• • •
The manifestos in this chapter address, in various ways, the rise of digital technology and its impact on the cinema. Many, responding to the challenges set out by the Dogme ’95 manifesto (which offers a seemingly utopian potential for cinema when conveyed through digital video and handheld camera immediacy, with ensuing challenges to feature-film conventions in narrative, characterization, sound, and cinematography), raise issues surrounding the DIY approach to filmmaking and are particularly concerned with the ways in which young, aspiring filmmakers can make films inexpensively, while at the same time addressing the specificity of the digital image. The digital image’s easy mutability, replicability, and dispensability are all of particular concern here.
Related aspects discussed in this chapter concern the rise of multiple screening formats and the ongoing question of convergence. As Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord note in their introduction to Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema: “The stories consumed in the industrialized democracies of the world are received through a multiplicity of hybrid and networked screens, creating a fragmented reception that increasingly characterizes our waking hours.”1 The manifestos in this chapter reflect the fragmentation of screen sites and the perils and possibilities that emerge from this development. Stan VanDerBeek’s “Culture: Intercom and Expanded Cinema: A Proposal and Manifesto,” an expanded cinema manifesto from 1966, foreshadows the world of interconnectivity that the digital can open up. Ana Kronschnabl’s well-known “Pluginmanifesto” also foregrounds the DIY aesthetic, outlining at the same time the need for a new form of cinema to accompany the new ways in which films are viewed in a digital and virtual world. Other manifestos, such as Khavn de la Cruz’s “Digital Dekalogo,” address questions of access in the face of rising film production costs and the face of globalization. Samira Makhmalbaf’s “The Digital Revolution and the Future of Cinema” addresses access, as well, but Makhmalbaf also maps out the ways in which digital production has changed not only our means of access but how we understand the cinema itself.
Stan VanDerBeek
[First published in Film Culture 40 (1966): 15–18.]
Using the phrase “expanded cinema” four years before Gene Youngblood’s groundbreaking book Expanded Cinema (1970), Stan VanDerBeek’s manifesto proposes, among other things, a “movie-drome”: a screening process that will help transcend the gap between the developed and developing world in a time when it often seems that the planet is on the precipice of nuclear destruction.
I should like to share with you a vision I have had concerning motion pictures. This vision concerns the immediate use of motion pictures . . . or expanded cinema, as a tool for world communication . . . and opens the future of what I like to call “Ethos-Cinema.” Motion pictures may be the most important means for world communication. At this moment motion pictures are the art form of our time.
We are on the verge of a new world/new technology/a new art.
When artists shall deal with the world as a work of art.
When we shall make motion pictures into an emotional experience tool that shall move art and life closer together.
All this is about to happen.
And it is not a second too soon. We are on the verge of a new world new technologies
new arts
“CULTURE: INTERCOM” AND EXPANDED CINEMA.
It is imperative that we quickly find some way for the entire level of world human understanding to rise to a new human scale.
This scale is the world . . .
The technological explosion of this last half-century, and the implied future are overwhelming, man is running the machines of his own invention.
while the machine that is man . . . runs the risk of running wild.
Technological research, development and involvement of the world community has almost completely out-distanced the emotional-sociological (socio-“logical”) comprehension of this technology.
It is imperative that each and every member of the world community, regardless of age and cultural background, join the 20th century as quickly as possible.
The “technique-power” and “culture-over-reach” that is just beginning to explode in many parts of the earth, is happening so quickly that it has put the logical fulcrum of man’s intelligence so far outside himself that he cannot judge or estimate the results of his acts before he commits them. The process of life as an experiment on earth has never been made clearer.
It is this danger . . . that man does not have time to talk to himself . . .
that man does not have means to talk to other men . . .
the world hangs by a thread of verbs and nouns.
Language and culture-semantics are as explosive as nuclear energy.
It is imperative that we (the world’s artists) invent a new world language . . . that we invent a non-verbal international picture-language . . .
I propose the following:
That immediate research begin on the possibility of an international picture-language using fundamentally motion pictures.
That we research immediately existing audio-visual devices, to combine these devices into an educational tool, that I shall call an “experience machine” or a “culture-intercom.” . . .
The establishment of audio-visual research centers . . . preferably on an international scale . . .
These centers to explore the existing audio-visual hardware . . .
The development of new image-making devices . . .
(the storage and transfer of image materials, motion pictures, television, computers, video-tape, etc. . . . )
In short, a complete examination of all audio-visual devices and procedures, with the idea in mind to find the best combination of such machines for non-verbal inter-change.
The training of artists on an international basis in the use of these image tools.
The immediate development of prototype theatres, hereafter called “Movie-Dromes” that incorporate the use of such projection hardware.
The immediate research and development of imago-events and performances in the “Movie-Drome.” . . .
I shall call these prototype presentations: “Movie-Murals,” “Ethos-Cinema,” “Newsreel of Dreams,” “Feedback,” “Image libraries” . . .
The “movie-drome” would operate as follows . . .
In a spherical dome, simultaneous images of all sorts—would be projected on the entire dome-screen . . . the audience lies down at the outer edge of the dome with their feet towards the center, thus almost the complete field of view is the dome-screen. Thousands of images would be projected on this screen . . . this image-flow could be compared to the “collage” form of the newspaper, or the three ring circus . . . (both of which suffice the audience with an [sic] collision of facts and data) . . . the audience takes what it can or wants from the presentation . . . and makes its own conclusions . . . each member of the audience will build his own references from the image-flow, in the best sense of the word the visual material is to be presented and each individual makes his own conclusions or realizations.
A particular example . . .
To prepare an hour-long presentation in the “movie-drome” using all sorts of multi-plex images, depicting the course of western civilization since the time of the Egyptians to the present . . . a rapid panoply of graphic: and light calling upon thousands of images, both still and in motion (with appropriate “sound-images”). It would be possible to compress the last three thousand years of western life into such an aspect ratio that we, the audience, can grasp the flow of man, time, and forms of life that have lead [sic] us up to the very moment . . . details are not important, it is the total scale of life that is . . . in other words . . . using the past and the immediate present to help us understand the likely future. . . .
Endless filmic variations of this idea are possible in each field of man’s endeavor . . . science, math, geography . . . art, poetry, dance, biology, etc. . . . Endless interpretations and variations of this idea by each culture group and nationality that take it on as a project . . . to be presented in turn to each other culture group . . . (by telstar, film exchange, “film-mobiles,” traveling shows, etc. . . . ). The purpose and effect of such image-flow, and image density, (also to be called “visual-velocity”), is to both deal with logical understanding, and to penetrate to unconscious levels, the use of such “emotion-xspictures” would be to reach for the “emotional denominator” of all men . . .
The basis of human life thought and understanding that is non-verbal to provide images that inspire basic intuitive instinct of self-realization to inspire all men to good will and “inter and intra-realization” . . .
When I talk of the movie-dromes as image libraries, it is understood that such “life-theatres” would use some of the coming techniques (video tape and computer inter-play) and thus be real communication and storage centers, that is, by satellite, each dome could receive its images from a world wide library source, store them and program a feedback presentation to the local community that lived near the center, this news-reel feedback, could authentically review the total world image “reality” in an hour long show that gave each member of the audience a sense of the entire world picture . . . the let us say world’s work of the month put into an hour.
“Intra-communitronics,” or dialogues with other centers would be likely, and instant reference material via transmission television and telephone could be called for and received at 186,000 m.p.s. . . . from anywhere in the world.
Thus I call this presentation, a “newsreel of ideas, of dreams, a movie-mural.”
An image library, a culture de-compression chamber, a culture-inter-com” . . . my concept is in effect the maximum use of the maximum information devices that we now have at our disposal. . . .
Certain things might happen . . . if an individual is exposed to an overwhelming information experience . . .
It might be possible to re-order the levels of awareness of any person . . . it certainly will re-order the structure of motion pictures as we know them . . .
Cinema will become a “performing” art . . . and image-library.
I foresee that such centers will have its artist in residence who will orchestrate the image material he has at his disposal . . .
And will lead to a totally new international art form . . .
That in probing for the “emotional denominator,” it would be possible by the visual “power” of such a presentation to reach any age or culture group irregardless of culture and background.
The “experience machine” could bring anyone on earth up to the twentieth century.
As the current growth rate risk of explosions to human flesh continues, the risk of survival increases accordingly.
It now stands at 200 pound of TNT per human pound of flesh . . . per human on earth.
There are an estimated 700 million people who are unlettered in the world . . . we have no time to lose.
Or miscalculate . . .
The world and self-education process must find a quick solution to re-order itself a revision of itself, an awareness of itself . . .
That is, each man, must somehow realize the enormous scale of human life and accomplishments on earth right now . . .
Man must find a way to leap over his own prejudices, apprehensions . . .
The means are on hand . . . here and now . . .
In technology and the extension of the senses . . .
To summarise:
My concern is for a way for the over-developing technology of part of the world to help the underdeveloped emotional-sociology of all of the world to catch up to the twentieth century . . . to counter-balance technique and logic—and to do it now, quickly . . .
My concern is for world peace and harmony . . .
The appreciation of individual minds . . .
The interlocking of good wills on an international exchange basis . . .
The interchange of images and ideas . . .
A realization of the process of “realization” of self-education . . .
In short: a way for all men to have fore-knowledge
By Advantageous use of past and immediate knowledge . . .
Mankind faces the immediate future with doubt on one hand and molecular energy on the other . . .
He must move quickly and surely to preserve his future . . .
He must realize the present . . .
The here and now . . . right now.
An international picture-language is a tool to build the future . . .
Samira Makhmalbaf
[First presented as a lecture at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival on 9 May 2000.]
In this manifesto on the future of cinema Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf, like many of those writing around the time of the centenary of the cinema, addresses its supposed death and sees the digital revolution as a means by which to both democratize access to filmmaking and allow people from impoverished nations to create cinema.
Cinema has always been at the mercy of political power, particularly in the East, financial capital, particularly in the West, and the concentration of means of production, anywhere in the world. The individual creativity of artists throughout the twentieth century has much suffered from the whimsical practices of this odd combination of forces. The situation at the threshold of the twenty-first century seems to have altered radically. With astonishing technological innovations now coming to fruition, artists no longer seem to be totally vulnerable to these impediments.
In the near future, the camera could very well turn into the simulacrum of a pen, comfortably put at the disposal of the artist, right in the palm of her hand. If, as it has been suggested, “the wheel is the advancement of the human feet,” then we might also say that the camera is the advancement of the creative eye of the filmmaker.
Earlier in the twentieth century, because of the overwhelming weight of the camera, the difficulty of operating it, and the need for technical support, this eye was cast like a heavy burden on the thoughts and emotions of the filmmaker. But today, following the digital revolution, I can very easily imagine a camera as light and small as a pair of eyeglasses, or even a pair of soft-lenses comfortably and unnoticeably placed inside the eye and on the cornea.
Three modes of external control have historically stifled the creative process for a filmmaker: political, financial and technological. Today with the digital revolution, the camera will bypass all such controls and be placed squarely at the disposal of the artist. The genuine birth of the author cinema is yet to be celebrated after the invention of the “camera-pen,” for we will then be at the dawn of a whole new history in our profession. As filmmaking becomes as inexpensive as writing, the centrality of capital in creative process will be radically diminished.
The distribution of our work will of course continue to be at the mercy of capital. Equally compromised will be governmental control and censorship, because we will be able to “screen” our film on the Internet and have it watched by millions around the globe in the privacy of their own living rooms. But that will not be the end of censorship because self-censorship for fear of persecution by religious fanaticism and terror will continue to thwart the creative imagination.
If the camera is turned into a pen, the filmmaker into an author, and the intervening harassment of power, capital and the means of production are all eliminated, or at least radically compromised, are we not then at the threshold of a whole new technological change in the very essence of cinema as a public media? I tend to believe that because of the increasingly individual nature of cinematic production, as well as spectatorship, the cinema of the twentieth century will become the literature of the twenty-first century.
Are we then attending an historical moment when cinema is being in effect eulogised? Is cinema about to die? François Truffaut made a film about the death of literature with the appearance of cinema. If Truffaut were alive today, would he not be tempted to try it again and make a film about the death of cinema at the hand of author digital? Or would he not imagine the granddaughter of Tarkovsky or Ford preserving the films of their grandfather somewhere in the North Pole?
I tend to think that the digital revolution is really the latest achievement of technological knowledge and not the summation of what artists still have to say. It is as if this revolution has been launched against certain cinema-related professions, and not against cinema itself. We will continue to have the centrality of scenario, creative editing, mise-en-scene, decoupage and acting. Perhaps the most affected aspects of the digital revolution will be the actual act of filming, light, sound and post-production laboratory works. But certainly not cinema itself.
In the last decade of the twentieth century, the unbalanced relation between the artist and the technician had reached a critical point that could have very well resulted in the death of cinema. Today, though, the relation is reversed and the technological advancements of the instruments of production may in fact result in the death of cinema as an industry and once again give the priority to cinema as an art. The digital revolution will reduce the technical aspect of filmmaking to a minimum and will, instead, maximise the centrality of the filmmaker. Thus, once again the centrality of the human aspect of cinema will overcome the intermediary function of its instruments, and film as an art form will reclaim its original posture.
It seems to me that with the priority of cinema over technique, we will begin to witness the birth of real auteur filmmakers. We still lack the presence of artists, philosophers, sociologists or poets among the filmmakers. Cinema is still in the hands of technicians. Most film schools throughout the world teach the technical rather than the creative aspects of filmmaking. Of course the question will always remain whether or not the creative aspects of filmmaking can really be taught. Whatever the case may be, cinema is today by and large limited to those who have access to expensive cameras. For about six billion inhabitants of the world, today we produce something around 3,000 films every year. Not more than 1,000 cameras are the instruments of this sum of annual cinematic production. When the demographic number of digital cameras improves dramatically, a massive number of camera-less authors will have an unprecedented opportunity to express their virgin ideas. Under the emerging technological democracy, political and financial hurdles can no longer thwart the effervescence of this thriving art.
Lets imagine a world in which painting a picture would be as difficult as making a film and that the ideas of Dali, Van Gogh or Picasso were to be implemented by a group of technicians. The digital revolution is like giving the potential equivalents of Van Gogh and Picasso a brush for the first time. If PhotoShop or Windows 98 software programs can render Monet, Manet, Pissaro [sic], Cézanne or Matisse redundant, then the digital camera can also make Truffaut, Ray, and Bergman redundant. The digital camera is the death of Hollywood production and not the death of cinema. . . . But would an astronomical increase in the number of auteurs not result in the death of the very idea of the auteur?
The ease with which just about anyone can become a filmmaker will undoubtedly result in an astronomical increase in the annual and per capita film production in every society. The increase in the supply of films will result in a decrease in demand. This will lead to an aggressive competition to overcome the generated noise that levels everything. The competition among the producers will be translated into competition among filmmakers and the potential audience will soon find itself in a huge supermarket, incapable of choosing a favourite product. By the end of the twentieth century, the filmmakers were in a position of power and choice. Would the digital revolution and its ancillary consequence of a massive increase in film production result in a stalemate where there are more people to make films than those who are willing to sit quiet in a dark room for a sustained period of time and actually watch a film? What if buying and operating a camera is as easy as buying a pen and writing with it? Certainly there have never been as many great creative writers as there have been pens in the world. Nor would the inexpensive availability of [a] digital camera mean the disappearance of the creative filmmaker. But cinema as an art will certainly lose its multitudinous audience. The general appeal of cinema may thus be fractured into more specific attractions, and a division of labour and market may take place in world cinema. Gradually, in fact, the audience, as consumers, may begin to dictate the terms of its expectations, and cinematic narrative may begin to be deeply affected by the expectations of its viewers.
In its technological growth, the camera gradually metamorphosed into a monster that in order to register the reality that faced it first had to kill that reality. Remember the scene where the camera and the band of technicians behind it are all gathered to register a close-up of an actor, while the director was trying to convince the actor that she was alone and had no hope of meeting anyone for the longest time. The wretched actor was put in the unenviable position of trying to ignore the platoon of people behind the camera. But now the smaller the camera gets the less it will impose its distorting presence on the nature of reality facing it. The observation of reality will become more direct, more intimate, to the point that the camera can now be literally considered as the very eye of the filmmaker.
If despite all its democratic intentions, Italian neo-realism could not surpass the technical limitations of cinema and witness the daily, routine realities, today such movements as Dogma 95 take full advantage of such technological advancements and reach for what Italian neo-realism could not achieve. We may very soon reach a point when a visual journalism will be possible, and cinema, just like journalism, may be able to perform its critical function in safeguarding democracy. An event may take place on a Saturday, on the basis of which a film may be made on Sunday, screened on Monday and thus have an immediate effect on the daily making of history.
Will the digital revolution result in a situation where cinema becomes an increasingly individual form of art? If feature films can now be produced with a small digital camera and then watched on the Internet on a personal computer, will that technological marvel result in the elimination of the very idea of a collective audience as the defining moment of a cinematic experience?
Imagine state-of-the-art home audio-visual equipment with screens as big as a wall of a living room. In such cases one may think of cinema, just like literature, to become an individual form of art and lose its social function. If the concentration of the means of production in the past had thwarted the creative imagination, cinema still had a particularly social function because of the communal nature of its spectatorship. Any artist, at the moment of creation, imagines herself in front of an audience. That is constitutional to the creative act. If imagining this collective audience is denied the artist then the result will have a catalytic effect on the creative process. On the part of the audience the effect is equally detrimental. If we deny the audience the pleasure of watching a film in the presence of others, cinema will lose one of its distinct and defining characters.
I believe that cinema has much benefited from the social nature of humanity and will not abandon it easily, neither will technological advancement so swiftly change our communal character. Today, most French people have coffee and coffeemakers at home. Why is it that street-side cafes are so full of people? It is the same urge that will bring people to movie houses. Cannes is yet another good example. Although cinema is still a very social event, the need to be part of an even larger crowd brings us together here at Cannes. The pleasure of watching a film here at Cannes is incomparably higher than watching the same film in a smaller festival, in a more modest theatre, and in the company of only a few people. Thus whatever the status of technological innovations, private screening, production and spectatorship, this collective urge will continue to guarantee the social function of cinema as an art form. The social nature of creative imagination will prevent the radical individualisation of cinema even beyond the privatisation of the means of production and spectatorship. The creative act has a vested interest in its remaining social, because eliminating the audience from the mind of an artist will thwart the creative process.
Art is ultimately intended and targeted towards its audience. In this respect art is very much like religious practices. Believing individuals can practice their piety in the privacy of their homes. But the social function of religion inevitably brings people out to communal practices. If from performing one’s religious rituals to drinking a cup of coffee continue to be social acts despite the abundant possibility of their privatisation then the collective need to watch movies in the presence of a crowd will also persist. The irony of this whole development is that in its historical growth cinema gradually found itself in a predicament that like architecture every aspect of its execution was contingent on something else. With the digital revolution, cinema can now retrieve its own status as an art form and yet by virtue of the same development it sees its own social function endangered.
What would be the relationship of the digital revolution to the civil function of imagination and the possibility of a more democratic cinema?
By far the most significant event in the digital revolution is the reversal of the political control in some countries (particularly in the East), and of financial control in others (particularly in the West).
There is another, equally important, consequence to the digital revolution. People in the less prosperous parts of the world have so far been at the receiving end of cinema as an art form. The history of cinema begins with wealthy and powerful nations making film not just about themselves but also about others. This is a slanted relation of power.
Today, one hundred years into the history of cinema, this undemocratic and unjust relation of power shows itself by the fact that not a single film is shown from the entire African continent in Cannes this year. Does Africa have nothing to say? Are Africans incapable of expressing themselves in visual terms? Or is it the unjust distribution of the means of production that has denied African artists this possibility. Another example in the unjust distribution of the means of production is comparing my own family with a nation-state like Syria. During the last year, Syria has produced only one film, and my family two and a half feature films!
With the same logic that the per capita production of film in my family was increased by my father sharing his knowledge and facilities with the rest of the family, the digital revolution will put such knowledge and facilities at the disposal of a larger community of artists. Imagine new, more diversified, and far more democratic sections of the Cannes Film Festival in the year 2010, all occasioned by the digital revolution.
Another crucial consequence of the digital revolution is that cinema will lose its monological, prophetic voice and a far more globally predicated dialogue will emerge. Right now some 3,000 films are produced annually for a global population of some 6 billion people, that is to say one film per 20 million people. But not all these 3,000 films have the opportunity of actually being screened. Competition with Hollywood is intense throughout the world. National cinemas are putting up an heroic resistance to Hollywood cinema. Many movie theatres are monopolised by Hollywood productions. There are movie theatres that are reserved for yet-to-be-made films in Hollywood, while the national cinemas are on the verge of destruction.
When there were few books people considered what was written superior truth and if a book was found in a remote village they would attribute its origin to heavenly sources. When books became abundant, this absolute and sacred assumption was broken and earthly auteurs lost their heavenly presumptions. In the age of the scarcity of cinematic productions Titanic has the function of that heavenly book and our world [is] very much like that small village.
The prevailing cinematic view of the world is that of the First World imposed on the Third World. Africa has been seen from the French point of view and not from the African point of view, nor have the French and Americans been seen from the African point of view. The digital revolution will surpass that imbalance. The First World will thus lose its centrality of vision as the dominant view of the world. The globality of our situation will no longer leave any credibility for the assumptions of a centre and a periphery to the world. We are now beyond the point of thinking that we received the technique from the West and then added to it our own substance. As a filmmaker, I will no longer be just an Iranian attending a film festival. I am a citizen of the world. Because from now on the global citizenship is no longer defined by the brick and mortar of houses or the printed words of the press, but by the collective force of an expansive visual vocabulary.
A certain degree of techno-phobia has always accompanied the art of cinema. One can only imagine the fear and anxiety that the first generation of moviegoers felt. Or the first time the French saw [the] Lumières’ train on the screen. The cinema of our future will not be immune to technological challenges and opportunities that are taking place around us. Beyond the techno-phobia of the previous generations, however, the new generation will play with these technological gadgets as toys of a whole new game.
It seems to me that this very conference is convened out of a techno-phobic impulse and as a collective mode of therapeutic exercise to alleviate this techno-phobia. Whereas I believe we should consider this event a ritual funeral for technology. Technology has now progressed so much that [it] is no longer technological! All we need [to know] in order to master the operation of a digital camera is how to turn a few buttons, as if unbuttoning our jacket in a dark room. One of our conclusions at the closing of this conference could very well be that after the digital revolution we are all cured of our techno-phobia.
A new fear will now preoccupy filmmakers, and that is whether or not I as an artist have something to say that other people with a digital camera in their hand do not. There is a story in Mathnavi of Rumi, one of our greatest poets, that once a grammarian mounted a ship and headed for the sea. Upon the calm and quite [sic] sea he had a conversation with the captain and asked him if he knew anything of syntax and morphology. “No,” answered the captain. “Half of your life is wasted,” retorted the learned grammarian. A short while later, the ship is caught in the middle of a huge storm. “Do you know how to swim?” asks the captain. “No,” says the grammarian. “All your life is wasted,” assures the captain.
Twenty years ago if someone wanted to enter the profession of filmmaking she would have been asked if she knew its technique. If she did not she would have been told that she was illiterate about half of the art. Some 20 years later the only question she needs to answer is if she has art.
Ana Kronschnabl
[“The Pluginmanifesto” was launched at the Watershed Media Centre, Bristol, on 17 May 2001. Published in Ana Kronschnabl and Tomas Rawlings, Plug In Turn On: A Guide to Internet Filmmaking (London: Marion Boyars, 2004).]
This manifesto is one of the first to consider the specificity and aesthetics of online film in the age of YouTube. Arguing that the structures that dominate Hollywood film are not conducive to the Internet, the pluginmanifesto postulates a digital cinema made with the specificity of online audiences in mind.
First came the Dogme 95 manifesto, where a collective of directors founded in Copenhagen in spring 1995 expressed the goal of countering “certain tendencies” towards “cosmetics” over content in the cinema today. They remarked, “Today a technological storm is raging, the result of which will be the ultimate democratisation of the cinema.” We agree, and now the online film website plugincinema.com is launching the pluginmanifesto, where filmmakers are asked to take advantage of the digital technology revolution.
The pluginmanifesto version 1.1
Films are familiar to us all, Hollywood films at least. So much so that it is difficult for us to think about film in any other terms. So we must start with experimentation; play with the conventions. Allow yourself the freedom to move in and out of them, adapting them, using them where appropriate. Freed from prescription, it is easier to see the other possibilities open to us in terms of form and structure as well as content.
The traditional length of a film—approximately 1 hour 30 minutes—seems right somehow. Much longer and we become restless, much shorter and we feel cheated. Plays also last the same approximate length of time. However, it is the viewing context that seems to be the most important element. The short film (10 to 15 minutes) seems the ideal length for the internet. It is the length of time we want to stop for a coffee at work, the length of time we spend having a smoke, or the length of time we don’t mind spending viewing a film we don’t find easily accessible.
Narrative evolved as an intrinsic part of Hollywood filmmaking. Examine other filmmakers such as Deren, Vertov, Godard and Brakhage to see how they structured their films outside the Hollywood narrative tradition. Structure can be created in many ways using colour, music, chapter headings, etc. as a shape from which you can hang the images. Or the structure can simply emerge from within the film, by allowing the content to shape itself.
It was decided early on in the development of the Hollywood ethos that films were products and not art. Independent filmmakers and artists have always known this to be ill-conceived and have preferred to make films with genuine artistic merit. This usually takes place outside the traditional studio system, although on occasion it happens from within. Film was hijacked very early on in its career. Claim it back! The difference is in the overt aim of the film: whether it is intended to communicate and inform as well as entertain or to simply make money.
Filmmaking on the internet is at a truly exciting time. As so little exists that has been designed specifically for viewing on the net, much has been carried across from other mediums such as TV and film. This is not good. It means that the work being shown cannot be appreciated in the form it was originally intended and it also does web films a disservice because audiences complain about the lack of quality: their expectations are for the traditional film, seen in its familiar context. In the same way that film found its own form in relation to theatre, and TV in relation to film, the web filmmaker needs to search for the appropriate form for films on the internet. It is incumbent on the independent filmmaker to be at the forefront of these new technologies less [sic] they be subsumed by the media conglomerates. Independent filmmakers, geeks and artists have an ideal opportunity to experiment and push these technologies creatively and the time is right to do so.
Use the tools that are appropriate for the job. Filmmaking for the internet is not filmmaking for the cinema. We should be taking the tools invented for the medium such as Flash, html, compression algorithms etc. and pushing them to see what they can do in creative terms: our creative terms. That is the job of the filmmaker and artist. The camera and celluloid defined films for the cinema; computers and the internet will define media for the new millennium.
Filmmakers, in order to be good at their craft, have always had to have a certain level of technical knowledge. Many of the short films appearing on the internet have been made by those familiar with the technology, rather than traditional filmmakers. This is no bad thing, however, how much better would those films be if people who have spent their lives learning the craft got together with people who could make the technology work for them? Co-operative and artistic endeavours, the clash of long term assumptions and traditional approaches with new ideas can produce surprising and challenging new work.
Above all, don’t believe the hype! Convergence is certainly happening but the potential of these mediums is only just being glimpsed. What is made for the internet currently can enlighten the forms of the future. The challenge is to create these forms now. This is not a televisual system that sits in the corner of our living rooms, but the internet: a huge system of information storage and retrieval for individual users, with no centralised control. Seize the day! and make your work available to millions of people. Be part of shaping the world’s next great art form.
Khavn de la Cruz
[First written in 2003. First published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, 31 October 2006.]
One of many manifestos by Philippine filmmaker Khavn de la Cruz—whose work is best described as part of international trash cinema—“Digital Dekalogo,” like Samira Makhmalbaf’s manifesto, addresses the freedom to make films offered by digital technologies to marginalized filmmakers and film cultures, Filipinos in particular.
Film is dead. It is dead as long as the economy is dead, when public taste and creativity are dead, when the imagination of multinational movie companies is dead. At millions of pesos per film production, there is not going to be a lot of happy days for the genuine filmmaker, the true artist who wants to make movies, not brainless displays of breasts and gunfire.
But technology has freed us. Digital film, with its qualities of mobility, flexibility, intimacy and accessibility, is the apt medium for a Third World Country like the Philippines. Ironically, the digital revolution has reduced the emphasis on technology and has reasserted the centrality of the filmmaker, the importance of the human condition over visual junk food.
Film is dead. Please omit the flowers.
I. Economics: A minute of celluloid film including processing costs around P1500. A minute of digital film costs around 3P. Do the math. A galaxy of difference.2
II. The only way to make a film is to shoot it. Shoot when you can. Do not delay. If you can finish everything in a day, why not? Sloth is the enemy of the Muse. The shadow filmmaker has now run out of excuses.
III. Your digital camera will not turn you into an instant Von Trier, Figgis, or Soderbergh. Your attitude toward filmmaking should be that of an amateur: half-serious, playful, light, not heavy, thus without baggage. There are no mistakes. The important thing is you learn.
IV. Utilise all the elements within your resources. If you have a knack for music, score your own soundtrack. If you have writing skills, craft your own screenplay. If you have money, invest in gear. If you have none of the above, make sure you have good friends.
V. Work within a minimized budget, cast, crew, location, and shooting schedule. Artificial lighting is not a necessity. The story is king. Everything else follows.
VI. Work with what you have. Release the bricoleur within. You are not a studio. Accept your present condition. Start here.
VII. Forget celebrities. Fuck the star system. Work only with those who are willing to work with you, and those who are dedicated to the craft. Avoid pretentious hangers-on with hidden agendas. Use a lie detector if needed.
VIII. Work with humble, patient, passionate, and courageously creative people. Ignore people that are the opposite.
IX. If you are alone, do not worry. Digital technology has reduced the crew into an option, rather than a must. Making a film by yourself is now possible. The pat is dead. Those who do not change will die.
X. Create first, criticise later. Take care of the quantity. God will take care of the quality—that is, assuming you believe in God. A filmmaker makes films, period.
In the name of the revolution,
Khavn