Fast Forward: The Future(s) of the Cinematic Arts

Fast Forward

Fast Forward

The Future(s) of the Cinematic Arts

Holly Willis

A Wallflower Press Book

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Columbia University Press

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Cover design by Elsa Mathern

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction The State of Things

Chapter 1  Past, Present, Future: Situating Post-Cinema

Chapter 2  New Practices / New Paradigms

Chapter 3  Live Cinema

Chapter 4  Urban Screens / Screened Urbanism

Chapter 5  Books to Watch, Films to Read, Stories to Touch: New Interfaces for Storytelling

Chapter 6  Virtual Reality and the Networked Self

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Fast Forward is for Ginger, Quiller and Steve, who remind me of the value of the slow, the here and the now

Acknowledgments

Fast Forward: The Future(s) of the Cinematic Arts emerges directly from my experience in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California where, since 2006, I have had the good fortune to be in the presence of filmmakers, writers, animators, media designers and scholars imagining new directions for the cinematic. As such, the book is fully informed by conversations, meetings, lectures and other interactions with faculty and staff colleagues, as well as students. I want to especially highlight the participants in the Envisioning the Future Group, a cluster of faculty whose meetings had the quality of being nearly secret, the time stolen; at their best, these meetings prompted moments of both brilliance and joy. The school’s research labs have also been very generous in sharing ideas and knowledge, and in shaping a culture of exuberant, magnanimous exploration.

I want to thank in particular Scott Fisher, Mark Bolas, Andreas Kratky, Alex McDowell, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, Henry Jenkins, Marsha Kinder, Tara Mcherson, Jen Stein and Jeff Watson, who have all specifically helped me imagine the futures of the cinematic. John Seely Brown has served as a source of constant provocation and imagination, while Dean Elizabeth Daley has offered generous and ongoing support. The book also benefitted greatly from the input of students in my ‘From Cinema to Post-Cinema: History, Theory, Practice’ course in Fall 2015. In addition, this book would not exist without the creativity and generosity of the artists who have not only produced experiments in posthuman, post-cinematic art, but who have shared their ideas with me in conversations and interviews. Similarly, the discussions, abundant input, edting and unflagging encouragement of my colleague and partner, Steve Anderson, were essential in helping produce and shape the ideas presented here.

Introduction: The State of Things

We tell stories, and our stories tell us. They give us insights into who we are, where we are going and where we will be in the near future. Right now, a little more than fifteen years into a new century, we, and our stories, are in the midst of transformation. Or rather, we and our stories continue to be in the midst of transformation. Cinematic storytelling in particular is in flux. No longer confined to the movie theatre or home entertainment system, moving images are now found on cell phones and computers, inside cardboard viewers and high-tech goggles, on giant screens throughout major cities and ensconced in museums, galleries and arts spaces all over the world. Films are now rarely shot on celluloid film with cameras; they are instead captured digitally, as data, and that data is often wrangled by a team of experts who bring with them new forms of expertise and shifts in long-standing filmmaking workflows. Screenings no longer necessarily unspool within the darkened theatres of the past. They may instead entail engaging multiple screens while wandering in a gallery setting; or experiencing hybrid works that meld film and live performance; or parsing the permutations of a story while clutching a mobile device and traversing urban streets and squares; or donning a head-mounted display and stepping this way and that in a virtual story world. In short, a host of new storytelling experiences is emerging, expanding upon the forms, genres and paradigms that have governed international film and television industries for the past century. Cinema, the primary mode of storytelling for the twentieth century, is being reconfigured for the twenty-first century through a process of dismantling and a proliferation of screens, stories, performers and viewers, all of which are reconsidered and re-mobilised toward new ends.

The dismantling and reconfiguration take place in conjunction with a host of other contemporary experiences that endeavour to invoke new forms of subjectivity in a culture transformed by computation and algorithms, databases and archives, sensors and surveillance. What is the subject in this culture, and how is it conjured, called forth and engaged by the myriad displays and interfaces that surround us? What roles do screen-based storytelling, immersive media environments and spatial navigation play in the dialogic intersections of stories and subjectivities? Further, is attention to the subject, the focus of enquiry for many film theorists of the last century, even an appropriate target of analysis for our current moment?¹

Fast Forward: The Future(s) of the Cinematic Arts explores this time of transition, investigating a set of diverse media projects that together contribute to a redefinition of moving image storytelling. These are works that experiment with expressions of time and space, and, in the process, disassemble the temporal and spatial codes of classical Hollywood cinema, and the illusion of coherence that they engender. These are also works that manifest their experiments in spatial and temporal terms, disrupting the very apparatus or dispositif of cinema and its traditional modes of production, distribution and exhibition. The result of these gestures – reconfiguration, rearrangement, reinvention – will be the focus of this book. So, too, will be a consideration of the why: why are our stories changing? And what? If we and our stories are deeply imbricated, what can our stories tell us, and how might we tell different stories?

I argue throughout this volume that the reasons for this rampant dismantling and reconfiguration include the need for new expressions and experiences of identity and subjectivity in a world that is increasingly mediated by networks and, as such, escapes our ability to perceive and comprehend it using tools and abilities of the past. It is a world characterised by an array of participatory media platforms and the ever-evolving habits of communication they produce; a world controlled by new forms of power, monitoring, tracking and surveillance; and a world in which to be human is to be culpable, to say the least; obsolete to say the worst; or posthuman, to gesture toward our suddenly seemingly mandatory ethical obligations in relation to the various sentient others around us. While many of the projects discussed in this book share multiple lineages – including the histories of video art, Net art, video games, expanded cinema, visual music, theatre and even painting – for my purposes, the cinematic apparatus remains central as both reference and point of departure. The cinematic, then, will serve as a fulcrum around which to organise, delineate and respond to these changes.

Projects emblematic of the reimagining of cinema include those of artists such as Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Douglas Gordon and Doug Aitken, who are re-siting the cinematic in galleries, museums and even throughout the city; they include artists such as John Carpenter, Nonny de la Peña and Erik Loyer, who are exploring the role of the participant’s body and gesture in the experience of moving images; they include transmedia artists such as Lance Weiler, who are extending stories across multiple platforms and venues; they also include the innumerable artists now probing augmented and virtual reality, and beginning to develop a new storytelling vocabulary based on haptic, embodied experience rather than the linear logic of editing; they include a rekindled attention to storytelling through audio with artists deeply attuned to this often neglected aspect of story experience; and they include artists sifting through iterations of live cinema, fusing performance, sound and moving image. In all of these cases, artists are testing the boundaries of the cinematic to explore reconfigurations of storytelling experience, and in the process, helping elucidate the qualities and characteristics of life within a decentred global network.²

This volume is also inspired by the creative and often speculative experiments and investigations undertaken by diverse media-making collectives and research labs across the United States. These efforts include the enquiries and projects at the intersection of data and research undertaken by the Office of Creative Research, with Ben Rubin, Jer Thorp and Mark Hansen; permutations of gestural interaction and collaborative interfaces crafted by Oblong Industries, founded by John Underkoffler; and the ongoing investigations of the body, media and interaction undertaken by Golan Levin’s Studio for Creative Inquiry. What are the questions driving this creative research and critical practice? What kinds of projects are emerging? And what do the storytellers, artists and designers involved in this process have to say about their investigations? Given both this specificity to story, cinema and practices of research, and the fact that change continues to unfold all around us, this study offers a snapshot, capturing some facets of a moment as storytelling forms morph and change.

Context

Fast Forward joins a collection of several other books published in the last decade dedicated to understanding the shift from traditional filmmaking techniques to digital filmmaking, and to parsing the larger philosophical context, and consequences, of this movement. These include Markos Hadjioannou’s From Light to Byte: Toward an Ethics of Digital Cinema (2012), in which the author bluntly asks, ‘What is cinema?’ His answer involves contemplating the myriad ramifications of the technological shift as digital media replaces celluloid film, altering in the process aspects of the production, distribution, exhibition and reception of moving images. The author also asks, ‘What is different in the way digital movies depict the world and engage with the individual?’ (2012: ix). What is different in how they engage with individuals? With these questions, Hadjioannou deftly captures precisely the fundamental nature of the shift. However, he goes further, delineating some of the qualities of a new form of cinematic storytelling when he writes, ‘The viewer gains the potential ability to roam around the image as if it were navigable’ (2012: 106); with this statement, he is attributing a form of passage to the image, one that both underscores the pervasiveness of the spatial metaphor and presages the navigable qualities of virtual and augmented reality. Indeed, Hadjioannou is most compelling when he offers inventive modes for considering the digital image at this liminal moment. He explores ‘the digital as an image of thought which reconfigures understandings of the movie image on the basis of ethical concerns raised with regard to the individual’s existential positioning in the world’ (2012: 36; emphasis in original). More specifically, he writes convincingly of the power of the space created by filmmaker Lars von Trier in his film Dogville (2003), highlighting the fact that by eliminating architectural structures and a clearly understood setting, the director ‘causes the image to become a plane of interactions between the characters’ (2012: 134). Hadjioannou here underscores a shift in attention from representation as it is generally understood to reckoning with the relational. He goes on to explore time, and, as with his chapter on space, finds a way to think beyond the technological to an understanding of the event and its potentialities. In reference to both time and space, the author discerns opportunities to leave behind indexicality as the marker of ethical authenticity, positing instead nuanced ways to understand ‘the reality of mediating technologies’ (2012: 176).

Franco Casetti comes to a similar conclusion in his exploration of the future of cinema in The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (2015). He does so initially by looking to the past and citing theorists as varied as Béla Belázs, Ricciotto Canudo and Blaise Cendrars, and making use of their often prescient wisdom regarding the ‘cinema to come’ before it was even cinema as we know it. He pairs this rich, early history with the work of contemporary theorists and historians, citing Mary Ann Doane, Raymond Bellour and Jacques Rancière, among others. To organise his exploration of possible cinematic futures, Casetti uses the words relocation, relics/icons, assemblage, expansion, hypertopia, display and performance, demonstrating how shifts in film production and audience reception signal not the death of cinema but its redefinition. The result is a broad context for understanding contemporary shifts, with specific attention to the myriad possibilities as cinema is activated within new sites and spaces; as it forms a dialogue with contemporary art; as spectators take it and remake it; and as attendance becomes a kind of performance, with spectators enjoying a sense of tactility with images that brings us full circle to the flip books at cinema’s origins. Casetti captures an essential trait of contemporary cinema, namely its mutability, and his taxonomy offers a fruitful parsing of cinema as it is manifested in fluctuating forms of practice: distribution becomes exchange; exhibition becomes siting; reception becomes performance; seeing becomes touching.

Other writers focus on the ontological specificity of digital cinema. In The Orientation of Future Cinema: Technology, Aesthetics, Spectacle (2013), for example, Bruce Isaacs asks, ‘Is the image created out of digital code cinematic?’ (2013: 24; emphasis in original) thereby entering a decade-long discussion dedicated to understanding the specificity of the digital image elaborated by theorists as diverse as David Bordwell (2006) and D. N. Rodowick (2007). Isaacs argues that we need a new vocabulary for explaining ‘the unique power of images in our culture’ (2013: 61), a power that is now, because it is digital, fundamentally different than it was in the past. To begin to build that vocabulary, Isaacs suggests that we consider the digital image in two new ways: as an ‘itinerary’ and as an ‘image-in-itself’. He intends these notions to take us beyond the movement-image and the time-image theorised by Gilles Deleuze, and he invites us to consider this new image as ‘not purely denotational, nor purely representational’ (2013: 68), but instead, as synthetic and uniquely able to fascinate. To illustrate this idea, Isaacs points us to an apt scene: ‘When Nolan’s Parisian streetscape in Inception transforms before our eyes, we contemplate the image not of the city, not of a Paris we may have visited, but of cinema and its capacity to astonish the senses’ (2013: 69). This, says Isaacs, is what contemporary cinema can and should do: offer spectators the opportunity to contemplate a synthesis of technology and design in a state of astonishment.

Steven Shaviro has similarly attended to the impact of contemporary cinema, using the term ‘post-cinema’ to designate this new realm in his long essay, ‘Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales’ (2010a).³ Overall, Shaviro assesses the impact of digital technologies and the emergence of what he calls ‘a different media regime’ (2010a: 2) with attention to effects, evocations and structures of feeling. Rather than tracing the genealogy of digital cinema, he instead explores the ways in which specific digital works are expressive, productive and indicative. He writes, ‘These works are symptomatic, in that they provide indices of complex social processes, which they transduce, condense and rearticulate in the form of what can be called, after Deleuze and Guattari, blocs of affect’ (ibid.). He goes on to argue that these works are ‘machines for generating affect’ (2010a: 3) and as such, we can imagine them playing a key role in the construction of contemporary subjectivity. He writes, ‘Just as the old Hollywood continuity editing system was an integral part of the Fordist mode of production, so the editing methods and formal devices of digital video and film belong directly to the computing-and-information-technology infrastructure of contemporary neoliberal finance’ (ibid.). Shaviro develops an intriguing argument about the role of investment and emotion, but overall, his attention to the nexus of media forms, contemporary culture and subjectivity illuminates a pathway for considering the fragmentation of the cinematic as it participates in the restructuring of subjectivity for new needs. He also situates cinema within the context of neoliberalism, highlighting its continued imbrication within infrastructures of power.

The term ‘post-cinema’ is perhaps most associated with Raymond Bellour’s work on intermedia and video installation. While many American critics have used the advent of video and digital technologies to bemoan the death of film, Bellour has for many years instead queried and valorised the transformation of cinema as it mingles with television and computers, as it moves from theatres to museums and galleries, and as it undergoes ‘an unprecedented expansion of intermediate operations’ (2012: 10). He has described and analysed ‘the explosion and dispersal’ of cinema, as well as the ways in which it has been ‘redistributed, transformed, mimicked and reinstalled’ (2008: 406). Indeed, Bellour is fascinated by the resultant ‘confusion’ and ‘impurity’, and much of his work has explored the efforts of artists who share his interest in this movement among forms – cinema, video, language, painting – and between images, the still and the moving image, the freeze-frame and the blurred image. Rather than isolating the specificities that delimit media forms, Bellour is intrigued by the connections, arguing that the greatest attribute of video has been its ability to open passageways, and to encourage incorporation and transformation.

This interest in the ‘impurity’ of media forms serves as the foundation for a series of recent texts dedicated to exploring the intersections of various media forms. Within cinema studies, for example, Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film (2014), edited by Anne Jerslev and Lúcia Nagib, represents this desire to query the concept of impurity. This collection of essays borrows its title from an article written by André Bazin in 1951 entitled ‘Pour un cinéma impur: défense de l’adaptation’. While Jerslev and Nagib acknowledge that the first translation of Bazin’s essay into English in 1967 with an altered title – ‘In Defence of Mixed Cinema’ – blunted the impact of the word ‘impurity’, they defend the use of the term with the goal of ‘applying it, on the one hand, to cinema’s interbreeding with other arts and media, and on the other, to its ability to convey and promote cultural diversity’ (2014: xviii). The anthology maps a series of cinematic projects that merge with other media forms, examining tensions and overlaps, and perhaps more importantly, insisting on the necessity to historicise intermediality.

Similarly, a flurry of publications and conference events examine the concept of intermedia. Ágnes Pethö’s Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-between (2011) addresses an array of intersections uniting cinema and the other arts, including painting and literature, but she is most interested in parsing the passage or qualities of the in-between. Pointedly, in her opening, she queries the reticence among other film scholars to engage with intermediality, wondering, perhaps rhetorically, why the blurring of boundaries among disciplines implicit in the employment of semiotics and cognitive theories within the context of cinema is deemed acceptable, while the hybridity and concomitant interdisciplinarity of intermediality is not (2011: 24). It is axiomatic to point out that cinema is bolstered as a discipline when it is deemed relevant within established humanities contexts, but suffers when its boundaries blur, ‘impurity’ itself acknowledging the problem.

Other enquires related to intermediality emerge from the perspectives of theatre and performance. The work of the Intermediality and Performance Research Group at De Montfort University in the UK, for example, is engaged in a series of research projects at the intersection of media and performance, while the Intermediality in Theatre and Performance working group, which was founded under the umbrella of the International Federation for Theatre Research in 1998, has published two important texts: Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, edited by Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt (2006) and Mapping Intermediality in Performance, edited by Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender and Robin Nelson (2010). While the work engaged in and studied here includes moving images, the orientation is rooted in the concerns of theatre and performance. However, as is perhaps very clear already, the boundaries among disciplines are blurring, and there is much to be gained in learning from diverse perspectives.⁴

While the shift from analogue to digital filmmaking within the film industry has in some ways covered over these shifts – we still talk about ‘films’ when referring to feature-length moving image entertainment, for example – the move toward the post-cinematic requires an imaginative reconfiguration of not only the words we use but the conceptual foundation from which we work. Garrett Stewart suggests as much in the opening of Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema: ‘At least since the 1995 centenary of motion pictures, and more spottily before, we have watched a filmic medium’s original serial imprint yielding to computerized adjustments at every level, from the generation to the editing of projected images’ (2007: 2). He continues, ‘Increasingly, the temporal transit (mechanical) of the image, frame by frame, gives way to its temporal transformation (electronic) within the frame’ (ibid.). This shift alone – from transit to transformation – bears scrutiny, and Stewart’s study offers a careful reading of films that embody this shift.

As is already apparent, I too sense that the transformations taking place need to be addressed, not only in our terminology, but in imagining the potentials of the cinematic in this new configuration. Dale Hudson and Patricia Zimmerman take up this task explicitly in Thinking Through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (2015), which opens by echoing Stewart, noting that digital media objects are mutable, malleable and responsive, and as a result, produce different sorts of relationships between the maker or designer and an audience.

Building on and responding to these diverse and insightful investigations of contemporary cinema, this volume draws together a deliberately eccentric range of media art practices, each of which speaks to different aspects of our current moment of transition. Rather than focusing on narrative feature filmmaking, or one particular alternative to that form, this study instead looks toward the myriad permutations of the cinematic. This book, then, is explicitly devoted to exploring media manifestations of both the post-cinematic and the posthuman as a critical and an ethical imperative. As such, this investigation is cheerfully unbounded by both genre and media platform, tolerating incongruity in the interests of exploiting the insights offered by stark juxtaposition.

A Manifesto and a Report

Fast Forward is also both a manifesto and a report. It is a manifesto in the sense that it makes a passionate plea for the continued use of the word ‘cinematic’ to characterise the proliferation of media-based storytelling formats and platforms within a context of blurred boundaries and new territories. Why retain ‘cinematic’? The word comes from cinematograph, the term coined by the Lumière brothers in the 1890s to describe the box that served as both camera and projector for making and showing movies. As the devices for capturing and sharing images proliferate, often – like the cinematograph – combining disparate possibilities within a single device, we return to the multipurpose machine at the beginnings of cinema.

Giuliana Bruno offers another reason to retain the term. As she has pointed out, the word ‘cinema’ is also derived from the Greek word kinema, meaning both motion and emotion. ‘Film moves, and fundamentally moves us, with its ability not simply to render affects but to affect materially, in transmittable forms and intermediated ways’ (2015: np). Cinema continues to move us, more so now perhaps than ever.

We commonly use ‘cinematic’ to refer to the majesty of large-scale moving images. ‘Cinematic’ often means big, awesome, magnificent. However, after the transition from analogue to digital technologies and the emergence of a host of new tools and platforms for making, disseminating, sharing and experiencing cinema, we need to redefine the term, and in the process reimagine the roles cinema can play in helping us understand new experiences and articulations of cinematic space, time, story and audience. The redefinition conjures a post-cinema.

If we take this challenge, ‘post-cinematic’ can expand to refer to deeply embodied experiences that engage us not only through sight and sound but through our entire bodies; it can expand to encompass the design of richly detailed virtual worlds that become environments not for telling stories but for creating the conditions for stories to emerge; it expands to mean robust participatory situations in which the audience helps create the artwork, one that might be generative and dynamic, unfolding in real time; it expands to mean experiences that move beyond the screen to become immersive, pervasive, mobile and playable. In this redefining, ‘post-cinematic’ recalibrates our understanding of time and space, identity and agency, helping us navigate through a world characterised by instantaneity and multiple layers of reality. In short, for my purposes in this volume, ‘post-cinematic’ expands to provoke a new definition: the post-cinematic brings the art and practice of crafting meaningful experiences of story, information and knowledge into attunement with contemporary culture. As we engage – and are engaged by – a networked culture, our post-cinematic artworks help bring to the fore the conditions of networked existence, too often occluded or ignored. They help call attention to the networked body, networked space and networked time, and, in the gap between what was and what could be, invite agency and attention despite the disenfranchisement, distraction and amnesia of contemporary culture.

Fast Forward is a report in the sense that, rather than predict the future, it instead offers a snapshot of a particular moment in the flux of cinema as the apparatus – the entire ‘arrangement’ of cinema – morphs in divergent directions. While the book’s title hints at a timeline and even a teleology, it also references the past and an era in which ‘fast forwarding’ specified the accelerated movement of magnetic tape in order to skip forward, to get to the next thing, along a linear line. ‘Fast Forward’ also echoes ‘feed-forward’, a term in computing that reminds us of the pervasiveness of networked systems and the call to imagine human experience in relationship to a world now characterised as sentient.⁵ ‘Fast forward’ also gestures toward the claim that in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, we are experiencing an unprecedented acceleration of the rate of change, an acceleration experienced in Western culture primarily through the swift comings and goings of technologies and devices. Because one of the core tenets of this book argues that we are also in the midst of a cultural reconfiguration of time and space, such that they are multiple and