The Cinematic Experience.Pdf
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Edited by Boris Debackere & Arie Altena THE CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE SONIC ACTS XII Edited by Boris Debackere & Arie Altena Sonic Acts Press 2008 | CONTENTS Introduction 11 A Few Thoughts on Cinematic Experience 107 Boris Debackere Duration, Structural Film and the Comforts of the Cinema Greg Kurcewicz The Mechanization of the Magical Sign 17 Joost Rekveld On the Internet I Do Not Need Somebody Else to Decide 115 if My Story is Worth Telling Heightening Experience 35 Interview with Tom Rawlings and Ana Kronschnabl Interview with Kurt Hentschläger Jan Hiddink Arie Altena New Eyes for the Mind 11 The Immersive Experience: Aspects and Challenges 43 Randy Jones Rob Vanderbeeken We Have Only Just Started 135 Drones Are a Defeat of Time and Space 57 Interview with Lev Manovich Interview with Stephen O’Malley Jan Hiddink Arie Altena The Danger Is that You Become too Illustrative 141 Notes on Cinema and Prosthetic Memory 63 Interview with Frank Bretschneider Thomas Zummer Arie Altena 612.43WEISS is Almost Cinema, 75 Live Audiovisual Performance as a Cinematic Practice 147 It Stops Just Before It Really Becomes Cinema Jan Schacher Interview with Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag Arie Altena The Projector Is My Favorite Sonic Object 159 Interview with Thomas Köner The Location of the Cinematic Experience 83 Arie Altena Lucrezia Cippitelli Activating the Visual Cortex 165 Experience is Being Thrown into Uncharted Territory, 91 Interview with Jürgen Reble Then You Discover Things Arie Altena Interview with Ernie Gehr Martijn van Boven / Arie Altena What’s Real About Film 11 Arjen Mulder Maybe Cinematic Experiences on the Web 101 Can Touch People as Much as Cinema Looking or Chattering 181 Interview with Simon Ruschmeyer Gerard Holthuis Jan Hiddink | INTRODUCTION BORIS DEBACKERE Cinema has stimulated our imagination for more than a century. Numerous successive media strive towards achieving a resembling experience in their audi- ences: a cinematic impact. Nowadays cinema is everywhere, especially outside the confines of the movie theatre: it exists in all manner of altered forms and has become moreover an essential aspect of contemporary art. The interest that artists have in cinema is nothing new: it can be traced back to the early twenti- eth-century avant-gardes whoexplored the possibilities of film and initiated the continuing interaction between art and cinema. What is this particular experience we describe as ‘cinematic’ that attracts us to the movie theater? In his book from 116, The Photoplay A Psychological Study, Hugo Münsterberg states: “Everybody knows from his own experience that there is a sharp and specific analogy between the film forms and the men- tal mechanism by which consciousness functions on all its levels.” In order to emerge, the cinema illusion asks for imagination. Film functions as a trigger for the mental processes that generate the true inner illusion. Film fused the magical way of creating movement introduced by the optical illusion toys with the qualities of photography to capture and represent reality. This merger shifted the attention of watching movement depicted to an expres- sive way of creating illusions by framing the world, structuring time and linking one experience to the next with sensations of images and sounds in space and INTRODUCTION 10 | 13 BORIS DEBACKERE 13 | 13 time. Only later did the world in front of the camera became a constructed one, based on adopted elements of narration, stage play and music from theater, opera and vaudeville. A fabricated mise en scène to appeal the human imagination chi- merically: unreal, imaginary and visionary. The steady technological evolution over the years updated cinema continu- art, and from contemporary artistic practice. They might not provide clear-cut ously and consequently revised our cinematic experience. Film is now colour, answers to all the questions, or provide an exhaustive overview of all the as- digital effects, surround sound and most likely American. The present accelerated pects of the contemporary ‘cinematic experience’; instead, they show the work progress of information technologies are inevitably defining new directions of practice, ideas and concerns of some contemporary artists and theorists who are how moving images will be experienced in the future, going beyond the viewing attempting to construct cinematic experiences and reflect on the effect of cinema. constellation of today and changing the relation between the creator and The Dutch experimental filmmaker Joost Rekveld theorises about film as a magi- his tools. cal sign; Thomas Zummer analyses the function of memory; Lucrezia Cippitelli Classical narrative cinema has explored the medium of film and created and Greg Kurcewicz give their thoughts on the history of the avant-garde, Struc- conventions to teach the audience how to deal with complex spatial and tempo- tural Film and its legacy in contemporary art; Randy Jones and Jan Schacher ral relations. Cinema became a transparent medium in favour of creating a truly – who both are active in generative Live Cinema – provide a clear outline for believable, immersive world. If cinema aspires to a state of absorption, what a theory of Live Cinema; Rob Vanderbeeken discusses the theme of immersion; makes it a crucial phase in the desire for a further reaching, increasingly convinc- finally, the Dutch writer and media theorist Arjen Mulder discusses the reality- ing immersive experience through the convergence of cinema, television and net- effect of film, and filmmaker Gerard Holthuis gives his view on the power of worked computers? What are the specific characteristics of this experience and images. are they still valid for new media like computer games and online 3-D multi-user The interviews were conducted in the second half of 200. Most focus on platforms? the artistic practice of the interviewees, often even concentrating on one specific In the evolution of mainstream film there is a traceable emancipation of work. The interviews with Frank Bretschneider, Stephen O’Malley and Thomas effects, in its most striking form the ‘special effect’: techniques that attempt to Köner deal mostly with the use of sound, American filmmaker Ernie Gehr ex- amplify the audiovisual experience of an unnatural event. Some film genres even plains how some of his works were conceived, Jürgen Reble talks about his way subordinate the credibility and continuity of the story in favour of effects. What of working with celluloid, and Jan-Peter Sonntag relates the creation process if the ‘core business’ of this ‘cinema of attractions’ is rather the composition of of his work 612.43WEISS and how it relates to cinema. Finally, the interviews effects where the story only functions as an intermezzo in between the different with Lev Manovich, Simon Ruschmeyer and Tom Rawlings & Ana Kronschnabl action sequences? Maybe film no longer remains a transparent medium but finds reflect on web-specific cinema. its immersion in exposing pure audiovisual impulses. Do these composed ele- The essays and interviews collected here zoom in on details of artworks and ments of sound and image in the current digital context have their own ‘natural’ the contemporary practice of live cinema and ‘cinematic experiences’, as they laws that can give rise to similar immersive qualities like an overwhelming block- zoom out to reflect on broader aspects of contemporary culture, science buster movie? and technology. Let this book be only a start. Digital media do not represent, they generate. They are software rather than hardware and unlike any other medium we have ever known, ephemeral: trans- forming and growing systems in itself. The modular qualities of software enable emergent processes, feedback loops and (re-)generating processes to unfold and flow into a variety of applications where they become dynamic elements. The virtual tool becomes a (re-)active actor in the creative process of producing film. Working and interacting with these kind of dynamic processes given by digital means demands different approaches to those from the era of mimicking media. Live Cinema; a term originally coined to describe the live musical accompa- niment to silent film is today redefined as performing with real-time generative audiovisuals, differentiated from the reproductive character of film. Exploring how to implement and present these active principles that change static objects into dynamic processes and introduce new relationships between the user and the screen based on an interactive way of looking. The following essays and interviews provide different perspectives on the above-mentioned issues: perspectives from theory, from the history of film and INTRODUCTION 12 | 15 BORIS DEBACKERE 15 | 15 The Mechanization of the Magical Sign JOOST REKVELD 1 | 1 Electric Shadows The daughter of the Greek sculptor Butades traced the shadow of her lover onto a wall, the night before he was going to war. He died on the battlefield and Butades made a sculpture from the silhouette she had drawn. being the foundation of western mathematics, it also firmly established the idea It was placed in the temple and became the object of a religious cult honouring of reducing a field of knowledge to a set of elements and production rules to the soul of the young man, a soul captured by fixing the shadow in its vertical make combinations of these elements. His book demonstrated the productive position. In this way, Pliny reveals the myth that explains the origin of painting power of an inner machinery of postulates and axioms. This scheme was perhaps and sculpture. even more influential than the mathematics he explained with it. Later in life, Another, even stranger story about the origin of images comes from Plato’s Euclid wrote a book of optics with a similar structure, and books following the allegory of the cave. Humans are imprisoned in a dark cave where forms are same method appeared in all areas of human knowledge, even including theology being carried around to cast shadows on the walls.