Circadian Cinema: A Working Model
Author John Fucile's exploration and research in the Circadian Cinema model explored below has inspired two short digital films which he produced, directed, and co-wrote with Simon Fraser entitled "Beat the Blue", which to date has been screened at festivals in New York, Oregon, Colorado, Massachusetts, Florida and California; and his most recent digital short, the wide-screen motion picture "Zero".This project, which is an attempt to analyze what distinguishes Digital Filmmaking from Hollywood, was ignited by what Siegfried Kracauer called film's inherent affinities: The Unstaged, The Fortuitous, Endlessness, The Indeterminate, and The Flow of Life. This study proposes a new theoretical and technology-based production approach that explores digital video's unique aesthetic potential and its inherent narrative affinities.
Marshall McLuhan called film and media extensions and amplifications of our own beings, and that crossing or hybridizing these media can release great new forces. The coming together of film, video and digital moving pictures opens up a host of questions and issues. First of all, what are the similarities and differences between the video/digital image and the traditional analog, mechanical, photographic film formats? What are the implications of the differences in the mind of the viewer? What are the possibilities for a new production model given the seemingly certain transition to digital cinema? What should remain of the traditional, and what will be lost in the transition? As McLuhan put it, a time like this offers an especially favorable opportunity to take heed of the structural properties of these varying media.
Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg's Dogme95 called for a doing away with tradition and a search for the new on a personal level. The Circadian Cinema Model for digital narrative production can potentially signal a paradigm shift toward a renewed understanding, and become a fresh production model for the next wave of Narrative Cinema. This decidedly grandiose and comprehensive approach is viable only under the assumption that each medium has a specific nature, which invites certain kinds of communications. Looking back and rooting ourselves in the traditions of motion pictures will provide the ground upon which we may plant our antennae.
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| Jessa LaForce as Outis Salon in SmackDabMedia's "Zero" |
Circadian Theory
Film and moving pictures have, since the days of Muybridge and the Lumiére Brothers' traveling picture shows, enveloped the audience in a fantasy world most art could only aspire to. Audiences become engaged psychologically before any intellectual stimulation occurs. The motion picture allows us the opportunity to record physical reality not normally seen or available to us, meaning that there is an increased demand on our senses. What does this imply for the cinematic narrative? The spectator, like a reader of novels, can be defined in terms of a similar activity: a quest for intentions rather than shapes, an intense desire for drama, not gestures. Whether the film amounts to a drama, a detective story, a myth, an everyday incident, or a tract, the result is invariably the same.
We have a good historical understanding of how film developed aesthetically and technically, but there needs to be a similar concerted effort towards video's evolution. In comparison to film, video has the potential to tell different stories as well as tell stories differently. The guidelines for a "Circadian" production model will now be surveyed and dissected under the following headings: The Spontaneous, The Human Mirror, The Fixed Outside, The Coincidental, The Natural, The Personal, and The Sustainable.
Circadian Cinema: Some Rules of the Game Explored
1. The Spontaneous: Locations of Action will be free of written texts or scripts.
2. The Human Mirror: Actors will be used to convey the Narrative.
3. The Fixed Outside: There will be no Video Monitors or Television Assist units used.
4. The Coincidental: All actions temporally occurring within the Narrative will be explored and honored as part of the Present and Master Narrative.
5. The Natural: There will be Music and Sound and the Image will be Moving.
6. The Personal: No shooting day will exceed eight (8) hours and the Technology will serve the Story.
7. The Sustainable Circuit: The Motion Picture will exist in a Digital Format.
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