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Circadian Cinema: A Working Model
by John Fucile
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. [1] 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 said 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. 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. [2]
Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg's Dogme 95 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. [3] Looking back and rooting ourselves in the traditions of motion pictures will provide the ground upon which we may plant our antennae.
Film was originally believed to be the end of photography, with a presumption of a public desire for all things moving. There were early attempts during the 1850s and 60s to make pictures move. People desired to see clouds float, rain fall, workers move, and tree leaves sway. Devices like the Vitascope, Vitagraph, Bioscope, Kinetoscope, Kinetograph, and Cinematograph attest to this reality and perhaps hinted at the public's desire for representations of life's movements and secrets (if not also lending support to the biologically based term "Circadian"). Film seemed perfectly equipped to deal with this desire and sprung forth from experimentation in photography.
Circadian Theory
Film and moving pictures have, since the days of Muybridge and the Lumière 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 hours and the technology will serve the story.
7. The Sustainable Circuit: The motion picture will exist in a digital format.
The Spontaneous
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, filmmakers 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 Molly Parker put it, "[With video,] there is none of the masking that films bring, none of the softness. Everything is there for you to see." [4]
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 point of view 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. [5]
The Coincidental
In the Circadian Cinema Model, continuity and script supervision is eliminated in favor of a narrative advisor. The duties include those that are familiar to the previous positions in that there is a process of recording "occurrences" such as gesture, placement or positioning. In filmic narratives, however, the technology forces a labour intensive day that requires someone to record the actions because often there are hours or days in-between shots and setups. The speed and simplicity of image capture with digital technologies makes these positions obsolete. The other difference between that of continuity and supervisor with that of narrative advisor is that the former is always working "from" something such as a script. Since Circadian Cinema occurs without scripts on set, the narrative advisor maintains a record of those actions organic to the camera reality. The promotion of that which is accidental differs from the improvised in that the improvised often leads to the accidental and rarely the reverse.
The Natural
Music and sound in all their forms are inherent in an oral or electronic culture and medium. Therefore all music and sound must come from the diegesis of the image. Where film sound relied almost exclusively on sound from reality proper and reality as defined by the narrative (diegesis), video finds itself in a unique historical position. Perhaps because of television, a spectator tends to define the sound associated with a video image as being more based in "reality proper" than the narrative or filmic construct. So when video is used in a traditionally narrative arena there are different possibilities, expectations, and ramifications for a filmmaker to exploit.
Sound permits us to absorb the visuals in ways that would not be possible were it not for the sound, but can also affect what is necessary visually. Although seemingly inconsistent or artificial, music in film also assumes that the picture aspires to a naturalness in which the image and sound share equal billing. However, it is more likely that music helps maintain emphasis on the image, especially when, for psychological reasons, vision becomes the dominant sense used to create the emotion within. We seem most immersed when the music or image throws into relief the other, and at this moment we may appreciate either for its powers alone.
The narrative or dramatic arena is traditionally built on the model of the theatrical or literary work; that is, the minds of those accustomed to verbal expression. Hearing is one of the senses utilized. The camera and our eyes scan the image with anticipation and with the hope of fulfilling our desires. Disregarding that the relation of the music to the image may imply priority, the important thing is that this inseparable relationship enliven the visuals to the point of evoking a more material representation of camera reality.
The Personal
Sources of inspiration for Circadian Cinema should be original and not filmic or literary. They may come from art, or philosophy, or poetry, or a postmodern mix. They may document or experiment in the tradition of the avant-garde artists who broke away from the commercialized cinema, not only because of what they perceived was the inferior quality of the adaptations, but out of the conviction that the story as the main element is alien to the medium. In fact, a story is often seen as the only prerequisite of appreciable box-office returns. [6] The technology of video has given us the ability to tell a story about many to many, but the language particular to video will emerge out of the personal telling of stories. Techniques and devices will arise without the distracting elements of artifice. Paul Ryan, an early video pioneer writes:
Whatever the electronic camera takes in passes through your eye to the brain. The term scanning is much more appropriate for video camera work than the term shooting, borrowed from the world of film. That implies selecting a target and pulling the trigger. Scanning implies searching for events in the alpha state. [7]
He goes on to explain one of the fundamental differences in recording between video and film:
Video perception is the absence of parallax. Normally with two eyes open we take advantage of parallax to gauge how far away from something we are: that is distance. Looking through a video camera with one eye, and closing the other, leaves you without the advantage of parallax. The triangulation of an object in space contributes to our normal tendency to identify and name objects and then jump to another object to name and classify. This process of naming, classifying, jumping, and judging is part of our common everyday awareness. A video camera enables one to push the envelope of perception into a way of seeing that is free of triangulation, naming and classifying. This is different in film technology where you are taught to measure exact distance prior to a shot for lens, f-stop and lighting concerns. Without the redundancy of two eyes providing triangular positioning in space, the one-eyed video mind seeks redundancy over time. Returning to the same patterns in different ways, at different times, creates redundancy over time. [8]
The filmmaker must stick to appearances to render intelligible incidentally, in an inevitably schematic manner, the interior, personal world.
The Sustainable Circuit
This is not the strength of big budget Hollywood movies. In fact, the bigger you are the slower and less often you change. Change is at the core of the Circadian Model and is necessary for its survival. The Sustainable Circuit is about smaller, more personal cinema in an electronically connected society, sharing the cultures of others via digital exchange. Shorter production time = smaller, personal, responsible motion pictures that challenge and experiment, not only with techniques of production but with focus on continuance, revenue and profit.
Conclusion
As Hollywood moves into producing movies that become rides, and sequels that occur temporally prior to the original, they have also discovered that personal reactions and opinions are irrelevant when it comes to predicting how the shares of a company that produced or distributed a film might be treated on the stock market. [9]
Entertainment industries produce things we experience, and that we emotionally carry away with us long after the lights have come up. Standard cookie-cutter accounting and forecasting methods don't seem to work very well when applied to this industry. Even a distributor's brand name doesn't matter anymore; with the possible exception of Disney, no one goes specifically to see a film because of who distributed it. [10]
Napster proved that old dogs could be taught new tricks even if they did file for Chapter 11 and even if those old dogs stole the trick and are making billions of dollars out of it.
Commercial television is being used as advertising propaganda for industrialization, but this is not inherent in the technology. The bias is not toward advertising but toward monitoring. What it allows us to do is to monitor events simultaneously with others. Modern culture as we know it is not sustainable. We deplete soil, exhaust fisheries, pollute air, foul waters, and warm the planet. There are ways to create cyber cultures where the circuitry of human-to-nature connections is rich enough to identify and eliminate these traditionally negative consequences. [11]
Circadian Cinema seeks to join in these goals. With the video revolution only just begun, the possibility of electronic, digital access to narrative motion pictures makes the chances of equal play, survival, and even profitability that much greater.
1. Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, The Oxford University Press, 1965, p. 60.
2. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1964. p. 49.
3. Kracauer, p. 3.
4. Hundley, Jessica. Director's Guide to Digital Video: Acting for DV.
5. Kracauer, p. 176. Quoting André Maurios.
6. Vogel, Harold, L., "Analyzing Movie Companies." in Squire, Jason, The Movie Business Book, Fireside, 1986, p. 161.
7. Ryan, Paul., Video Chi.
8. Ibid.
9. Vogel, p. 164.
10. Ibid., p. 163.
11. Ryan, Paul., Video Chi.
John Fucile is a filmmaker and co-founder of SmackDabMedia. His digital video short Beat the Blue received the Global Vision Award at the World Population Film & Video Festival. Fucile was a Departmental Fellow and Scholar in the Graduate Media Studies program at New School University in New York. There he developed the digital video narrative production model Circadian Cinema: The Art of Making Motion Pictures a Biological Activity.
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