When we talk about ‘video’ and art and ‘film’ definitions abound, boundaries are blurred. So called video art used to be the province of gallery artists, specially creating video pieces with no narrative directions. Video art also coincided with the rise of VHS video technology in 1970’s and was more or less an ‘elite’ art form in comparison to film. So called film art covers a much wider spectrum in terms of its audience, from the consumerist nature of industry films to art house industry films to films outside the accepted art house films. Nevertheless these films share a different ‘feel’ from so called video art. In addition to the fact that film usually focuses on narrative, the difference in all probability also arose from the nature of the video medium itself.

Video has a different quality from film (even in these heady days of HD resolution), and this can definitely be seen from the VHS days. Apart from resolution there are of course different textures. Take a Super Eight image for example, which though it doesn’t have great resolution, is somehow is intrinsically different from video, digital video for example which definitely has more resolution. So much so that certain purists have elected to shoot on Super Eight as opposed to video. After all, it is - film.

To sidetrack for a moment, shooting even ten minutes of Super Eight is equivalent to the cost of maybe twenty hours of dv tape (including processing, buying the film and all the rest of the hassle associated with film), so who can complain that people shoot with dv more?

The question is, how important is it? Besides the purists hailing from brand name film schools who end up never making a feature all their lives because they’re hung up on shooting on film, (and more importantly one suspects because they don’t have anything to say) what we are interested in is, is the medium the message, as the great man used to ask?

Is the medium the message?

So is the medium the message? Let me postulate some reasons why video looks and feels different. Firstly, the nature of the electronic nature of video as opposed to the analogue nature of film. Electronic images inherently look different, feel different, say different things. Film is by nature richer, like a painting, while electronic mediums gives more immediacy somehow. Why does it seem so?

A number of reasons possibly, the first of which is the deinterlaced nature of video. While film frames are consistently and truly frames, in the sense that 24 frames do run through a projector per second in film projection, video is inherently made up of a series of electronic lines. So is reality is interlaced or in frames? Deinterlaced video appear to be somewhat hollow while frames appear to be more concrete, yet one can say that reality is in fact more digital than we may think. The electronic nature of video corresponds to the nature of time in its ephemeral quality and thus is better able to represent the passing of time. Film captures truly a moment in time in 24 fixed frames. It can be seen and touched. Electronic lines cannot, much as we cannot touch time. We can see it pass by us but we cannot touch it.

Secondly, the conditioning of our perceptions where video and film is concerned. We are used to seeing the video as news footage on television while film consistently dominates the realm of fantasy and so called art. Which is what made video art interesting because it transposes a so called realistic medium into the context of a art form.

Thirdly film allows film-makers to paint, to describe larger degrees of ambiguity into their images. The subtly of film stock is able to paint abstract or subjective worlds in the landscape of their compositions. Video, even digital video has only perhaps one quarter of effective film resolution and much lower latitude simply cannot do that.

Contradictorily however is the video image is ‘truer’ in a certain sense? The fake richness of many 35mm films we see in the cinema bears no resemblance to the world we live in today. The ability of film to replicate reality is questionable. When one watches video however one does feel that inherently that is the way reality is. Richness and lushness of color has become a fetish. Direct representation is much less desired. Film in and of itself does engender a degree of escapism as Walter Murch noted, hence the desirability of watching film inside a cinema, we can be alone with our fantasies. Escapism appears indeed in a visual manner here, the lushness and richness of the film frame allows us to escape from the mundane nature of ordinary life. Certain primary colors are soothing definitely, and seeing beauty on screen unfold give us a certain sense of comfort. Indeed it could be argued that escapism is inherently what guides cinema of the 21st century seeing disastrous state of the world. This applies to the film festival circuit similarly, one looks for beauty rather than truth. The heritage of the ‘exotic’ genre films pioneered by the Mainland Chinese directors Zhang and Chen among others, the exotic artiness of the Taiwanese like Cai further propagates this. But that is a different topic.

The above considerations allows us to understand that the forms are different and thus the art created would differ. Film affords film makers a stylistic way of painting a frame. Video due to it’s electronic nature is starker. Inherently to make a video frame beautiful takes a degree of effort and the result cannot be comparable to the film frame, that is, until the HD video age. And even then, HD is somehow lacks the something that even a Super Eight frame has. I’m no purist but I’d be the first to admit that. Just look at the colors, it’s just different. Yes, HD may be clearer than Super Eight but we’re talking about something else here.

As such even film makers on the fringe like Cassevettes and Brakage have always used film. The reason simply being the resolution of the video frame was simple not good enough and editing options limited, making a film on Video 8 formats or VHS, did not seem like an alternative.

Digital Video Films

The appearance of digital video, in main, the appearance of the three CCD cameras in late nineties and the non-linear editing systems changed the landscape somewhat. Video than appeared to be closing the gap on film in terms of its resolution. In terms of super 8 versus digital video, the latter clearly stands out, and even though dv is slightly below the richness of 16mm, it seemed to be enough to make film-makers opt to use dv as a medium of choice.

The continual improvement in technologies effectively ensured this. The movement in dv film making so to speak moved strongly towards making dv mimic the look of film. These took the steps of inputting gamma curves to improve the richness of colors, the process of deinterlacing as first introduced by Panasonic and then latter day post production deinterlacing processes, the used of anarmorphic adapters for the ‘true’ 16:9 look and later the use of mini-adapters to use 35mm still lenses on dv camcorders.

Most importantly many so called dv film-makers shot and composed their films just like they would a 35mm feature. This can be called this the 35mm fetish. Much of the dv films having great success in the world festival circuits including the so called dv movement or small cinema movement in Malaysia takes a strong cue from this.

Digital video film making also distinguished itself from ‘film’ film making in other ways. Mainly, the affordability of the venture. Economic freedom ensured that stories could be told and independence of monetary restraints freed up the artist. Film is not just a medium it is also an industry, it is a state of mind, it is an aesthetic attitude. What happens when one deinterlaces and adds gamma curves for example to an inherently video film? The result is a hybrid. In interviews for example one understands how these video-film-makers work - they have not freed themselves from the 35mm aesthetics. Many of these so called video film-makers are simply those who wish to retain the aesthetics and business of the old film-industry without taking into consideration the aesthetics of the new medium. Film festivals make this worse encouraging this particular approach, emphasizing how well a film is made according to this mode. The question of course arises, should one ignore film aesthetics in shooting digital video films? Perhaps not, video is video, film is film, so what happens to the frame of video that attempts to look like film? The interesting thing about the video frame after it has gone through the post production process is that it retains its essentially electronic nature, yet it takes on some qualities of film.

To test this, just take your standard video frame with some movement on it, and de-interlace it and drop a gamma curve or two on it and compare it with a non altered frame. The comparison should show you something, I call this something a hybrid between film and video.

But back to the politico-economics of film-making. As Scorsese always says and film makers like Antionini go through, ‘film’ film is always half or more about money. Marty was always afraid the studios hated his films and won’t let him make the films he wanted. Antionini was screwed after he was no longer a success and couldn’t make films for a long time. Conversely a person like Cassevettes simply made his own money and financed his own films. Of course he too needed the commercial success of a film like ‘A Woman Under the Influence’ to effectively continue what he was doing at one point. DV film making does circumvent the financial issue in a way.

More than that however the gap between what digital video film art looks like and what ‘film’ film looks like gives us the possibility of the creation of a new aesthetics, something apart from video art and film art in and of itself. When one understands the history of film, one understands too that it is a contest of human will against industry in many instances. Film is a unique art that stands totally apart from painting, or writing or sculpture. It is not the sixth art. Film is a child of the industrial age and as such is submitted to the economic imperatives that goes with it

Lack of an Identity

The remarkable characteristic about industrial technology is the interconnectedness of each and every component. A computer can only be made if the one hundred other industries that exist support it. One needs plastic factories, metal factories, raw material processing, hard disk factories and the list goes on and on. Non industrial technology on the other hand has no such requirement. One can simply write using a piece of charcoal on a stone wall. Or at most a paper mill and simple technologies. The upshot of this is that an industrial art form is industrial by nature and thus requires the huge capitalistic machine to support its existence, as well as a market to ensure it’s survival. In contrast something like writing does not. A poem exist in and of itself. Whether a poet desires to write more poetry does not, in fact should not, depend on whether he had an audience for his poetry. If this principle was not obeyed in the art we would not have the novels of Kafka, nor the paintings of Van Gogh. On the other hand in film we see this perennial struggle in reaching for the artistic ideals in directors such as Welles or Bresson contra the monetary muscle needed to mount their ideals into celluloid. Film is a very impure art form.

Surely than one would argue, without the state sponsorship Brecht’s vision of Epic could never really take off, or without commissions the Renaissance painters or Handel’s operas would never have been written. One would note that the Brecht collective’s (correctly one should say that the works of his mistresses including E.Hauptmann, R.Berlau, H.Weigel, M.Steffin) earlier works were staged without state sponsorship, and theatre does not necessarily involve huge economic outlays although as in the case of Brecht it did. Ibsen’s earlier works were mainly published in book forms, Beckett’s plays can be staged by a high school drama club. Operatic music aside, Mozart also wrote non commissioned works, and Beethoven was one of the first to work as a free lance musician to maintain the integrity of his works. Music can be written than listened to. Economics does not create art’s limitations, it may limit when and to whom it’s heard but the creation nevertheless is independent, a similar case can be made for painting.

Cannot one than do smaller films, so to speak? The problem with ‘smaller’ films is that they try to be ‘bigger’ films, dv pretending to be 35mm. And to succeed at the film festival circuit, this indeed is a very good strategy.

But why? Well, let’s look at the superstructure of dv film making, it too has it’s corresponding ‘industry’, only it’s more ideological than concrete. Corresponding to Antonio Gramsci’s ideological infrastructure as opposed to the traditional Marxist superstructure.

I’m here using Gramscian example because it is more appropriate, and the superstructure of art and culture anyway what he consider instrumental in blocking the logic of an inevitable movement to a classless society. In other words it is the ideas that block us, as much as the concrete existence of an opposing structure. Let us take the Singapore example.

Here, the hard superstructure of film making is represented by the funding bodies, the rental houses, and the distribution avenues. We will deal with one for the moment. The funding bodies or rather body comes in the form of the Singapore Film Commission. SFC’s criterial on funding feature films definitely favors productions that can ‘sell’ or productions that come from proven directors that do well in the film festival circuit industry. Most importantly it favors big budget productions and so called ‘professional’ production values. Raintree, the biggest production house in Singapore and offshoot of Mediacorp follows in very much the same vein, if not worse.

Independent production houses are plagued by a certain mode of film-making which though not as industrial an approach as the SFC and Raintree, is itself very limiting. This is largely due to the subconscious ideological landscape in film making in Singapore.

In independent film production one sees the bringing of these attitudes into film making, especial in such a material society as Singapore. Hardly one sees the attitude of a Pedro Almodova who said one should simply shoot as and when one can with whatever formats over weekends etc. Film shoots here whether on digital, film or HD takes on the fetish of high-consumerism. Huge crews are used, Hollywood style production values are espoused. Shoots are expected to last less than a month, made in an industrial production climate. Spielberg is the unspoken god of all these so called independent film makers here whatever they may say. Beautiful pictures and frames are the fetish of these film-makers.

Of those who do not have enough money to lavish on such productions, the key is doing films that would appeal to the festival circuit. Cannes is the God of all these festivals going by the drooling accolades accorded to those who ‘made it’ there.

Throughout all this the spontaneity of dv film making is seriously ignored, nothing but the best cameras, the best editing equipment, the highest sound quality is demanded. The French New Wave discarded the cinema of quality so many years ago only to have it come back with a vengeance, especially when film making has become so much cheaper, what an irony.

It is my contention that dv should be taken seriously as a medium, that we do not look for it to imitate the production value of film, that we rediscover the aesthetics of dv as it is. The so called Malaysian New Wave succeeds because it prescribes to this ‘quality’ film making, how innovative it is, because the circumvention of cost through dv equipment remains to be seen. In that sense only is there a real movement, not a self proclaimed, imitative 35mm fetish.

Part II and Part III of this essay will go further into the industrial and aesthetic super structure of dv film making.