Circadian Cinema: A Working Model
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| Robert Lincourt as Stuart and Krista Worth as Karen in SmackDabMedia's "Zero" |
This is the home of Improvisation. It does not limit the use of a script or screenplay proper. Rather it is meant to create an area of action where the whole of the intended narrative can be explored. In their 1999 film The Blair Witch Project, filmmaker's Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick let the lead character Sarah wander off into the night and record her own, "last will and testament', which was freely improvised and known only to her. This moment would later become one of the more memorable scenes in the film. Indeed Lars Von Trier's The Idiots not only follows around a spasmodic group as they move about and improvise, but utilized improvisation in the recreation of the Improvised.
The Human Mirror
If the qualities and functions the stage actor and the film actor possess differ based on the requirements of the particular medium, it stands to reason that the same would hold true for those actors brave enough to partake in the video arena. A theatrical actor, because of the physical distance and scope over which they must communicate their character, is limited in the ability to imply subtle nuance or minutia. What is actually "delivered" is only that which is possible and necessary given these conditions. In the motion picture, gesture, costume, voice, staging, and mannerisms are captured in all their pain and glory by the camera and projected mercilessly larger than life. They are representations of life as close as we are currently capable of showing, and because they exist essentially in the realm of camera-reality, they occupy a foundational role in digital narrative. From the early actualities and their images of factory workers, train passengers, and babies, the history of cinema is one of drawing from the streets. Portraying what is happening historically, socially or culturally calls for the human portrayal of reality. Digital Video has the potential to bring to an end the traditional star system and schools of acting that claim to "recreate reality" and that have dominated American popular culture for the last one hundred years. The Blair Witch Project, without a single A-list actor, grossed more than $350 million worldwide in 1999-2000. The professional actor becomes, on video, the unit through which reality, for a time, is measured. Disposable and recyclable, however terrified, they are free to work as such, without the burden of superfluous interference. The actor on video finally becomes the light of the bulb -- pure by nature, or as actress Parker Posey put it [with video], there is none of the masking that films bring, none of the softness. Everything is there for you to see.
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The Fixed Outside
The Fixed Outside is the discipline of cinematography as it relates to video. Video needs its own language. Just as Eisenstein named "the shot" and "the sequence" as the building blocks of film in 1929, so too must the video aesthetic grow. In Circadian Cinema the shot is replaced by the moment, so heavily tied to the Coincidental and The Spontaneous. The history of video is different from that of film. It is primarily based in television and video art. Remember the first video camera is less than thirty years old. Riding sidecar to video, like a belated Siamese big brother, is cinema's history and baggage. While Hollywood spent its time trying to hide the camera with the smoothness and invisibility of the movements (what Deleuze calls the sensory-motor skills of the "movement-image"), video is unable and/or unwilling to shake its essence as a technology-based medium whose fluid capabilities force the audience to assume a position unique from that of an observer of filmic content. We assume our relation to the image. We assume the fixed outside because the technology is a shared one. Television and video are familiar to us in ways that film is not.
The cinema is ambiguous and it is based on the shot -- which tends to isolate itself and attract an attention of the inquiring variety -- as well as on the sequence, which creates a definite unity of meaning between the shots and arouses in the spectator an intense desire for continuation. From the spectator's POV one might call this the law of double interest; he usually finds the film too long and the shots too short because he has, spontaneously, the two contrary tendencies to retain the shot in order to exhaust its riches and to relinquish it as soon as he has decoded it sufficiently to satisfy his curiosity and his taste for drama.
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