Re-Born Digital? Film and Moving Image Studies' by Catherine Grant

Film and Moving Image Studies:Re-Born Digital?

Catherine Grant Film Studies For Free, Decoding the Digital Humanities Workshop Series, University of Sussex, February 24, 2012

Friday, 29 June 2012

Ryan Gosling's 2012 take on C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" (1959 Rede Lecture)

Source: http://publichistorianryangosling.tumblr.com/post/16414487666


http://publichistorianryangosling.tumblr.com/post/16414487666

http://publichistorianryangosling.tumblr.com/post/16414487666

"The appearance around the end of the 1990s of a number of essays and collections that argue for a 'reconstruction' or a 'reinvention' of film studies is [...] a fresh symptom of a field in self-perceived crisis -- a field giving way to interdisciplinary imperatives as the boundaries demarcating film studies erode by the force of powerful waves of new and emerging media and visual technologies."

Mark Betz, 'Little Books', in Lee Grieveson and Haydee Wasson (eds), Inventing Film Studies (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 319-341, 341. My emphasis.

The Language of Revitalisation


• Deborah Knight, “Reconsidering Film Theory and Method.” New Literary History 24,no. 2 (1993): 321-38;

• David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (eds), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996);

• Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (eds), Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2000);

• Lee Grieveson and Haydee Wasson (eds), Inventing Film Studies (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008)




• "Old film can be seen with new eyes"

• "[D]igital technology, rather than killing the cinema, brings it new life and new directions"

Laura Mulvey, "Passing Time: Reflections on the Old and the New", in Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice, ed. Clive Meyer (New York: Wallflower Press, 2011), p. 80. Also see Mulvey, Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion, 2006) re. the move, enabled by digital technology, from Mulvey's notion of "possessive spectatorship" ("fetishistically absorbed by the image of the human body"' Death 24x... p. 11) to Bellour's "pensive spectatorship" ("engaged in reflection on the visibility or time in the cinema"), ibid.]



On the Internet...

“[T]he repressed film culture that gave rise to film studies has returned with a vengeance."

Mark Betz, ʻLittle Booksʼ, in Lee Grieveson and Haydee Wasson (eds), Inventing Film Studies (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 319-341.


English Language Digital Film Studies Resources

• The rapid growth of the World Wide Web from 1991 onwards, affording hosting and dissemination spaces for:

• Online Film Indices and Databases: in 1990 Col Needham founds the Internet Movie Database as a USENET newsgroup; mid 1990s the online Film Index International formed from BFI's offline Summary of Film and Television database

• Online moving image archives, video sharing and VOD: Internet Archive Moving Image Collection, 1999; CinemaNow, MovieFlix (both U.S.) and Cinero (Korea) offer VOD or movie download services, 1999; video sharing sites Vimeo, 2004; and YouTube, 2005 start up; academic multimedia sharing site Critical Commons receives generous funding, 2008

• ‘Hypertextual’ film and cultural theory education: e.g. Daniel Chandler, ‘Notes on the Gaze’, 1995; ‘An Introduction to Genre Theory’, 1997. Also see the work of Sarah Zupko, e.g. PopCultures.com, 1996

• Online Academic Listservs, then Salons, then Journals: Film-Philosophy, 1996; Screening the Past, 1997; Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Media Studies, 1999; JumpCut online, 2001; Vectors, 2005

• Influential online film studies and film criticism curators and informal salon hosts including, from the 1990s, Fred Camper, Glen W. Norton, and from the 2000s, for example, Steve Erickson & Girish Shambu

• More ‘formal’ film studies related blogging, such as Bordwell and Thompson, 2006; The Bioscope, 2007; Film Studies For Free, 2008

• Advent of computer-based, ‘prosumer’, non-linear video editing systems, early 1990s

• CD-ROMS e.g. 1992-1999: Virtual Screening Room, a CD-Rom digital textbook. Produced by Henry Jenkins, Janet Murray, Ben Singer and Ellen Draper

• Growth of Digital Home Video Formats (and their ‘Extras’!) like the LaserDisc (1978-2001), replaced by the much more popular DVD format ,1997

• Data Mining and Metrics: Cinemetrics software created by Gunars Civjans, used by Yuri Tsivian for his work on Intolerance, 2003/5; the term "cultural analytics" was coined by Lev Manovich, 2007


Understanding Digital Humanities

Edited by David Berry ( Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)

• The application of new computational techniques and visualisation technologies in arts and humanities are resulting in fresh approaches and methodologies for the study of new and traditional corpora.

• This ‘computational turn’ takes the methods and techniques from computer science to create innovative means of close and distant reading. This book discusses the implications and applications of ‘digital humanities’ and the questions raised when using algorithmic techniques.

• The contrast between narrative versus database, pattern-matching versus hermeneutics, and the statistical paradigm versus the data mining paradigm

• The new forms of collaboration within arts and humanities that are raised through modular research teams and new organisational structures, ‘big humanities’, as well as techniques for interdisciplinary collaboration.


Understanding Digital Humanities

"I posit the digital humanities as a diverse field of practices associated with computational techniques and reaching beyond print in its modes of enquiry, research, publication and dissemination. In this sense, the digital humanities includes text encoding and analysis, digital editions of print works, historical research that re-creates classical architecture in virtual reality formats [...], archival and geospatial sites, and since there is a vibrant conversation between scholarly and creative work in this field, electronic literature and digital art that draws on and remediates humanities traditions." [p. 45]

"The possibility of creating synergistically recursive interactions between close reading and quantitative analyses..." [p. 49]

N. Katherine Hayles, 'How We Think: Transforming Power and Digital Technologies', in ed. Berry, Understanding Digital Humanities (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) My emphasis


Digital film and moving image studies

Quantitative but also qualitative, involving

1. Randomisation, new forms of visualisation, abstraction, defamiliarisation (neo-Ostranenie), unconscious optics, haptic and non-instrumental looking

2. "Distant reading" (Moretti, 2000), but also new possibilities for close analysis, quotation, juxtaposition and live, or time-based, experiential forms of comparison.


Database Logic

"Lev Manovich [described] the database as "a new way to structure our experience of ourselves and our world," and therefore as the contemporary counterpart to the traditional form of narration.

The database became an expression of the variability of new media: entries can be modified, added and deleted without consequences for the entity of the database; the user is granted random access to different kinds of multimedia objects. In the simplest case this may be by engaging in the linearity of a movie by jumping to different positions."

Birk Weilberg, 'Beyond Interactive Cinema', Keyframe, August 2002 1/2


Database versus narrative logic?

"The rise of the database changes the relation between paradigm and syntagm as described by de Saussure and Barthes. Traditionally, the paradigm becomes visible as an ordered collection of signs only through the syntagm as a meaningful arrangement of selected signs.

When narration is superseded by the database, the paradigm becomes real and the syntagm virtual. In comparison to narration with its one dimensional-structure of time, database information is structured in multiple dimensions."

Birk Weilberg, 'Beyond Interactive Cinema', Keyframe, August 2002 2/2


Digital toolkits at workin film and moving image research

• Cinemetrics: Project founded in 2005 (ongoing) by Yuri Tsivian, William Colvin Professor, Departments of Art History, Slavic Languages & Literatures, and Comparative Literature, the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, University of Chicago http://www.cinemetrics.lv/index.php

• Cultural Analytics/Software Studies Initiative (2007-ongoing): Project founded by Lev Manovich: http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/09/cultural-analytics.html

• See video 'Methods of Cultural Analytics' (2010): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHUft3fDUFA

• Digital Formalism project (2007-2011) with the Austrian Filmmuseum: http://www.filmmuseum.at/en/_research__education/research_projects/digital_formalism_1

• See also visualisations for 'Vertov Films Comparisons' at http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/sets/72157622608431194/

• And Adelheid Heftberger, 'Do Computers Dream of Cinema? Film Data for Computer Analysis and Visualization' in Berry (ed.), Understanding Digital Humanities (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)


http://www.cinemetrics.lv/index.php

http://www.cinemetrics.lv/index.php

http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/09/cultural-analytics.html




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHUft3fDUFA




http://www.filmmuseum.at/en/_research__education/research_projects/digital_formalism_1




http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/sets/72157622608431194/




Crowdsourcing Cinemetrics

• "The Cinemetrics project offers a collaborative tool for automating the recording of data about shot types and lengths while watching films in real time.

• Users can download the tool [designed by Gunars Civjans], capture shot data using a remote-control-like interface, and then upload the data into the Cinemetrics online database, which enables users to visualize and graphically map trends in shot statistics. [See the tool in action in Daniel Chávez Hera's video here: http://vimeo.com/23183149]

• The project appeals to film scholars interested in the sub-field of cinemetrics, scholars looking for humanities/film data sets, film editors/directors, and media historians."

Hagenmeyer (http://blogs.ischool.utexas.edu/f2011dh/2011/08/30/digital-humanities-tools-and-projects-annotated-bibliography/)


http://vimeo.com/23183149




http://blogs.ischool.utexas.edu/f2011dh/2011/08/30/digital-humanities-tools-and-projects-annotated-bibliography/


Cinemetrics, Film History and Poetry

• "Tsivian builds his case for the functionality of the technology in his own analyses of shot pacing in Griffith’s Intolerance and in his experiment to prove that the pace of cutting in Russian films evolved from the slowest of international tempos in 1917 to the fastest in 1918.

• He argues that film, like poetry, is an art of timing; this is a tool for measuring the art that resides in patterns of time."

Hagenmeyer (http://blogs.ischool.utexas.edu/f2011dh/2011/08/30/digital-humanities-tools-and-projects-annotated-bibliography/)






Cinematic (Re-)Visualisation: Neo-Cubism?

"Brendan Dawes' Cinema Redux (2004) creates a single visual distillation of an entire movie; each row represents one minute of film time, comprised of 60 frames, each taken at one second intervals. The result is a unique fingerprint of an entire movie, born from taking many moments spread across time and bringing all of them together in one single moment to create something new. [On the right, a tiny

image of Dawes' Vertigo exhibit]"

[http://www.brendandawes.com/project/cinema-redux/]


http://www.brendandawes.com/project/cinema-redux/




Re-Visualisation and Unconscious Optics

"[C]inemetrics is an experiment to find out if the data that is inherent in the movie can be used to make something visible that otherwise would remain unnoticed."

Frederic Brodbeck's 2011 bachelor graduation project at the Royal Academy of Arts (KABK), Den Haag

http://cinemetrics.fredericbrodbeck.de/

Also see Valentina de Filippo on The Shining: http://www.valentinadefilippo.co.uk/portfolio/the-shining/




http://www.valentinadefilippo.co.uk/portfolio/the-shining/




Tracking the unconscious optics of the cinematic gaze in motion

Tim SmithBirkbeck College: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/psychology/our-staff/academic/tim-smith/researchResearch blog: http://continuityboy.blogspot.com/

"My research focuses on Visual Cognition in the context of naturalistic visual scenes. How do we attend to, perceive, encode in memory and reason about complex visual scenes? Key to my research is the observation that viewers overtly shift their attention about a scene when free to do so. This sequence of eye movements provides an index of the viewer's on-line cognitive processing of a visual scene. By using eyetracking to monitor where a person fixates and when they program saccades in combination with behavioural probes either during viewing (e.g. gaze-contingent onsets/offsets), or after viewing (e.g. recognition tests) we are able to investigate the cognitive processes occurring during scene viewing."


http://www.bbk.ac.uk/psychology/our-staff/academic/tim-smith/research




http://continuityboy.blogspot.com/

http://continuityboy.blogspot.com/

Unconscious Optics and Defamiliarisation

"[With "Das optisch Unbewußte" (1931) Walter Benjamin] is concerned with the invisible that is present inside the visible, those bodily movements that are too minute to be discerned by the human eye and too automatic to impinge on human consciousness. [Eadweard] Muybridge's series of still images of horses running, woman walking, or men wrestling must have been in his mind. The camera reveals these movements:

! Evidently, a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye -- if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. Even if one has general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person's posture during the fractional second of a stride... Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions."

[Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 117; citing Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 236-237.]


Unconscious Optics and Ideology

• Benjamin argued that the evaporation of aura achieved by formal reproducibility reveals an "unconscious optics" of filmic reproduction:

- "the camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses" (237).

• New media technologies, like the camera, allow us to become aware of the ways in which perception is molded and, consequently, aware of how ideology is perpetuated in the ways in which the subject is asked to "see" the world. David Beard and Joshua Gunn, ʻPaul Virilio and the Mediation of Perception and Technologyʼ, Enculturation, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 2002


Videographic Film Studies Back to an experimental, multimedia future?


Back to an Experimental Multimedia Future?

PENTHESILEA: QUEEN OF THE AMAZONS

(Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1974)

On the iconography of warrior women

RIDDLES OF THE SPHINX

(Mulvey and Wollen, 1977)

An avant-garde exploration of female experience


Back to an Experimental Multimedia Future?

• '[Experimental film] teaches “theory” students something important: that “theory” is a desperate attempt to catch up with the most cutting edge practice'....

Chuck Kleinhans, February 17, 2012 (http://wp.me/p1oYul-ea)


http://wp.me/p1oYul-ea

http://wp.me/p1oYul-ea

Videographic film studies?

• Using film as the medium of its own criticism (Bellour, 1990)?

• An immersive and affective film criticism and theory?

• The constraints of online, non-commercial, non-broadcast remix may be productive ones?


Videographic film studies essays?

• "[T]he essayistic describes the many-layered activities of a personal point of view as a public experience."

Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne After Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 13.


AUDIOVISUALCY: Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies

http://vimeo.com/groups/audiovisualcy

"Video Essays: A Multiprotagonist Manifesto"

http://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.com/2009/07/video-essays-on-films-multiprotagonist.html

FILMANALYTICAL

http://filmanalytical.blogspot.com



















Video essays shown:

• 'Quote Unquote: the Unattainable [Film] Text in the Age of Digital Reproduction' video essay by Catherine Grant, March 2010 (unpublished); including short excerpts from:

• Image par Image: La Règle du jeu (Pierre Oscar Levy, 1987; Editions Montparnasse)

• The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (Sophie Fiennes, 2006)

• Psycho (1960) vs. Psycho (1998). Anonymous. Online at e.g http://vimeo.com/14236217

• The Substance of Style, pt 1: Wes Anderson and his pantheon of heroes (Schulz, Welles, Truffaut), March 30, 2009. Online at http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/the-substance-of-style-pt-1-20090330

• Video essay on E.A. Dupont's Variety, by Kristin Thompson and Kevin B. Lee, February 18, 2009. Online at http://alsolikelife.com/shooting/2009/02/video-essays-for-la-roue-1922-abel-gance-and-variety-1925-ea-dupont-featuring-commentary-by-kristin-thompson/

• 'Notes Towards a Project on Citizen Kane' by Paul Malcolm, 2007: Online at http://www.archive.org/details/NotesTowardsAProjectOnKane






http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/the-substance-of-style-pt-1-20090330




http://alsolikelife.com/shooting/2009/02/video-essays-for-la-roue-1922-abel-gance-and-variety-1925-ea-dupont-featuring-commentary-by-kristin-thompson/






http://www.archive.org/details/NotesTowardsAProjectOnKane





Further viewing:

• Regarding randomization and unconscious optics: 'Establishing Split': On Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream - http://filmanalytical.blogspot.com/2010/11/establishing-split-requiem-102-project.html

• Regarding quotation, juxtaposition and live, experiential forms of comparison: 'True Likeness': On Peeping Tom and Code Unknown - http://filmanalytical.blogspot.com/2010/06/true-likeness-peeping-tom-and-code.html

• Regarding haptic and non-instrumental looking, and videographical film studies theory: 'Touching the Film Object' - http://filmanalytical.blogspot.com/2011/08/touching-film-object-notes-on-haptic-in.html


http://filmanalytical.blogspot.com/2010/11/establishing-split-requiem-102-project.html




http://filmanalytical.blogspot.com/2010/06/true-likeness-peeping-tom-and-code.html




http://filmanalytical.blogspot.com/2011/08/touching-film-object-notes-on-haptic-in.html




Digital film and moving image studies

Quantitative but also qualitative, involving

1. Randomisation, new forms of visualisation, abstraction, defamiliarisation (neo-Ostranenie), unconscious optics, haptic and non-instrumental looking

2. "Distant reading" (Moretti, 2000), but also new possibilities for close analysis, quotation, juxtaposition and live, or time-based, experiential forms of comparison.


Digital Film and Moving Image Studies:Towards a Manifesto 2.0-3.0

• We should work to revitalise Film Studies through a (renewed) contact with film cultures in ways that are enabled by digital/computational technologies and cultures;

• But we should continue to engage in a hermeneutics of suspicion about all our methods (as well as in the opposite, too: reparative reading);

• We should strive not to fetishise code, digital culture, or the results of our use of digital tools;

• We must interrogate our own experimentor effects;

• We should strive to understand all that is at stake in our digital media object relations.


Must Read

• Theory: Christian Keathley, 'La Camera-Stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia', in Clayton, Alex and Klevan, Andrew (eds.), The Language and Style of Film Criticism. London: Routledge, 2011

• Practice: Jason Mittell article in 'Prof Hacker' Column in chronicle.com (http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/how-to-rip-dvd-clips/26090)


http://chronicle.com

http://chronicle.com

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/how-to-rip-dvd-clips/26090




Creating Digital Film Clips

• Handbrake (free to download) for format shifting from DVDs (http://handbrake.fr/)

• MPEG Streamclip video converter for Mac OS X/Windows (free to download) - a really flexible converter for all sorts of digital material and formats (http://www.squared5.com/)

• Real Player Downloader and Converter (free to download) for downloading AV (.flv) material from the Internet and converting it into suitable formats for editing (albeit at a low resolution) (http://www.real.com/realplayer/convert-video; http://www.real.com/realplayer/download-video)

• iMovie (free with Macs) for editing (image and sound, voiceover, text/titling)

• Garageband (free with Macs) for additional sound/music editing


http://handbrake.fr/

http://handbrake.fr/

http://www.squared5.com/

http://www.squared5.com/

http://www.real.com/realplayer/convert-video

http://www.real.com/realplayer/convert-video

http://www.real.com/realplayer/download-video




Fair Use/Fair Dealing

• Center for Social Media: http://centerforsocialmedia.org/fair-use/best-practices

• 'Educational Use of media. Exemptions to the DMCA', http://www.asc.upenn.edu/DMCA/

• Watch Kirby Ferguson, Everything is a Remix, Pt 4: http://vimeo.com/36881035


http://centerforsocialmedia.org/fair-use/best-practices






http://www.asc.upenn.edu/DMCA/

http://www.asc.upenn.edu/DMCA/



• ONE: COMMENTING ON OR CRITIQUING OF COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL

• BUT the new use should not become a market substitute for the material.


• TWO: USING COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL FOR ILLUSTRATION OR EXAMPLE

• BUT properly attribute the source and use no more of it than you need for illustration or example.


• THREE: CAPTURING COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL INCIDENTALLY OR ACCIDENTALLY

• BUT use must be proportionate.


• FOUR: REPOSTING, REPRODUCING, OR QUOTING IN ORDER TO MEMORIALIZE, PRESERVE, OR RESCUE AN EVENT, OR A CULTURAL PHENOMENON

• BUT use must be proportionate or from readily available, authorised sources.


• FIVE: COPYING, REPOSTING, AND RECIRCULATING A WORK OR PART OF A WORK FOR PURPOSES OF LAUNCHING A DISCUSSION

• BUT this purpose must be clear.


• SIX: QUOTING IN ORDER TO RECOMBINE ELEMENTS TO MAKE A NEW WORK THAT DEPENDS FOR ITS MEANING ON (OFTEN UNLIKELY) RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE ELEMENTS

• BUT there must be a significant change of context or meaning.

Center for Social Media, "Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Online Video: http://centerforsocialmedia.org/fair-use/related-materials/codes/code-best-practices-fair-use-online-video


http://centerforsocialmedia.org/fair-use/related-materials/codes/code-best-practices-fair-use-online-video






Documents

Re-Born Digital? Film and Moving Image Studies' by Catherine Grant