CAPTURED A Thesis Presented in Partia l Fulllment o the Requirements or the Degree o Master o Fine Arts in Digital Media in the Department o Digital Media o The Rhode Island School o Design
By Serena Kuo Rhode Island School o Design 2008 Master’s Examination Committee Approved by:
Teri Rueb, Digital + Media Associate Proessor Rhode Island School o Design, Primary Advisor
John Terry, Dean o Fine Arts Rhode Island School o Design
Dietrich Neumann Proessor or the History o Modern Architecture and Urban Studies, Brown University Vincent Scully Visiting theand History o Architecture, Yale University Department o theProessor History oorArt Architecture, Brown University
Amy Kravitz, Film/Animation/Video Proessor Rhode Island School o Design
CAPTURED
Captured by Serena Kuo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Liscense.
The word ‘shot’ can be reserved or xed spatial determinations, slices o space or distances in relation to the camera. […] It is then the sequence o shots which inherits the movement and the duration. But since this is not an adequately determinate notion, it is necessary to create more precise concepts to identiy the unities o movement and duration. […] From our point o view or the movement, the notion o shot [plan] has sucient unity and extension i it is given its ull projective, perspectival or temporal sense. In act a unity is always that o an act which includes as much a multiplicity o passive or acted elements. Shots, as immobile spatial determinations, are perectly capable o being, in this sense, the multiplicity which corresponds to the unity o the shotwill , as mobile section or temporal perspective. The unity vary according to the multiplicity that it contains, but will be no less the unity o this correlative multiplicity. 1
1 Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: Movement- Image . University o Minnesota Press, 1986. PP. 25-26
Illustrations Abstract “Captured “ Introduction Theory I. Experiencing Geography, Architecture & Constructed Space The Origin o Cinematic Space Objectiying the Medium Excerpt: My Visit to Pompeii II. Construction o Reality Synthesis o Scienc e and A rt Mise-en-scene & Cinematography Structural Fragmentation in Cinematic Space
Work 5/4 The Water The Bicycle Camera Transpositions Ice Apartment Body Landscapes Captured
Conclusion Bibliography
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ILLUSTRATIONS Fig 1.
Michael Snow, Wavelength , 1967.
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Fig 2.
Michelangelo Antonioni, The Passenger , 1975.
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Fig 3.
Sergein Eisenstein, October/Ten Days that Shook the World , 1927.
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Fig 4.
D.W. Gri ith, The Birth o a Nation , 1915.
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Fig 5.
René Clair, Paris qui dort , 1915
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Fig 6.
Dziga Vertov, The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929 .
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Fig 7.
Michael Snow, Wavelength , 1967.
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Fig 8.
Eadweard Muybridge, Galloping Horse , 1878.
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Fig 9.
F.W. Mur anu, The Last Laugh , 1925.
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Fig 10.
F.W. Murnau, Noseratu , 1922.
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Fig 11.
F.W. Murnau, Sunrise , 1927.
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Fig 12.
Orson Welles, Citizen Kane , 1941.
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Fig 13.
Chris Welsby, Windmill II , 1972.
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Fig 14.
Michelan gelo Antonioni, The Passenger , 1975.
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Fig 15.
Alred Hitchcock, Rear Window , 1954.
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Fig 16.
Alred Hitchcock, Vertigo , 1958.
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Fig 17.
Serena Kuo, Script diag ram or 5/4 , 2007.
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Fig 18.
Serena Kuo, Set still rom 5/4 , 2007.
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Fig 19.
Serena Kuo, instal lation vizu alizat ion or The Water , 2008.
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Fig 20.
Serena Kuo, The Water, instal lation view, 2008.
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Fig 21.
Serena Kuo, narrativ e brainstorm or The Water , 2008.
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Fig 22.
Serena Kuo, scenario maps or The Water , 2008.
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Fig 23.
Serena Kuo, Documentat ion o i lming process, The Bicycle Camera , 2007.
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Fig 24.
Serena Kuo, sketch exploring the inverted relationship between speed and distance, The Bicycle Camera , 2007.
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Fig 25.
Serena Kuo, Transpositions: Nathaniel , 2008.
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Fig 26.
Serena Kuo, Transpositions: Lauren , 2008.
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Fig 27.
Serena Kuo, Ice Apartment , ilm, 2007.
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Fig 28.
Serena Kuo, Ice Apartment , installation view, 2007.
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Fig 29.
Serena Kuo, Body Landscapes , 2007.
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Fig 30.
Serena Kuo, Composition timeline and corresponding scenes, Body Landscapes , 2007.
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Fig 31.
Serena Kuo, Captured , 2008.
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Fig 32.
Serena Kuo, Captured , 2008.
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Fig 33.
Dziga Vertov, The Man with a Movie Camera , 1929.
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ABSTRACT
My current work ocuses specically on the depiction o action traversing through space and creation o spatiality in cinema. Using the camera as a physical extension o the eye, the viewer is asked to bridge the conventional unction o a shot with real-experiences o perceiving space as an immersive environment during the process o travel. In my body o thesis projects, this endeavor is maniested in various ways: 1. Reerencing the traditional narrative lm ormat in a purely two-dimensio nal projection, where the audience expects a beginning, middle, and end, and hence restricting the lm space and temporality to one nite entity 2. Placing the lens at the position o the eye to visually simulate the experience o moving within real space 3. Establishing a more active spatial environment or cinematic spectatorship through a change in the placements o its projection suraces 4. Inverse to point 1, removing narrative and temporal niteness to imitate the mundane and seemingly innite nature o reality Through the work examined in this brie thesis, my attempt is not to interrogate the allencompassing question o reality in cinema, but to articulate a body o work that both stems rom and expands the medium’s conventions. With my work, I wish to acilitate a critical engagement with the medium’s process o constructing reality by using its very conventions to move outside the constraints and traditional parameters.
“CAPTURED”
In several ways, representational media such as lm Θ can be deemed non-generative. The images we see, printed or projected, are markings made by light reecting o o preexisting objects onto chemicals and sensors. The stories we delineate rom these images are altered personal experiences, adaptations, ables, and common human logic. We are handed visual and textual components, pieced together in specic ashions, that direct us to re-imagine what it is like to be within a certain real world, real place, real time, and real situation. Nothing is made rom nothing. When looking at an action taking place within the letterbox o a lm, we are not always addressed with what exists beyond this rame, yet two phenomena take place during our viewing experience: (1) We gather inormation rom the characters, the set, and the story to inorm what kind o a world contains this limited space presented beore us, and (2) We place ourselves within this world in the role o an ally, a witness, or a passive spectator. While these are the two certain goals or any lm work that engrosses the viewer, the parameters within which they occur are exible and subject to inventiveness. This is how lm is in actuality completely generative, its execution absolutely srcinal to each maker. While lm reproduces pre-existing material, it is more so the reiteration o that material as opposed to its replica. The changes that take place in a lm work rom the reality that srcinates its visual content are the result o layers o capturing – a selective process that highlights and obscures acts and emotions. The moving image captures a reality and contains it within a cinematic space, shaped by this selective process. The viewer captures a reality construed and impressed by the resulted lm, and is reciprocally captured within the reality she has just created. In other words, lm is the art o capturing captured-ness. As a nal note, the title “Captured” is also inuenced by my own obsessive indulgence with the lmmaking. The empty ramesthat o the unexposed lmstrip a blankare miniDV tapecrat (andorecently, portable hard drives directly connect to the or camera) voids eager to be lled with a certain angle o the outside world. The camera apparatus provides the maker with access to a specically conceived construct o reality, and simultaneously captures the physical world it photographs and the lmmaker into its mechanisms. Θ
The term “ilm” here encompasses all time-based photo-realistic media.
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INTRODUCTION
I create narrative and non-narrative lms with altered parameters o space, time, and movement. My work questions the spatial reality constructed in traditional cinema. The basis o my work is inormed by a synthesis o traditional and avant-garde lms, new media, architecture, a nd the intrinsic symbiosis between mobility and time-based media. The thematic thread that runs through my work examines personal interactions as the product o specic spatial and temporal constraints and the emotional ragmentation that characterizes these interacti ons. It is my goal to reerenc e traditional cinema in my work - to provide a amil iar reerence point or the viewer in order to acilitate examination o experimental elements rom a reinvented context. Film as a medium constructs re ality par tly through the cinematic conventions emp loyed to represent space and time. These conventions are the oundation o all categories: narrative (story or the text), mise-en-scene2 , cinematography, assemblage o shots, special eects, a nd space o spectatorship. Fo r example, conventions o a narrative i nclude genre, character, orm and time. Low and high angles, close-ups and extreme wide shots, dolly, and poi nt-o-view a re some o t he most requently util ized cinematographic conventions. Assemblage o shots can be conventionalized by collisional or conict-driven montage. Lastly, the space o spectatorship is cultura lly ostered into multiplexes, black box art house t heatres, televisions, and recently, personal computers and portable media players – all o which generate dierent levels o social and intellectual interactions between the image and the viewer. The sense o space and time a spectator translates rom a lm is inormed by preexisting experience and the knowledge o cinema’s structuring o time and space. Both “seeing” and “cinema” occur within a cultural context rom production to reception. This is what contemporary theorists reer to as t he “impression o reality 3” – it is actually an image and not the reality it appears to be – an act o signication . Upon equating the act o signication with ideology, Louis Althusser 2 3
Francois Truaut reers to mise-en-scene as comprised the camera position, the angle selected, the shot’s length, an actor’s gesture. In other words, at once the story that is being told and the manner o telling it. Truaut, Francois. The Films in My Lie . Da Capo Press, 1994. PP. 13-14 Allen, Richard. Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression o Reality (Cambridge Studies in Film) . Cambridg e University Pre ss, 1997. P . 9
describes that “the eect o the impression o reality in the cinema upon the spectator was likened to the eect o language upon the individual in its ideological impact. In the case o the analysis o signication, it was necessary to turn to a distinctive use o language – literary language – in order to nd a way to expose the ideological eects o language.” 4 This process is central to Structuralist lmmaking, which P. Adams Sitney describes as “cinema o structure in which the shape o the whole lm is predetermined and simplied, and it is that shape which is the primal impression o the lm.” 5 JeanLouis Baudr y respondsto Althusser’s th eory by break ing down its eect on the spectator into three parts 6: perspectival positioning, identication, and believing in the illusory world presented by lm as truth. As lm is a representation o a reality within which the spectator exists, it represents (and enorces) ideological assumptions about the nature o that reality. Since lm is a timebased medium that is rst invented with the purpose to document and examine actions – in other words, a representational medium - it reects the nature o space and time through the synthetic application o its conventions. For instance, the progression o time in narrative is cinematographically captured by exposing the action onto the lmstrip at a specic rame rate, which is then coupled with editorial dissolves that convey a passage o time. The selective raming o an interior space, repeated rom a multitude o angles, distance, is cut together to establish a specic physical environment that both reveals and obscures the action. In other words, the process o communication or the lmic medium is the organization and construction o space and time. 7 This process o re-organization and reconstruction o space and time in cinema always runs along two tracks: delity to reality versus the desire to revolt against the very transparency o this constructed reality. This is the conict between classical cinema’s transparent mise-en-scene and a lmmaker’s conscious eort to objectiy and bring attention to the orchestrated content within the lm rame. Toward the rst approach o mediation, Baudry writes that “[…] cinema is ideological in its orm because it is not authentic art; that is, it does not present the world to us in a manner that appears mediated by artistic orm.” Whereas the latter, a conscious objectication o the medium, according to Theodore Adorno in his inuential writing Culture Industry 8, “elevates lm to art.”
4 Allen. P. 9 5 Sitney, P. Adam s. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000. Oxord University Press, USA, 2002. P. 348 6 Baudry, Jean-Louis. Ide ological Eects o the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus . Film Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Winter, 1974-1975). PP. 39-47 7 Russian i lmma ker Lev K uleshov, n oted or his causal editing montage techniques, considers ilm not as photographic recordings but as purely spatial manipulation within a projective geometry. 8 Adorno, Theodor. Culture Industry (Routledge Classics) . Routledge, 2001.
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Adorno uses Michelangelo Antonioni as an example o this latter methodology, where the lmmaker consciously distills the photography o the environments in The Passenger to the point that the motion that accompanies the perspective o a moving perceiver – the camera and the viewer – is entirely removed. Michael Snow’s renown ed Wavelength brings attention to the unction o zooming in with a camera lens, which, in contrast to walking closer to an object, elicits a more visual, less physical spatial experience. In the realm o assemblage, Vsevolod Pudovkin believes that the montage is the only way through which lm can translate reality: “the isolated shot is not even a small ragment o cinema; it is only raw material, a ragment o the real world. Only by montage can one pass rom photography to cinema […]. Broadly dened, montage is quite simply inseparable rom the composition o the work itsel.9” Whereas Pudovkin strives to maniest realism with his cuts, Sergei Eisenstein reuses to submit to any type o ow in his work, and consciously opposes descriptive realism with Kuleshov-inspired “collisional montage,” the juxtaposition o visually conicting shots. With a minimalist approach to narrative, my work brings awareness to the lmic medium specically through the portrayal o space and time. My methods o approach encompass various aspects o the ve elements previously mentioned. The ilmic medium emerges in the late 19th century when depictions o stillness no longer suice to translate human experience with surrounding environments, when mobility by the means o automobiles is required to ulill an expanding urban liestyle. Drawing rom this correlation, I question how our perception o space changes in accordance to our increasing reedom to traverse through diverse landscapes, and how ilm evolved to acilitate the articulation o these travel experiences. I also question the medium’s capacity to simulate the experience o crossing through a spatial e nvironment: how does the medium successully construct 9 Fig 1.
Metz, Christia n. Film Lang uage: A Semiotics o the Cinema. University o Chicago Press, 1990. P. 32 Let, Michael Snow, Wavelength, 1967.
Fig 2.
Right, Michelangelo Antonioni, The Passenger , 1975.
Image courtesy o http:/ /www.greylodge.org Image courtesy o Sony Pictures Classics
the experience o physically intersecting a three-dimensional reality through two-dimensional means? How much o the spectator’s preexisting knowledge contributes into understanding this construction? How much can be altered beore this construction becomes completely incomprehensible? In ways o content and orm, my work links the ideological signatures implicit in the lmic medium (such as the psychological eects o cinematographic styles, shot duration, sound perspectivization, assemblage, o-screen space, etc.) and incorporates technology/techniques in video installation and site-specic cinema. My work aims to discuss t he perception and conceptio n o action in space a nd time in these ormats in the traditional sense, and these media’s deliberate departure rom the normative. Origi nally educated as a lmmaker, I was once completely submerged in the content o lm as a traditional medium. Through these two specic types o installation-based new media work, my goal is to generate new syntaxes as ormal ltration o the content. I wish to reinvent both the spectator’s and my personal relationship with the medium.
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Fig 3.
Sergei Eisenstein, October/Ten Days that Shook the World, Image Courtesy o http:/ /www.youtube.com
1927 .
THE
RY 00:00:00:06
1. EXPERIENCING GEOGRAPHY, ARCHIT ECTURE AN D CON STRUC TE D SPACE
THE ORIGIN OF CINE MATIC SPACE
The invention o the cinema comes rom Eadweard Muybridge’s desire to reveal the truth about a racehorse. Animals are regarded as machines, whose close analysis requires the more acute perception o another machine, the camera. In such a way, the early unction o lm is scientic and revelatory; it brings its subjects to the audience or urther examination. The Lumieres consider lm to be no more than a “scientic curiosity,” nature caught in the act. Unnoticed by the Lumieres, stylistic visual motis are present throughout their work that veer the lms away rom being purely objective observations. Around the beginning o the 20th century, countless screen tests, short lms, and lm experiments test the capacity o the lm camera. On one end o the spectrum are observational shots o events and landscapes by technological pioneers such as Thomas Edison and W.K.L. Dickson. lms, oten reerencing or dioramaso-the (that were popular in Europe in theThese 1800s), break away rom thepanoramas theatrical proscenium pre-cinema screen. Panorama rom Times Building, New York (Edison, 1905) exposes an expanse o cityscape using the lm camera’s primitive ability to pan and tilt. Panorama o 4th St., St Joseph (A. E, Weed, 1902) uses the mobile and rst person perspective o a moving vehicle to couple the experience o travel to that o exploring landscape in c inema. The marriage between cinema and mobility is instigated by the same curiosity that Muybridge possesses to see more and to be immersed in the experience o world travel. As a lmmaker strives to communicate the emotional journey o encountering a new place, lm transorms rom a scientic device to a medium that incites both intellectual and emotional response. This is where the technical conventions o lm become essential to acilitate the expansion o the medium’s communicative capacity. This is where early lmic exper imentations enter and broaden the language o the medium. In describing this social trend that orms around tourism and cinematic viewer-ship, Italian Film Theorist Giuliana Bruno comments “[lm] – and the ‘house’ in which its motion dwelt – was a way o urther extending this cityscape, ragmenting it, reinventing its assemblage, expanding its horizons.”10 Just as an actual site o travel is ltered through one’s subjective00:00:00:08 perception, broken down into moments paired with personal meaning, the authorship o 10 Fig 4.
Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas o Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film D.W. Gri ith, The Birth o a Nation, 1915 . Image Courtesy o Henderson, Robert M.
D. W. Griith His Lie and Work
, 1972.
. Verso, 2007. P. 77
conveying specic ideas in experiencing space is characterized by the process o organizing the visuals to resonate with intended meaning. This process engenders progressively more methods o establishing space in cinema. On the opposite end o observational panoram ic lms are lm experiments that explore the eect o new cutting methods, camera movements, and new compositions by D.W. Grith, as well as the methodical approaches to creating meaning through the conict and collision between images by Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Lev Kuleshov, which are calculated to a state that can be described as mathematical. As the srcinator o American narrative cinema, D.W. Grith is known or his exploration o urbanism and the country lie. The increasing tempo o editing in his historical epic, Birth o a Nation (1915), endows the viewer with a sense o mobility that traverses through separate yet connected ph ysical landscapes o America through parallel editing γ. The rhythm o editing, in this context, supplies the experience o travel with increasing emotional eect. His lmic style reerences the expositional structure o 19th century novels, where subplots overlap and jump back and orth through the pages, especially in his editing o parallel actions, which is one o the rst attempts or cinema to tackle the notion o simultaneous actions in multiple spaces. During these two decades o prolieration, ilm enters into the masses as a popular medium. A series o “City Symphony” ilms that emerged in the 1920s used the birth o cinema to explore the medium’s intrinsic link to mobility with a revelatory agenda. French Filmmaker René Clair remarks that the main aesthetics o cinema is movement – the object’s external movement and the inner movement o the action. In Paris qui dort (1925), a laser ray accidentally reezes the entire c ity o Paris i n time. Film theorist A nnette Michelson describes Clai r’s work (along with the work o Dziga Vertov) as “metacinematic 11”, a conscious analysis o the ilm apparatus through the metaphorical use o the narrative. Thematically, the ray illustrates how the movie camera constructs the relationship between corporeality and motion. It is the instrument that translates the meaning s o actions through suspen ding them, rami ng 11 γ
Fig 5.
Michelson, Annette. Dr. Craze and Mr. Clair. October, Vol. 11, Essays in Honor o Jay Leyda . (Winter, 1979). PP. 30-53. A technique in ilm editing to suggest simultaneity o actions in separate locations by placing one action ater another. René Clair, Paris qui dort, 1925 . Image Courtesy o http:/ /www.youtube.com
them in space. This is perhaps what Bruno reers to as the “perceptual interplay that exists betwee n immobility a nd mobility .” 12 Those that are spared by the ray ma neuver through the rozen city, exploring its various corners, in a sense assembling together the staged ragments o a complete narrative.
Film’s spectatorship is thus a practice o space that it dwelt in, as in the built environment. The itinerary o such a practice is similarly drawn by the visitor to a city or its resident, who goes to the highest point – a hill, a skyscraper, a tower – to project hersel onto the cityscape, and who also engages the anatomy o the streets, the city’s underbelly, as she traverses dierent urban congurations. Such a multiplicity o perspectives, a montage o ‘traveling’ shots with diverse viewpoints and rhythms, also guides the cinema and its way o site-seeing. Changes in the height, size, angle, and scale o the view, as well as the speed o the transport, are embedded in the very language o lmic shots, editing, and camera movements. Travel culture is written on the techniques o lmic observation. 13 Dziga Vertov was the ounder o the Kinopravda movement o 1920s Soviet Russia. Kinopravda (“lm-truth”) describes the reality captured by a camera without articial creative input by the screenwriter. The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) documents, with creative air, a day in the lie o a Russian city (shot in Moscow and Odessa). The sequence o the edit is chronological. There is also an absence o titles, which removes narrative specicity rom the work. Vertov regards drama to be an opiate or the masses , yet stylistically, his lm reects the emotive rhythm o traveling. American Video Artist Doug Aitken describes the lm as a “kaleidoscope o visual impressions” and a
12 13
Bruno. P. 55. Ibid. P. 62.
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“rapid-re montage o city lie in split screens, reeze rames, double exposures, and dissolves.”14Furthermore, the movie theatre contextualizes the viewing o the meta-lm, which begins with the parting o the theatre curtains and the unolding o theatre chairs. The journey o the cameraman/camera through the city in turn carries the movie audience through the cityscape. In addition to The Man with a Movie Camera, and Paris qui dort , numerous other city symphony lms establish the intimate association between cinema and urban travel on both a documentary and an emotional level. Mobility also becomes a necessary part o reinstating reality, whether it is in the staging or in the production. Motion, rst introduced to realistically render the gesture o moving in space, becomes a creative element used to simulate the physical sensation o movements, grand or minute. “The technically mature lm ‘subjective’ movements – movements, that is, which the spectator is invited to execute – constantly compete with objective ones,” states Bruno. “The spectator may have to identiy himsel with a tilting, panning, or traveling camera which insists on bringing motionless as well as moving objects to his attention. Or an appropriate arrangement o shots may rush the audience through vast expanses o time and/or space so as to make it witness, almost simultaneously, events in dierent periods and places.”15 Soon, as the movie camera becomes portable, the camera’s movement through space also gains the added reedom to simulate any mode o travel. Once bound to a car or a train, the camera is now handheld and organically expressive. The camera’s course o action transorms rom raming the audience into its spatial construction to becoming the extension o the eye. Its very presence within the lm’s physical environment acilitates the telepresence o the viewer’s body. Traversing through the lmic space, the viewer becomes immersed and inormed by the perspective and conguration o the environment. As a result o this propagation o visuality, the engagement between the screen and the v iewer becomes progress ively more experientially immersive. 14 15 Fig 6.
Aitken, Doug. Broken Screen: Expanding the Image, Breaking the Narrative. Publishers, Inc, 2005. P. 287 Bruno. P. 34. Dziga Vertov, The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929 . Image Courtesy o Kino Video.
D.A.P./Distributed Art
OBJECTIFYING THE MEDIUM
German Film theorist Siegried Kracauer qualies lms that are regarded as art as those that “organize the raw material to which they resort into some sel-sucient composition instead o accepting it as an element in its own right,” that “their underlying ormative impulses re so a ∋ strong that they deeat the cinematic approach with its concern or camera-reality.”16 Art in the orm o lm, or any other medium that exemplies the science o lm, or metacinema, is the deliberation o ormative lmic techniques. Using the conventions o cinema – its staging, its cinematography, and the phenomenology o cinema spectatorship – artists requently explore the perception and construction o spatiality by borrowing rom our amiliarity with popular lms. Michael Snow’s work builds heavily rom the process o lmic objectication, the spotlighting o cinematographic conventions (camera zooms, actions occurring out o rame) to imply the existence o a narrative that is actually rarely present. Snow’s work oten relies the on viewer’s analysis o the process and mechanisms involved in the making o the work. In his lmic work, Back and Forth (1968-1969), a camera swings back and orth in the path o a pendulum within a room. Primarily, the work emphasizes the presence o the camera as a traveling object within the space. Its route is concrete and predictable; its limited view o the room does not construct the space o the room any more than the viewer is capable o placing the motion within the actual space within which the ootage is lmed. “The distension, repetition, and aggressive use o movement […] is an attempt to orce discursive and analytic unctions rom the mind, thus creating a timelessness within a temporal structu re, or more exactly, a temporality ground in the perception o space rather than in narrative.”17 In La région centrale(1970-1971), Snow once againhighlights the movements o ht e camera by revealing compositions o a Quebec landscape unperceivable by the human eye. The camera, 00:00:00:12 moving along various axes at dierent speeds, transorms the raming o the space into abstract ∋
16 17
Kracauer describes two ways o cinematically construc ting reality: motion and staging. Kracauer, Siegried. Theory o Film . Princeton University Pres s, 1997. Taubin, Amy. “Double Visions” in Michael Snow Almost Cover to Cover . Black Dog, 2000.
shapes. With no narrative center to ocus on, the interaction between the image and its rame becomes the lm’s most accentuated action. Unlike city symphony lms, Snow’s work seeks to separate the rst-person immersion within the lmic space, but nevertheless imparts on the viewer the sensation o experiencing the physical riction o movements through space. Film and video installation artist Doug Aitken reerences traditional cinema primarily through the lmically aestheticized rendition o his subject matters. One o his earliest works, Infection (1992), displays the ootage shot rom a 16mm lm camera mounted onto a rocket roaming over the landscape o a Caliornian suburb. The work strives to communicate an imagined point o view, unable to be directly experienced by the human eye – much like La région centrale . Aitken consistently looks to lmic technology as an enabler o alternative perspectives. A later work, Diamond Sea (1997), contains the world’s oldest desert, only reerred to as Diamond Areas 1 and 2. Shot on lm, scored with orchestral music, the three-channel video installation juxtaposes the grandeur o vast landscape in lm with the sensation o social desolation. The deserted natural space also contrasts the installation’s overt display o technology. Aitken’s design or Diamond Sea calls attention to role o camera as both a revelatory instrument and a bridge between the out-o-reach and the accessible space within the museum. Aitken’s multi-channel video work challenges the temporal and spatial linearity o traditional lm by both inheriting the look o cinema and breaking apart the rame i nto multiple acets. This is not unlike a new iteration o Grith’s cross-cutting o simultaneous actions, or Eisenstein’s purposeul collisional montage. A body o installation work, including Electric Earth (1999),I Am Into You (2000), Blow Debris (2000), and New Ocean (2001), conveys change and transormation in the orm o narrative, character, and landscape. To access and capture the reality o these installations, the viewer is either
Fig 7.
Michael Snow, Wavelength, 1967 .
Image courtesy o http:/ /www.greylodge.com
enguled by a panorama o the lm, or conronted by an array o screens, together orming a eld o ragmented imageries, while individually segregating elements rom the whole o the lm to induce unpredictable rhythmic change. In writing about his work, Aitken makes a d irect correlation between the linearity o a lmstrip, its implicati on on temporality, and his desire or a “broken screen.” Film and video structure our experience in a linear way simply because they’re moving images on a strip o emulsion or tape. They create a story out o everything because it’s inherent to the medium and to the structure o the montage. But o co urse, we e xperience time in a much more complex way. The question or me is, “how can I break through this idea, which is reinorced constantly? How can I make time somehow collapse or expand, so it no longer unolds in this one narrow orm?18
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18
Birnbaum, Daniel. Doug Aitken (Contemporary Artists Series)
. Phaidon Press, 2001. p. 51
MY VISIT TO POMPEII
Walter Benjamin’s description o the theatrical character o the townscape o Naples is an exact picture o the combined stage and auditorium in Rear Window: Buildings are used as a popular stage. They are all divided into innumerable, simultaneously animated theatres. Balcony, courtyard, window, gateway, staircase, roo are the same time stage and boxes. 19 The eld o vision has always seemed to me comparable to the ground o an archeological excavation.20 I have always harbored a deep passion or architectural cross-sections. For as long as I can remember, their aesthetics and design have mesmerized me. It’s a very specic interest or which I previously had no rationale. In July o 2007, I traveled rom through Italy, rom North to South, with a close riend, Heather McPherson, who is a painter. We began to discuss the reasons behind specic aspects o our artistic passions. These discussions eventually led to an important personal discovery… I was walking in the ruins o Pompeii, Naples. It was late in July, during a shade-less aternoon. Pompeii was one o the last destinations o my Italy trip. I was glad that all the artiacts were either excavated or looted, because the bareness o the architecture was honest and un-staged. Moving past the rooess walls, down a kilometer o streets that were simultaneously anonymous and specic, layers o rooms, common halls, and courtyards shited past me. I witnessed multiples at the same time, a strange clash o vacancy and society. The rectangles and squares in the walls ormed innite congurations o lmic compositions. It was the highlight o my year.
19 20
Pallasmaa: “Geometry o Terror” p. 147 Virilio, Paul. L’horizon Negati : Essai De Dr omoscopie (Debats). Editions Galilee, 1984. p. 1
The next day, I began to investigate precisely why I was so moved. I listed several topics that have always ascinated me and driven me to sel-expression. I wrote this response in my sketchbook:
This real-lie cross-section o an entire society is something that has ascinated me since childhood. I was perpetually drawn to it with unexplainable orce. As I aged, this attraction did not s ubside. I anything, it grew stronger and more complex. Even now, I am xated on exploring space, breaks and continuums in space, simultaneous actions within and around spaces – the visible and invisible sense o space. I ully recognize my passion, but rarely asked why. It’s been with me or so long. Standing against the ruins, I suddenly began to wonder – it was the rst time I have been immersed within a dreamscape-like arena where my usual sense o spatiality was challenged. It has never happened beore…where I could so clearly see multiple planes o divisions simultaneously. I could visualize the people that used to possess these spaces moving about, all together, in one continuous web o interspersed strings. The story o the place suddenly becomes about the inter-relationship s, the energ y o transitions, as opposed to any singular object. The simultaneity o actions perormed by multiple people is a orm o calm rhythm.
- July 7, 2007, on the train to Cealu
Ater this reection, projects that I have never considered personal have become quiet intimate. My lm work attempts to describe the conict between isolation and coexistence. The situation is oten mundane, or at least nothing “happens.” The dramatic tension in the narrative exists not in the subjects, but in the physical void between them. To build a theoretical map o an architectonics as mobile as that o motion pictures, one must use a traveling lens and make room or the sensory spatiality o lm, or our apprehension o space, including lmic space, occurs through an engagement w ith touch and movement. Our site-seeing tour ollows this intimate path o mobilized visual space, “erring 21” rom architectural and artistic sites to moving pictures. Haptically driven, the atlasplace ndsthat a design lmic the space within the delicate sentient existsor between map, the wall, and thecartography screen. 22 o emotion, that 00:00:00:16
21 22
Bruno reers to erring as strayin g rom a path. Bruno. P. 16
2. CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY
SYNTHESIS OF SCIENCE AND ART
One shouldn’t be astonished that the cinema has always elt the natural, unavoidable necessity to insert a ‘story’ in the reality to make it exciting and ‘spectacular.’ All the same, it is clear that such a method evades a direct approach to everyday reality, and suggests that it cannot be portrayed without the intervention o ant asy or artice. 23 When lm was rst invented as a practical technology, it observed reality through one angle and one composition. It was conceived as a machine that more acutely reveals truths in the world unperceived by the human eye. Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope dissects motion into individual moments as to oer scientic evidence or the moment when the horse’s our legs are suspended in midair. Right rom the start, lm is regarded not just as a medium that sustains movement, but as one that generates movement rom the assemblage o single moments. This concept is the springboard or decades o lmic styles to come – the methodical and scientic assignment o images onto a continuous timeline conveys premeditated thoughts and triggers planned sensations. At its birth, the lm camera’s role as a spectator simulates that o a theatre audience. In theatre, actions are pantomimed and speech is exaggerated or practicality’s sake, so that the audience member sitting at the urther rows away rom the stage can still understand the gesture and the message. In a sense, the narrative is communicated through symbolic and mimetic means. Familiarity with theatrical arts allows the audience to lter out the exaggerations and extract the intent o these gestures, then assemble them into a story. Beginning cinema sought to do the same. Film theorist Noel Burch calls this mode o presentation in cinema primitivism, where the bare-bone construction o lmic reality unctions when the spectator is centered within the illusory picture at crucial moments o action. This immersion, as dened by Burch, is “o a single space-time continuum and o
23
Zavatti ni, Cesare. “Some Ideas on the Cinema.” MacCan n, Richard Dyer, ed. Film: A Montage o Theories , 216-228. New York, Dutton, 1966.
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the spectator as a unied subject o vision who moves rom one vantage point to another within the continuum is cre ated by the many converging codes o representation: linear perspective, ca mera ubiquity, camera movement, eye-line matchin g […] and so on.” 24 During t he period that Burch describes as primitivism – namely beore the introduction o sound lm in the late 1920s, or movable camera (by dolly tracks and then by hand) – the raming o a scene generally resembles a theatrical stage, where the lm audience is placed in ront row center. In order to maintain the time-space continuum o the action, this stationary shot persists, sometim es with small degrees o panning on a tripod, u ntil an important plot point in the narrative calls or the insertion o other inormation, such as a text-card or a close-up. Ater this insert, the composition returns to the srcinal “master shot” as the story succinctly ends. Beginning in the 1910s with Kuleshov, Eisenstein, and Grith, cinema was soon able to realize that the xed distance and viewing perspective between the subject and the audience can be abolished. This is where mise-en-scene takes a ront seat in creatively controlling the visual content through spatial organization, design, orientation, and ragmentation. “The audience’s identication with the actor is really an identication with the camera,” Walter Benjamin comments on the shit toward the use o cinematic technology to break up the careu lly maintained temporal and spatial continu um in early cinema. “[C]onsequently the audience takes the position o the camera; its approach is that o testing. This is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed.” 25
24 25 Fig 8.
Burch, Noel. N.d. Correction Please – or How We Got into Pictures. (Pamphlet accompanying ilm o same name.) ___ _. 1978 – 1979. “Porter, or Ambivalence.” Screen 19 , no. 4: 19-105. Benjamin, Water. “The Work o Art in the Age o Mechanica l Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Relections . Schocken, 1969. P. 228. Eadweard Muybridge, Galloping Horse, 1878 . Image courtesy o http:// www.digitaljour nalist.org
Beore diving into the techniques that accompany this shit away rom cinematic primitivism, one must keep in mind that the role that reality plays in dierent genres and movements o lm. In his seminal essay, written in 1967, Andre Bazin26 opposes two kinds o lmmakers in the orchestration o the cinematic image: those that put aith in the image, such as Russian Constructivists, and German Expressionists, Hitchcock, and lmmakers o the French New Wave; and those that put aith in reality, such as Renoir, Antonioni, Murnau, and Angelopoulos. In the rst grouping, the image is assembled jarringly and manipulated to communicate an intellectual and emotional message. In the second grouping, the cinema is used to, as commented by David Bordwell, “capture the concrete relations o people and objects knit into the seamless abric o reality…which conveys the lmmaker’s unique conceptions o the world.”27 Yet the two groupings o lmmaking are not polar opposites, within the tension-packed visual compositions by Eisenstein, imageries and rhythms reerence instances o reality – and the collision resulted by each abrupt cut certainly recalls some type o real emotional experience. Likewise, within the canvas o seamless portrayals o reality, aberrant elements occur to set things awry in order to direct the viewer’s attention toward specic visual and narrative threads. This ollowing chapter is dedicated to addressing the primary methods through which cinema reerences and constructs reality with an emphasis on spatiality and temporal ity. The discussion will be broken down into the production components o mise-en-scene, cinematography, and assemblage. The second part o this chapter investigates the reality within the narrative context as created by these components and the message that the spectator receives.
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26 27
Bazin, Andre. “The Evolution o the Lang uage o Cinema,” in What is Cinema? Vol. 1 . University o Caliornia Press, 2004. Bordwell, David. Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging . University o Caliornia Press, 2005. P. 11
Mise-en-scene Expanding rom François Truaut’s denition, Bordwell outlines “mise-en-scene” as setting, lighting, costume, makeup and perormance within the shot. 28 These elements when combined orm the visual style o the lm. They serve our main purposes: 1. 2. 3. 4.
To denote a ctional or non-ctional realm o actions, agents, and circumstances (the narrative) To generate expressive qualities – to “inect viewers with strong eelings” 29 To yield more abstract, conceptual meanings – symbolism To work somewhat on its own – unctioning decoratively
Together, the elements within a rame construct the “world” o the lm. While it is most likely reerential o reality in appearance – or ex ample: earthy landscapes, identiabl e architecture, illuminations that imply sunlight or practical lighting, class-appropriate clothing, non-pantomimic acting, and so on – it is also a completely believable unique entity. An extreme example is Star Wars (1977, George Lucas), where every visual element o the lm helps to estab lish a culture very removed rom an ordinary lie on earth. Ri ght rom the start, the lm announces that it takes place “in a galaxy ar, ar away.” This statement not only sets the antastic tone or the trilogy, but also immediately suspends the audience’s belie in establishing that the visual uniqueness throughout the lm is not unusual or articial to the civilization it seeks to create. Hence, the visual content within the lm is compatible with the parameters set or the reality within the lm. In addition, while this araway galaxy is a departure rom lie on earth, the behavior and sociality o its inhabitants, as shown through the perormance, is signicantly comparable to that o earth. Uniormity o the mise-en-scene is what ultimately makes this separation possible.
28 29
Ibid. P. 16 Ibid. P. 34
This is what Bordwell means by his rst point. It is also easy to see that the our unctions o successul mise-en-scene work hand-in-hand with one another. In other words, narrative emotes, symbolism reinorces narrative (as it does in literature), and aesthetics incites specic sensational responses. Eisenstein’s meticulous study o montage is partnered with his detailed analysis o cinematography, which he calls “mise-en-cadre,” or “mise-en-shot.” “Art is always conict, according to its methodology” and “cinematography is, rst and oremost, montage.”30 The conict, which Eisenstein extensively breaks up into several categories (which will be addressed later in this chapter) entail the relationship ormed between images, or rames o a lm. Instead o seeing each image as placed laterally in relation to one another, Eisenstein perceives one as on top o the other. Motion emerges rom this juxtaposition. By motion, Eisenstein does not simply mean the physical act o moving through space, but also emotional and intellectual movements, which establish the tonality and narrative content o the lm. These movements, working symbiotically within the lm rame, construct reality in all aspects that relate to the human experience. This is “the reason or the phenomenon o spatial depth, in the optical superimposition o two planes [...]. From the superimposition o two elements o the same dimension always arises a new, higher dimension.”31 The content within the rame is analyzed in both a painterly (orm-oriented) and intellectual (content-oriented) ashion.
30 31 Fig 9.
Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Ibid. P. 49 Let, F.W. Murnau, The Last Laugh, 1924 .
Fig 10.
Center, F.W. Murnau, Noseratu, 1922 .
Fig 11.
Right, F.W. Murnau, Sunrise, 1927 .
Image courtesy o Kino Video. Image courtesy o Kino Video.
Image courtesy o Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertain
ment.
Harvest Books, 1969.
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Cinematography There are two important qualities that dene cinematography: 1. Subconsciously or consciously, it is a decision 2. It is motivated by the text o the lm. Cinematography is the visual ramework through which the lmmaker interprets and expresses events, which, unless it is a purely abstract idea, possesses temporal, spatial, and emotional continuity. It is clear why the movement o a camera, the granularity o the lm stock, andthat the make depiction o the image through thetochoice lens and lengthin–the all the attributes up cinematography – work createo motion andocal spatiality same ashion, i not collaboratively, with assemblage or montage. To more closely investigate how mise-en-scene and cinematography contribute to the construction o reality, whether it is spatial, textual, social, or aesthetic, I will identiy their unction within several stylistically distinctive lms that heavily employ space as either a metaphor or a direct component o their text. This theoretical analysis serves to explicate both the reerential aspect and the point o departure in my own work. Two entirely dierent directions o lmmaking suraced in Germany during the 1920s, particularly in relation to their dissimilarities in mise-en-scene. Robert Wiene’s most notable work, Cabinet o Doctor Caligari (1920), is characterized by sets painted with shadows, corridors, and light. In conjunction with its stylistic title cards and cryptic storyline, Caligari’s mise-en-scene is overtly abricated and non-representational. While there is no spatial realism in Caligari, the lm implies depth and apertures on blatantly at planes, a process that calls attention to the artice o lm as a two-dimensional projection.
Fig 12.
Orson Welles, Citizen Kane, 1941 . Image courtesy o Warner Home Video.
Ater Noseratu (1922), F.W. Murnau’s lms, albeit remaining expressive and surreal, take a realistic turn. The success o The Last Laugh (1924) – which will be discussed urther or its cinematographic signicance – leads to Sunrise (1927), a lm that visually articulates the experience o travel through the imitation o realistic rural and urban landscapes. During a dramatic narrative sequence, the lm’s protagonists transition rom a rural town into the city center via a train. The moving vehicle enables continuous visibility o changing exterior – a trope rom beginning cinema, and undoubtedly resonant with the urban movement mentality o its time. With this staging, Murnau not only addresses the spatial reality and the world o Sunrise , but also juxtaposes the character development with the setting, emphasizing the importance o this architectural shit in the narrative. This is how visual inormation is both passive and active: the landscapes around the train serve both as background inormation and analogize the emotional change that the characters are about to experience in Sunrise ’s narrative arc. Going back to The Last Laugh, the relationship between mise-en-scene and cinematography plays a crucial part in the lm’s narrative. The afuent city o Berlin rises over its protagonist, gloriying his role as a proud hotel porter and diminishing his status when he is emotionally devastated by his demotion to a janitor. To communicate the diminutive spatiality that accompanies the character’s psychological low point, two shots take place: 1.
2.
The physical gesture o buildings alling over the porter, as i they are anthropomorphized to the role o villains. This is what Eisenstein reers to as confict between matter and its spatial nature – which is achieved by the distortion o the lens. The placement o the porter to the lower right corner o the rame – the least noticeable area o the composition – removes his power over the situation.
Here, the construction o spa ce goes beyond addressing the certain cultural or geographical identity o Berlin. The lm’s spatiality is not just the architecture that contains actions, but the active tension between the environment and character. Mise-en-scene and the camera activate this psychology. The our-minute opening shot in Orson Welles’Touch o Evil (1958) is a signature example o how the realist director “dramatizes lm space.”32 As a wideshot, the moving composition explores the US-Mexico border with deep ocus and clarity. The space is depicted concretely,33 since geographies o both by thethis border the town play important the narrative. Within the space ramed shot,and layers o actions take place,parts someinsetting cultural 00:00:01:00
32 33
Bordwell. P. 172 In act, Welles demands that the il m be shot in a “real space” as opposed to a i lm set.
context, some the noir aesthetics that resonates throughout Welles’ work, some establishing moral identication or the male protagonist, and some building up the narrative plot point that is about to take place – the explosion that interrupts the shot. Actions are ramed within and outside o the lm rame; the continuity o the shot reinorces the idea that narrative extends beyond the visible realm. The motion o the camera describes Eisenstein’s third conict o motives: the projection o conict into space, a zig-zag movement traveling through space. While the camera work orients the viewer within the world o Touch o Evil, the mise-en-scene implies the presence o acts yet to be revealed, i.e., a lurking danger that sets the world o-balance, a common theme o Film Noir. As the audience, we are now keyed into the multi-layering o action and space. Welles employs deep ocus shots constantly to ll his raming with inormation. The slow dolly-ing back rom the snow inCitizen Kane (1941) is another amous example. A young Charles Foster Kane playing in the snow is ramed by the window, placed center screen to emphasize his importance and entrapment, the bleak interior o the Foster residence counterbalances the blissul child’s play, while the actual dialogue exchange takes place in the oreground. In one shot, Welles collapses three spaces into one in order to create conict. The emotional experience o moving through this lm space also increases in tension. The works o Italian Neorealistic (and later) New Wave Director, Michelangelo Antonioni, challenge the way o seeing the environment by stripping away dramatic elements, cinematic style, and the artice o studio lms. La Notte (1961), or example, is lmed with documentary aesthetics. The visual tension is subtly conveyed through one’s prolonged observation o the mise-en-scene. Blowup (1966) takes an alternate approach through using the photographic medium as a metaphor or the cinematic construction o spatial reality, which also translates into the construction o truth in the narrative. Ater all, what is
Fig 13.
Chris Welsby, Windmill II, 1973 . Image courtesy British Film Institute.
revealed by the camera is what inorms the reality o the situation; what is hidden is only inerred by the visible, and is otherwise non-existent, as i it never happened. Antonioni describes that his goal or Blowup is to “question ‘the reality o our experience,’” and that one o the lm’s main themes is “to see or not to see the correct value o things.”34 Events hidden rom the eye o a camera are either non-existent or presumed to have taken place in an unexplored space, which is nevertheless existent within the spatial reality o the lm. In other words, what Antinioni means by questioning the reality o experience is or the viewer to decide between these two possibilities implied by this act o obscuring. Three scenes in Blowup demonstrate the method o its spatial construction. In the park, when Thomas the photographer rst encounters a man and a woman having an aair, his visual perception is driven by the couple’s actions. With the couple situated in the center o his line o vision, he captures the moment with his camera, casting both the couple’s behaviors and the physical structure o the park into the mise-en-scene. In the second scene, these ragmented images are printed and arranged to recreate the physical reality o the park. What is noteworthy o this assemblage is the motion that motivates Thomas to begin this endeavor – the woman’s eyeline. Her gaze extends the space beyond the camera that rames her in a two-dimensional plane. This raming inorms the photographer (and the lm viewer) o a counter-action that occurs opposite her gaze. This is the Eisensteinian “conict between viewpoints,” which is directed by camera angles 35. A requently used convention is the “shot-reverse-shot,” which constructs a causal relationship between shot A and B purely by placing one ater another in editing. Beore revealing the subject o her gaze, space is constructed outside o the rame. Antonioni asks us to have aith in our speculation about a reality that is more oten deduced than revealed. This is what the lm’s nal scene is about: believing in a reality separate rom the norm through piecing together dialogical actions.
34 35
“E nato a Londra ma non e un il m ingelese,” rom Corriere della Sera , 12 February 1982. Translated by Allison Cooper. Eisenstein. P. 54.
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Film and video artist Chris Welsby, oten described as a British Structuralist lmmaker, illustrates this shot-reverse-shot causal eect withWindmill (1973). In Windmill, a mirrorized windmill is placed in close proximity to a 16mm lm camera. The camera is set on a tripod situated in a park. As the windmill rotates in response to wind ow, three layers o spaces are recorded by the lm: the deep space beyond the windmill (the park), the space behind the camera reected by the mirrors, and the in-between space, the visual plane that appears as a merging o the abstract ashes o colors and light captured by the quick movements o windmill, acting almost as a camera shutter that both obscures and reveals. The work is a maniestation o the editing process and its unction to cohere and construct spatiality.
Being, says Heidegger, is being-in-the-world. When David senses the end (although probably not even he himsel is sure o it), he is no longer in the world. The world is outside the window.36 – Michelangelo Antonioni, in response to the end shot o The Passenger. The last shot o The Passenger (1975) is one o most theorized moments in Antonioni’s work. Spanning seven minutes, the sho t begins rom within protagonist Davi d Locke’s hotel room, moves steadily out the gated window, pans over that empty arena outside the hotel, and nally turns around so that the window is now in its view and we are now looking inside at Locke, dead. This is done in one long take w ith no edits. Like his other work, The Passenger unravels slowly and natura lly, without dram atic high points, music, or even extensive dialogue. Natu ral and man-made architectures, which demarcate the expanse and connes o physical space, are heavily explored by the camera. In slow, wide compositions, Antonioni prolongs the process o staging, orcing the audience to speculate on the scene’s purpose. The architectural mise-en-scene, in this context, removes visua l cues indicative o drama by obscuring the actions – to “dedramatize” the situation, as Bordwell puts it. What is signicant about this seven-minute shot is its preservation o temporal continuity, and in turn spatial continuity. Throughout the entire lm, Locke is a character out o place, yet shaped by his oreign environment. By integrating the interior o Locke’s world with the exterior environment with which he cannot connect, Antonioni stresses the multilayered nature o space.
36
“Il mondo e uori dall a inestr a,” in Filmcritica 252 , March 1975. Translated by Dana Renga.
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Fig 14.
Michelang elo Antonioni, The Passenger, 1975 . Image courtesy o Sony Pictures Classics.
STRUCTURAL FRAGMENTATION IN CIN EMATIC SPACE : CINEMATOGRAPHY & MONTAGE The isolated shot is not even a small ragment o cinema; it is only raw material, a ragment o the real world. Only by montage can one pass rom photography to cinema, rom slavish copy to art. Broadly dened, montage is quite simply inseparable rom the composition o the work itsel.37 Drawing rom the beginning o this thesis, Gilles Deleuze expresses in his writing “Cinema 1: The Movement-Image” that cinema depicts motion as a unity o multiplicity. Not only does sequence shots describe action, it places us,tothe audience, motion to provide a sense o o perspective andan time. Deleuze goes on describe two twithin ypes o mobility: the mobility o the action, and the mobility o the camera, which are both embedded into the nature o shots. As previously discussed in this chapter, shots are placed within the mise-en-scene, which is given orm by editing and by cinematography. Yet, it is the assemblage o shots that orients the action. In other words, visual editing is capable o ragmenting and reconguring lmed or staged physical space into a new space that conveys a deliberate emotional and intellectual message. In his inuential writing, “The Production o Space,” French philosopher Henri Leebvre describes that space is socially constructed in a ashion comparable to Eisenstein’s explanation o the role conict and Deleuze’s emphasis on multiplicity. “The orm o social space is encounter, assembly, simultaneity.38 ” Leebvre includes everything there is in space as what creates space, objects, movements, and signs. “Natural space juxtaposes – and thus disperses: it puts places and that which occupies them side by side. It particularizes. By contrast, social space implies actual or potential assembly at a single point, or around that point.” In this light, the process o assembling ragments o space as captured by lm into a sequence, providing an implicit movement and convergence o perspectives, accumulates and transorms the natural space into a social space. 37 38
R. Barthes. In Communications , no. 4, 1964 (special issue: “ Recherches semiologiques”). p. 47 Leebvre, Henri. The Production o Space . Blackwell Publishing Limited, 1991. p. 101
Motion exists in space. As it drives through space, it possesses a certain kind o rhythm, a temporality. This driving orce is the mobility o the action within the mise-en-scene. Since montage is the superimposition o one image onto the next, a second motion arises out o the change between the two images. “The concept o the moving (time-consuming ) image arises rom the superimposition – or counterpoint – o two diering immobile images.”39 This is a phenomenological projection o motion. Above and beyond creating emotional undertones and addressing the orientation o one’s movement through lm space, the rhythm by visual conict its best, phenomena an intellectual “Composition takesormed the structural elements o is, theatportrayed andmontage. rom these composes its canon or building the containing work...In doing this composition actually takes such elements, rst o all, rom the structure o the emotional behavior o man, joined with the experienced content o this or that portrayed phenomenon.”40 The intellectual message o this type o montage is integral to the narrative. Instead o directly addressing the textual components and hard acts o the story, the phenomenological approach o intellectual montage is to reerence the mental experience simulated by the design o an assemblage o shots, as to contextualize the actual narrative. Through this contextualization, the relationship between space and its subjects becomes more complex. A quick illustration: Alred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) uses interspersed cutting o expositional visuals and stylized graphics to weave together a simultaneously anxious and narrative experience. This is how the lm appears at a glance. Upon deeper examination, one can easily identiy the thematic and structural emphasis on the staircase o the church – where the “accidental” protagonist proceeds to haunt James Stewart’s Detective Ferguson or theall restoothe theemale lm – as a space whose presence resonates throughout 00:00:01:06
39 40 Fig 15.
Eisenstein. P. 53. Eisenstein. P. 151. Alred Hitchcock, Rear Window, 1954 . Image courtesy o Universal Home Entertainment.
the entire lm. Vertigo’s main graphic, spiraling out o control, is a good example where Hitchcock uses collisional montage to iner the desired phenomenological experience associated with the staircase (its association with vertigo, repetition and transition), and in turn situates the audience in a certain direction o narrative. We know that the staircase is physically threatening to the protagonist, who has vertigo. We understand that the act o looking down the staircase induces neurosis as it recalls tragic memories, triggering conict between matter and its spatial nature (the distortion o the lens when the character looks downward41), but most signicantly, we also, through Hitchcock’s rather abstract assemblage and production o spatiality, expect the staircase to be a vital part o the resolution. From this case, we can see how the symbiotic connection between assemblage/ editing, cinematography, and mise-en-scene is crucial to what, in my introduction, JeanLouis Baudry reerred to as “the impression o reality”.
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41 Fig 16.
The shot is achieved by a simultaneous zooming in and moving away rom the object, so that the relative sizes o the oreground object and the background constantly change – achieving a renzied, dream-like visual eect. Oten reerred to as the “Vertigo Shot.” Alred Hitchcock, Vertigo, 1958 . Image courtesy o Universal Home Entertainment.
W
RK
5/4 Moving along with the history o space, cinema denes itsel as an architectural practice. It is an art orm o the street, an agent in the building o city views. The landscape o the city ends up interacting closely with lmic representations, and to this extent, the streetscape is as much a lmic ‘construction’ as it is an architectural one.42 5/443 uses an innitely rising staircase to demarcate and map a physical continu um. From a visual stance, each ight o stairs is as nondescript as the next. During the six-minute loop, the central character contin uously walks upstairs to imply that the path is innite. While her uninterrupted motion cuts through this spiraling physical construct, actions around her take place in loops with varying lengths. For example, a man waits next to his ancée’s door every our ights o stairs on a loop. Another woman tak ing her dog or a walk descends in a ve-ight loop, thus intersecting with the man at dierent points o her descent during each loop. Each character occupies separate temporal continuums like dierent durations o melodic ostinatos in a musical composition 44. Their spatial occupation, in turn, become individualized and isolated, despite the sharing o the stairwell. This work visualizes the multi-lay ered quality o ti me as dened by actions in space using lm and architecture as means o organization into a logical narrative. This work is rst conceived to take place in a circular corridor. Soon, because o the natural spiraling architecture o a staircase, the narrative and characters are designed to t its structure instead. The metaphorical connection between the dierent layers o temporalities and the narrative makes the construction o a linear script dicult. To clariy the visual dynamic o the screen space (to acilitate storyboarding), a chart is constructed to display where any character is at any time – with minutes spanning the x-axis, and ights o steps (20 being the end o one 00:00:01:12 loop) spanning o y-axis. 42 43 44
Bru no. P. 27. Denotes the musical time signatu re that is ive beats per measure, one beat being one quar ter note. Sets o continuous variat ions in a musical composition.
In this chart, the sociality within the lm space is excavated rom what the camera does not reveal, as continuity o space and time is assured. From a secondary glance, it is apparent how the structure o the work takes ater a musical composition, where multiple partials o requencies and melodic components are assembled in changing but ordered ashion. The nished composition is usually not overtly structural, but its elements repeat enough to convey their own sets o behaviors. The single diagonal that travels up to the upper right corner indicate both the protagonist’s presence and the eye o the camera. The dog and its owner, demarcated by downward-pointing diagonal lines, are deliberately arranged to occupy ve ights o stairs, as to generate varied interactions with the camera (protagonist) each time in passing. With this scientic blueprint o a rather abstract conceit, my intended central intellectual experience o viewing 5/4 is the mental act o piecing together spatiality and narrative through implicative cinematic and perormed gestures. The raming o each shot provides visual cues to aid to this endeavor. In 5/4, the organization o space and action is also likened to the metric montage o organization discussed by Eisenstein, in that the “realization is in the repetition o ormula-driven measures.”45 Metric montage, according to Eisenstein, diers rom rhythmic montage in its adherence to concrete mathematical divisions o time. The musical composition is written so that each chord change coincides with the crossing o one more ight o steps. Despite the dierent durations o each chord, the implied temporal organization o a musical score reinorces a deliberated mathematical method o spatial organization. The objectication o both the physical environment and the eeting intersections between paths o motion accentuate the scientic methodology behind the process o making the work, emphasizing its ormativ e aspects, removing it rom the representational cinematic approach dened by Kracauer. We exist in separate layers o reality, prescribed by our own sense o space, time, and thus actions. To say that we perceive our coexistence because we occupy the same physical space is negligent o the social interactions that signiy the intersection o our actions. The changing manners o interactions between the protagonist and the surrounding characters demonstrates the multilayered quality o time and space theoretically discussed above. On a sur ace level, the loop structure orms permutations o intersecting actions. Taking advantage o the spectator’s amiliarity o lm narrative tropes, these intersections generate escalating expectations, investment in characters, and build an ascending story arc that takes ater traditional cinema. From a metaphysical angle,
5/4 questionspersonal the social nature o our as dictated by routines – a built-in, programmed sense o time – ourliestyles unique metronomes. 00:00:01:14
45 Fig 17. Fig 18.
Eisenstein. P. 72 Script, 5/4 , 2007. Next spread, sequential shots, 5/4 , 2007.
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THE WATER The Water is a video installation that comprises o three simultaneous video projections onto three suraces within an unlit, empty room. The central projection occupies the width o the room and aces the other two projections, laid out side by side on the opposite wall. Between these two projections is a ve-oot gap that accommodates entrance into the viewing space. Together, the videos convey a looped narrative o a character’s exploration o this physical space, ull o straying paths, visual motis, and sounds that “dimensionalize” this projected environment. The two walls that accommodate the side projections are placed diagonally. As the viewer walks past the initial ve-oot gap, the walls part to suggest o entrance into physical space separate rom the rest o the exhibition. The space is consciously congured this way to bring awareness to the gap’s transitional characteristics, that it is a conux o ingress and egress. In other words, it both invites the viewer to step into an alternate cinematic space and calls upon the lm’s character to exit the cinematic space within which she exists. Lastly, the inability to perceive all three projections simultaneously – where the lm is constantly experienced both directly and in periphery – induces a sense o visual ragmentation and ambiguity also present within the narrative. In the central screen, l med cinematically widescreen, the pro tagonist is shown walking toward the viewer, although her eyes never cross the lens. She is motivated by the sound o water, which grows louder as she steps downhill. The water, as indicated also by the title, is the narrative goal and her nal destination. The sound distribution and music are designed to reinorce the thematic link between the cinematic space and the narrative. The sound o water is positioned at the entrance point, which is situated behind the viewer as she wal ks into the space, and beyond the character’s reach. Ambient and ootstep sounds pan across the viewing space, transorming the movement-image into action in space. The two projections acing the central image display what appears to be the character’s point-o-view, inerring to lm’s unction as a revelatory medium. As she traverses through
the orest, this set o moving images inorms her o her location, but simultaneously disorients her with their rantic movements and disjunction. At a glance, the whole o the piece seems straightorward – but it is precisely the impression o realism that is used to conuse the understanding o the work’s spatiality. When juxtaposing the lm’s natural space into the natural space o the installation, the positioning o the three projections also implies that the character is walking toward the gap that leads to the outside world. The character uses the woods’ architectural makeup (as provided by the surrounding projections) as visual cues in an endless attempt to solve the labyrinth. The term labyrinth is used here to imply both some type o organized structure inherent in the orest and the motion o traveling in circles. What the viewer does not notice at rst is that the three projections loop seamlessly at dierent intervals, hence creating new spaces as the character wanders on, desperately trying to break the labyrinth. Through her journey, orest’s anonymity instigates conusion and struggle. As we the viewer experience the installation, we too constantly question our construction o the orest’s geometry. Ater some period o disorientation, the character’s implied goal changes rom trying to nd the water to trying to locate hersel within the inrastructure o the environment constructed by the assemblage o shots amongst the three screens. This constant second-guessing challenges the traditional sense o lm space shown on a solely two-dimensional plane. With two additional moving images protruding toward and wrapping around the spectator, the physical relationship between the projection and the receptor is reconsidered. In terms o reerencing the conventions o cinema, The Water draws rom the impression o space in lmic projection and the idea o durati on in lm ic narrative. Revealing v isual clues that strive to complete the construction o physical space, in a way “sculpting space,” the jumpy editing amongst the three screens, as well as within each screen, sculpts time to bring awareness to the extended temporality that accompanies the experience o being lost. This deliberate emphasis on editorial structure parallels Stan Douglas’ execution in Win, Place or Show (1998) and Suspiria (2002-2003) where, through careully programmed duratio ns o edits, intellectual impressions that cont extuali ze the event a s well as rame the emotional experience, are materialized in spectatorship. Th e work also aesthetically echoes Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s lmic installation, The Wind (2006), where the narrative is broken down into ragmented segments, and as a result distort time and causal relationship rom one action to the next. The work aims to dispute the viewer’s impression o the three-dimensional space as implied by the various conventions in traditional cinema. In a subconscious and automatic eort to orient onesel within the work’s constructed real space, an ideological and physical exchange takes place between the viewer and the screen(s), much akin to that o cinematic spectatorship, which is constantly immersive.
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Fig 19.
The Water , installati on visualizati on 2008.
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Fig 20. Fig 21. Fig 22.
Let top, instal lation views, The Water , 2008. Let bottom, narrativ e brainstorm, The Water , 2008. Above, scenario maps, The Water , 2008.
THE BICYCLE CAMERA Part 1 To exami ne the communicative nature and intricate balance between real istic portrayal and emotive interpretation o action in space, my work, The Bicycle Camera , borrows the spectator’s preexisting visual impression o the road as viewed rom a moving bicycle as a basis or contrast to a manipulated lm that depicts the action. (We all have a xed impression o how quickly our surroundings pass us by as we bike down a street.) To briey describe the conceived technical construction o the central mechanism, a gear is positioned next to the ront wheel o the bicycle as well as a 16mm lm camera mounted directly on top o the wheel. As the wheel rotates, its spokes drive the gear orward, which in turnrames icks the the camera, a time. The aster the wheel rotates, the more per shutter second isoexposed ontoone therame lm. at Playback o this ootage reverses the speed o travel during lming - as portions where the bicycle moves at a aster pace are slowed down by the higher number rames exposed, and slow portions quickened by the lack o rames. The relationship between the speed and action o biking is inverted. In a sense, the physical continuum o the path traveled becomes the only constant in dictating lm’s visual component. No matter how ast or slow the bicycle moves, the same amount o imagery is recorded. Additionally, only surrounding actions can reveal this distortion o time and space, since otherwise it only seems that the revolution per second remains unchanged. When we enter an environment, we cut into it with momentum and orce. While we do not make direct contact with the objects around us, a rictional impulse emerges between our surrounding objects (and lie orms) and ourselves. I wish to document a variety o urban and rural landscapes with this mechanism, and as a result both accentuate and 00:00:02:00
mediate this universally physical and psychological response. As lm srcinates as a contemporary to and a product o industrialization and mobility, it is the most eective ormat or generating discussion o the two topics. The material chosen to create this work is celluloid lm or two main reasons. One, I want to emphasize the direct linkage between the motion that characterizes the lm medium and the application o transportation. The two technologies exist hand in hand, and it is most appropriate to have one quite literally drive the other. Two, the lmstrip, too, is a path, an unbroken continuum that maps out a space. The lm belongs in the genre o a “city symphony,” and like lms by Dziga Vertov, René Clair, Walter Ruttman, Sheeler, and Strand, simulates our experience within a physical space by mimicking the visual transormation o the city landscape during travel. Perhaps more signicantly, like Russian Constructivist and Propaganda lms, this work approaches the documentary o reality with the attitude to emote and challenge. My perpetration is enabled by a change o the camera motor technology as opposed to a scripted narrative. The narrative takes place in the city o Providence, Rhode Island, where a diverse group o cityscapes are lumped together into close proximity. Within the span o twenty minutes, a bicyclist is likely to encounter rich suburbs, universities, local town stores, grand hotels, shopping malls, boutiques, bridges and waterways, an abandoned downtown, and industrial developments. Such anthropological variance oers opportunities or a dramatic a rch, which u rthers my endeavor to embed emotional meaning into the activity o travel through the lm medium. Obviously, the reality o the work is loyally representational o its counterpart reality outside o lm. As a result, the spectator is invited to project her understanding o that physical reality back at the lm in order to comprehend its narrative. The spectator’s projection ultimately leads to my attempt to reinstate physical signicance into the transient lm medium. The distance between architectural organization o space and Fig 23.
Documentati on o ilming process, The Bicycle Camera , 2007.
time becomes distorted (inverted relationship to speed during playback) cinematic organization o space can be removed through this return rom projected orm to physical orm. I the spectator is able to project signicance o physical space onto lm’s ephemeral space, what level o physical detail is retained or added? In regards to both the architecturally or geographically dened and the more abstract, what is the dierence between spectatorial spatial reality – which exists solely in the mind – and the spatial reality represented by the lm in selected bits and parts a s images?
Part II To seek an answer to t he question o the reinstatement o the physical, The Bicycle Camera sprouts into its second phase. Ater lming the physical space o Providence with the modied camera, the ootage is projected back onto the road via a bicycle-dr iven projector. The projector is wired to the bicycle similarly to the camera, and all the increments are carried over rom the rst to the second phase. Since the physical continuum o the path traveled is the constant, a continuously moving and changing cityscape is projected back onto three-dimensional architecture in the appearance o its srcinal presence. In a sense, one physical space is tra nslated, through the mode o lm, onto another physical space. This phase signies my gesture o physical reinstatement through a quite literal means o projecting back, and more extensively explores the multilayered quality o physical and social space. The actual action exerted or this projecting back also conveys the active eort exerted by the spectator while creating meaning rom a lm. The documentary re erence in this work invites the spectator to project her understanding o that physical reality back at the lm in order to comprehend its narrative. The spectator’s projection ultimately leads to my attempt to reinstate physical signicance into the transient lmic medium. The distance between architectural organization o space and cinematic organization o space can be removed through this return rom projected orm to physical orm.
Fig 24.
Sketch exploring the inverted relationship between speed and distance or The Bicycle Camera , 2007.
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“At the moment I’m ully conscious o my every step being recorded by the camera and the act that I need to speak o my steps. These irst maybe ten steps are in complete camera consciousness. I think at this pothole here I’m ready to switch into just walking and not acting…so or the next ten steps to this series o cracks on the road and this breeze o wind against my ace I’ll recognize that the house next to you is or rent.” He crosses Brown Street and approaches the ence that outlines a eld.
“I’m gonna cross this ence now that allows entry to Hope High School… and it surprisingly looks more like a all day today than a spring day. I remember when we played ootball here…I remember that there’s an entrance in the ence right here, here it is.” He crawls in.
“And here I am…at the home plate. And you know, I don’t think I’ve played baseball in my entire lie…I’ve never actually stood on a baseball diamond. I’m not even sure where one’d stand in relation to the base. Andthe ball would come like this, and I’d swing and hit. That was not a very good one. That was a oul ball, maybe? Not growing up in this country it was not part o my experience.. Like, growing up playing baseball, little league, maybe? I don’t even know what to do. I think right-handed is more sure-ooted, right?” He stands over the diamond, pretends a ball is coming. He swings. His body spins around ul ly.
“And the pitch is coming, and I’m an ATHLETE!!”
Fig 25.
Transpositions: Nathaniel , 2008.
TRANSPOSITIONS
Transpositions is a one-channel video that presents the journey o our people walking through an open eld. Each walk is lmed in one continuous hand-held shot to reinorce its spatial and temporal continuity. Instead o implementing a script, each person is given three simple directions that vaguely struct ure the perormance: 1. Your goal is to traverse rom one end o the eld to the other. 2. You should speak instructively and descriptively about your walk, as anything you say will inorm the ollowing walker o the right course o action during their travel. 3. You should not consciously ignore the presence o the camera. As in, you are allowed to acknowledge the gaze o the lens and make visual interactions with it. Ater the rst walk, the audio inormation o the recorded ootage is passed onto the ollowing walker, who is told to “respond” to what is said about the journey. The deliberate choice o the transitive verb “respond” leaves room to explore the relationship between the perormers, who are amiliar with one another on a personal basis. The perormers are given the reedom to connect the ragments o verbal inormation with the various impressions associated with the instructor, whether it is a specic past experience or an assumption based on personality. The title o the piece is derived rom the process o translating one space to another, one movement to another, and one impression to another. The repeating element rom one segment to the next is the action o traversing an unchanging space. As the route o the travel transorms based on a perormer’s biased interpretation o instructions, the spatial reality that is understood by the previous traveler becomes recongured. In this sense, the spatiality that is ormed by movement becomes an extended metaphor or the recongured “narrative,” and vice versa. From a Structuralist standpoint, this work is my attempt to address the innite amount o angles one can use to perceive and interact with a natural space. Through the cross-examination between each lm segment, not only does the space become more explored, but also the interrelationships between the our travelers.
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“I guess I’m s upposed to respond to Nathaniel, though. He talked about Art, and he talked about baseball, and he talked about leaves and seasons. But the thing that was more striking when I was listening to him were the things that were happening around.” “This bench is missing a seat. But I guess you can sit on it.” She sits down. It’s co ld. She tucks i n her hands.
“How do I know when I’m done. How do I know when I got there?”
Fig 26.
Transpositions: Nathaniel , 2008.
Merging the genres o documentary and improvisational perormance, the characters are not directed to act as someone else, although a transormation rom a non -actor to a perormer takes place during lm ing, as the individual i s subject to both th e exam ination o the camera and the next traveler. Utterances are made with the intent o a specic listener, personal details are mediated both by the consciousness o a public audience and tailored or a amiliar individual with certain predispositions. As the our perormers are not ormerly trained in acting, their transormation is unnatural and conspicuous. This, too, adds to the suspicion o artice when constructing tr uth in lm spectatorship – a salient topic o discussion in the documentary genre.
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Fig 27. Fig 28.
Top, Ice Apartment , Film, 2007. Bottom, Ice Apartment , Installation View, 2007.
ICE APARTMENT In The Ice Apartment , the counterbalance between the mundane and the dramatic once again enters my lmic exploration. The installation conveys a situation between our co-inhabitants o a square room. These our gures, three women and one man, are aware o one another’s physical presence, but do not commit themselves to any true communicative exchange. As i they exist in separate spaces, they are distilled within sel-centered motions that repeat or an indenite amount o time. This situation is shot rom our dierent angles to establish the physical presence o the room. The our-sided video is then translated via projection onto a our-sided miniature room made o ice walls. In the dark, this ice room is illuminated by the blue-green light emitted by the projectors. Depending on the surace texture o each ice wall, the video image either oats on the outside, or appears trapped within the 5-inch thick material. The video playback is looped to express the unchanging dynamic o the characters’ relationships, as well as the tension that lies dormant under their lack o interaction. It is my intent to incorporate the material and thematic attributes o ice into the mise-enscene o the lm. As a physical object, the ice serves both as a projection surace and as a substantial three-dimensional object that seemingly contains the visual content (which provides it with palpability). Aesthetically, its reractions and luminosity spotlight the mundane event. Tonally, its temperature and inconsistency become a metaphor or the ragile and unstable relationships present within the environment. The our aces o the ice room simulate theatri cal staging – at, un i-planer perspectives where the characters are placed so that their actions are completely visible to the viewer. When juxtaposed onto the ice, however, the ima ges are partially obscured by material incongruousness , which orces the viewer to constantly seek a better angle at understanding what is going on. This interactive element o the work adds complexity to the spatiality within the lm, drawing emphasis to the act that space is created through motion, or the motion created by the association between images.
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BODY LANDSCAPES In The Ice Apartment , the counterbalance between the mundane and the dramatic once again enters my lmic exploration. The installation conveys a situation between our co-inhabitants o a square room. These our gures, three women and one man, are aware o one another’s physical presence, but do not commit themselves to any true communicative exchange. As i they exist in separate spaces, they are distilled within sel-centered motions that repeat or an indenite amount o time. This situation is shot rom our dierent angles to establish the physical presence o the room. The our-sided video is then translated via projection onto a our-sided miniature room made o ice walls. In the dark, this ice room is illuminated by the blue-green light emitted by the projectors. Depending on the surace texture o each ice wall, the video image either oats on the outside, or appears trapped within the 5-inch thick material. The video playback is looped to express the unchanging dynamic o the characters’ relationships, as well as the tension that lies dormant under their lack o interaction. It is my intent to incorporate the material and thematic attributes o ice into the mise-enscene o the lm. As a physical object, the ice serves both as a projection surace and as a substantial three-dimensional object that seemingly contains the visual content (which provides it with palpability). Aesthetically, its reractions and luminosity spotlight the mundane event. Tonally, its temperature and inconsistency become a metaphor or the ragile and unstable relationships present within the environment. The our aces o the ice room simulate theatri cal staging – at, un i-planer perspectives where the characters are placed so that their actions are completely visible to the viewer. When juxtaposed onto the ice, however, the ima ges are partially obscured by material incongruousness , which orces the viewer to constantly seek a better angle at understanding what is going on. This interactive element o the work adds complexity to the spatiality within the lm, drawing emphasis to the act that space is created through motion, or the motion created by the association between images.
Fig 29.
Body Landscapes , 2007.
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Fig 30.
Composition timeline and corresponding scenes, Body Landscapes , 2007.
Fig 31, 32. Let & Above, Captured , 2008.
CAPTURED Looking at my body o work, I regardCaptured, my most recent one-channel video, as a point o change. For the rst time, I place mysel within the rame o this teen-minute lm as the one and only character. In doing so, I consciously pluck mysel away rom the symbiosis that I usually maintain with the camera mechanism. My role within the work shits rom being synonymous with the camera to the opposition and the subject o examination. The set o actions in Captured is simple: I, the ilmmaker/ilm artist/video artist, box the camera as an equally capable opponent. As I attack my opponent, I am also on my guard , anticipating a return. Eventually, I am enervated by my actions and physically orced to stop the match. The idea or Captured sprouts rom a brie conversation about particularly grotesque (yet simultaneously beautiul) sports photography o boxing matches. The camera’s capacity to distill incredibly imperceptible details in ast movements astounds the spectator, despite the reality o the movements always being present. This connects back to my discussion about lm as a revelatory medium at the time o its rst prolieration. Yet this ability to reveal reality beyond what the human eye can see is also requently used to dramatize an event – to bring orth all the “gory details,” the strange moments within an act that appear awkward, out o context, and doubly bizarre because it is real. These surreal moments become spectacles not only captured, but generated by the camera. For them to exist, one would have to assume the presence o a camera in the same setting. The image and the lens are in conux and conict with each other. Originally, my plan was to hire a proessional boxer to carry out the previously mentioned set o actions. My goal was to make a lm that rstly provides a constant stream o this said conrontation. The boxer regards the lens as not necessarily a receptor o substance, but a orce that projects outwards its target. The camera is not so much anthropomorphized as it is viewed as sitting on the same organic and ree-willed hierarchy as the boxer. Secondly, the punches’ physical impact against the lens calls attention to the object-ness o the camera, that it does not simply replace the eye o the spectator, but stands between the subject and the spectator as a physical lter.
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Ater some consideration, it becomes clear that my intimacy with the camera is a very salient point in the conception o the project, which results in my taking the role o the boxer. Working as a cinematographer, I perceive the camera as both the container o a physical reality and a weapon toward that reality. By hitting the lens repeatedly until I am exhausted to the ground, I wish to not only address my srcinal goals or the piece, but to illustrate my emotional relationship with and regard or the powerul mechanism.
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CONCLUSION
My relationship with lm srcinates rom aesthetic appreciation, especially in the area o cinematography. The re-contextualization o my work through the New Media genre is my eort to consciously re-examine the medium – and all the constructs around the camera – as a technology that engages in ideological and experiential exchange with various bodies o spectators. Through my epiphany in Pompeii, I am able to rationalize the correlation between the central elements that recur in all o my past work: cinematography, routine actions, moving through space, and architecture. Amidst current discussions about lm being a “dying medium,” I seek to heighten the awareness o its actual prevalence in cont emporary art. While lm as a physical substan ce is perhaps no longer the most desirable choice o ormat or reasons o economy and eciency, the connectedness between its orm and the theories ocused in New Media is as strong as it has always been with other emerging methods o creative expression. Form, as I have briey summarized in my theoretical writing, encompasses ideas such as the creation and reinstatement o a movement-image, to the compounding and collision between the lens and its subject, the screen and the spectator, and the spectator and the physical space generated in the decoding projection. The interactionrelationship that takes place prescribed by this ormalist study is o notthat so much an action-response that is sometimes archetypal o New Media and Digital Media, but an initially invisible ideological exchange that is eventually rendered physical and spatial. My view that the lens enables such interaction describes the impact and eect, as well as the engagement with other media it subsumes. This is the mode o cinema that I wish to investigate. This cinema resonates with the type o intellectual dialogue present in New Media, where the roles o receiver and the giver are constantly shiting and being reevaluated, where the denition o interaction is complex and dynamic, where the meaning o the image is equally important as, i not governed, by the technology that rames it. In the end, my relationship with this cinema exists on a personal level beyond int ellectua l articulation. I eel welded onto the mechanism and ingrained into the movement it captures. It is not an agent or escape, but a tool o dispersion and multiplication. It satises and perhaps greed, be physically touchs o with a ll at theRISD, layersmy o preexistingmy anddesire, abricated space and time.toDuring my twoinyear studies love or the structuralism and ormalism in the medium grew increasingly more prominent and demanding o direct address. This urged an elaboration, hence the emergence o Captured (the work as well as the title o this thesis). It is my hope to create a new body o work – extending rom where th is one takes o – where my love or the camera and my physical presence within the camera become the subject o close examination.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Writings Adorno, Theodor. Culture Industry (Routledge Classics) (Routledge Classics). Routledge, 2001. Aitken, Doug. Broken Screen: Expanding the Image, Breaking the Narrative. D.A.P./ Distributed Art P ublishers, Inc, 2005. Allen, Richard. Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression o Reality (Cambridge Studies in Film). Cambridge University Press, 1997. Antonioni, Michelangelo. “Il mondo e uori dalla nestra,” in Filmcritica 252, March 1975. Translated by Dana Renga. Antonioni, Michelangelo. In Communications, no. 4, 1964 (special issue: “Recherches semiologiques”). Bazin, Andre. “The Evolution o the Language o Cinema,” in What is Cinema? Vol. 1. University o Caliornia Press, 2004. Benjamin, Water. “The Work o Art in the Age o Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reections. Schocken, 1969. Birnbaum, Daniel. Doug Aitken (Contemporary Artists Series). Phaidon Press, 2001. Bordwell, David. Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging. University o Caliornia Press, 2005.
Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas o Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film . Verso, 2007. Burch, Noel. N.d. Correct ion Please – or How We Got into Pict ures. (Pamphlet accompanying lm o same name.). 1978 – 1979. “Porter, or Ambivalence.” Screen 19, no. 4: 19-105. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: Movement-Image , University o Mi nnesota Press, 1986. Kracauer, Siegried. Theory o Film . Princeton University Press, 1997. Leebvre, Henri. The Production o Space. Blackwell Publishing Limited, 1991. Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics o the Cinema. University O Chicago Press, 1990. Michelson, Annette. “Dr. Craze and Mr. Clair.” October, Vol. 11, Essays in Honor o Jay Leyda. (Winter, 1979). Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde , 1943-2000. Oxord University Press, USA, 2002. Taubin, Amy. “Double Visions” in Michael Snow Almost Cover to Cover. Black Dog, 2000. Truaut, Francois. The Films in My Lie . Da Capo Press, 1994. Virilio, Paul. L’horizon Negati: Essai De Dromoscopie (Debats). Editions Galilee, 1984. Zavattini, Cesare. “Some Ideas on the Cinema.” MacCann, Richard Dyer, ed. Montage o Theories, 216-228. New York, Dutton, 1966, 1966.
Film: A
“Il mondo e uori dalla nestra,” in Filmcritica 252 , March 1975. Translated by Dana Renga. “E nato a Londra ma non e un lm ingelese,” rom Corriere della Sera , 12 February 1982. Translated by Allison Cooper. R. Barthes. In Communications, no. 4 , 1964 (special issue: “Recherches semiologiques”). Pallasmaa, Juhani. “The Geometry o Terror”. Available rom http://www.saa./ark/ark4_97/hitchcoche1.html. 1997.
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Work Ahtila, Eija-Liisa. The Wind. 2006. Aitken, Doug and others. Blow Debris . 2000. Aitken, Doug and others. Diamond Sea . 1997. Aitken, Doug and others. Electric Earth . 1999. Aitken, Doug and others. I Am Into You. 2000. Aitken, Doug and others. Infections . 1992. Aitken, Doug and others. New Ocean . 2001. Antonioni, Michelangelo and others. 1961. La Notte. 1 DVD (122 min.) videorecording. Fox Lorber. Antonioni, Michelangelo and others. Blowup. 1966. 1 DVD (111 min.) videorecording. Warner Home Video. Antonioni, M ichelangelo and others. The Passenger . 1975. 1 DVD (126 min.) videorecording. Sony Pictures. Clair, René and others. Paris qui dort . 1925. 1 DVD (35 min.) videorecording. Home Vision Entertainment. Douglas, Stan. Win, Place or Show . 1998. Douglas, Stan. Suspiria. 2002-2003. Edison, Thomas and others.Panorama rom Times Building, New York. Grith, D.W. and others.Birth o a Nation. 1915. 1 DVD (187 min.) videorecording. Image Entertainment. Hitchcock, Alred and others. Rear Window. 1954. 1 DVD (115 min.) videorecording. Universal.
Hitchcock, Alred and others. Vertigo. 1958. 1 DVD (129 min.) videorecording. Universal. Lucas, George and others. Star Wars. 1977. 1 DVD (125 min.) videorecording. 20th Century Fox. Murnau, F.W. and others.Noseratu. 1922. 1 DVD (94 min.) videorecording. Kino Video. Murnau, F.W. and others. Sunrise . 1926. 1 DVD (95 min.) videorecording. Eureka. Murnau, F.W. and others. The Last Laugh . 1924. 1 DVD (90 min.) videorecording. Kino Video. Snow, Michael and others. Back and Forth . 1969. 16mm Film (52 min.) Snow, Michael and others. La région centrale . 1971. 16 mm Film (180 min.) Snow, Michael and others. Wavelength . 1967. 16mm Film (45 min.) Vertov, Dziga and others. The Man With A Movie Camera . 1929. 1 DVD (68 min.) videorecording. Image Entertainment. Weed, A.E. and others. Panorama o 4th St., St Joseph . Welles, Orson and others. Citizen Kane . 1941. 1 DVD (119 min.) videorecording. Warner Home Video. Welles, Orson and others. Touch o Evil. 1958. 1 DVD (111 min.) videorecording. Universal. Welsby, Chris and others. Windmill . 1973. 16 mm Film (8 min.) Wiene, Robert and others. The Cabinet o Doctor Caligri . 1920. 1 DVD (75 min.) videorecording. Ima ge Entertain ment.
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“We are the twenty-story tower high above the Soviet streets –
We are the camera – We – – We are are the the lm viewer We are the lens – We are the subject – We are the lights – We are the chemistry – We are the audience –
We watch ourselves – We reect ourselves – We ragment ourselves –
We are the camera – We cannot be stopped – We are here to stay!” 46
`
46 Fig 33.
- Doug Aitken on The Man With a Movie Camera
Aitken. P. 287 Dziga Vertov, The Man with a Movie Camera , 1929.