Little Movies >>
Lev Manovich
little movies is a lyrical and theoretical project about the aesthetics of
digital cinema
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||| HIAFF 3.0 | university of colorado | department of art and art history | digital arts area | in conjunction with alt-x | atlas | blurr
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Rick Silva: What was the first movie you remember watching?
Lev Manovich: I don't remember the first movie I saw but the first film that
made a tremendous impression on me was Tarkovsky's "Mirror."
RS: In the Little Movies intro you mention that cinema is being reborn on the
computer. In an interview we did with Mark Napier he mentioned that the
computer is too much of a utilitarian tool for him, and that he is awaiting the
escape of the internet into the "real" world. Do you feel that the desktop is
merely a pit stop for cinema?
LM: The recent decades saw a real exposition of a variety of new forms of
cinema, both in terms of the look, the cinematic language and the physical
apparatus: from IMAX and location-based motion rides to interactive cinematic
narratives of computer games to various animation / graphic design / video /
typography hybrids in music videos, Flash animations, etc. Given this I don't
think desktop is just a pit stop for some "essential" cinema that needs its own
unique apparatus. Of course, desktop itself is just stage in the development of
computing, on its way to be replaced by smaller PDA-type devices, large flat
screens, etc. Like a virus, cinema seems to be able to find its way in all of
these machines; they are all legitimate ways to distribute cinema.
RS: Watching a film on a computer screen seems more like television sometimes
because of the screen size, the scan light, and because the pc lacks the
physical community of a movie theatre. Why do you think new media has embraced
a filmic approach even more than a television aesthetic?
LM: Indeed, while information interfaces embraced some of the conventions of TV
culture (the metaphor of channels; VCR-like controls used in various software
media players), visually desktop cinema seems to aspire not to TV but to
cinema: think, for instance, of camera moves, special effects, and the opening
sequences of computer games. In part this has to do with the fact that cinema
is much more prestigious in our culture than TV: everybody aspires to be a film
director, rather than a TV director. In addition, until now cinema look
represented the ultimate in visual illusionism, something that other media,
including computers, tried to emulate.
RS: In The Language of New Media, you talk about Eisenstein's montage as the
root of frames in net cinema, and Len Lye and Brakhage's painting on film as
being the precursor to today's video editing software that includes paint
features. Have there been any cinematic precedents to the web's use of multi
media, that is, when a site has separate audio, film, text - all relating to
the same piece? What about interactivity in cinema history?
LM: Regarding Web's use of multimedia, I would say that cinema was the original
multimedia, combining iconic images, music, voice, text and sometimes graphics
(think of Godard's films from the 1960s). To me this is one of the main reasons
why it makes sense to think of new media in relation to cinema: throughout its
history cinema already worked out many sophisticated techniques of how to
combine various media in a s ingle multimedia piece.
Regarding your second question about interactivity in cinema: during cinema's
first decade, a projectionist would select which short films he would show and
in which sequence. So we can say that early cinema was interactive (although
this is of course the most simplistic type of interactivity). In terms of more
recent cinema, many people thought that "Run, Lora, Run" was influenced by
interactive narratives of computer games in that it showed three different
scenarios which started from the same promise - as though you are playing a
computer game and choosing a particular path through all the possible
narratives possible.
RS: Have there been any works of net art that have approached or embodied your
macrocinema concept?
LM: Olia Lialina's classic Web work "my boyfriend came back from the warS" came
pretty close. As I wrote about in my The Language of New Media, "As the
narrative activates different parts of the screen, montage in time gives way to
montage in space. Put differently, we can say that montage acquires a new
spatial dimension. In addition to montage dimensions already explored by cinema
(differences in images' content, composition, movement) we now have a new
dimension: the position of the images in space in relation to each other. In
addition, as images do not replace each other (as in cinema) but remain on the
screen throughout the movie, each new image is juxtaposed not just with one
image which preceded it, but with all the other images present on the screen."
Another work that I thought was a real breakthrough was text.ure by io360
(1999). As in Olia's work, here the screen was also broken into a number of
frames that were all "wired" to each other; that is, an action in one of the
frames made information in other frames change as well.
RS: Seen any good films lately?
LM: I am going to see the new Mike Figgis film in two weeks and I hope it is at
least as good as his "Timecode" which I loved on all levels as an exploration
of a new cinematic language, as an intimate portrait of contemporary life, and
as a successful attempt to deal with one of the key problems of visual arts and
media today: how to represent a telecommunication society defined as much by a
cell phone conversation as by a personal physical interaction. |
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