O cinema-cefalópode dos infernos: entrevista com William Brown

Entrevista on-line concedida a Paulo Roberto Ferreira de Camargo logo após o Seminário Avançado The squid cinema from hell, ministrado aos alunos e professores do PPG-Com UTP; e também on-line, no dia 16 de outubro de 2020, com tradução de Antonio Carlos Persegani Florenzano. O pesquisador britânico William Brown, PhD em Cinema Contemporâneo pela Universidade de Oxford, atua como Senior Lecturer em Estudos Fílmicos na Universidade de Roehampton, em Londres. Escreveu inúmeros artigos e editou coleções com ênfase na tecnologia digital. Ele é o autor dos livros Deleuze and Film (with David Martin-Jones, 2012); Supercinema: Film Philosophy for the Digital Age (2015); Non-cinema: Global Digital Filmmaking and the Multitude (2018); e The Squid Cinema From Hell (with David H. Fleming, 2020). Brown é também um criador de filmes de micro-orçamento, incluindo En Attendant Godard (2009), Selfie (2014) e This is Cinema (2019). A entrevista concentra-se na apresentação de Brown, com base no seu livro mais recente. A partir da exemplificação da presença de cefalópodes e criaturas semelhantes em vários filmes, de diferentes gêneros e no mundo todo, o autor, ousadamente, vai sugerir que a mídia digital - e talvez os meios de comunicação de forma mais geral - podem ser melhor entendidos como 'kinoteuthis infernalis'. Ou seja, as mídias digitais constituiriam uma Medusa moderna, fixando nosso olhar e nos transformando em pedra - ainda que também possam nos ajudar, positivamente, a reconfigurar nosso lugar com o multiverso e nossa relação com o espaço e o tempo.

Gone Girls of Escamontage

Escamontage designates the coincidence of a subtle cut in film, made without an apparent break in framing, with the disappearance of a woman’s body. This chapter proposes that escamontage constitutes its own form of editing in which concealment is expressed as a formal element and thematic principle. The history of escamontage is conveyed in three key moments: first, its initial articulation in early cinema with Thomas Edison’s The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895); its development in classical Hollywood cinema with Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948); and finally, its realization in contemporary digital filmmaking with David Fincher’s Gone Girl (2014).

Intermedial Détrompe l’Oeil and Contemporary Polish Narrative Cinema

New technologies have deeply informed the ways to think about cinema, film and video. If digital cinema is often understood as a break with past film aesthetics, this chapter rather sees continuity. Digital culture also preserves and prolongs video culture. This chapter examines the use of video and digital images in the context of minor national cinemas, and takes the view that digital filmmaking is a continuation not only of argentic cinema but also of video aesthetics. It suggests that certain Polish films use analogue and digital video cameras in ways that can be considered as strategies of unveilment, which assist the critical discourse that these works engage in regarding the social reality they depict.

Digital Filmmaking at the Interstices

This chapter offers a comprehensive discussion of the making of In Vanda’s Room (2000). It contextualises Pedro Costa’s use of digital video to sustain a low-budget shooting process that merges personal and professional agency. This filmcan surely be considered the filmmaker’s most radical approach to filmmaking, particularly with regards to its shooting process. Unsurprisingly, it is commonly analysed as the result of a personal endeavour which privileges creative independence and artisanal practices steering away from film industry norms. As this chapter explains, however, the film is as much a result of a low scale digital video artisanal practice as it is of production negotiations commonly observed in European film co-productions. Examining this interstitial quality, this chapter offers a fresh insight into the making of In Vanda’s Room by also scrutinising its finance and post-production processes, overlooked in previous academic and non-academic literature about the film.

Computer Interface as Film: Post-Media Aesthetics of Desktop Documentary

This paper explores a recently emerged audiovisual form called desktop documentary, an interdisciplinary computer-based variant of the essay film. As a post-media practice, no longer exclusively dependent on the film medium, desktop filmmaking represents a hybrid audiovisual genre entirely conducted in the digital environment by using and exploiting preexisting materials in new contexts while using the advantages of the Internet, widely used software and digital tools. Desktop documentary filmmaking corresponds to the widespread artistic practice of postproduction – a concept introduced by Nicolas Bourriaud signifying a new state of affairs when all texts of culture are already available (mostly as digital objects) and the artist intervenes on existing materials rather than produces artworks ex nihilo. Belonging to the tradition of essay film – a cinematic documentary and experimental mode in which moving images and off-screen verbal voice or textual captions establish complex relations – desktop video essays introduce new post-media aesthetics. Similar to the idea of using everyday materials in the artistic context, initially proposed with Duchamp’s ready-mades, which unprecedentedly effaced every notion of the style from their avant-garde aesthetics, desktop documentaries often minimize and abolish cinematic stylistic qualities. One of the most significant aspects of desktop documentaries is that the act of film viewing does not differ from common computer user experience: having replaced traditional film screen with the computer interface, the interactive process of computational multitasking and navigation, performed on various digital data and files, becomes the very content of the film. After the historical overview of the phenomenon and general introduction into the post-media theory, selected works of representative desktop documentarists such as Kevin B. Lee and Louis Henderson are analyzed in their deconstructive approach to traditional and digital filmmaking – subversive both formally and politically. Article received: May 28, 2019; Article accepted: July 6, 2019; Published online: October 15, 2019; Original scholarly paperHow to cite this article: Bešlagić, Luka. "Computer Interface as Film: Post-Media Aesthetics of Desktop Documentary." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 20 (2019): 51-60. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i20.323.

James Benning Goes Digital

James Benning’s turn from 16mm filmmaking to digital filmmaking after his RR (2007) released the already prolific Benning from his struggles with 16mm film projection and print damage and unleashed a new wave of digital productivity. This interview explores Benning’s many digital films, including the several films that are part of his Two Cabins project (focusing on the cabins, lives, and writings of Henry David Thoreau and Ted Kaczynski), his Warhol-inspired portrait films—After Warhol (2011), Twenty Cigarettes (2011)—his three-hour-plus “single-shot” film, BNSF (2012), his cine-exploration of Vienna’s Naturhistorischesmuseum, and his personal epic, 52 Films (2015), an adventure into modifying a broad range of online postings from the internet—originally designed to be presented on fifty-two computers, but so far, shown mostly as interactive screenings with Benning present.

Lois Patiño

This is the first extensive, career interview in English with Lois Patiño. After several years making films and installation work about mental illness and the moment of death, Patiño found his métier as a landscape artist, focusing on landscape as a spiritual entity. Patiño works in the tradition of place-oriented cinema pioneered by Larry Gottheim, James Benning, Sharon Lockhart, and Peter Hutton. In Patiño’s films human beings are seen as parts of the landscape, sometimes in a more literal sense, as in Costa da morte (2013) his feature about the Galician coast of Spain, and at other times in more mythic senses. Patiño’s films are stunningly beautiful and demonstrate that digital filmmaking can compete with even the most visually remarkable celluloid works.