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‘Enter the Memory’: interactivity, authorship, and the empowered spectator in the digital audio-visual essays of Chris Marker
No full textThis article theorizes the cinematic essay as a fluid, self-reflexive form which addresses the spectator directly in order to engage them in an intellectual process of dialogical exchange. Because it encourages the active involvement of the viewer in the determination of essayistic meaning, the cinematic essay challenges traditional models of authorship. As opposed to relaying information to a passive viewer from a position of authority and omniscience, the cinematic essayist offers tentative thoughts and ruminations which the spectator is called upon to critically interrogate and treat as the foundation for their own essayistic reflections. This article focuses on two of Chris Marker’s late period works to examine the relationship between dialogical exchange, interactive spectatorship, and the capabilities of the digital database: Immemory (1997) and Ouvroir (2012). In these works, Marker carries over his career-long impulse towards dialogism to the realm of the digitized database, composing intricate, intermedial constellations of archival materials which the viewer may peruse in whatever order they please. This article offers two substantial contributions to existing scholarship: firstly, it demonstrates the impact of digital technology on the nature of spectatorial engagement in essayistic audio-visual texts; secondly, it explores the role that technological innovation played in facilitating communicative exchange between filmmaker and spectator across Marker’s body of work. Applying close textual analysis to two of Marker’s late projects illustrates that Marker embraced new media in a particularly enthusiastic and exploratory fashion in the latter part of his career because the technology offered his new ways to break down the barrier between artist and viewer, create intellectually active viewing situations, and treat the spectator as an empowered co-creator of artistic meaning.<br/
In the shadow of women: frustrated gazes and thwarted desire in José Luis Guerín’s In the City of Sylvia
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The age of visible machines is over: navigating the simulated image, epistemological uncertainty, and the waning of the index in the late digital works of Harun Farocki
No full textIn this paper, I explore how the Harun Farocki’s late cinematic essays engage with a variety of computer-synthesised images to critically interrogate cultural anxieties regarding the waning of the index and the ostensible ‘loss’ of the real in the era of digital filmmaking. Applying close textual analysis to the projects Serious Games (2009-2010) and Parallel I-IV (2012-2014), I demonstrate that Farocki’s sustained engagement with ex nihilo images extends the filmmaker’s career-long interest in deconstructing the technical, ideological and economic aspects of ‘operational’ imagery to the specific context of advanced digital animation. In these cinematic essays, I argue, Farocki repurposes a range of digitally simulated images extracted from different sources, including footage extracted from popular video games, 3D architectural models, and military training programs, to investigate both the aesthetic qualities of computer animation and the role they play in wider social and institutional processes.Before I examine Farocki’s late work in depth, I first address the scholarly discourse surrounding the development of digital filmmaking, which treats the split between analogue and new media in terms of a straightforward conflict between the inherent trustworthiness of the former and the unreliability of the latter. According to such a viewpoint, the fact that analogue media is based on pro-filmic light values being physically imprinted onto a photochemical surface creates an immediate isomorphic link between the referent and its cinematic record, which means that analogue footage can be relied on to function as a ‘trace’ of the real.Having established this as background, I then examine the essayistic strategies mobilized by Farocki in his late digital works to challenge the ‘truth status’ of cinematic images and encourage the viewer to think carefully about the process of production which created the image and the social context in which it was circulated. Applying close textual analysis of the projects Serious Games and Parallel I-IV, I illustrate that Farocki’s late cinematic essays offer a sophisticated examination of the nature of realism, materiality and epistemological uncertainty in the digital era. It is my contention that, instead of communicating a single, objective ‘truth’ to the viewer, Farocki’s cinematic essays reflexively call into question the truth status of the images they place under scrutiny, therefore pointing to the ways in which images may be manipulated, falsified and inflected with bias. Farocki, therefore, mobilizes essayistic strategies to realize the epistemological potential of synthesized images which hold no direct indexical connection to pro-filmic events by subjecting them to a rigorous process of critical reframing. In exploring the function, formal design, and technological constitution of contemporary simulated images, Farocki expands and reconfigures classical notions of ‘truth value’ in nonfiction cinema based on the values on transparency, objectivity and photographic indexicality
I reach out my hand and what do I feel?: thematising digitization in Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis
No full textOrigins of the 21st century: the impact of digital technology on the construction of the cinematic essay
No full textThis paper explores the impact of technology on the practice and theorization of the cinematic essay, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which digital tools have shaped the form in the early twenty-first century. I first argue that the cinematic essay has been associated with technological evolution throughout its history, and then discuss recent examples of the form which utilize aesthetic strategies, editing techniques, and modes of spectatorial address that are rooted in the capabilities of digital technologies. I conceptualize the cinematic essay as a self-reflexive mode of nonfiction cinema that foregrounds the filmmaking apparatus and the act of its own making. In doing so, the cinematic essay launches an inquiry into the ontological nature of the cinematic image, the tools which construct it, and the wider artistic landscape in which it is embedded. To illustrate how digitization has opened new opportunities for essayistic expression, this paper draws parallels between the current use of digital moviemaking tools and earlier periods in which new technologies were utilized to reimagine essayistic craft
Origins of the 21st Century: Theorising the cinematic essay in the digital age.
No full textThis thesis explores the effect of technological innovation on the construction of the cinematic essay, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which digital tools have shaped the form in the early twenty-first century. I first argue that the cinematic essay has been associated with technological evolution throughout its history, and then discuss recent examples of the form which utilize aesthetic strategies, editing techniques, and modes of spectatorial address that are rooted in the capabilities of digital technologies. Drawing on theories of the essay as a literary mode by Michel De Montaigne, Theodor Adorno and György Lukács, and connecting them to a range of theoretical work on intellectual montage and reflexivity in cinema, I outline an understanding of the cinematic essay as an innovative, self-reflexive form of filmmaking which foregrounds the act of its own making. My aim is to highlight that essay filmmakers have consistently implemented new filmmaking technologies into their craft to explore their potential for opening new opportunities for essayistic expression, while simultaneously reflecting on the ways in which the development and proliferation of these new technologies have transformed the wider landscape of cinema. I take as my primary case studies three essay filmmakers who have embraced technological innovation throughout their careers, and produced a variety of work using film, video and digital: Harun Farocki, Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard. Focusing on their late works, I illustrate how each filmmaker’s interaction with digital technology influenced their approach to crafting essayistic discourse and how their experimentation with digital image-making tools critically tackles wider intellectual concerns related to the digitisation of visual culture in the early 21st century. Subjects dealt with throughout this thesis include interactivity, simulated imagery, the democratisation of filmmaking resources, dialogical exchange, intertextuality, and digital archiving methods
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