the avant-garde today that we are left with the stultifying aura of “history” surrounding such movements as Dogme 95?
The gradual enmeshment in administrated networks of professors and theorists is especially noteworthy in the American college and university system, where vocational models of higher education have largely supplanted the older (perhaps mythical) models of the university as a utopian site of dissent and critique. If theory has been banished from today’s administrated, technocratic university (which in its student-as-customer incarnation tends to regard the hard edges of theory as impractical and alienating) it has found a new home in the very forms of popular culture it once tried to demystify, rendering divisions such as avant-garde and mainstream, or theoretical and naïve, practically meaningless. In short, the theorist-professor is disappearing because media today theorizes its own ideology in fairly explicit ways, in terms of both form and content. And nowhere is this more evident than in the contradictory uses to which DV filmmaking is being put.
Today, the process of theoretical deconstruction—at one time restricted to the halls of academe—has become our culture’s new lyricism. In Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige wrote of punk’s ordered anarchy: "The punk subculture…signified chaos at every level, but this was only possible because the style itself was so thoroughly ordered" (113). Today, it is in the very ordering, or administration, of newly deployed reality, signaled by shaky cameras and images that in their imperfection reveal their status as images, that we witness the final codification of deconstruction.
Ironically, the radically deconstructive narrative and aesthetic possibilities of DV—glimpsed in films ranging from the DV precursor Blair Witch Project to the Dogme 95 films to Time Code—are almost entirely absent in the films produced by one of the premier DV film production companies, Independent Digital Entertainment (InDigEnt), which is responsible for DV films including Tadpole, Pieces of April, Chelsea Walls, and Tape. InDigEnt describes its vision this way: "Inspired by Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration and the legacy of John Cassavetes, Gary Winick ‘realized that there exists a technology that could be used by this great independent film community here in New York to come up with some really wonderful stories’." And yet, there is very little in the InDigEnt films that approaches the controlled recklessness of Vinterberg’s The Celebration or any of the eruptive work of Cassavetes, save for some startling fast-panning shots in Tape. Instead, the InDiGent films suggest that DV is simply another way to shoot fairly traditional stories. This is perhaps one path that DV will take: a relatively seamless reproduction of the medium that it replaces, as opposed to a further deconstruction of that medium.
And yet if we look at another DV production company—the United States military—we see a rawer, more experimental aesthetics of DV filmmaking emerging, one that borrows in terms of its theory and its production tactics many of the signature characteristics of the Dogme 95 movement. How, well-meaning theorists might ask, has it come to pass that the most startling cinema of the year 2003 was the film of the captured Saddam Hussein in what looked like the prologue to a snuff film, recorded on a Sony PD 150, the camera of choice for the U.S. military in Iraq? Sergeant Wesley Wooden, a combat cameraman, has said that "Basically what we’re trained for is that the camera is our first weapon…We’re lucky enough to carry pistols. It gives you some more protection. You can shoot and shoot at the same time" (Heffernan, 2). That it is the U.S. military producing some of the most startling cinema verité, very much in the spirit of the Dogme 95 movement, reminds us of Paul Virilio, who has written famously that the gestures of surveillance, of vision, of speed have for a long time linked cinema and the military: "One could go on forever listing the technological weapons, the panoply of light-war, the aesthetic of the electronic battlefield" (88).
And what, if not an avant-garde film studio, is the Joint Combat Camera Program which is part of the Department of Defense’s Defense Visual Information (DVI) Directorate? For it is the tactics of guerilla filmmaking, the New Wave, the fast-and-go immediacy of post-punk film that is described in the section on the "Video Flyaway Kit": "All items are fitted into one case which is easily handled by one person. It provides a single videographer with the capability to acquire video imagery, edit and compress the imagery using the laptop, and transmit the video clip via INMARSAT. In addition the INMARSAT can also be used to transmit still imagery. This is an ideal system for use by a two man documentation team."
The preeminence of the military as a movie production company using guerilla filmmaking tactics is understandable given the gradual incorporation of theory and irony into the major channels of cultural distribution in the 1980s and 90s. The self-aware, ironic comments by Sgt. Wooden, who recognizes that the language of warfare and the language of perception are bound together, is made possible because theory—once the province of cultural theorists and the professorial elite—has been extensively mainstreamed into popular culture over the past twenty years.
And the incorporation of theory into popular culture is archived in not only the contents but the format or medium of the DVD, where films are permanently demystified, stripped of their aura in ways described by Walter Benjamin in his 1935 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Indeed, the self-theorizing dimension of the films is there for all to see because they are permanently archived, easily available, and garner publicity in multiple cultural arenas ranging from amazon.com to blogs. The recently released titles in the Director’s Label, DVDs by Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, and Michael Cunningham, are excellent examples, and illustrate the extent to which popular culture has absorbed the logic of theory in ways that demonstrate the obsolescence of the professional theorist/critic and the emergence of a powerful new cultural form that exists at the far edges of what used to be called film or video.
Michel Gondry’s video "Lucas with the Lid Off" (1994; available on The Director’s Label collection) is an interesting example of a pop video whose self-theorizing elements are radically foregrounded. Shot in one continuous take, the video is a series of over twenty shots, each one anticipated by a numbered frame that awaits the camera’s arrival. In effect, we see how each tableau (more often than not featuring the singer Lucas) has in fact been pre-staged for us. In addition to the frame of our television sets, we are made aware of the frame of the camera itself, as it positions itself for each shot in a literal frame that anticipates the camera’s arrival. The story the video tells is essentially the story of its production, although without resorting to the usual methods of revealing the camera. One is tempted to call this video—and indeed most of Michel Gondry’s videos—avant-garde, although in film studies this term is usually reserved for artists whose work is considered to be largely outside the mainstream. And yet many of Gondry’s films and videos are as experimental as the work of Maya Deren, Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, and others canonized in the avant-garde pantheon.
By the 1990s, irony in American culture—previously associated with the avant-garde, most notably in the Pop Art movement of the 1960s—had become incorporated into mainstream practices, a process expertly documented by David Foster Wallace in his 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," which explores the nexus between ironic modes in postmodern fiction and popular culture of the 1980s, such as Isuzu car commercials and Late Night with David Letterman. Letterman’s relentless breaking of the codes of technical invisibility (the 360 degree rotating camera, cameras attached to a monkey’s head in the "Monkey Cam" episodes, etc.) were as experimental as any serious avant-garde films being made at the time. Television shows like Talk Soup (1991-present) further mainstreamed irony as a prime-time formula, and by the mid 1990s, with Scream’s (1996), relentless self-awareness and self-commentary, we witness a simultaneous outcropping of theory in disparate places, including highly commercial films, music videos, academic books and essays, and avant-garde, experimental films and websites.
Indeed, in Scream’s famous moment where the film Halloween is paused so that one of the beer-toting teens can explain to his friends (a la a film professor) the underlying codes of slasher films, he offers an explication of the "rules" of slasher filmmaking that echoes not only deconstructive film theory but also the "rules" in the Dogme 95 "Vow of Chastity." If Scream signaled the mainstreaming of film theory in ways that helped to resuscitate a moribund genre (the slasher film), and if the Dogme 95 movement shared this same logic of self-theorizing in the guise of provocation and aesthetics, then we could say that Carol Clover’s book Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1992), which similarly deconstructed cinematic rules in academic discourse, represented the last moment that a certain kind of film theory was possible. This deconstructionist approach to film—one that had enjoyed the status of authority for decades in American universities—was stripped away the moment commercial films began validating, and thus rendering obsolete, rarefied academic film theory. As we shall see, the demise of film theory as a potent unmasking force was cemented with the popularization of media whose very form theorized itself.
What does it mean today to say that many forms of new media are embedded within the very structures of critique and theory that is supposedly the province of the theorist? Certainly, the tendency to look to artifacts themselves—rather than to professional academics—for theory is nothing new. In her 1969 essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies," Pauline Kael sided with the potentially subversive qualities of film as opposed to the official academic culture which taught students how to read such films: "It’s appalling to read solemn academic studies of Hitchcock or von Sternberg by people who seem to have lost sight of the primary reason for seeing films like ‘Notorious’ or ‘Morocco’—which is that they were not intended solemnly, that they were playful and inventive and faintly (often deliberately) absurd" (113). And auteurs of the past, such as Eisenstein and Godard, also theorized about film in terms of ideology and aesthetics in ways that would be familiar to us now as academic. So the notion that groups other than professional theorists are capable of offering critiques and theories that explore the deeper ideological dimensions of film is nothing new.
However, as Robert Ray has suggested, the institutionalization of film studies as an academic discipline in the 1960s contributed not only to a productive and alert interdisciplinary model but also to a kind of stagnation as various theoretical approaches—the Frankfurt School, semiotics, cultural studies—became codified, regularized, reproducible, and defanged. Whereas many of the previous theorists—Eisenstein, Godard, Mekas, Deren, Kael, Bazin—were either filmmakers themselves or else wrote independently of academic institutions, by the 1960s and 70s in the United States, film theory became almost exclusively associated with academia. Theory became a practice, inevitable fragmenting into schools, slowly removing itself from the objects of its critique, and largely assuming that films—especially Hollywood films—were essentially naïve and untheorized at a conscious level. Film theory, it was assumed, was the tool by which to crack open the hard kernel of ideology masquerading as film.
Of course this was not the case, but because of the impermanence and unarchived nature of film, who could dispute such a claim? Until the advent of the VCR as a household commodity in the 1980s, it was difficult for average film viewers to capture a film long enough to study it. Rather than widely accessible film archives, we had widely accessible archives of theory given the weight of permanence in books and journals. Today, however, theory is confronted with the object of its critique, as more and more films, previously available only in museums or film festival circuits, make their way to the affordable DVD home viewing format, thus challenging decades of theory that depended for its authority on the obscurity and impermanence of the films it was critiquing.
The proliferation of theory not only in terms of narrative content (i.e., The Matrix, Scream) but also in terms of self-revealing formats (i.e., DVDs with their attendant behind-the-scenes, deconstructive content) suggests that DV has the potential to archive the breakdown of the real even as it captures it. A film like 28 Days Later is significant because its attempt to capture realistically a hypothetical future only highlights the artifice of the medium. Ironically, the realism of the Dogme 95 and Dogme-like films—notably The Celebration, The Blair Witch Project, and the Saddam Hussein tape—rests precisely in their momentary anti-realism. Although many of the films deploy shaky, hand-held cameras and self-conscious lighting as shorthand for realism, this only serves to reinforce the fact of the camera behind the image. The closer DV takes us to the Real, the more we recognize it as illusion. Keith Griffiths notes that "[w]hat gave cinema part of its value—a confident, assured and unchallenged recording of reality, and one that was extremely difficult to modify and manipulate—has now been fundamentally changed by the new digital technology" (2).
Alas, are we to be tempted into nostalgia for the digital so soon after its appearance? Do we already yearn for the "good old days" of early DV and the noisy proclamations of Dogme 95 movement, or are those aesthetics yet to be found in the productions of the U.S. military? Does the cycle of incorporation and commodification come so quickly on the heels of the avant-garde today that we are left with the stultifying aura of "history" surrounding such movements as Dogme 95? In perhaps the ultimate cruelty, our ironic sense of theory and our hunger for deconstruction robs us even of the sedate pleasures of nostalgia, which, someone will no doubt remind us, is just another myth.