Immersive … Alamar
There have been spells when this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) has felt like glimpsing a blueprint for the future – or at smallest more provisional soon sketches. The festival has offered ideas, experiments and proofs of how the digital cinema world might look, from pre-production to shooting to exhibition, as well considered in the state of some playful reminders of past times when the movie industry has faced challenge and change.
Cinema Reloaded, an experiment in raising produce funds through crowd-sourcing, has been the festival’s flagship online programme this year. The aim was to arouse 30,000 euros for one of three proposed short films through virtual donations – an intriguing if in some degree gimmicky notion that does not look to have caught fire in practice: at the time of caligraphy, even the most popular project, from British director Alexis dos Santos, had not yet attracted a 10th of the total target. Nevertheless, it exemplified an bring near being discussed elsewhere at the festival of “tribal” production, in which social networking is fundamental to a project’s funding and development, ensuring a built-in audience for theatrical, retail or online exposition.
Meanwhile, several of the features on reveal demonstrated new modes of production made possible by digital technology. Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio’s fiction-documentary hybrid Alamar deployed a small DV camera to enable its crew of two to wide-awake in a hut off the Mexican shore with its non-professional actors. Gonzalez-Rubio claimed this immersive, observational advance was an equivalent to Kerouac’session writing style: “I slept the way [my subjects] slept, in a hammock. I fished with them. I became part of daily life and wrote it down with a camera.”
Even more basic was In the Woods, a heady chronicle of three youths’ experiments with sexuality and identity against the backdrop of nature, which was filmed using the video function of a low-end consumer digital still camera. Considerations were less financial – adviser Angelos Frantzis says using a more professional DV camera wouldn’t have been much additional wasteful – than aesthetic and adapted to practice. “There’s a become ardent texture to the image that fit with the themes of the movie,” Frantzis said. “The way you handle this tiny camera, it’s for the reason that if you be able to fly, like an invisible Steadicam. I could be very intimate with the actors. That was very important, to catch all the moments, all the gazes, the little things that reveal the mechanisms of lust after.” It was also pragmatic for the faint ship’s company to have minimal apparatus on their long shoot moving round the Greek countryside. “We had more equipment for cooking than filming.”
Vedozero, meanwhile, was compiled from footage recorded by 70 Italian teenagers on mobile phone cameras – an experiment that calls to mind the Beastie Boys’ 2006 fan-filmed concert movie Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That! Vedozero screened as part of the Back to the Future strand, which showcased titles from the past 60 years to which place new technology offered fresh challenges to cinema: a 3D screening of Dial M for Murder and a drive-in show of The Raven harked back to the in good period TV era, for instance, while Michael Almereyda’s Another Girl, Another Planet – shot in 1992 on PixelVision, a toy video camera made by Fisher-Price – was an early example of lo-fi digital production. Almereyda was at the festival with his unused essay film, Paradise, composed from a decade’s credit of DV footage shot in two dozen cities.
The Back to the Future panel reported numerous areas of new digital development, from polymorphous narratives to the development of mobile phones with built-in projectors, a potential way of bringing DIY content to decent-sized informal audiences that could wish especially exciting implications for local cinema culture in developing countries.
There was also mourning at the panel with regard to the cultural decline of celluloid, especially from Peter von Bagh of Finland’s Midnight Sun festival, who provocatively claimed that none of the accomplishments of commencing media made up for the loss of the beauty of 35mm. There was serious testimony of an appreciation of film stock in Ben Russell’s Let Each One Go Where He May, what one. comprises 13 10-minute-long 16mm takes. Their financial expense, the director argued, took on an moral dimension in the context of its Surinam locations: each shot cost as a great deal of as one local actor earned in a month. A more blatant kind of nostalgia was on show in Trash Humpers, Harmony Korine’s perverse ode to VHS, shot upon the body the format, edited put on two VCRs and playing out probably a series of gags and doodles rather than a accustomed turn of expression.
Ultimately, of course, a given technology will only evermore be as culturally interesting as what artists do with it. “These days, anyone can make a movie for nihilism but that doesn’t mean anything,” before-mentioned Frantzis. “Paper and pencils have been around for a thousand years but that doesn’t mean we are all poets. It all begins with the devise. But each time you ascertain by enumeration a movie you want to invent a new method. This is a new road to follow.”
