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PARALLEL WITH THE MAINSTREAM
During the more than century-long history of movie-making, the artistic
exploration of the possibilities of storytelling have developed in parallel
with the mainstream movies ambition to create narrative conventions. When
working in the field of digital narrativity, studies of the moving image
grammar and syntax are productive. Especially the theoretic research into
how the moving image relates to the process of human thought.
Here the ambition is not to study this large and complex research area
in depth, rather to use theoretical viewpoints as an inspiration during
the development of the project.
2.1
The Montage
In classic filmtheory, Sergej Eisensteins writings about the ”intellectual
montage”, is regarded as a pioneering work. His theory is based
on the presumption that two images viewed after each other creates a third
in the consciousness of the observer, a theory developed from the logic
of dialectics. The montage serves as a model for how associations and
experiences can be communicated to the viewer.
”Our films are faced with the task of presenting not only a
narrative that is logically connected, but one that contains a maximum
of emotion and stimulating power.”(1)
A classic
example on this method is to be found in the silent feature Battleship
Potemkin (Eisenstein 1925), in the famous stairway sequence were soldiers
opens fire on civilians. Visually the sequence is constructed using an
interplay between tight close-ups and wide panoramas. We see a rifle,
a baby carriage, a womans face. Images that contain narrative elements
by their own, linked together with the use of montage they trigger the
strong emotional reaction of the scene in the viewers mind.
Eisenstein developed the theory of montage further from the basic model
of ”1+1=3”, pointing out that each scene/image contained several
narrative levels at play simultaneously, he called this process ”vertical
montage” and defined its function: ”Each montage-piece
has a double reponsibility - to build the total line as to continue the
movement within each of the contributory themes.”(2)
In a summary of Eisenstein´s method, in the essay entitled ”Film
– a thinking, seeing and hearing machine”, filmtheorist Anna
Sofia Rossholm points out that ”the movement in film is comparable
to the act of thinking and perception. The celloluid strip of still images
that makes out the films rawmaterial creates a third cathegory in our
minds eye: a movement. This mechanism, deepy rooted in our perception,
also forms the basis of thinking.” (2)
Eisensteing developed his refinement of film form in an age were the audience
to a large extend were analphabets. In russian massculture in the 1920´s,
the written word was a tool among the well-off, the oral storytelling
the narrative form used by the masses. Eisenstein worked in movies before
sound, thus being able to focus on the language of the moving image.
When developing his montage theory Eisenstein had a wider ambition than
finding tools for communication of ideas – ”the process
of creating awareness through the use of the film montage is developed
in close analogy with the process of thought and the mechanics of film.”(3)
The artistic
montage as method and form fascinated the contemporary surrealists, in
”L´Age d`Or”, Luis Bunüel and Salvador Dalis experimental
silent movie from 1928, there are striking examples on the power of illusions
created by the visual montage. Their artistic focus were on the creation
of a cinematic dream language were association and deliberate shifts in
the realistic perspective created an experience beyond the control of
consciousness.
Other experimental filmmakers of the time, as the swede Viking Eggeling,
worked with formal abstract images and animations, used the image frame
as a research palette for investigations of movement and rhytm. His short
movie ”Diagonalsymphonie” (Eggeling 1924) is considered a
classic abstract piece of work in movie making. Another contemporary work
is Ballet Méchanique (Léger 1923-24) in which the artist
Ferdinand Léger staged the mechanical surfaces of painting in animated
sequences. The film worked with themes and variations on a theme to create
a narrative flow, an inspiration from classic music as pointed out by
the filmtheorist David Boardwell in an analysis, ”Ballet Méchanique
uses the theme-and-variation approach in a complex way, introducing many
individual motifs in rapid succesion, then bringing them back at intervals
and in different combinations.” (4)
These abstract experiments forms another line of investigations into the
esthetic of the moving image, they were created in an artistic climate
were futurists engaged themselves in the estethetics of the machine age
and can be viewed as a parallel with these ideas.
Some of these early pioneering directors managed to transform a personal
cinematic language into the massmedium of motion pictures, one of them
being Bunüel. In his films he often used scenarios were dreams, elements
of chance and fragmented memories shaped narrative structures. Late movies
like Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (Bunüel 1973) and Le fantôme
de la liberté (Bunüel 1974) uses visual elements that challenge
the basic elements of visual narration.
2.2
The New Wave
In line with the development of the movie industry into a narrative massmedium,
the experiments became more and more marginalized. The artistic strategies
limited itself to the content, using the moving image to comment and shape
our view of the world. But with the french ”new wave” in the
60´s a new generation of filmmakers were established, deliberately
using the the filmic form as an integrated, denotative element in narration.
This wave was artisticly heteroegenous, some of the filmmakers focused
on contemporary stories, while others challenged the way movies represented
reality. Directors like Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard
investigated the artistic possibilities of narration in filmmaking, at
the same time speaking of film as the New Art, created for and by the
modern human. In Godard´s work an interest for the montage as an
creative element is evident, he spoke of the assemblage as a specific
filmic language; image and sound delivers meaning separately, freed from
syncronity they can be linked differently and in that act create new contexts.
In his debute A Bout de Suffle (Godard 1959) his experimented with breaking
down the time and story logic of a traditional thriller narrative into
a new free form.
Resnais cooperated with several writers that are regarded as innovators
of the french novel. For the feature movie Last Year in Marienbad (Resnais
1961) the writer Alain Robbe-Grillet created a scenario free from the
logic of time, based on memories and Resnais proceeded that narrative
method by deconstructing the movies visual language. An artistic endevour
he began with his debute feature Hiroshima Mon Amour (Resnais 1959) where
he used the screenplay by writer Marguerite Duras as a kind of radio drama.
Resnais uses silent images of a passionate love story between a japanese
man and a french woman, on the soundtrack they communicate with each other,
but never in moving images. Parallel documentary footage of the atombomb
and the post-war reality in Japan are intertwined. As Peter Cowie notes
in his ”A Concise History of the Cinema” : ”…builds
his film out of the interplay of thought and action, memory and desire.”
(5)
La Jetée (1962), a photo-novel by director Chris Marker, is an
investigation of how film can use memory and time to construct a story
based solely on black and white still images and a narrative on the soundtrack.
The plot transports the protagonist from a close future back to childhood
and a love affair in past tense, into the future were the man realizes
he cannot change his destiny. Time are dissolved as the man, from his
childhoods point of view, watches himself die.
Many filmtheorists
has pointed out La Jetée as a unique narrative experiment of how
an image can be used as a methaphor for memory. Jean-Louis Schefer reflects
over this in the catalogue to the exhibition ”Passages of the Image”
över detta. ”The originality of Chris Marker´s film
obviously resides in the work of the image itself: a framing of the most
obscure zone´s of memory´s fragility and unpredictabiblity;
and a montage that replicates gaps in recollection”. (6)
The form in Markers film are developed from a methodological narrative
context; memory narrative, fragmented pieces of events and timelapses
are used as an challenge to expand the borders of form and technology.
The script served as basis for the movie 12 Monkeys (Gilliam 1995), were
the intricate play with the dissolvment of time were staged using digital
special effects.
Many filmmakers in modern cinema have shown that memories and dreams can
act as important inspiration for constructing cinematic narratives; Frederico
Fellini in 8 ½ (Fellini 1965) used a writers daydream as a starting
point for the movies visual sceneries, in To the End of the World (1991)
Wim Wenders used a science-fiction story framework to visualize a technological
future were science have the abilities to control the human memories basic
functions.
The french/european cinema during the 1960´s are central in moviemaking
history both as cinematic epoque and for the filmtheory basis created
by critics/directors around the magazine Cahiers d`Cinema. They created
a term to label a director as an unique artistic contributer in moviemaking
- l´auteur. The point being that filmmaking was more than a massmedium,
filmmaking was an artistic creation. The personal language and expression
used by the filmmaker was as pregnant as the literary language, as ideabased
and conceptually andvanced as the language of ”high” art.
2.3 Time-image – Movement-image
In the french ”new wave” climate with its strong theoretical
and formal awareness, the interest for cinema as bearer and enactor of
artistic ideas and contemporary opinions spread among theorists. The philosopher
Gilles Deleuze formulated a theory of the cinematic language in ”L´image-movement”
and ”L´image-temps”. Filmtheorist Anna Sofia Rossholm
points out that Deleuze in his writing articulates how ”film
creates conceptions and ideas, cinematic ideas, that cannot be defined
or pinpointed since they by their nature constantly change, intertwine
and affect each other into new meaning.” (7)
A basic conception
in Deleuze´ philosophical cinematic theory is the differentiation
between ”movement-image” and ”time-image”. These
terms define two main narrative strategies, summarized as ”american”
and ”european”. The european cinema takes an interest in dream,
psychoanalysis and intellectual experiences, while the american put emphasis
on events and action.
”European cinema saw in this a means of breaking with the ‘American‘
limitations of the action-image, and also of reaching a mystery of time,
of uniting image, thought and camera in a single ‘automatic subjectivity‘,
in contrast to the over-objective conception of the Americans”.
(8)
With this
description of differences in the cinematic media between the european
and american, Deleuze´ focus on a creative choice, the subjective
against the objective. In analogy to this resoning, european filmmakers
in general are more interested in introspection, while the americans focus
on story, on events and actions in their cinematic narratives.
Deleuze takes an interest not only in overall analysis, in his writings
he also goes in close encounter with the cinematic form and analyzes different
montage and editing techniques, as well as visual perspectives. One term
he establishes is the irrational cut, in doing this he recycles Eistenstein´s
theories of montage as a thought process, Deleuze calls the concept ”a
cinema of the brain”.
In her essay Anna Sofia Rossholm concludes that - ”Deleuze bestows
the moving image with a capability of thought, of being a ’thinking
machine’ ”.(9) This notion of cinema as an prolongment
of the human memory and the brains capabilities to associate and create
meaning, is a description of the media even more relevant if you take
in consideration the possibilities of digital technology and the moving
image.
2.4
Cinema as story world
Another theorethical view on the cinematic montage and narrative model
can be found reading Edward Branigan who takes the audience viewpoint
in his analysis of the narrative tools in film media. In his essay ”Story
World and Screen” he argues from a welldefined theorethical view
on cinematic narrative :
"Narrative is a way of comprehending space, time, and casuality.
Since in film there are at least two important frames of reference for
understanding space, time, and casuality, narrative in film is the principle
by which data is converted from the frame of the screen into a diegesis
-– a world – that frames a particular story, or sequence of
actions, in the world; equally, it is the principle by which data is converted
from story onto screen." (10)
Branigan
notes that several simultaneous readings of a movie takes place when an
observer screens the image, partly ”bottom-up”, a perceptual
decoding of shadows, deep, movement and space; partly through a thought
process ”based on acquired knowledge and schemas, not constrained
by stimulus time, and work `top-down´ on the data, using a spectator´s
expectations and goals as principles of organization.” (9)
Seen in this context the cinematic narration simultaneous works back and
forth in time, the observer uses personal association to interpret the
events in a sequence, at the same time building an expectation on the
continuation. Branigan concludes further:
”Because top-down processes are active in watching a film, a
spectator´s cognitive activity is not restricted to the particular
moment being viewed in a film. Instead the spectator is able to move forward
and backward through screen data in order to experiment with a variety
of syntactical, semantic, and referential hypotheses; as Ian Jarvie notes,
`We cannot see movies without thinking about them«”.
(11)
Cinema narrative
is a linear sequence of images, a montage, but the cinematic experience
from the observers point of view is a composite experience backward, forward
and in present time; a vertical montage to use Eisenstein´s terminology.
Also, in Braningan´s model it is the observer that must be regarded
”the thinking machine” not the cinema as Deleuze wrote in
his model.
No matter which theory perspective you consider to be relevant for analysis
of the narrative process in the film media, it is necessary to be aware
of the structural connections in the creation of cinematic works. With
digital narrativity tools, the connections between the computer screen
and the user constitutes a process with several dimensions. The second
technological revolution where the computer can be regarded as the ”thinking
machine” creates an expanded narrative stage, a media where theorethical
strategies can be staged in cinematic form.
2.5 Cinema in computer / Computer in cinema
Artificial intelligence – A I – is a research area fuelled
with stuff for the imagination, it creates an attractive base of narrative
material. The A I – scenario implies that mankind today can create
a machine capable of storing huge quantities of information, a machine
with a memory that never fails (in theory), a machine with an interface,
image and sound, camera and recorder; everything it needs to develop self-governed
thinking and creation (again in theory).
The visualization of these fantasies using up-to-date digital technology,
with animations in real-time and special effects, makes the fantasy alive.
The science-fictionmovie The Matrix (Warchowski Brothers 1999) is settled
in a world where the borders between the artificial reality and the actual
are dissolved. A code – The Matrix – controls and creates
all life, it is pure Artificial Intelligence.
The characters in the movie are at the same time real and representations
of themselves in a supercomputer. The linearity of time is as dissolved
as the logic of history. An aggressive hacker in the 1990´s can
create a system collapse in the future, a ”cookie” can be
equipped with all necessary information to have the power to control the
code.
Basically an action story, fuelled with traditional good and evil components,
the good protagonist depicted as a man with messaic qualities and evil
represented by artificial agents that can move freely in the digital universe,
their goal is for the Machine=The Matrix to take over control of its own
destiny.
The Matrix
is a contemporary exemple of the possibilities of traditional storytelling
to enact complex theories and ideas on a vertical level. Digital visual
effects can help us in understanding abstract theories of artificial intelligence
and the computers ability to simulate reality. At the same time, Matrix
is an example on the need for a closure in manistream movie language,
the basic theme being Mankinds victory over the machine; true to this
model, the ending of the movie leaves no uncertainty of the outcome of
this struggle. The entertainment industry seems, at least in the example
of The Matrix, to keep the agreements of content, even when depicting
the digital rooms dissolvement in time and space.
(1) Eisenstein, Sergei The Film Sense s4 (Harcourt, Brace & World,
Inc 1942)
(2) Eisenstein, Sergei The Film Sense s76 (Harcourt, Brace & World,
Inc 1942)
(3) Rossholm, Anna Sofia ”Filmen - en tänkande, seende och
hörande maskin” Dagens Nyheter 2001-01-18.
(4) Bordwell, David ”Nonnarrative Formal Systems” s149 Film
art, an introduction. (McCraw-Hill 1997)
(5) Cowie, Peter A Concise History of The Cinema s104 (A.Zwemmer Ltd London,
A.S. Barnes & co. New York 1971)
(6) Schefer, Jean-Louis The Enigmatic Body (Cambridge University Press
1995) återgivet på http://mason.gmu.edu/~psmith5/trans.html
2001-04-24
(7) see footnote 3.
(8) Donato, Totaro Off Screen essays, Gilles Deleuze´s Bergsonian
Film Project. http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/9903/offscreen_essays 2001-04-23
Quote taken from english translation of Gilles Deleuze Cinema 2: The Time-Image.
(London: The Athlone Press (1989).
(9) see footnote 3.
(10) Braningan, Edward ”Story World and Screen” Narratology;
An Introduction s239-240 (Longman London and New York, 1996)
(11) ibid
THORE
SONESON 2001
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