectual property that used to be protected by the nature of the fact that it was a physical object that was sold, one by one, and shipped to you and you alone, to hold and keep in view on your shelf up there. Right up there. I haven't opened it yet. I'll get to it. I didn't want it to go out of print. I've already seen it anyway. I just like to know I have it.

Sure, we all still desire material objects. But intellectual property has been enabled to move easily across physical borders by the digital revolution. The studios and distributors are so worried about people stealing their shows and movies and short clips that they sometimes refuse to even release it (Lorne Michaels continually fights with NBC to keep skits from SNL up on YouTube, trying to generate buzz and activity both short-term and farther down the long tail, but the GE suits get so nervous they end up taking them right down again. Disney is positively feral about protecting their intellectual property from appearing in places they don't authorize and completely control.).

What they fail to realize is that those objects are worthless.

They have no value anymore. It's free out there. When there's no need to pay for it, they might as well give it away. Because the value is no longer in selling items that are too easily available - the value has moved upstream - to the authors.

Many filmmakers're (understandably) concerned that if their films are available "free" online then they can't sell them. But - the objects themselves - the films - are now free. And are by themselves therefore worthless. The value of the intellectual property has moved from the objects themselves, no longer sellable, to the artists, the producers who create the value by creating the thing in the first place.

And frankly that's where the value really resides anyway. The "author" (or producer or musician or re-mixer) is the one who's the creative force, and the objects are merely artifacts - traces and evidence of the author's value as creator.

And if someone tries to copy them, it doesn't matter, because they're "free" and have no value, copy or original - the value resides at the author, my friend, who can not be copied. A copy of a Vermeer is not a Vermeer, it is now a Steinbrenner (or an Artanis). Which creates its own value, separate from the original. (See appropriate episode.)

And if the object is copied and distributed? Folks, that is the beauty (and the curse) of the digital. Things are now infinitely duplicatable - you don't have to build and ship a 2nd item to get it into the hands of one more person, then again a third time for the next, etc. You have the ability to get 1 million "free" copies into the hands of 1 million fans without worrying about value - except that it flows back to you, the author.

A million smart-eggs out there, spreading your message.

Phish can give away their music for free and make fortunes touring live for audiences who will pay to be in the same room as them. Or buy Trent Reznor's signed x-rays.

So an artist may ask herself, if my work is rendered "worthless" once it appears in the wild digital yonder, why create? Besides the obvious phenomenological Saul Bass reasons, the realm of art creation still lives in an economic sphere. Out of all the material available, someone must create it all. Approximately 90% of the people in the 15-to-35 age range visit YouTube, Hulu or some other video site apparently at least once a week, yet do more than 1% of those people actually create content?

It's the lumpen proletariet, the unwashed mob of opiated workers right out of Marx 100 years ago, even more narcotized (still a word) by the tsunami of moving images.

With such a large and habitualized audience, there's always need for new content. The investors, advertisers, and CEOs love when more traffic is generated by their content, and anyone who can create buzz, traffic, comments, or controversy with their work, their voice, their unique insight or raw talent will be paid. Handsomely.

Just because the millions of viewers a day are not paying any money to watch your video doesn't mean that money isn't changing hands.

What "authors" need to do is not be part of the 99% that consume, of which there is a surplus; but be part of the 1% that creates, of which there is a scarcity, which means there is value - and where there is value, there is possibly a swimming pool in your future.

As well as having created art that is not gathering dust in the bottom of your closet (or up there on the shelf, next to the unopened DVDs), but out in the world, accessible to all.

Rather than signaling the "death" of the author, as Barthes may have claimed in a post-modern, pre-videotape '70s, the Internet portends a rebirth of the author.

At least, a redefinition of her. As a producer of intellectual property - without property to stand in the way.

It's positively Marxist.

_ _ _ _ _

(Related: see also Time article here.)

Alone, Or With People

The Archives Trilogy - Part Two
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There's a social network that surrounds the showing of films. The coming together of people into a dark and cavernous place, anonymously and at the mercy of a loud and oppressive spectacle, shaping what you will feel emotionally for 2 full hours. It's a bit ominous.

There's waiting in line and eavesdropping on other conversations, eating and drinking before and after - if you're lucky there's something to talk about. And someone to talk about it with.

And of course, there is the battlefield in the parking structure, where patrons jockey for position and prestige, capital investments are parked or scratched, or fights break out - substances are consumed. Sometimes girlfriends are found. Or lost.

That social sphere was very much a part of finding and seeing a film, sometimes miles away, sometimes once a decade. There was a physical, financial, and temporal commitment. It helped to be able to talk your friends into it. Don't you want to come with, see if this thing is any good? I don't want to go by myself.

These modes of consumption has been taken over by the Internet. The social network that surrounded film-going has moved away from theatres, and from archives, which now remain stranded as the last bastion of curatorship for our cultural filmed heritage.

The old purpose of museums were to create a space in which archival behavior was kept and displayed for the edification of the public and scholars. It was a public trust, and a social space grew around them. It might involve Q & As with filmmakers, entire programs surrounding themes to create context and expert meaning. Sitting around coffee, ice cream, tuna melts or wine while talking about the film you'd just seen (often with strangers you met in the lobby, people who had worked on the film sometimes (they were there to see it again one more time as well), or even that cocky know-it-all usher) is a social network all itself, centered around that shared experience, shared together.

Such networking created an emotional context around and beyond the film itself. It was a community. And it added meaning.

But the shift to the www has moved these social behaviors away from brick-and-mortar coffee-hutches. Out of the bookstore alcove. What museum-spaces traditionally used to do - that is, collect and present the detritus and leavings of society, for a new and motivated audience to research - they're doing alone and empty.

They've found their role as arbiter of cultural memory, as the privileged altars of higher learning, stolen by the allure of online social interaction, easier, quicker, shallower but more far-reaching.

No one's in their playground anymore. The idea of being a gatekeeper has been blown off the hinges. There is no more gate, there is no need for a keeper.

The digital realm houses the new social fabric surrounding the presentation of moving images.

Without the social sphere to support it, any institution is doomed to deteriorate.

I'm An Oilman

It's been a year since Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" was released, and it seems it's aging well in only that short a time. It's nice to be so far from of the maelstrom of the hype. I now find it much better than the Coen Brothers' "No Country For Old Men," the other end-of-year "western" that it was so aggressively compared to during awards season and found wanting.

"Blood" is appearing on the UK best-of-the-year lists since they got it in early in 2008 - and I've revisited it recently. I think it's fairly brilliant, more so than I thought the first time (my experience was unique - because it was close to 3 hours and I worked at a theatre where it played, I ended up seeing it in sequential 30-minute segments, which only emphasized the (perhaps) intentionally baroque tonal shifts as the plot lumbered along, not least of which was the bowling alley non-ending. (Or is it?)).

12 months later the difficulty with that ending as well as the hate heaped on the soundtrack seems so completely misplaced. Jonny Greenwood's electronic (but not atonal) foreboding (but not industrial) underscore is as appropriate and conservative as "Atmospheres" seems during the final trip in "2001" nowadays.

By contrast, "No Country For Old Men" in retrospect seems only ultimately to be about a haircut, and a couple of shots that they seemed to have left out in an effort to make us fume about the ending... or lack thereof. I haven't read the original book, but it now seems obvious that Josh Brolin's character got away with the money - the scene in the hotel room and the open grate isn't about something so mundane as who is or isn't behind what door, or whether evil is everywhere or nowhere... it's trying to tell us that Chirgurh hasn't found all the cash. Moss still has it, and that shot of him upside down "dead" on the carpet isn't Josh Brolin. It's another guy in his place - he bought 2 shirts after all. Oops, I guess I probably should have had a spoiler warning on this.

(But maybe I'm reading too much into what's just bad shot composition, or the perverse lack of a CU when he's laying on the slab in the morgue (as Jones tries to recognize him). It reminds me all of the meta-excitement around the ending shot of "Jagged Edge" back in 1985 - remind me to tell you that story sometime. And why else add 3 codas that seem to be just character beats, outside the narrative. The Coens usually know better.)

All in a row, "Blood" unfurls with a level assuredness we don't associate with Anderson. While he ultimately resorts to various baroque convulsions of plot, they don't seem unmotivated, just unexpected; his themes are judiciously and deliciously fingered, and simmer in a measured way he wouldn't have pulled off if he didn't construct this as such an arid and linear setpiece and have Daniel Day-Lewis to tease every nuance from an otherwise hidden subtext. (I half-think the film would have worked as well as a 95-minute thriller.) There's a thousand minuscule decisions that reinforce rather than confound its relentless progression. It's ridiculous and unnecessary to ask why he does what he does. It's too enjoyable and fated to doubt.

And as for the ending, I love when Sunday/Dano returns, looking the same age (only now completely different). They needed each other and both fell to ruin out of each other's influence. The meat, the repeating of lines, the bowling pins and the water/blood/oil/milkshake merged metaphor all give the film a physicality that, after Plainview's intangible drift away from his own salvation, grounds it in our own mortal world.

I guess I should have had a spoiler warning on that as well. The film's apparent sparseness, love for long takes and quiet mise-en-scene fooled some observers into invoking Kubrick (right down to the last-act mannerism). But Anderson, as in "Boogie Nights," even in "Magnolia" and his early "Hard Eight" (with its absent exposition), is primarily concerned with family and teasing out the ramifications of an extended - or absent - one.  Regardless of how broken.

Anderson is really a sentimentalist. And his trust in letting the small details carry the weight of the story reveals him to be less arrogant, more curious, and increasingly more masterful than he has revealed ever before.

Rep

I miss the film repertory houses that I spent so much time in during my formative movie-going years. It was my film school, and the curriculum was created very much haphazardly. I was pretty much on my own to see what I chose.

It's not just the films, which for the most part are now available through Netflix or online (although a healthy percent are still MIA). That is part of it - getting them at the exact (or near) moment you find out about them isn't the same as going to a repertory theatre, where what they program may be something you know about or have an idea of what to expect, but can't entirely be sure of. You had a change to find out once a year, if you were lucky.

You were at the mercy of the programmers and the program, and if it was on that calendar (issued 9 times a year - or less) there was probably a reason. It was up to you to make the trip if you dared.

The setting was just as important. They were usually dingy single-screens on their last legs, made obsolete by television in the '60s, and now playing old artistic or foreign fare for the college 2 miles down whose cinema department still supported the theatre. The first runs were all in malls now (3 theatres, under one roof!). These old prints sitting in the exchanges were more than happy to rotate out the films that television generally weren't interested in; the foreign, the racy, the difficult or the academic. Repertory would get them at reduced or flat rental rates, an early example of an attempt to generate income down the long tail.

They'd show Fellini double bills, and early Altman. Woody Allen and science fiction. Bergman one night, Ed Wood the next. Most of the films you'd never heard of, and you'd only plan on seeing a couple. But after reading about "Deep End" or "Solaris," you started to wonder. What are those films like? Was I missing something? When "King of Hearts" kept showing up once every 3 months, it was a powerful motivator. You couldn't look it up on IMDB back then. Film magazines were so much more important then. To study, keep, and pour over. I would fall in love with stills, right out of "Day For Night." My love affair with Nathalie Baye started with a still.

The calendars were the primers on what had been culturally important in previous decades. Quotes from dinosaurs named Crowther and Gilliatt, Reed or Williamson. Everyone has stories of the brilliant double bills and magical discoveries they made on accident at the local movie house. I saw "Nashville" years late and was underwhelmed, while "Rancho Deluxe," the second feature I knew nothing about, changed my life. (I still think the link had to do with Rip Torn, who's in neither film. I'm sticking with that story. And what book are you going to read that in?)

There was a seemingly endless catalog of unknown and vaguely familiar gems. There must be some arcane and invisible art to creating such a wide selection for such a limited audience. The programmers for these theatres would create clever or playful double bills, using the familiar matched with the unknown or transgressive to generate conflict, curiosity and a sense of elitist purpose and rebellion. The right program, or the unexpected choice, would create an urgency to see (and try to deduce why it was there). (I grew up in Southern California, so the nascent Landmark theatre chain was an important part of this, but there was also the Academy, the Capri, and the Fine Arts. All demolished now.).

A rep house was where I finally saw Stacy Keach in "The Travelling Executioner," a t.v. movie that still isn't available anywhere. John Byrum's "Inserts" was worth it alone for seeing Jessica Harper in one of her few post "Phantom of the Paradise" appearances (and I wouldn't recommend it except to Harper, Byrum, or Dreyfuss completists - and you know who you are). It was doubled with "The Day of the Locust," which is enough to cure anyone of wanting to be in show business.

I learned about Truffaut's oeuvre from the calendars as well, although ironically I never went to see any of them. I went to "Slaughterhouse-Five" for Valerie Perrine and left a fan of Vonnegut. An evocative image from Makavejev's "WR- The Mysteries of the Organism" stayed in my mind for 20 years before I finally caught up with that one. OMG. That was worth the wait.

But people's habits were hard to predict. They'd show up for "In A Lonely Place" but leave 5 minutes into "Casablanca". They'd sit through "200 Motels" but leave from "Casino Royale" (the first one, but why?). The age of TNT, Bravo, and TMC was upon us, where most of it was ending up, until DVD exploded and completely sated the appetite for old classics and new, rendering the repertory theatres obsolete. The last gasp of money seemed to be made on the Asian martial arts films, coming into vogue in the early '90s and still not quite widely available through mainstream channels.

Things like Schroeder's "The Valley," Perry's "Diary of a Mad Housewife," and Haines' "Steppenwolf," all from in the heady age of the '70s were revived, if only for a night, in the '80s; now they've all come to DVD in the 21st century. The bigger hits with the bigger stars always seem to be available, but when I happen to notice that one of these more obscure films have been released, I realize - I've actually heard of it. I remember them because they were at the rep houses, listed with a small inch-by-inch image and a 100-word write-up.

Those repertory house may not have generated much income for the films that showed (less than 100 people a night, at only $6.00 apiece paying back maybe 60%?), but they helped save the films from oblivion. By being in circulation and on that calender, they remained in the canon. I was directed, unintentionally, to so many more films I could never discover on Netflix, never even consider if I saw in a video store, and would probably not drive the half-mile to see down at the 8-plex.

I often think the infinite availability of stuff on the Internet isn't doing us any favors.

The Pointlessness of Authenticity

The famous "Surgeon's Photo" of the Loch Ness Monster, from 1934, revealed to be a hoax over 60 years later. By that time the image has become well-known and evocative of something wonderful and mysterious.

It was better than real. The "shared" memory of the creature was so prevelant and widespread that it had become a cultural lynchpin, an event of history... not of something so quodition as a prehistoric creature in the water, but of a larger happening everyone appreciated, valued, and "remembered."

There were (and are) over 500 reported sightings of Nessie since and thousands of snapshots to go with many of them. There's nothing like photographic evidence to back up your claim.

In 1995, found alien autopsy footage, along with some reconstructions, was aired on Fox, produced by the famously suspect Ray Santilli. The show was broadcast in 30 countries, and half a dozen television and cable specials followed in its wake, analyzing and investigating the veracity of the footage and visits by aliens. I was able to find 20 websites specifically devoted to the original footage. Millions of viewers have seen and chimed in on this show, special effects experts and film archivists alike.

Now it has a life as a historical event that reverberates through popular culture. The authenticity of the original is not important - the effects of that broadcast continue to be felt in the culture at large, in the dialogue we have with documentaries and with "reality" television shows. Is it real? Is it entertaining? Are other people talking about it? Should I know about it?

The existence of discourse out in the mediasphere, where reporters, bloggers, or citizens are talking about popular culture events, creates as much content as hard facts about who won the Grammy or got kicked off the island. (And their level of authenticity is as much in doubt as ever.) "Buzz" is enough to create meaning for events that are not technically "historic" - simply popular. It is easier to pretend to be important nowadays because on the Internet it is so easy to merely exist.

The binary relationship between document and mockument has been diffused, both by the inability to discern the nuance between them and a frank lack of concern about the difference.

With the infinite duplications possible in the digital realm, there is no more original anyway. There is no need to revert to the original source when there's copies everywhere. And nowadays, what people adopt as their folksonomies is creating a forceful authenticity all its own.

It doesn't matter that it's "fake."

We all just want to enjoy the ride.

Panic Hardware

The Archive Trilogy - Part One
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You can find almost anything on the Internet. You can find a friend that loves just that one janky Darin Morgan episode of "The X-Files" only you appreciated among your classmates. Even though she lives in Indonesia, you've now found a soulmate.

You can find the answers to tomorrow's test. The teacher didn't know how to protect her usenet account. You can find the secret to true happiness. (And Oprah will sell you the book if you like.)

You can find clips of the Marx Brothers' "Duck Soup." It's not being streamed on MGM.com - they want you to buy it. It is available on DVD but someone's illegally ripped it and uploaded it to YouTube and elsewhere. They were able to find and take down only the most obvious infringers. Hint, don't name your file "Duck Soup" - or "illegal rip."

You can do whatever you want with it as well. You can edit it down, cut new shots in, play it backwards, or change the music and the dialogue.

It's the new avant-garde. New media is being fueled by appropriation of somebody else's intellectual property. It's the wild wild west, all right, but the robbers are using laptops instead of horses and pistoleros.

And then they post their crimes right up again, for a million people to enjoy and comment on what they've done.

The Internet is different than radio, or television, or even satellite. It's more than an infinitely larger distribution stream for all kinds of media. It's 2-way. All the previous modes to deliver content were controlled and fed by big companies, which depended upon managing access to their assets. The public had to go get it, and paid for the privilege.

Once a film had exhausted its theatrical run, the film traditionally (that is, until about 2 years ago) travelled through the various ancillary streams, from cable to home video to network t.v., a dollar or 2 changing hands every time, eventually ending up on the schedule of a rep house or in an archive, for when someone wanted to do a retrospective. Or a paper. Or a remake.

The Internet and the digital age has changed all that. Now there's a rend in the chainlink fence - that hardware on the exit doors is broken, and letting hundreds if not millions into the back door of the theatre. And the digital tools at our disposal now allow us to grab and re-use the content. I'm not just talking about re-mixing "The Simpsons" with "Scarface" dialogue. It also engenders much more innocent and appropriate uses.

Like watching "Gossip Girl" on my phone. Or studying mid-period Sergio Amadio for that paper that's due in Italian Film next week. Or old "Burke's Law" episodes.

Maybe I'll lay the Christian Bale soundtrack over my home videos of our family picnic.

Access to the material is becoming increasingly valuable and desirable, because its use has skyrocketed. Infinite access is a powerful seducer. So is infinite adaptability.

The archives are online. On YouTube, through BitTorrents, or on the online Moving Image Archive. It's the site of artistic, uncontrolled, academic and downright transgressive behavior. It is unregulated and unregulatable. And that's why it's exciting.

While the traditional archives were concerned with whether or not they should move their old film holdings to some kind of digital format to create access copies, anxious that these weren't the high quality traditional scholars or historians might like, suspicious that digital stripped the originals of their priviledged and ritualized modes of presentation (and in hushed tones), the rest of the world was quietly uploading everything of interest and streaming it.

Shortening it or cutting it into clips. Adding music and adding commentary. Sending, uploading, downloading, copying - stealing the clips to share, study, and rework.

Archives, as physical buildings housing materials, are becoming obsolete. The materials that are culturally relevant today - the researchers and artists - aren't there anymore. In large part because what's relevant needs to be outside. Not behind lock and key.

What's culturally relevant is now in the hands of the public. Along with the tools to appreciate it.

I Think This Is The Good Part

This scene from Ken Russell's "The Who's Tommy" (1975) shows something you haven't seen in any other film before (probably). Ann Margaret is being inundated by baked beans, flowing out of a broken television. It's a visual rhyme, of course, to the cover of their earlier album, "The Who Sell Out."

Ann Margaret was nominated for an Oscar for this role.

The '70s were a very different time.

This is the type of promotional shot that can create a high level of interest for some viewers. Films are successful sometimes only based on a couple of great moments; if you can stick your award-winning actress in a pile of baked beans you got a scene people are going to talk about.

Ken Russell was good at putting those kinds of scenes in his films, often when they wouldn't fit. Nowadays even the most conservative films need at least one show-stopper, or at least something to talk about as you make your way home. Even a rather mannered remake like Burton's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" created an inordinate amount of buzz by adding the heart-tugging emotional sinkhole of Wonka's wacky father, an appropriate and resonant addition to what at first seemed like a bad idea for a remake.



A genre film delivers generally exactly to our expectations, and anything it may do to surprise us is part of the texture - not really a shock so much as comforting. ("I just knew they were gonna poke that guy in the eye.") But the above shot from "The Rats" (2002) has a visual shock of the familiar and the uncanny – a special effect (that in real life may turn out not to be very special at all), combining the common place, spectacle, and production value (a wide underwater-lit pool and a girl in a bathing suit) demands that you seek this out – if just to see that good part.

One scene, or a plot point, that captures our imagination. Such a thing can inordinately drive ticket sales. "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" (2009) features Kevin James riding around on a Segway which has a certain amount of charm and daffiness, but when he hits that double-glass door and does a John Candy fall (not once but twice in the trailer), I was sold.

I said to myself, "I have to see that."

And apparently, so did a lot of America as well. The #1 movie two weeks in a row. Much less people paid to see the blue vampire movie.

Besides, that was a prequel - those aren't ever any good.

High Finance

Information is moving to us at a rate that is impossible to filter and make meaningful. We've moved beyond wondering what is valuable, and now merely stop at what's good enough.

You couldn't find what you wanted to, even if you had the time. Google shouldn't be helping us to search for interesting things, it should be helping us weed it all out.

Writer Clay Shirky calls it “filter failure.” The model of one producer creating content for a million (or more) consumers has been supplanted by the rise of an age in which a million consumers are producing content - for everyone else. The problem with this is that no money changes hands. It’s all free labor, and hard if not impossible to monetize.

If you can grab it for free, what is the financial motivation to supply it? How do you create value for an audience that has so much at its disposal that there is no apparent incentive to look for something out of the way?

You can't get them to pay for it. So much is deliverable to your desktop, the object-based/ widget-selling/ limited resource model is about over.

Perhaps the secret is traffic? That doesn't translate into money changing hands on the back-end, either. Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube all claim the vast majority of traffic for their respective market niches, yet seem to be losing money on each individual transaction. They've functioned in the red since their inceptions, yet behind the scenes, these properties become more and more valuable each time someone leverages a golden parachute or stock's traded for ownership stakes.

Amazon isn't interested in selling books at a profit, but rather in having a piece of every book that sells; used, new, or digital. Wanna buy a Kindle? $350. Yet a download of "Treasure Island" costs 10c. It's the opposite of the razor blade rubric.

The value of these companies have been in the larger philosophical IPO realm up to now, outside the normal capitalist circles most of us understand, and that have been doing so well by the stock market lately.

:)

When the cost of providing access far exceeds the possible profits from supplying content (let alone creating it), it's no wonder everything old is new again. Why spend any time developing or convincing audiences that there's something new under the sun.

It even says in Ecclesiastes that there's nothing new under the sun. And that was a long time ago. It will take you 10 lifetimes to get through what's already out there. They tried to get your interest by going deep into the vaults and releasing all the old catalog on DVD. Now we've figured out that the Long Tail is an elegant concept that doesn't actually play out in the real world. 99% of the people really do purchase only 1% of the content.

Still. Providing content is a blockbuster-driven business, and the infinitely democratic promise of the Internet actually makes it more so now than the pre-Amazon/bricks-and-mortar days of the '80s.

There's so much shit out there, you have to look at the lists, the diggs, the del.ici.ouses (del.ici.i? del.ici.eaux?) to see what everyone else is interested in. There's no other way to filter it.

It's information overload.

Traffic in itself is a virtual presence, a mob-acknowledgement to popularity which subscribes value to something as well. Maybe the joke is true - they lose a dollar on every transaction but make it up on the volume.

The Border Between Calm and Catastrophe

There is a deeply ambivalent feeling about the rise of digital among the hardwired film fans I know. (And I am one of them.)

The prevailing wisdom is that digital is taking over in all avenues of media, that film as a production medium is dead, that all film will be forgotten, including the very experience of watching film.

That's actually all likely. Most t.v. and all major motion pictures are created on digital media and edited, colored, adjusted and outputted by computers now. There is no "negative." There is no physical object that is worked as an artisan in the old sense of the word might do, or have done for the last 100 years of Hollywood's history. Indeed there is no original object by which we can ever go back to "restore" or save from the dustbin of time.

Digital is so resolutely and stubbornly of the now, and has no reverberant history or meaning beyond its present tense of today's transmission. No remnant of history, but rather just a shiny but shallow reflection, of what it captures. And, in many ways, of the industry itself.

But digital imagery is so pretty. The images are clear in a way that goes beyond mere photographic indexical capturing - hobbled and abstract as it tends to be. Film does not capture everything in front 0f it- only a trace, the light traces. The "art of film" has always depended upon what aspects of that light (the reflections on the street, the highlights in Garbo's eyes) that the filmmakers choose to capture.

HD manifests clearly a bit-streamed millions of colors at a level that goes (at least 1%) beyond the human ability to discern differences in the subtlest shades in the palette. When digital is presented by a carrier that can accurately (that is, electronically bit by bit) address and convert all the information of a hi-def moving-image to a screen or display, the images transform to a hyperreal, hyper-present, and hyper-modern reflection of what happened in front of the camera lens.

It has an intoxicating assertiveness that goes beyond any deconstructive arguments about the indexical limits of a photo-chemical filmed image. Digital is culturally savvy, it is urgent, and it is portable. It is anonymous, democratic, and non-empirical.

It is crystal clear. It's transparent.

To insist in the old modes of production creates a kind of self-imposed obsolescence. So we find ourselves rushing to embrace the beauties of digital cinema and the new modern mode of spectatorship that it engenders.

The unexpected, yet unmourned fall of the previous 100-year reign of film troubles us. We "know" how to do film, and find comfort in its relatively conservative cache. Yet the glitz and glamour of digital seduces us.

So do we follow our worst (or is it best) impulses? Do we allow ourselves to be seduced by what we want over what we know? By what makes us comfortable? Or do we engage the future, even though we're understandably suspicious we'll regret it? And will have lost our innocence and what we don't even know is important until it's gone?

Do we jump?

Worked Matter

(A continuation of the ideas in the post, "The Real and the True.")

This still is from the Buster Keaton film "Doughboys" from 1930, a couple years into his sad and drunken decline at MGM. It's a cheaply produced programmer, and what joys it has revolves around Keaton gamely (but ultimately unsuccessfully) mouthing and falling over material way beneath him. They worked him hard and spit him out. You can see it in his eyes.

He's not in the south of France. He's in Culver City. MGM made a half-hearted attempt to recreate a WWI war scene on their backlot, and the forced perspectives in the backdrops, the on-cue smoke machines and fake explosions entertain as they show how the littlest of effort could go a long way to set the stage.

While certainly not convincing, it was all staged for the camera and edited competently to convince the viewers then (and now) just enough to go along with the gag. Film writer Stanley Cavell notes that while a painting may create a world on a canvas, photography is ever only of the world. It shows only what it is pointed at. It records, not creates.

Film - as an artform - is more than its parts. It an amalgam of worked objects, primarily of photographed shots. Photography has an intimate relationship to the real world - what is shown to it is revealed, yet what isn't is lost forever. These concrete and hyperreal, yet specific and limited, objects are then manipulated by the artist. Or artists. Or the process.

Photography approaches a kind of allographic art - a (captured) index of a preexisting object that is re-presented, rather like a song that is written then subsequently performed, creating a new work to be considered. Film (cinema) requires a series of arts and artisans working to create a new fictional, specific and virtual object. This craftwork is not separatable from the film - while you can measure the skill in a song, regardless of a bad performance, the "performance" of a film demonstrates and manifests the art. The cutting, acting, photography, or music used in unison with closeups, etc. all are made tangible only in its complete presentation.

The (film) object also has the property that it is not the actual artifact by which the artist(s) worked on. It is merely a representation of the final product, a duplicate (except in the rare instance in which you may actually handle the original nitrate print that Chaplin edited himself, or perhaps the original lithograph in which Andy Warhol spread ink onto, the one from which all the subsequent silkscreens derived (lending credence to the idea of an artist's aura remaining on the original artistically-worked object, and not on the subsequent copies. Regardless of the artist's intentions.).).

A film print is the manifestation of the history at its own making and of its subsequent remaking. Digital film- and image-making, on the other hand, does not preserve its historical roots; the images aren't worked so much as created - or re-created - by computer algorithms. The process redefines the original photographic pieces-of-the-world. And while the images may be astounding or spectacular, they no longer have a relationship to previous events of the world.

Such recent animated comic books as "The Spirit" or "The Dark Knight" demonstrate the unreality of surfaces that don't convince so much as suggest (it is still only the primal performance of Heath Ledger, surrounded by madness as much as manifesting it (extra-texturally as well as narratively), that still elicits comment - (so far) 6 months after that film's release). Such "unwanted" traces as a shoddy set, a hung-over actor, explosions with no sound (or jokes with no punchlines) are not the texture of the new media.

The raw footage isn't "historical" - it is fluid, and therefore has no specificity in time or history.

It's "faked," and the spectacle of the presented material moves to a kind of painting, creating a world but not being of the world.

The Keaton film remains a problematic document of a specific time in Keaton's career, and demonstrates (while it simultaneously suffers from) a specific mode and circumstance of production. Yet regardless of its "importance," it is a unique and historical reflection, in its parts and in total. The flaws create (and alter) its meaning.

The dinosaurs in "The Lost World" or the post-apocalyptic Earth of "Wall-E" are profoundly convincing, yet lack the visceral force of, for example, Dennis Rodman's performance in "Double Team" (1977).

The spectacle of Rodman's presence before the camera illicits a lurid fascination with the tragedy of humanity (and perhaps sympathy for the director) that digital lederdermain, for all its chicanery, can never hope to accomplish.