Babette Mangolte, The Sky on Location (still), 1982.
In the South of France, some fifteen kilometers east of Avignon, in the summer 1970.1
It is a warm evening under a sky shining with stars on a terrace, with the smell of laurel trees overpowering lavender and thyme. The cicadas have stopped at sunset and in the quiet of the night the only noises now are the crickets and the croaks of some small green frogs in the irrigation ditches in the cantaloupe fields. I look at the sky but my mind is elsewhere, enchanted by what I am hearing about a film with an intriguing title about the distance of a wave. I am left puzzled by what I am told, a marvelous account of a complex time machine and philosophical toy. I am also curious to understand how one person can be so utterly fascinated by what somebody else has previously described to me as the most boring film ever made in which nothing happens, and it takes forty-five minutes to do so.2 How can something be an aesthetic revolution for one person and a negligible, inconsequential occurrence for another? That summer day I decided that I had to see it for myself, even if it meant traveling to New York City where the film was shot. (That would be my first airplane trip, my first of many other things as well.) I felt in love that night under the stars with the idea of understanding the complexity of the world and the seeming impossibility of satisfying the compulsion to solve contradictions. I also felt in love with the romantic urge to chart new territory.
Time has long passed since you could think there was a choice to be made between digital and analog, between pixel and silver-based. Of course you can still shoot in black and white film, but in the mind of almost everyone, film is now color, and it is digital. The image is now a bitmap made of pixels, and the grains of the silver image of the past can be added on with a simple aftereffect algorithm. Even when generated first by a film camera and not by a digital camera, and viewed principally in the form of a film print, the interaction of digital and film is everywhere inscribed in filmmaking processes today, in cinematography as well as editing and scoring. This constant interaction and transfer of analog to digital and vice versa is changing the relation the filmmaker has with his or her tools. Do the tools he or she uses affect the filmmaker’s subjectivity? Obviously they do, and the films made now reflect these new tools. In this change, what have we filmmakers gained, and what have we lost? And is it a question of gain or loss? Or is it that the new technologies and market forces that shape what the future holds for us constitute an historical change that other forces try to reverse?
If the replacement of analog by digital isn’t a matter of time anymore, time is still at the heart of the difference between the two. For a filmmaker, you could say that time is of the essence and is everywhere inscribed into film in a complex and metaphorical manner. Time is appended with an adjective and to name a few, filmmakers speak of running time, screen time, performance time, shooting time, real time, and a sense of time. All those times converge ‘as a construction’ through editing or as time regained through allusions to the past or future via flashback and flash-forward, without forgetting the ‘times’ displayed or alluded to in the narrative and the visual and aural editing choices. Basically, a filmmaker constructs a ‘sense of time’ and a ‘sense of space’ in every film. The two are inextricably intertwined and meshed into the fabric of film itself, its projected images and playback sounds.
The filmmaker alludes to and juggles all these times while thinking about and making his or her film.3 The filmmaker thinks in fragments that add up to and create time. The fragments are the shots and the addition of all the shots is the editing. But during the shooting, time collapses into duration and is visualized through images of spaces. So the margins between time, space, and duration are blurred.
Furthermore, although the filmmaker constantly counts time, measuring every shooting day, every few feet of film exposed, the seconds and minutes of possible screen time versus the running time of every shot, the result of all this counting is a film that does not necessarily produce an experience of time for the spectator. On the contrary, we often assume that a film is good because we lose track of time and are surprised on leaving the movie theater that two hours have passed. Although film is time-based, it is not always received as time-passing but rather as time-forgotten.
Everything in film seems to be about time, including the camera apparatus defined by its frame-per-second speed. And we know that among the first filmmakers, Georges Melies had great fun with tricks as early as 1900 that subverted the ability of the camera to reproduce real time, taking pleasure in playing with accelerated time or slowed down time. Certainly for Dziga Vertov in Man With A Movie Camera (1929) the camera was a time machine, as it was for Rene Clair in Paris Qui Dort (1925). This fascination with camera speed effects is very much alive now. We see it in Hong Kong cinema and Hollywood action films. But are spectators able to see such motion effects as an experience of time? I doubt it.
I know of two films that have succeeded in creating a time experience for the viewer by collapsing time as space and time as movement. The two films are Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967) and 2001 (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). In Wavelength, the propelling forward movement of a continuous and relentless zoom is combined with constant changes in camera stocks and color filters, creating a disruption of the forward movement seen as relentless as the sound wave on the soundtrack.4 Time is both progressive and made of stop motion, like the motion picture film that is made of successive photograms. The separation of each photogram during projection is enabled by the closing of the shutter, permitting the shift from the current photogram to the next.
Using digital rather than analog tools does not change any of the counting of various times during production. But I think it changes the end result at the time of projection. For the viewer, even if a film isn’t creating an experiential sense of time, it can evoke it, but the digital film is at a disadvantage in this regard.
Why is the brightness of the LCD screen, the relentless glare of the digital image with no shutter reprieve, no back and forth between one forty-eighth of a second of dark followed by one forty-eighth of a second of projected image, with no repetitive pattern as regular as your own heartbeat, unable to establish and construct an experiential sense of time passing? And why could the projected film image do it so effortlessly in the past and still can? Is it because every projected film frame or photogram is separated by black and therefore can be counted?
Why is it difficult for a digital image to communicate duration? Like most filmmakers, I am intimately convinced that new technologies are a source of opportunity, and I feel betrayed by this limitation of digital. I very much want the passage to digital to be all gain and no loss. But I notice a loss when I compare a film projected as a film, in particular films that deal with time and duration, and the same film projected from a DVD instead of a film print. Somehow, neither Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975), Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961), nor Kubrick’s 2001 work very well unless you see them on film in a movie theater — and preferably in 35mm or 70mm if you can.5 And most underground films do not work either. Certainly flicker films like the ones of Paul Sharits, or the quick refocus and reframing by Stan Brakhage, don’t work well in video viewing; neither do most of Andy Warhol’s films, including The Chelsea Girls (1967). Immediately you think it is because of the precision provided by a much more detailed film image. But maybe this isn’t all that matters to create a percept (Deleuze’s definition of a work of art).6
At the core of the difference between silver-based film and digital is the absence of the shutter. No more flicker. No more heartbeat. The persistence of vision isn’t called to the rescue to make possible the reproduction of movement using photograms. Film is made of still photographs after all. But the digital film is not. Underneath there is a grid of pixel-size slots, and it is fixed. Somehow the pixel makes what you see an icon; it is graphic and not sensorial.
In those experiential films, time is inscribed in the emulsion grain, which constantly trades places and spaces from one frame to the next. The grain became to the experimental filmmaker of the late 1960s what feathers and lipstick were to Jack Smith, an endless source of fascination and performance hubris. But what this shifting grain creates is the constant reminder of a change from the preceding frame, reinforcing the demonstration of time passing.
In the world of digital, time is encoded in a bit-map, and there can be no entropy. In the compression algorithm of a digital image, only what changes in the shot is renewed. That which is the same in the shot stays the same in the digital image, in contrast to the constantly changing emulsion grain from one frame to the next in the film image. The inscription of the decaying body in Wavelength is therefore not possible in digital, even in HD DIGI.7 Time is not transformation anymore, the essence of film in which there is a change twenty-four times a second. Now time is geography and is inscribed in layers on a set screen with bit-size slots. When you dig into these bit-size slots to see what is there, you find bits of time memory one on top of the other without chronology. You travel through time now by traveling through layers of pixels. And the space is totally in front of you without shadow. It would be optimistic to say that you are traveling in your memory in the way that you move through Son Nom De Venise Dans Calcutta Desert (Marguerite Duras, 1975).8
Time is fixed as in a map in digital and is totally repeatable with no degradation due to copying loss, while silver-based film is structured by time as entropy, therefore unrepeatable. The unpredictability of time passing and time past, the slippage between one and the other, and the pathos of their essentially ineluctable difference are lost.
On my arrival in New York City, I find myself in the middle of the night. Everything I see is dirty, and I can’t find a pay phone that works. The names of subway stations, which can bear the same name, such as 42nd Street, but be in three different locations blocks apart, mystifies me. What happened to the idea of international standards and clarity? Descartes is far away. I feel like I am in the middle of a Third World country, and I don’t speak English. I have doubts about why I am here. But two days after my arrival in late October 1970, I am invited to a private screening of a new film titled Eyes. I discover what an ‘untutored eye’ can see and do.9 The film is about police work in Pittsburgh. Later I will know that it is part of Stan Brakhage’s Pittsburgh Trilogy. My eyes are wide open; my mind suddenly jolted by the absence of moderation and common sense shown by the cinematographer whom I discover is also the filmmaker. This film, my first experience of a Brakhage film, is going to revolutionize my conception of cinematography and change my life like the conversation about Wavelength and Michael Snow had done some months earlier.
I encountered high-definition video in the prehistoric age before it turned digital. I was a visitor on the set of Zbigniev Rybczynski’s music video in 1986, when he was shooting John Lennon’s Imagine and an ironic homage to Eisenstein’s ‘Odessa Steps’ sequence.10 The whole preoccupation of the technical crew was with the sharpness of the image received by a monitor on which you could see the image shot by the prototype Sony high-definition video camera. It had come straight from Japan where the videotape would be shipped back to be printed on 35mm film once production was completed. The lines of the high-definition monitor were not as fine as the thickest of grains in a 35mm film, and what appeared perfectly sharp on the monitor screen could be ‘blown up’ to 35mm but only as a softer image. Later I was invited to the private screening of the 35mm print, and indeed it was very strange to discover sharpness and softness in places you would not have expected if the image had been obtained with a film emulsion rather than an electronic recording. What was also troubling was the lack of depth of field; somehow it was sharp or soft with no gradation in between. Because the market for this expensive experiment was the music channel MTV, most viewers never saw the print version, and when shown in the reduction of TV NTSC broadcast viewing the sharpness issue became irrelevant.
In many ways, all this was repeated with the first all-digital feature cartoons such as Toy Story (1995), made for theatrical release and shown in 35mm. This time what was funny was the total sharpness of the field of vision with no receding areas of softness or out-of-focus blur. This limitation has been vanquished in more recent cartoon feature films in which even chiaroscuro techniques have been mimicked successfully. You can manufacture softness in digital, but if you look carefully it appears fake because it has the same hard edges that sharpness has.11 The outline of the pixel is always there underneath the softness or the sharpness.
In my own experience with shooting a digital image, the first thing I discovered that I like is the extreme sharpness and pristine quality of the edges, but here I am in a minority as most filmmakers, instead of embracing this, use a change in the shutter speed available in the digital camera menu to obtain what the cinematographer calls a ‘film look,’ a blurring around the edges specifically in shots with quick movement. This re-establishes the limitation of the reproduction of movement caused by the shutter opening that is seen in many films, for instance in close-ups of a fast moving wheel of a stagecoach ready to spin out of its axle.
I don’t quite know why I am so attracted to the clarity and lack of mystery of a sharp image. It seems that sharpness could prevent one from ‘freeing the mind from its desire to concentrate.12 Freeing the mind is one of the objectives of the films I have mentioned and that I so dearly love because they attempt to liberate the audience from routine and prejudice. Yet I have never felt that sharpness contradicts the possibility of a drift. Drifting to free your mind seems to be so much part of the processes of the white screen in the black box, the dispositif dear to Roland Barthes.13 But you need the time to wander (I would like to use the French word flâner, meaning, ‘idle stroll’ — another spatial metaphor about the mind). With film, was this freedom to wander acquired through ‘real time’ in opposition to ‘screen time’? The difference between ‘real’ and ‘screen’ is not clear in digital viewing, that much is certain. Furthermore, the brightness of the digital image is a deterrent to concentration. But that deterrent doesn’t free the mind. It only makes it more restless.
This text is part of Babette Mangolte’s essay, “Afterward: A Matter of Time: Analog Versus Digital, the Perennial Question of Shifting Technology and Its Implications for an Experimental Filmmaker’s Odyssey,” first published in Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, edited by Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (Amsterdam University Press, 2003).
Film Notes editor’s note: This text is an excerpt from Babette Mangolte’s essay, ‘Afterward: A Matter of Time: Analog Versus Digital, the Perennial Question of Shifting Technology and Its Implications for an Experimental Filmmaker’s Odyssey,’ originally published in Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, edited by Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003).
Wavelenght (1967) was unavailable in France at the time, as were most other experimental films of the New York avant-garde. In Paris, some cognoscenti knew about the film because of its controversial first prize win at the Knokke le Zoute film festival where it had been shown in 1967 and where some French filmmakers had seen it.
On most shoots, there is one person in charge of actually measuring the timing of every shot so the director can somehow pre-visualize the time construction of the film while the film is being made. The name of this position is ‘continuity person’ or ‘script person.’
Manny Farber wrote, ’ Wavelenght, a pure, tough, forty-five minutes that may become the Birth of a Nation in Underground Films, is a straightforward document of a room in which a dozen businesses have lived and gone bankrupt,’ Negative Space (New York: Praeger, 1971), p. 250
An interesting article by Stuart Klawans states that when released in 70mm, Kubrick’s film was very successful, but when the film went to general release and was shown in 35mm, attendance dropped sharply (New York Times, 11 November, 2001). Klawans’s argument is that the details in 7omm overwhelm the viewer, who is led by Kubrick into a series of disorienting experiences of weightlessness, like the floating pen: ‘The original audience could sense itself hovering, floating, sometimes plunging into the endless depths of the concave Cinerama screen. The sensation was arguably the movie’s theme.’ Klawans rightly credits this argument to Annette Michelson’s pioneering article, ‘Bodies in Space: Films as Carnal Knowledge,’ Artforum VII, no. 6 (February 1969), pp. 53-64
In L’abecedaire de Gilles Deleuze (Pierre-Andre Boutang, 1996), Deleuze defines the work of art as testing ideas by creating new ‘percepts’ and ‘affects’ (see the entry ‘I’ as in ‘Idea’). Deleuze defines a ‘percept’ as a complex fabric of perceptions and sensations that survives the person who experiences it. He also speaks of the artist’s desire in creating a ‘percept’ to make it ‘durable.’
This is the nickname for a high-definition digital video format that runs at 24 frames per second in NTSC and that supposedly compares favorably with the 35mm film image. The camera uses the same optics as Panavision film equipment, and the format is supposedly going to replace film in the next ten years, although some insiders are skeptical because the cost is very much higher than film and could remain so in the future. Georges Lucas has been testing this format for his next Star Wars chapter.
Son Nom De Venise Dans Calcutta Desert (1975) is a film by Marguerite Duras in which she uses the soundtrack of her preceding film India Song (1974) but in combination with a totally new image made of continuous tracking shots of a deserted mansion, showing all the decay of neglect. The image is without the presence of bodies, while the soundtrack is pregnant with the sensuality of the voices from the first film in which you see all the languorous drifting of the leisure class in a hypothetical India from the 130S. Son Nom De Venise Dans Calcutta Desert is notable for its recall of the seduction shown in India Song (1975), and the way its voices without representation create a sense of disincarnation and estrangement of the body.
Stan Brakhage writes of his camera as an ‘untutored eye’ in his Metaphors on Vision, Film Culture 30 (1963).
Another memorable music video by ‘Zbig’ was about fish floating in the middle of New York’s Grand Central Station. High-definition video was used to simplify multiple exposures because the quality of the chromakey separation was very good, and the superimposition could be viewed live. You could superimpose more than forty exposures with little effort using various scales at every stage. The making of this layered image principally involved the ordering of layers, deciding which were going to come in front and obscure preceding layers in the background. It was also possible to move a part of the same layer from front to back, and all the fun had to do with how much you could show yourself to be a virtuoso with the layering processes.
Here I must respectfully disagree with my friend and colleague Lev Manovich, who speaks of the digitally manufactured image as having the potential to reach ‘perfect photographic credibility.’ Technically, he is right and photojournalism will not revert back to silver-based photography. The quality of the images of the Afghan war of 2001 shows that digital photography comes close to matching the atmospheric characteristics of the silver-based process. But cinematography is not photography. Also, the problem for me is that digital is too perfect, and this perfection distracts from its credibility. Besides, both credibility and perfection are ‘culture’ rather than ‘nature.’
A memorable quotation from John Cage.
I am alluding to Roland Barthes’s text about the movie theater as a black box.