As I shot, the structure of the film and the rhythm of the shooting emerged spontaneously from the landscape. The camera was always moving through space; the visual imagery was constantly in flux.
– Nancy Holt, Pine Barrens (2011: 251)1
I was travelling on a spiritual mission, but sometimes I got distracted.
– The Unborn Child, Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991)
In Cosmopolis (novel by Don deLillo [2003]; film directed by David Cronenberg [2012]), the character Vija Kinski, Eric Packer’s ‘Chief of Theory’, tells him that technology ‘helps us make our fate’. This truism is given support in the narrative in a number of ways that hold the proposition to be true. In Cronenberg’s film, this dialogue takes place in one of the central technology images of the film: the long white limousine, which is used for the day by Mr. Packer (played by Robert Pattinson) as his mobile office. As an example of automotive technology, in addition to its engineering design for transportation, the limousine as this techno-image signals the divergent histories of Fordist labour, and the automotive century’s cultural and economic structural divisions of visible and invisible, privileged and disadvantaged, able and disabled, information and opacity. The vehicular technology Cronenberg’s film expresses, reminds me of the political (in the epistemic and economic terms of gendered, sexed, classed and racial) functions of all technologies. Technology, in its broadest sense, refers to the crafting or use of tools used to modify, create and craft materials to affect, interact or produce something. The automotive stage in Cosmopolis provided the situation for the digital camera (by Cronenberg’s longtime Director of Photography, Peter Suschitzky), where one imagines the camera is guiding the action, and the highly restricted movement of that camera becomes the whole condition of the film, supplanted by the original soundtrack created by Cronenberg’s composer Howard Shore and Canadian band Metric. It is the controlled, measured, electronic sounds of the end of one century.
As a field or paradigm for thinking about the image, ‘technology’ does not just refer to mechanical or digital things – such as the physical analog and digital equipment, the crafts involved in set, costume, make-up, story-boarding, chemical or digital processes required for pre- and post-processing, speed, timing and rhythms of editing, data storage, the technicalities of sound composition and recording, and so on. Technology also refers to all manner of ways in which the image is either mediated or autonomous – the either/or is contingent upon one’s theoretical (or political) opinion on what kind of modeling affect technology has, or can have. And in that sense of mediation, and/or autonomy, comes restriction and control, as per Cosmopolis, which I described as a technology image. In Stiegler’s terms, my description of the limousine as techno-image provides a grammatised image, where we understand the description a moving image’s technological adaption through a written account of a number of connective technologies.
With changes in technology, new terms and neologisms come into play as the social and political materiality of technology affecting the way the film can be produced, and the ways in which theorisation might be adequate to those images are tested. When technology connects with sentient and other non-sentient beings, then new forms of political history are made – for example as we see played out in films like Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), where all beings desire the security given by what Arthur Krocker calls a ‘genetic determinism’ (2012: 122). Or, in Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995), where the town of Machine is a technological platform that facilitates the actions of its inhabitants through the genocide of one race in favour of another’s industrial pursuits. There are films where historical technologies are staged, such as in Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) or Free Radicals (Len Lye, 1958–79). These different kinds of moments in film history are technologically-mediated events, created through specific material cultures, with specific sets of cultural knowledge and tools of technology. How does the film theory one writes respond to this mediation?
The type of technology used to make film determines the form of film that is made. This may seem like a redundant point to make, but it is both a structural and mediating condition – as well as component or device – that when highlighted or absented from film theory provides an immediate measure of what constitute the intentions and aims of the given theory. Without the electric current provided by a lightning bolt, Frankenstein’s monster would not be given life. Different technologies enable different connections to be made. The operating systems of different technological platforms effectively present a system of formal boundaries (the space of the car; the open landscape) whereby the conditions for creativity emerge. For example, we see this in filmmaking industrial practices as bounded by strict national censorship laws, as in the case of Thailand or Australia, or formal technical rules concerning camera movement and the laws of physics – as in the case of Classical Hollywood cinema, or rules for the use of the DV digital video technology at the end of the 1990s by the Dogme 95 group.
Collectively, societies do not yet know what technologies can enable. But we can speculate upon and test out their potential – collaboratively and individually. New technologies facilitate different practices, which in turn interface with resources, information and knowledge in new ways of conceiving of worlds, examining how they operate, and how the subjects and objects inside them operate, and what are their material forms. We can imagine and describe the possible consequences when we see the technology of an inanimate body irrigated by energy engage in processes that involve the sentient world. From the film producers’ point of view, the value of this energised body is frequently in terms of its potential productive labour; how many entertainment units can x idea generate, or what is the profit return on a film, or its cultural value; its aesthetic (and thus political) potential, as a work of art or as a political manifesto. But from the film creators’ position, there are other uses of technology. These may be built and programmed into the production, intuited and/or crafted through the technical tools available, and often filmmakers/cinematographers/sound designers/visual designers will use a combination of approaches to achieve their image and film. The images that film technologies create are said to reflect, represent, copy, mirror, critique, question and embrace the ‘reality’ they have been drawn from. This type of position is critiqued for the value placed on the ‘illusion’ of the final (filmic, or media) image where the politics involved in technological crafting and design is ignored (see Kember and Zylinska 2012: 10) – for example, the discussion on the demands on human labour involved in the production of film (see Blair 2001). Theories that uncritically regard images as ‘reflections’ or ‘representations’ use already determined readings of their material cultures of production, given by an ‘intergenerational’ tertiary memory (see Stiegler 2010: 9). There are also theories that argue that technologies determine and mediate knowledge of ‘reality’, through means of the technological apparatus and its use (as described by Holt’s guidance through space by the camera, reciprocating the movement of her gait through space).
In film theory, the address of the technologies of the cinema is uneven and sporadic. There is the technical manual, as in Barry Salt’s work (2006, 2009), which is an empirical film theory as it is concerned with historical and technical details. But the technical details and their experiential testing and use are the language of the medium. So the discussion, for example, on the range of depth of field achieved by Gregg Toland’s camera modification (see Cowan 2012), or why ‘digital film’ is an incorrect technicality (film strips are made of an unstable substance, celluloid, which record through chemical and light interface, whereas digital processes involve recording data) (see Streible 2013), or an anthropologist’s field observations of the film production of a Tamali film crew turned speculative theory (see Pandian 2013) provide the material-semiotic details for all styles of film theory.
Film theorisation of film technology is limited, restricted in part by the theoretical preference for narrativisation. We see a film and want to respond to it as a story, as an experience to be described, telling how it affects us, the viewer, or what correlative allegories or metaphors about cultural, political and/or sociological issues it provides. In these senses, technology is but another model (as defined in the previous chapter); but it is necessarily – vis-à-vis the materiality of film – the meta-model that impacts upon all film theory. The experiential theorisation of new technologies dominates historical periods of technological innovation and change (cf. Elsaesser and Barker 1990; Schwartz 1995; Bennett et al. 2008; W. Brown 2013; Scholz 2013). How different people and generations respond to technological innovation is what will drive further investigation and testing of applications of technologies and their theorisation. Even if that is not the intention of all films, once distributed and in a public screening venue, interpretation is still of course mediated by the industrial factors that determine the senses of individuated subject and collective group, and access to theoretical models, and normative epistemologies that structure the experiences of those bodies.
Theorisations of technology are criticised for their commercially driven narrative of ‘progress’; such as ‘this camera is faster, smaller/bigger/better’ (for example, see Slane 1997: 72). The progressive narrative engages the modernist myth of technological ‘solutions’ to social and political problems, the naivety of the audience, and works through another political binarism of ‘advanced/primitive’ (cf. Gunning 1986; Russell 1999). Theoretical address of technology can wax lyrical about the ‘freedom’ it promises to the ‘imagination’, but ignore the ways in which the fetishisation of technologies have led to the exploitation of workers (see Beller 2013), the depletion of natural resources (see Bozak 2011), changes to images of sex on screen (see White 2006: 174), the mediation of desire, and so on. Direct technical address of the medium was at first contingent upon access to films and film technology (cf. Whannel and Harcourt 1964: 5–7). Usually there is a separation in film theory between those that directly address how something works, and those that ignore the technology altogether. It is common to pick up a film theory book and find no reference to technology or the technological in the text of the book, index, notes or research references. In writing, it is often assumed that the specialist reader of film theory knows that the technological platform has been crafted and designed in order to achieve its results. On the other hand, theories that model their analysis and thesis upon the technological platform types are routinely subject to critiques of ‘technological determinism’, where the argument claims that technology is what determines society and culture – including the cultural artefacts it produces, such as film. The correlative position to this is technological autonomy, claiming that technology develops through its own logic, and is not something that humans control (Dusek 2006: 84). These positions are notions that films and film theory frequently test (cf. Virilio 1989; Kellner 1999; Stiegler 2011; Scholz 2013), and are taken further in critical media theories that address technology in cultural and political terms (for example, Haraway 1991; Grau and Veigl 2011).
In film theory, the term technology is used in a number of different ways, as per the theory. For example, De Lauretis’s (1987) technologies of gender on screen have a different contextual meaning than Stiegler’s sense of filmic technology as a prosthetic for human memory and consciousness (2011: 60). Yet there are connections to be made and distinctions to be drawn between the writing of technological platforms that produce content. In film theory, attention to the technology of the production of the film – the materiality of the filmic content – is not always in evidence. Nonetheless the technological platform always contributes to the determination of the distributed meaning.
For clarity (and economy), in this chapter I approach the multiple theoretical approaches to technology by film theory for their focus on distinctive facets of cinema. The core types are (i) industrial practices, where theory constructs arguments concerning the movements and histories of film technologies; and (ii) the matter of mediation, where theory addresses the materiality of film technology in aesthetic-political, critical, conceptual and philosophical terms. By way of conclusion, this chapter raises a third point, the theoretical elephant of a technologically facilitated ‘reality’ in and by film theory. While these three approaches are not exclusive, they are easily distinguished by methodological approaches, where the account of film creation is informed by its discipline specific rules, or broken rules as in the case of transdisciplinary writing, and the cultural mores of grammatisation.
Industrial practices and im/materialflows
On 17 January 2014, at 3:47pm, The Los Angeles Times reported that the Hollywood film studio, Paramount Pictures had stopped releasing movies on analog film formats in United States theatres (see Verrier 2014). 35mm film projection was the format used in cinema theatres since its invention and first screenings at the start of the twentieth century in New York (see Gomery 1992: 34ff). This fact is significant in terms of the dominance that analog filmic industrial practice held for the first century of filmmaking, as the industry moves to all-digital film global releases by the Hollywood studios (Paramount’s first all-digital release was Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, 2013). As I read this headline about Paramount, I can almost hear the cheers of glee from the experimental filmmakers and the graves of the historical avant-garde filmmakers ringing in at that exact moment. Jonas Mekas did not hold back when he wrote:
Hollywood films (and we mean Hollywoods all over the world) reach us beautiful and dead. They are made with money, cameras, and splicers, instead of with enthusiasm, passion, and imagination. If it will help us to free our cinema by throwing out the splicers and the budget-makers and by shooting our films on 16mm as Cassavetes did, let us do so … there is no other way of breaking the frozen cinematic ground than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses (1971: 75)
Mekas’s refusal of the commercial narrative cinema’s interests is indicative of the theoretical divide in aesthetic and political positions, between commercial and art-film practices. The structure of this apparent oppositional, reactionary stand-point offers an antagonistic reciprocity, as commercial films learn techniques and ideas from the experimental, thus lending awareness and tolerance of the terms of avant-garde experimentation (see debates in Michelson 1971; Cornwell 1972). Often, a (false) equilibrium is reached between the two, as commercial practices absorb the experimental, while the innovations of an artistic practice struggle to compete against commercially-funded industries’ applications of technologies that facilitate, produce and distribute innovations in image- and sound-making faster than independent companies. So we see in commercial narrative cinemas the use of previously experimental-only techniques. The absorption of the marginal by the mainstream is one of capital’s cyclical traits, where information and ideas, and creativity flows from one circuit of production to another, losing some of the context and material specificity on the way.
Mekas’s own style of filmmaking produced personal films, poetically structured, engaging in what Naficy terms the epistolary mode (2001), a style commonly seen in exilic filmmaking, but always in pursuit of the medium itself. An obsession with technology and its possibilities, and its restrictions (as Mekas points out above, sarcasm notwithstanding), has produced a significant, although small, body of film theory devoted to the artist film, manifesto-style philosophies of film technology (for example, see Sitney 1971; Gidal 1976, 1989; O’Pray 2003; Curtis 2007; Speilmann 2008). Together with Jerome Hill, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka and Stan Brakhage, Mekas was one of the co-founders of the Anthology Film Archives in New York, in 1969. This archive collects and exhibits forms of film that are made as art.2 The stated intention of the archive is to ‘encourage the study of the medium’s masterworks as works of art rather than disposable entertainment’ (Anthology Film Archives 2014).
Mekas’s group is an example of a well-organised artists’ collective, devoted to not just the practice but also the archiving of their technology. In the 1960s the first portable video cameras (albeit with suitcases full of batteries) enabled new modes of independent filmmaking practices, not only in New York, from where Mekas speaks, but globally, situated in specific locales. The same era, for example, would see develop in the UK a group of what is historically known as British expanded cinema. Less formal ‘groupings’ were provided with theorisation and validation of the terms of a ‘materialist cinema’ of the late 1970s, through practitioners Peter Gidal and Malcolm Le Grice, described as oppositional to the mainstream dominance of narrative commercial film (see Gidal 1976; Le Grice 2001; Ball 2011: 272). These positions have been critiques for their lack of address of feminist filmmaking issues of the 1970s era of their production (see De Bruyn 2012: 89), for example, in the now fairly well-known filmic works of the same era – such as those by Carolee Schneeman, Marie Menken and Yoko Ono (see Mellencamp 1990: 21). Artists’ filmmaking collectives also engage a different set of work practices, in part determined by their relationship with the technologies they use, in comparison to the restricted, economic requirements of workers that produce the Hollywood technological machinery of film, where Fordist work practices make enormous demands on human labour.3
Technological changes are mapped out in film theory against, or comparatively with changes in resourcing costs. These are contingent upon the local economic and governmental concerns. The terms of the continuous economic restructuring of the twentieth-century Hollywood production studios (see Balio 2013) is a now historical account of the local events with global impacts. In addition to recounting the events, some film theorisation also looks to analyse its local use of new technologies and what their economic infrastructure does for the film industry. For example, Ranjani Mazumdar argues that the ways in which the various Bollywood production companies organise their star’s bodies, through technological facilitation, has produced ‘a new language of liveness’ (2012: 835). The liveness of technological mediation is something that all media forms have used to spatialise their experience of technology and the self-referentiality of technology, as it contributes to the work being made (art films whose work is about the physicality of making work, such as One Plus One [Jean-Luc Godard, 1968]; commercial films about the process of making a film such as Singin' in the Rain [Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952]). However, the theorisation of ‘liveness’ is also itself subject to criticism for its assumptions about what and who constitute that ‘life’ (cf. Stiegler 2011: 64, 68; Kember and Zylinska 2012: xvi).
In theorising technology and film, cinema and screen images, the terms of the materiality and physics of movement are employed – for example, in the writing of issues of territory, space, duration, velocity and determination of content, spatialisation. In her modeling of the affects to perception of the world via satellite technologies, Lisa Parks describes televisual information in terms of technological modes of ‘convergence’ as a ‘relational model of understanding how technologies inflect, inform, and interact with one another in the process of their emergence’ (2005: 77). She describes the structure of technological convergences (and we could think of other forms of convergence here, for example between the gaming industry and film, or between the porn industry and commercial cinema and so on), in terms of ‘a form of horizontal fragmentation (or flow) but also as a set of vertical practices of uplinking and downlinking’ (2005: 69). Parks’ terminology of verticality is drawn from Deleuze, and invokes a question of territoriality and the differences between striated and smooth spaces (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 482ff). The term 'flows' is described by cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai as a series of global flows of ideas and cultural materials that media forms facilitate across the globe, but often resulting in strangely apolitical manifestations of imagery and ideas (see 1996: 29–30).
Appadurai describes how global flows operate to create a placeless ‘community’, full of ‘ironies and resistances’ as they share images but not cultural or political affinities (1996: 29). His example concerns how ‘nostalgia without memory’ can occur in cultures, which we often see in 'post'-media forms that draw from a history or place never experienced. Parks provides a good example of where technological forms facilitate a shift in cultural memory – without the physicality of experience – through the lines of flow or linkage between convergent media. Parks describes how a 1999 videotaped story on the Australian Indigenous 'Stolen Generation' by an Imparja TV camera operator, Dwayne Ticker, was picked up from the local Yuendumu Imparja National News by commercial Australian television networks, then CNN, and then via satellite, globally distributed (2005: 68–9). The results of which was an Australian filmmaker living in New York, Phillip Noyce, seeing this news item and deciding to make a film about this aspect of Australian history, Rabbit-Proof Fence.4
The theorisation of the role of technologies in convergences of cultures has been mapped in a number of different ways by film theory. First, it looks at adaptations of different technologies of print media, commonly from news stories, scripts, poetry, novels, photographs and art images. Convergences between film and other disciplines also occur, as a sharing of technological platforms of information, such as the translation of ideas, discoveries and stories from the sciences and other humanities, narrativised and imaged (see Jenkins 2006; Brown and Krzywinska 2009: 91). Convergences between film and other technological forms (such as robotics) have historicised technological events as contributing to larger media archaeologies at work across cultures (cf. Ellul 1967; Elsaesser 2004; Ndalianis 2006; Parikka and Hertz 2010), and the grammatisation process in filmic worlds, or cinematic ‘re-producibility’ (Stiegler 2011: 213–15).
The matter of mediation
What these (and other) theories of instances of convergences of film forms and cultures direct critical theorisation to is a consideration of the implications of filmic technology and the grammatical terms of historical medium materiality. The territorial privilege of technology and its display in terms of film also draws theoretical attention. The question of access to materials is as significant to the theoretical ability to connect with the materiality of the experience. Sometimes this connection has unexpected consequences. So I will take examples from a few different film forms to discuss – first an ethnographic film, a detour back to a narrative experimental film, then a brief look at animation in this chapter, and a narrative cinema in the following chapter, then we begin to see how film theory describes the filmmaker-as-technological body’s privilege of access as deterministically bound with progress narratives or ethical questions.
Filmmaker Jean Rouch conceptualised the idea of Dziga Vertov’s Cinéma vérité, described by Bill Nichols as an ‘observational cinema’ (1991: 108ff). Rouch’s access to Songhay West African rituals enabled him to theorise the technological platform of his camera for a range of reasons (see Russell 1999: 218–21). It is these reasons that draw attention to Rouch’s work, and how film theory treats the question of cine-mediation. Most accounts of the histories of observational cinema will mention in passing Rouch’s technique and aims, linking his work with Edgar Morin, as they worked together on projects. However, while some film theory accepts the work that Rouch did uncritically, some eulogise his work (see Stoller 1992), others will point to the questionable ethics of his films, and their theorisation (see Russell 1999: 228), which were a result of the mediation of the camera technology. Roach states that he used his camera to 'seek the truth', couched in the historical endorsement of Vertov’ kinopravda – literally meaning the 'film truth' of the camera, where film would not show any kind of ‘staged reality’, but capture life ‘unawares’ (Petrić 1993: 4). Rouch described his version of kinopravda as ‘cinétranse’, where the filmmaker leaves his body (as in a trance) and becomes one with the camera equipment, able to record the ‘pure truth’; the technologised 'reality' that ‘only the camera’ can see (Russell 1999: 77ff)
Vlada Petrić argues that the contradictions inherent in Vertov’s approach are to be seen within the context of his historical milieu; that of a constructivist aesthetic that used deconstructive methods in order to reconstruct 'the truth' (1993: 10ff, 188; see also Aitken 2002: 57–8). Catherine Russell cautions against reading Rouch too literally, or out of his historical context (1999: 228). The integration of technology and 'man' may come through the mediation of themes and genres; for example, religious technologies that allow the discussion of the camera-Rouch-body as a ‘shaman’ (Michael Eaton cited in Russell 1999: 228). There is also the discussion of the camera-body as anthropomorphised actor, where technology performs: ‘By virtue of its material form and technological apparatus, cinema wears its performative intervention openly’ (Bell 2007: 4). Following this logic we can describe Rouch’s 'truth' as performing a semiotic-ritual, to which we can also add the technological structuring devices of editing, cuts, frame matches, the cognitive figuring of a rhythm of relations (see Bordwell 1985: 76). As Lev Kuleshov noted: ‘A shot must be treated like a sign, like a letter’ (cited in Drummond et al. 1979: 4).
Can technology ever capture the world? Desires? Ideas? Imagination? Specters? Death?
Theories abound where cinema is described as a mixing of art and technology (see Blassnigg 2009). We can speculate, as Julie Dash does in Daughters of the Dust, as to what the technology of the camera might be able to register; to perceive that which the human eye cannot perceive. In this film, ancestral figures of the past and future take the forms of spectral children and the earthly elements, and the food consumed, the physical rituals followed, the winds, the seas, the earth, and the senses are all given equal attention within the film world’s mise-en-scène. Several kinds of technology are deployed as motifs in the film, used as devices that signal the recording and the re-ordering of the past and the mortal duration of those present; buttons, fabric. This is the spectral vitality of film that Barthes and Bazin sought to describe in their writing about the image – photographic and moving. There is the technology of food, of indigo dye for cotton production, technologies of witchcraft and of photography. Jacqueline Bobo describes Dash’s use of technology as a homage, which ‘establishes a creative provenance’ for the film (1995: 133). Bobo describes the production and meanings of the film scenes and narrative layers through a historical account of each image’s provenance – the use of the large-format camera is a reference to the Harlem photographer James Van der Zee. Bobo’s account of technologies as layers of motifs describes a sensorial grammatisation as a power that their visualisation holds. Bobo's theory echoes the script’s aim of the ‘empowerment of black women’ (1995: 165). Bobo suggests that the technology that has enabled the image to realise its potential also becomes a tool of interrogation of the image itself.
Consideration of the apparatus of the cinema, and of film, has led theory to a number of surprising places. Apparatus theories of the 1970s and 1980s focused on either metaphorically relating the visual field to psychoanalytic theories (see Baudry 1986; De Lauretis and Heath 1986), or the audio field to a semiotic-psychological model (see Doane 1985; Bonitzer 1986), or to the philosophical field (see Lyotard 1986; Silverman 1986) or gender model (see De Lauretis 1986). In the face of digital developments, at first glance, this era’s focus on psychoanalytic models and use of psychoanalytic terminology seems hopelessly narrow and out of touch with filmmaking practices and, as I discuss in the following chapter, a few key theories unfortunately make generalist statements about a universal 'spectator' that can alienate/exclude other spectators. However, some of the arguments are well worth closer analysis for their contribution to debates on semiotics, materialism, affect, and can be read in positivist ways for their highlighting of areas where theoretical and practical work needs to be done.
Apparatus theories use analogy and metaphor to relate the physical experience of a screen projection to the spectator, and the image is described in terms of positive or negative attributes (the lack, the look, the gaze). Psychoanalytic modeling ascribes gender, sex and racial roles to screen images, so putting those politics aside for a moment we are left with the still binarist terms of a historical piece of technology. Thinking purely in terms of a specific apparatus will lead film theory to ascribe the terms of 'old' and 'new media' (as Lev Manovich defined in 2001). Some of the apparatus theoretical positions, however, developed into different strands. Thinking about time and sound, for example, but also taking on the technological determinist challenge of thinking about the actual ontology; the being of the camera as autonomous.
Unlike the dominant film theorists of the 1980s, Donna Haraway’s prescient comment in her Cyborg Manifesto (from 1984) states: ‘The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment’ (1991: 180). If the machine is 'us' as the camera then how do the differences in technology affect this processual body? As a nineteenth-century industrial invention, the camera measured light photons. The construction of analog film worlds is done by light energy, harnessed into photochemical film. Digital images are constructed through the light entering the camera’s lens, which focuses the light (tone and duration) onto electronic sensors where individual charges convert light into digital data pixels. The digital has shifted the possibilities of image production. The aesthetic of the image has altered, although post-production effects can achieve something of the analog's silver halide crystals, the depth of the image is different between digital and analog. The digital is not just about coding and computation. Just like analog film, the digital is used as a visual creative tool, as a platform technology for generating content. Unlike analog, the digital has created new archival possibilities for both old and new media forms. Cinematographers, editors and post-production workers all have to be attendant to the new and unknown aspects of the digital; there are many stories about technicians building their own systems. Because digital is a malleable recording device that translates light and sound into zeros and ones then there is no degradation of that information in the editing room (which happens with photochemical film) as it is taken out, manipulated, reordered, augmented, put back into pixel plastic strips (see Fossati 2014). So the digital film system as we know it today exists as a result of the technical skills and creativity of studio technicians, as well as the larger production vision. Many texts exist on film techniques, how to light/shoot/edit (see, for example, Murch 2001). Film theory per se has not yet figured a way to accommodate the pragmatics with the materialist, with the desire to tell stories about favourite films. How to be an artist and a film technician at the same time is what is missing from film theory scholarship. For example, the history of how George Lucas built his own technology company so that he could film the kind of worlds he imagined on screen require some critical contextualising, while at present we have either press release promotional materials from Lucas’s company (see Block 2010), or passing references in philosophy of film texts (see Wilson 2013); neither of which are inaccurate, but connected would provide a more nuanced account. Haraway's machine theory thus posits us as camera, as a dynamic technology. Theorisation of the processes of machinic 'embodiment' of the processes of cinematography have produced speculation on the perceptual capacities of humans as structured by machinic potentia, perhaps more fully realised in film than in theory as yet (cf. Videodrome, David Cronenberg, 1983).
The archiving of film images has drawn much attention in film theory due not only to the implications that a realisation of preservation or destruction achieves (see Cherchi Usai 2001; Fossati 2014), but has also highlighted the potential within the archive (see Parikka and Hertz 2010) that builds with information, coding and digitised knowledge. The modeling of the archive, informatics and new digital technologies redirect attention to the languages and codes of cinematic grammar. The terms of ‘obsolescence’ for industrial technologies like film, forms the subject of many films (for example, Disappearance at Sea by Tacita Dean [1996]; see discussion by Connolly 2009: 53), and film theory has turned to the ways in which data might be preserved through digital means that bypass the physical deterioration of the film strip.
The onset of the digital for commercial film has seen analog technologies receive more attention for their novelty factor, for the question of what technology can animate and for their aesthetics. From the 1950s the influence of television on film production marked a shift in technologies and in the grammatisation of images, through the availability of the VCR from the 1980s (see Friedberg 1993: 132). From the 1960s, artists’ films (including 16mm film projection) and videos (NTSC, PAL, SECAM), once minor forms in art galleries, became more visible. Access to the Internet from the end of the 1990s enabled access to both art and commercial film (analog and digital), video and other screen-based media. The change from analog to digital technologies and accessibility to the Internet at the end of the 1990s caused a further re-direction of the technology image. In 2014, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has a whole department devoted to 'Future Media' which investigates the spectator’s interactive potential, with the 'red button' of home viewers' remote control providing real-time feedback to 'live' broadcast services.
The availability of digital technology for filmmaking had a restricted moment over the turn of the century. The first fully digital films were in theatres in the late 1990s, distributed under ‘art-house’ guise. Two independent companies capture the global market’s attention with their digital films: the first is the New York-based company InDigEnt (Independent Digital Entertainment). The second are those made by Zentropa, based in Hvidovre, Denmark.5
The InDigEnt films have thus far received far less critical or theoretical attention than their Danish cousins. At the 2001 ‘digital film festival’ at ACMI (The Australian Centre for the Moving Image) I saw Bruce Wagner’s Women in Film (2001), which provides an acerbic commentary on the Hollywood industry. Taking the digital as its platform (recording devices are a constant motif), the film uses black humour to engage the nature of experimental filmmaking, and as the title suggests, it tackles the issue of ‘women in film’, onscreen, as support industries (masseuse, wife, lover, prostitute, producer, psychologist, hired help, mother), in terms of their colour, class and ethics. Produced by Pam Koffler, Jon Marcus and Christine Vachon (who produced most of Todd Haynes' work, including Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story [1987] and Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer [1997]), Women in Film follows Pasolini’s lead in Theorem, first in building images through small units, each emphasising the (digital) cinematographic recording process, and second through the conceit of one of the stories within the film as a systemic process, that of a Hollywood producer (played by Beverly D’Angelo), trying to raise funds to do a remake of Theorem. Sound binds the otherwise schizo film together, images are edited to the soundtrack of instrumental songs from Boston-based indie band The Supreme Dicks; Mozart’s death march, 'Requiem'; and the women actor’s confessional monologue and singing. The producer’s funding for the Theorem remake becomes stalled, however, as she has an (unsighted, but narrated) affair with her future lead actor.
InDigEnt did venture into more commercial films (such as Pieces of April [Peter Hedges, 2003]), but was not successful in terms of technological innovation at the time (see Willis 2005: 32). The Dogme 95 rules of DV and hand-held camera restricted the use of equipment and after effects, producing a specific style that was globally copied and has since become synonymous with that technological moment (see Hjort and MacKenzie 2003: 164). The digital capture of sensory and movement data in the real-time of the body's interaction with the world signal another shift in the breadth of cinematographic perceptual embodiment, as the cinematographers of Cosmopolis and of Festen (the first Dogme film, directed by Thomas Vinterberg, DoP Anthony Dod Mantle, 1998) comment in their production notes. A rethinking of the technical possibilities of filmmaking as a digital ecology create new forms in cinematography. The disappearance of 35mm film material enables new forms to emerge, as different technical platforms are tested. As much as analog practices continue to inform some styles of filmmaking, including processes such as those seen in the 3D conversion work of commercial films like Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013), filmmakers are pursuing different agendas for filmmaking.
Theorisation of innovations in digital technology tend to be either auteurist (fascinated by the director Lars von Trier, for example; see Stevenson 2002), critical of the technical conceit of the rules of the model for theorisation that repeats the same lineage histories of film theory (see Thanouli 2013), or just summative of events. As Philip Cowan (2012) points out, the modeling of film theory around the name of the director, or theories of auteurship, has a serious flaw in logic, as filmmaking is a largely collaborative practice, and the technical contribution of various people misses the creative and material elements of that process in its theorisation. In other words, although film theory convention currently dictates the use of the director’s name as the 'author' of the film, filmmaking is a collaborative effort, whether in the use of materials created by others, or in the use of a film crew. Although it relies on standard notions of crafting the set and actors, discussion of the film Gravity provides a new paradigm for the theorisation of the expanding role of the cinematographer on films with significant virtual components. This role was noted in discussion of Cuarón’s work in Children of Men (2006), which incorporated innovative filming techniques to attain a 'new' standard of filmic 'realism' for the time of production (see Amago 2010). In film theory, the film narrative has been addressed, less so the implications of the use of digital technology (see Chaudhary 2009). Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and visual effects supervisor Tim Webber worked closely with the director (see Benjamin 2013; especially the workflow chart that details the technical steps in the production of this film). The digital recording of light proved to be one of the tricks for setting continuity and making textual depth. Because this is a film set in orbit around the Earth, the mimicry of that position in space was achieved in many technical ways, including through ‘the programming of lighting environments that would mimic the filmed bodies’ (ibid.) at given times of their orbit (breakfast over Mexico, sunset over camera-movement trajectories and for both characters’ points of view).
The technical roles in filmmaking are many, including the cinematographer, sound designer, the visual-effects supervisor, set designer, props, wardrobe, stunt doubles, and so on. Criticism of the lack of theoretical attention to the role of technicians (such as Cowan 2012) takes a different form in discussion of artist’s films, where the filmmaker is often the director, editor, cinematographer and actor. Also the artist film often contains a rhetorical expression, presenting itself as a modernist- or materialist-styled manifesto about the nature of the work of film, being about the investigation into film’s material conditions or situation, including the 'failures' of technology.6 Technological processes, as told in terms of the 'progression' narrative of technology, with 'theory' and 'history' conveyed is the domain of commercial film (see Side By Side [2012], a documentary produced by Keanu Reeves which 'explains' the technological changes in significant commercial film moments). Questioning why theorists and critics of film kept proclaiming it [celluloid film] 'dead' with the proliferation of digital in the early 2000s, Jonathan Walley notes that far from being 'dead', artists who continue to use [analog and digital] film in their expanded cinema practices of filmmaking, installation and performance have moved past the ‘pure film-specific research’ and its ‘jettisoning of meaning’ and this form of cinema’s current investigations ‘restores meaning to a highly material cinema’ (2011: 250). The question of the ‘value’ of a ‘content’ that is external to the film’s technological properties is not noted by Walley, but the list of ‘content’ he gives is what you do see at any current selection of artist's films in galleries: ‘analogies with nature, the organic, the body, references to film history, politically-charged distinctions between film and video, even illusionism and visual pleasure’ (ibid.). Walley names classifiable positions, each of which come attached with identity politics. Examples of such positions are to be found in other and earlier materialist films including the work of Stan Brakhage, Len Lye, Carolee Schneeman, Maya Deren, Nancy Holt, Richard Serra, Liz Rhodes, Derek Jarman and Malcolm Le Grice.
Temporal mediation, and its failures
The use of a technology in film, or film theory, is not always given as a progressive utopic narrative, nor is it always solely concerned with material factors. Disenchanted with the way that Hollywood uses its technicians, Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler wrote a scathing account of their experiences in composing for Hollywood films during the classical period:
In motion picture music, the idea of the whole and its articulation holds absolute primacy, sometimes in the form of an abstract pattern that conjures up rhythms, tone sequences, and figures at a given place without the composer’s specific knowledge of them in advance. (1994: 95)
Adorno and Eisler’s concern with the conditions for [creative] work, and the worker’s conditions and rights appear, ironically enough in another instance of convergence through grammatisation.7 Speculating on the queer content of computer-generated imgery such as the animated Pixar films’ including Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich, 2003) and Chicken Run (Peter Lord and Nick Park, 2000), Judith Halberstam argues the Pixar films are preoccupied with ‘revolt, change, cooperation, and transformation’ (2011: 79), and are not only subversive, but offer queered social models where workers can reorganise themselves into a collaborative model of work and shared labour.
Animation as a film technology has always presented for film theory instances of what I call a materialist media grammatisation, where relational a connections are formed between multiple types of media and recording information – graphic, symbolic, analog, digital, different audio tracks, and multiple movement techniques, post-production methods and conditions of work for the studio required to produce the labour-intensive animated cells or frames. Of course the details of the materiality are in how theory is addressing the type of production of the images, whether in Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willy (Ub Iwerks and Walt Disney, 1928), Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001) or Chicken Run.
Referring to the production of the intensive Japanese anime industry Thomas Lamarre (2009) refers to both the technology of animation (the multiplane camera that Walt Disney invented), and the development of otaku psychology through the popularity of anime cultures, as the ‘animetic machine’.8 In both Halberstam and Lamarre’s approaches, the technological materiality of production is treated as the grammatisation machinery, where psychology, and political ideology is connected to this production to critique the film image. These are examples of a theory of technology that is neither solely deterministic, nor sees the machine as autonomous, but is reliant on engaging with the local crafting of materials and ideas to design and realise the film. The materials of film perform as temporal objects within their cinematic systems of making.
With the creation of images, the forms of technology used will influthe activity of the image. We see different types of image performance facilitated from different film technologies, and this determines in part the modes of acting (of things and of all living organisms, not just people) that can take place within the diegetic world, and as this image contributes and is mediated by the lived world. An analog film reel has a determinate time-limit that actors and crew work to, compared with the unlimited digital recording time of a scene. Thus what is written or conceived of as a ten-minute scene to be shot on 35mm requires a thousand feet of celluloid film in the reel, with digital, the limitation of scene time is given also through data storage capacity, but this is more easily solved than the physical requirements of chemical film processing. Thus digital modes of production of images can extend for days and weeks of filming in order to get the ‘right’ performance recorded. What the intensification that the digital enables – through both performance (for example, see the reviews for Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac [2014]) – and through change in the speed and volume of 'frames' (see Bordwell 2002; Shaviro 2010) is not the concern of this chapter, although the (aesthetic and thus political) activities enabled by this intensification arise as an implicit question for this reader.
In terms of performance and film, it is always worth remembering Kuleshov’s theory, that technically the cinema is a language working with units. To think of this theory, made in the analog-only era but perfectly translatable as an element of the grammars of technology, is to imagine a new vocabulary for film theory. Digital platforms enable different types of transformation of matter, and this is the commonality we see across all digital ecologies. Using methods of copying, compression, deviation, granularity and synchronisation, the digital has transformed the ways that we understand and interact with data, materials, designing and aestheticising the world. New types of modeling software and hardware has enabled architects, artists, designers, filmmakers and theorists to create forms that would have been unimaginable or very difficult to produce by using traditional methods. Contingent upon their theoretical intention, film theory describes this change in form in the terms of its queering; its making different, or making new, or its redirection. The writing of the forms as produced by a specific material mediation provides the content, expressed affectively and or technically.
Let us go a little closer in reading the images with the performance of technologies model to see how the convergences flow. Lamarre’s machinic affect of anime is drawn from the language of Félix Guattari, who wrote of machines and models (see 1995; 2012). In performing the technologically enhanced body, a machinic affect (of the specific technology) occurs. The body may be enhanced by its acted gestural styles, by make-up, by costuming, or with prosthetics, all providing readymade effects. In Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012), for example, multiple prostheses are used to imitate and animate the various acts of the film. The bodies of the actors perform their various roles through their material enhancements, with Carax directing an overplay of the dramatisation of the body. These technologies of disguise are what the film centres upon, as with materialist cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. The film work is the work. Characters in Holy Motors perform multiple possibilities for the filmic body of 2012, and are cast in a very different way from Cronenberg’s cosmopolitan futurist machine. We can literally read the ‘Holy Motors’ as the anthropomorphised machinic body (or ‘soul’ machine, after Lamarre [2009: 200]), as these limousines are fully cogniscant of their impending obsolescence. Human bodies that pass through the motors are recognisable by their performance of a specific technology of gender (to appropriate De Lauretis’s terminology), they are in a range of disguises, including performing in motion-capture suits, rendered as anime game avatars. In one scene, the enhancement of the reconstructed Pietà with costuming and penile prosthesis points to a consideration of the performance of the prosthetic effects of life as technology images of material processes.
Film theorists will address the durational concept in terms of its technological platform in various ways. The medium of electricity provides the common language for two films that Mary Ann Doane describes, Actuality films (short films of everyday life) that are ‘indexical’ records of time that nevertheless display certain unassimilable’ incidents (2002: 140). The tightly orchestrated structure of the film sequences, Doane argues, engage the historical modes of history event/disaster paintings and photography, where the everyday details and contingencies exceed the formal staging of the image (see 2002: 142–43). Doane’s examples include the ‘actualities’, recordings of live events such as the reenactment of the electrocution of the man that killed US President McKinley in 1901, Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison (Edwin S. Porter, 1901) and the infamous Electrocuting an Elephant (Thomas A. Edison, 1903). Doane reads these films through their empirically observed structure, and duration, for analysis that uses some of the technological factors but remains more speculative in the modeling of the event of death/s on screen.
In technical terms, film duration dictates what will make the final cut and what is discarded in editing. In theoretical terms, time is an abstract concept, so the screen image must work to provide both form and content for this abstraction. It does so in a number of ways; (i) time on screen is expressed as a spatialised concept (as an event, a place, a song, perhaps a map or expression of the variations of life, self-reflexive screen forms or as a film within a film); (ii) chronometric and durational time is given form through various themes (the unchanging forms of daily life, generational change, the movement of physical things, essences, ideas, and their material and existential tendencies); (iii) time is imagined as an expression of other dimensions of life (experiential moments, essences without physical presence, spiritual senses, memories, hallucinations, dreams, recollections, deja-vu). Describing the story of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michael Gondry, 2004) Chris Dzialo denotes the action as ‘the struggle against the endless erasure of projector time’ (2009: 116) – a phrase that could be used to summarise a few very significant aspects of twentieth-century cinema technology: the end of the projector as a grammatisation of the materials of duration – brains, bodies, time, projector.
When technological materials converge through film to record (as in the actualities or in documentary film), or to create new images, theory can describe this as a ‘contingency within [filmic] structure’ as Doane does (2002: 171). Or, theory can take a philosophical view, and use the notion of ‘presentism’ (see Cox and Levine 2002: 102–3) to try to express the experience of the passage of time that Doane also struggles to express. But many film theories that look at time today do not write in terms of the singular viewer’s experience, and in fact put forward theories that are irreducible to any notion of a simple set of diegetic rules, genre theories or personal experiential accounts. Rather, film (and other screen-based media) theories are looking at the production and measurement of time as a part of a complex network of film production, where time factors as a human labour-fed technological product of capitalism, and film has a limited time set for its commodification period. For example, Sean Cubitt describes those films that elicit ‘wonder and despair’ (as in Doane’s choice of death films caused both emotions for her) as ‘not so much interminable’ (2004: 294), but uncomfortable, non-communicative. Of the cinéma du look of Leos Carax (given as an example among others), Cubitt notes that it is a manipulated ‘pleasure of seeing’, as this cinema has ‘nothing to sell, beyond the ticket that has already been sold: [it is] a postcommodity’ (2004: 296). If 'we' are merely participants in the cycle of capitalist exchange, then are the filmmakers more than theorists more critical in their critique, subversion and/or delight in the connections of ‘human and machine’ (ibid.) that enables the creation of technology images of this system? There are, of course, exceptions.
Film theories that take the Russian school of Vertov and Eisenstein often address the perceptual awareness of the (material, technological, ideological) relationships between things generated by the use of the materials of cinematic technology. Jonathan Beller writes: ‘For Vertov, film is the technology that will provide the utopian inspiration and practical means for the arrival of socialism’ (2006: 37). Beller’s thesis, as I examine more closely in chapter three, focuses on the ways in which a perceptual economy feeds capitalist production, but his arguments are underpinned by his advocacy of the materiality of the technological platform of the movie camera as the driver of this process. The context of this argument can be developed through Bernard Stiegler’s work on cinema, as discussed in the introduction to think through the processes of image grammatisation. Stiegler’s work examines the role of technology in societies driven by capitalism, and argues that technology is not a metaphor for human behaviours, but that human consciousness is but a function of technologies, where consciousness is the cinema, and time is reveled ‘cinemato-graphically’ (see Barker 2009; Stiegler 2011: 31).
Stiegler has published thus far three volumes (more to come) in his series on Technics and Time (see 1998, 2009, 2011). His thesis is that technics (forms of media technologies) are what organise and constitute human memory, and these technics are currently a ‘convergence’ of ‘analog, digital, and soon biological syntheses’ (2011: 210), along with all the technical industrial technologies that are now digital. When humans die, their genetic and individual memories die with them. While genetics may contain inherited information (although how to retrieve more than just an intuitive feeling or biological dispossession, or predilection for things in the world has yet to be determined), characteristics and individual experiences can only be ‘passed on’ through a tertiary form (contingent upon the society, for example a book, some music, a film, a game). Stiegler refers to tertiary form as a ‘third memory’, an ‘epiphylogenesis, in which memory is housed outside of the body through the organization of the inorganic; a tool, a system of writing (or speaking), a technical trace’ (2011: 206). So, if we think of film as ‘the digitized temporal audiovisual object’, its sound-images function as a technics of our memory, supplementing it, redirecting it, and changing it (2011: 211). The salient part of Stiegler’s theory is something that filmmakers already know: ‘the possible is a modality of the real’, because all technosciences that organise the life and experiences of a body are outside of that body, as they are constituted through an exteriorised convergence of industrial products (see 2011: 206–10). Memory is digitally retained through a process of ‘new grammatical formalizations’, whereby technical means media forms (films, books, music, robots, ‘nanotechnical prostheses’) (2011: 210), hold and constitute memory. Stiegler thinks through the cyclical nature of image production, noting that reproduction is transformative (2011: 221). He thus makes some claims for a reform of capitalism towards a more individuated society that has drawn critical attention (cf. Hansen 2004; Barker 2009; Bunyard 2012). Stiegler’s contribution to film theory provides one of the stronger contemporary arguments on the politics of technology (for further discussion and critiques of Stiegler, see Stiegler and Derrida 2002; Roberts 2006, 2012; Crogan 2010; Kember 2011).
Stiegler’s philosophical address of the ontology of technology, in terms of its medium specificity (how ‘life is always cinema’ [2011: 16]) has ramifications for the ways in which concepts of realism, politics, ethics and humans are understood. Other thinkers of cinema plus technology also draw from philosophy on the impact of the technological on human consciousness, and on human activities, including Paolo Cherchi Usai (2000, 2001), Paul Virilio (1989, 1994), Donna Haraway (1991). These theories, as they pertain to film theory, provide accounts of what Stiegler calls ‘the very principle of cinema: to connect disparate elements together in a single temporal flux’ (2011: 15). What is the life that cinema creates, and how does film theory account for this activity, this imagined and made new place?
This is a 'reality-question', and it appears throughout film theory as either a philosophically-posed question (cf. debates in Zizek 1992; Mullarkey 2009; Rushton 2011), or as an investigation into exteriorised industrial, cinematic products (cf. Ndalianis 2006; Rascaroli et al. 2014). It maybe posed a hang-over from the twentieth century’s modernist imperative of achieving the 'new' by marking difference from previous work through overt referencing techniques, which in turn act as temporal markers (of events, situations, achievements and failures), or it may be marked by research into another kind of production. The current phase is where the processes of creation rely less on already invented paradigms and their recognisable types, but employ methods that respond to the new technological conditions – some in ways similar to modes of investigation observable in early film (actualities, or recording endurance tasks, or performance of routines while the camera acts as silent observer; or they do follow the logic of Stiegler’s thesis by re-producing in order to individuate [2011: 221]).
Stiegler’s work is also highlighted by its difference from twentieth-century theories of vision and film that pursue phenomenological accounts of the experience of technologically-organised matter. For example, when Dudley Andrew draws our attention to a phenomenology of technology, the model for this already sketched out: ‘Bazin, less interested [than Sartre] in the freedom of the imagination, focuses on the power of the photograph to amplify our perception, "teaching us" what our eyes alone would not have noticed' (2010: 13). The critical question would be 'whose eyes?' and 'who is us?' in this model of thinking over the perceptual field that technology creates – which relies on the notion of a 'spectator' to drive the theorisation, rather than having an automated technological driver.
From auto to audio mediation
The technologies of film sound have received more dedicated attention than other areas of film production, perhaps because sound lends itself to abstraction more readily than the pragmatics of lighting or make up. Composer Michel Chion has argued extensively and influentially for the recognition of watching film to become known as an ‘audio-viewing’, in order to account for the ways in which the technologies of sound direct the viewer as auditor’s attention (see Chion 2009). His logic is similar to Stiegler in that his position is also for a cognition of the autonomy of the technic. There are detailed histories of film sound that offer some critical synopsis of films, but do not offer a system for theorisation in their analyses (cf. Brophy 1998, 2004). However technical, all sound books infer the same thing: sound is a composite part of the image. Sound activates certain elements in an image. A handful of theorists have dedicated their work to film sounds. Film sound can refer to a musical score, speech, noise, screen silence and chance or found sounds recorded (cf. Attali 1985; Schaeffer 2004; Chion 2005). The acoustic experience can alter the visual image in dramatic or subtle ways, as sound appeals to a different range of sensorial experiences of the auditor. Names and faces may recede into memory, but fragments of place and situation can be readily invoked through the neurological affect of audition. Sound is thus a cause whose effect exceeds itself, as it creates an emanative property. How that is produced in film, produced for film or edited in post-production for a film – all has different effects upon the film’s own immanent properties (see, for example, the range of essays on sound matters in Harper et al. 2006).
Conclusions – technology as prosthetic reality
Technologies are game changers. They can alter the filmic paradigm quickly, subtly, but surely. When Sadie Benning made use of the Fisher Price children’s video camera in the 1990s and produced films like Girl Power (1992) and Flat is Beautiful (1995), the images she made shifted a number of significant paradigms about image quality, and matching form with content (see Marks 1998). The image, as Virilio describes, is man-made technology. For him, the technology of the image is not just something that will ‘take over from immediate perception’, as John Lechte argues (2012: 84). Rather, like Stiegler, Virilio argues that different visual technologies enable various images to be created, and are used in specific ways to populate the world with what Virilio describes as ‘dromoscopic’ concepts and objects of life; where dromoscopy refers to the speeds of mediation that create ‘cinematic illusion’ (see 2005: 115–6; also Beckman 2010: 107). Ultimately, Virilio argues that the image is the body of the world, as it functions as a continuous organiser of policies of the political affects and materials that feed the movement of capitalism, where ‘we are no longer seers of our world, but already merely reviewers’ (2005: 37). Arguing against Virilio's vision of technology, Douglas Kellner describes Virilio as ‘one of the major critics of war, technology and vision machines’ who displays ‘technophobic proclivities’ (1999: 104).
Critiques of the technological paradigm as a vectorial and catalytic point for the expression or imagination of the change, or ‘evolution’, of something point to the ways in which technology has its own problematic methodologies and ideologies. Different technological platforms arrive through different forms of political facilitation. When it comes to the philosophical framework for considering technologies such as film and media then, an essentially masculinist paradigm has provided the overarching narrative that has gendered the use and the perception of technologies of all types. The error of this paradigm lies with its application of the masculinist, and thus hierarchical, application and metaphors of technology that then re-produce the gendered structure, based upon normative sex and biological determinism.
Film technology affects the content by its technological processes. One does not precede the other, and they rarely operate singularly, but the intersections of both are what determine the style and form of film produced. The type of technological platform (as technological platform, an apparatus, a machine, or as an epistemic recording and shaping device) and structure may determine or support the content. The structure and forms of film are a part of a technologically-informed process, the details of which inform film theory. As filmmakers and theorists address, making is a process that can be pre-figured, but can also be formed through an intuitive working through technology.9 What will produce a change in form and content are the connections between technologies used (visual, audio, intertextual), and the paradigmatic theoretical terms for these processes, as well as the production team’s ethos for filmmaking. Technological impact is rendered most obviously at visual and auditory levels (of which many viewers are unaware), where technical specificities are what are determining the overall trajectory of content.
In the short history of filmmaking there have been many technological revolutions. Technology is not the same as creativity, but it will provide a medium for the capture of a moment or event that may be later deemed to be creative, innovative, original, clichéd, and so on. With each change, innovation or obsolescence, comes shifts in the film grammar, where informatics, codes, images and sounds change.
Notes
2 The definition of film art is reflected in the choice of film screenings. Male directors dominate; 2014's film screenings include American Dreams (Lost and Found) (James Benning, 1984; 55 min, 16mm-to-35mm), Soup Can (Robert Russett, 1967; 3 min, 16mm), A Woman of Paris (Charles Chaplin, 1923; 82 min, 35mm, b&w, silent), The Battle Below (Caroline Ceniza-Levine, 2013; ca. 14 min, digital).
3 Further discussion of these points would involve a historical address of the theories of technological agency (see Feenberg 1999: 101ff).
4 For discussion of Australian-born Hollywood director Philip Noyce’s reasons to shoot this film, using the argument that the commercial success is due to the Hollywood-style use of genre-marketing tactics and the address of the media debate surrounding the politics of the film, see Collins and Davis 2004: 134–9.
5 InDigEnt was a production company for independent filmmakers that ran from 1999–2007, founded by director Gary Winick. It produced films with a limited crew and shot on miniDV (digital video). Films from the company include Women in Film (Bruce Wagner, 2001), Pieces of April (Peter Hedges, 2003), Personal Velocity (Rebecca Miller, 2002), November (Greg Harrison, 2004). (The word 'indigent' commonly refers to an artist who is poor or needy.) Zentropa was founded in 1992 by director Lars von Trier and producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen [http://www.zentropa.dk/about/historie]. The first film was Europa ([also known as Zentropa], directed by von Trier, 1990). The company became well known after its Dogme 95 projects and other von Trier films, including Dancer in the Dark (2000), Dogville (2003) and Melancholia (2011).
7 See also Crawford 2009 on the period of development of Hollywood sound through the arrival of immigrants fleeing the war in Europe in the 1930s.
8 Otaku culture refers to the groups of people who are highly technologically literate in Japanese popular culture (see Ito, Okabe, Tsuji 2012).
9 We may compare films and their theorisations here; for example, the approach taken by David Lynch in Inland Empire (2006; and theorised by Sinnerbrink 2011), or the non-narrative of a Len Lye film such as Free Radicals (discussed in Sitney 1974: 269–71), or Julie Dash’s elliptical approach in Daughters of the Dust (and its theorisation, cf. Humm 1997: 115ff), to consider the range of synergesic and autonomous technical processes at work in film production, and as noted in film theory.