Modes of Interfacing

"Here the image counts not for what it adds to reality, but for what it reveals of reality." (Andre Bazin, qtd. in V.F. Perkins Film as Film)

Faced with the challenge of including computers, video games, the internet, and the imagined realm of "cyberspace" in their films, filmmakers have developed a variety of methods for depicting the new digital technologies.  Below I have attempted to outline some of the methods I have observed with which internet and video game films bring their subject technologies into the frame.  The identification process is ongoing and was undertaken in order to focus my attention on moments in these films when the boundary between the photographic and the digital are blurred, obscuring the occasional abandonment of the frame of the filmstrip for bitmapped dimensionality.  As it is primarily an observational exercise, the list should be considered an incomplete theoretical taxonomy rather than a closed definition.

Hopefully you will find that the list functions like a push in: locating the digital screen, focusing on it, moving to close-up, and eventually pushing through to an imagined electronic environment.  Such a push shot rhymes with the meta-narrative of cinema's incorporation of digital technologies and actually appears in many interfacing films (as demonstrated by the clip which concludes this post which, like the other illustrations, is from Iain Softley's Hackers (1995)).

1)Mise-en-scene

• frames in frames
• digital screens are located within the shot

The most basic method for including digital technologies is to present them as elements of mise-en-scene:  computers in the laps or on the desks of characters, cell phones in the hands of characters, and video games in arcades are all examples of the inclusion of technology within an arrangement of details in the film frame.


2)Frame shot

• includes a mise-en-abyme frame
• also used when interfacing with tv, theater, and film
• generally occurs in a pov shot

The frame shot is characterized by the presence of embedded frames, the outermost and therefore most authoritative being the frame of the cinema screen, as it is constituted by the the physical boundary of the filmstrip.  Frame shots include within the master frame a secondary frame.  In the case of television, a frame shot might include the television cabinet, its dials and knobs at most, and in its capture of the screen it would reveal the dancing lines of cathode-tube projection.  In the case of a video game or internet sequence, the secondary frame is the plastic of a monitor or panel display which serves as the periphery of digital depiction.

3) Interfacing

• often a pov shot
• an equalizing substitution of one screen for the other
• alters the heritage of the on-screen image
• may be cropped due to aspect-ratio conflict
• may be photographic (camera masks interface) or digital (computer animation)
• often presents an imaginatively animated approximate to actual computer interfaces

Interfacing is marked by the focus of the camera-eye on a diegetic screen, substituting the diegetic screen for the film's own.  In interfacing with film or television, for example at the Proletariat Theater in Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (1929), the interface presents the mise-en-abyme of receding layers of photographic space.  In interfacing with computers or video games, however, interfacing cedes the photographic to the digital; the properties of digital rendering and the fixed frame of the computer screen or game console supersede filmic techniques of point-of-view, pan, track, zoom, etc.

In some instances of interfacing the camera records the digital screen, revealing in the process its shape, the glare it reflects from other objects in the room, or the pixels which construct its image.  In other instances of interfacing, the entire contents of the frame are digitally produced.  While it is often hard for me to discern the distinction between digital depiction and photographic recording of a screen, in either case the heritage of the image is ultimately aligned with the former rather than the latter.  Beyond this change in the heritage of the image, I believe that there exists an important distinction between a filmed screen, the processes related to which remain aligned with traditional film ontology, and a digitally produced environment, the processes related to which posit a momentary revision to traditional film ontology.

4)Close-up POV or Zoom Interface

• utilizes cinema techniques of zoom and, occasionally, pan in a pov shot

The Zoom Interface differs from interfacing in that it isolates a portion of the interfaced screen, generally in a point-of-view shot.  As with frame shots and interfacing, there remains difficulty in disentangling the primacy of photographic versus digital.  In most cases, however, the entanglement is representative of the intersticial characteristics of interfacing.

5) Digital animation

• animated digitally, often emulating cinema techniques (zoom, pan, tracking and crane shots)
• depicts "cyber space," imaged physical space beyond the interface

In film, digital environments are primarily conceived of spacially (an observation which may contribute as much to discussions about the primacy of space versus time in the cinema as it does to an understanding of early methods of comprehending computer technology).  Most filmmakers depict the spacial landscape of cyberspace with pure digital animation.  These animated sequences are revelatory of contemporary conceptions of internet and computer technology, often presenting anachronistic and sexualized visions of computing.

The conceptualizations of cyberspace on film can be expanded into a much longer entry.  Here I will simply note two standard visual metaphors for cyberspace:  the tunnel and the city.  The tunnel metaphor depicts the hacker as penetrating a digital environment, often overcoming obstacles and blockages in order to force foreign systems into submission.  The city metaphor is modeled on the physical appearance of circuit boards and their rhyme with an overhead view of a city.  These are not the only metaphors, nor  are they mutually exclusive.  Further, both regularly contain "information" in the form of equations (E=mc² makes a frequent appearance) floating in a digital ether, itself another standard image of cinematic cyberspace.  Hacking scenarios also often employ metaphors of virus which sometimes expand upon the sexual conception of penetrating another computer or signify associatively with contemporaneous medical concerns (for example, AIDS or cancer).

Hypothesis:  Narrativizing the role of emergent technologies pushed filmmakers to include digitally rendered animation, especially in the depiction of the imagined, spacial "cyberspace."  The technophilic co-emergence of digital animation and internet narratives therefore often occasioned the abandonment, if only momentary, of the photographic in favor of the digital, anticipating a move to a more comprehensively digital medium.

Each of the above methods of depiction occurs within the following 38 second clip from Hackers, as do examples of the tunnel and city metaphors.


(Please note that when played in the blog the clip is off center, cutting off the rightmost area of the frame.  To view without the irksome cropping, click on the video.  A new window or tab will open to the video at youtube.com.)

On The Distinction Between Interfacing and (Pre-Digital) Animation

As I continue to bend ears about my observations on interfacing in internet and video game films, friends and advisors often suggest I look into work on animation.  While no corridor of thought should go entirely unexplored (and, indeed, I am taking an animation seminar next semester), the insinuation that interfacing is merely a reversion to animation has always struck me as incorrect.

When, in films like The Last Starfighter (1984), Weird Science (1985), Hackers (1995), and Catfish (2005), filmed space is given over to the interface of a digital technology, it is more than just a shift in representational aesthetics.  In these and other internet and video game films, interfacing relinquishes the filmic space of the frame to a digital environment.  In the process, one animating technology (the movie camera) cedes to another (digital rendering).  The transition is significant because it anticipates the broader encroachment of digital technology into the medium of "film," an encroachment that has caused many theorists to revist the ontology of celluloid film in effort to understand the continuing effects of its evolving nature.

Based upon my working definition of interfacing, pre-digital animation might seem to be an "interface" with the illustrator's artwork or the sculptor's molded clay (the latter so much less so because the presence of a frame is requisite for both interfacing and film, but not for sculpture).  In either case, however, it is the camera which is the animating force; rapidly flashed sequences of photographs of the drawn or sculpted "pro-filmic" creates the illusion of movement.  The digital screens with which the films interface are powered by a new animating technology.  By giving up the filmed space to a space which is digitally rendered, interfacing in films from the 1980's introduced viewers to technologies which have since become increasingly a part of our culture and the films that represent it.

In my earliest writings on internet films I tended to view internet and video game narratives exclusively as cultural myths, narratives designed to interrogate and domesticate the digital frontier, to rationalize (indeed narrativize) new ways of life, including a prominent new form of masculinity.  Consideration of the tendency of these early internet films to interface with computer screens reveals that there also exists grounds for a formal investigation into the the role of interfacing in the larger evoloution of the medium.  More than just an aesthetic preference for animation, interfacing presents a technological interstice, a digital breach into filmic space that mirrors the contemporaneous intrusion of technology into so many other aspects of work and leisure.  The Last Starfighter, for example, not only interfaces with the computer graphics of video games but is also (according to the DVD special features) the first film to feature action sequences in completely digitally rendered environments.  Wholly remarkable at the time, the relative banality of "digitally rendered environments" in modern films suggests that cinema's encorporation of digital technology on both the narrative and formal level may have been for the medium's own sake rather than for the sake of its audience.

Testing the limits of the possibility and acceptability of digital rendering may have been enmeshed with attempts to visualize and understand the various, rapidly developing new technologies, but it was also a crucial period of self-reflexivity, the cinema discovering its digital self.  Glancing at the list of films I marshalled above as representatives of interfacing, it is clear to see that, from fantasy to science-fiction to documentary, we, too, have been getting accustomed to our new digital lives.  As digital interfaces were doubly appropriate, both documenting and enacting a switch from mechanical to digital, so these random notes on interfacing are appropriately uploaded to blogger.com, released to the imaged space of our networked environment.

Some Thoughts After an Initial Viewing of CATFISH

Catfish (2010) is an excellent example of what I consider to be the technophilic tendency of Internet movies. The film does not bear an antagonistic relationship with new media, though it is interested in replicating the broad impact of those emergent digital technologies which have made one fundamental condition of film viewing, looking at a screen, a pervasive activity in daily American life. How to interpret the value of a digital life is up to the spectator; the film, however, presents it to the viewer with affection.

In its obsession with digital screens, including laptop and desktop computers, cell phones, and gps navigators, Catfish poses interesting questions for those interested in the ontology of cinema. According to Baizan, the innate power of film was the automatic capture of impressions of light reflected off of the world it looks upon. What happens, then, when the cinema's gaze turns towards a virtual space?

One thing that happens is an aesthetic shift towards the values of an amateur camera. Another is that the film often adapts to the interface of the new technology. We see the former in the lack of depth or consistent color values, the off-center framing and unsteady hand of the documentary filmmakers, each of which connotes both the democratizing power computer digital technology has wielded over the arts and a (faux)authenticity, the honest there-ness of the naive camera. When at the end of the film the image is sucked away into the lower-right hand corner of the frame, it is a nod to the computer interface, a minimized window that has similar dual connotations. Other instances of interfacing appear when the film allows a cursor, in the form of a hand (!) or an arrow, linger on the image, a signal that the film has given itself up, adopting the aesthetics of the computer screen as its own. The mise-en-abyme is only accentuated by the fact that I watched my copy of the film on my computer. When the thought occurs to check whether it is the film's cursor or my own, I am instantly made aware of the digital essence of Catfish, a film created with and about technology similar to that which I possess and with which I access and review the film. Again, the film forces the question upon ontologists: Is this the appropriately ontological capture of a digital cinema? I can't help but think of Vertov's anthropomorphic dancing camera, itself depicted in Man With a Movie Camera (1929) as a projection viewed by the guests of the Proletariat Theater, an historical antecedent to the interfacing I am describing here.

Interestingly, Catfish doesn't merely interface, as do many earlier internet films. Rather, Catfish depicts the computer screen through cinematic techniques of panning (across Google Maps screens, themselves apparently digitally enhanced), and point-of-view shots that allow for close-up (so as to magnify and reveal the pulsing pixels of a monitor) and shots ofthe technologies themselves as an element of mise-en-scene (on the dashboard of the car or across the laps of the characters). The point-of-view shots are interesting because their subjectivity extends to the audience. Motivated by a character's look, the mise-en-abyme makes the point of view belong all the more to the spectator. Screened in a theater, I imagine recognition of the cursor has a similar effect to that of the Lumiere train, causing audience members to instinctually move their right hands to point the arrow off-screen. I find this close-up technique disappointing, however. After all, the nature of looking at a digital screen is not one of deep, penetrating gazes. Instead our eyes are constantly searching, skimming, easily distracted and quick to move on. A truly realistic interfacing would have to acknowledge the competition for attention inherent in all of our digital activities.

It may be the case in other internet films that the investigation of technology is designed as exposé or admonition, but that doesn't seem to be the case with Catfish. The narrative logic of the film implies that the steady, close gaze is not meant to register a concern about the ubiquity of the digital in contemporary American life. It might seem so at first, especially given that the film works to embody all the suggestive anonymity of a Facebook contact. The filmmakers and their friend, Nev, seem to spend every waking moment in front of a screen. It is hinted that Nev is a professional photographer, but the ballet he photographs reaches the viewer primarily through the digital photos he uploads to his computer. The majority of the film takes place in enclosed spaces, and indeed Lev’s bicycle is a sad object, hanging far above the ground in the background of his well-wired garage. In the world of the film riding a bike seems analog, backward; the kind of thing that might happen along the driveway of the Pierce family, who in the film represent the stereotype of America unplugged.

The emphasis on a technological divide, especially in developing the character of the Pierces, emphasizes that the film calls not for a resolution to or recognition of the saturation of technology it depicts, but rather it suggests the necessity of "appropriate" absorption. Catfish presents an updated (and presumably real-life) incarnation of the archetype of the internet film: a young, computer-savvy male whose familiarity with new technologies is empowering. In his trip to Ishpeming Lev seems to embody the necessity of face-to-face relationships, but the humanity of the film is technophilic, too. His confrontation with Angela is about correcting her online behavior more than it is about bringing friendship into her life. The lesson of Lev's compassion is that life without technology is difficult, filled with delusions, self-flagellation, the tragedy of mental retardation, failed dreams, sorrow and interpersonal disconnection. Not only does the film depict an analog existence as traumatic, but it presents Lev's response as digital- Messianic: if you reach out through technology you will be found and saved by technology. The epilogue reassures the viewer that Angela has deleted the Facebook accounts of her various personas and replaced her own profile picture with an image of herself; she even represents herself as an artist online (as the video artists behind Supermache surely did and do), and has thereby made it possible to earn hundreds of real virtual friends, though she will likely never eclipse the virtual popularity of the handsome star of the picture. Indeed, Lev is portrayed as every bit her superior in the modern world.

No, the gaze Catfish casts towards the digital world, towards the technology through which it was born and through which it will be distributed and viewed, is a reverential one. It is no surprise, then, that the most interesting sequence of the film is a travel montage composed primarily through interfacing. The sequence depicts the filmmaker’s trip to Michigan where they plan to use the Pierce family Sunday breakfast tradition as an opportunity to pay a surprise visit to Angela. Their flight to Chicago is captured in the Casablanca ('42) / Indiana Jones ('81,4) illustrated map style rendered through a Google Maps interface. After landing they take a car from Chicago to Michigan and their drive is depicted through an interface with Google Maps Street View function. The camera-as-computer screen presents a jolting advance across Highway 94, a crude animation of sequential still shots digitally photographed, uploaded, and brought into a blurred approximation of motion by the mouse clicks of the filmmakers. Intercut between the plane ride and the Street View animation are a few moments of live footage, including the only human interaction the filmmakers have outside of the Pierce family and themselves. (Interestingly, this meeting is arguably the most impersonal in the film. The waitress interviewed briefly relates the story of her sister’s experience of a online relationship, but there is no dialogue between her and Nev or the cameramen, nor is she named. The camera cuts to the three men in the car, and here, too, is an absence of communication. The men are not speaking and indeed not moving, as a camera pans to ascribe all movement to the vehicle they are in, closing in on the spinning hubcap before giving way to the aforementioned map interface.)

The montage sequence is a beautiful moment in the film, a celebration of the filmic potential of digital media. It is worth noting here the pride the film takes in its computer origination, as on my copy it is preceded by a digital reproduction of a countdown leader, with the smiling Macintosh symbol appearing for an instant in the bottom right-hand of the number 6, both a wink and a salute. Catfish utilizes digital production techniques to depict increasing presence of technology in American life. Its method is perfectly matched to its subject, as if recognizing that, as the world changes, the art must too. It is a call for a new conception of ontology in the digital cinema, one which allows the camera to retain its ability to “affect us like a phenomenon in [digital] nature” (Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image").

Android (1982)

I picked up Android (1982) on VHS at a local Friends of the Library book sale. Because of my work on internet related films (I also picked up War Games (1984) on VHS!) and because I am a fan of films like Westworld (1973) I figured it was going to be well worth the 35 cent donation.

Oh was it ever! There is much for a young theorist to work his maws over in the 80 minute sci-fi tale, proclaimed on the back of the box as "a triumph of what is human over what is alien." The film, believe it or not, never makes a clear case for "what is human," and there are no aliens, so...maybe that reviewer saw an early cut. The film is about triumphs, however, including the sexual coming of age of a frustrated 5 year old android named Max 404, the Oedipal slaying of a father figure (played by the, well, German Klaus Kinski), and the violent rise of the proletariat worker (really! See below!).

In the film, Max is coded as a teenager, listening to rock and roll (James Brown's "Its a man's man's world"), dressing like a gangster, playing video games, and returning like for like by disrespecting the rule of his overbearing father and creator, Dr. Daniel. After the Dr. tells him to turn off his music, stop playing his games, and go to sleep, he takes a distress call from a passing police ship. In doing so he is unaware that he is actually letting on board three escaped convicts who have killed the ships crew.

Even by the time they hear the news that the trio, including Brie Howard as the sultry Maggie, it is little matter to the father and son who have been at least 5 years without the sight of a woman. Dr. Daniel is a Dr. Frankenstein character whose major narrative dilemma is his inability to design a female android parter, thereby completing his dream of creating "the ideal working class" (yes, that is a quote). He sees in Maggie the solution to his problems, a body on which to base his creation as well as the animating force. No parthenogenesis here; Androids can only come to life in the presence of sexual energy. Klaus is happy therefore, despite Max's rebelliousness, when he catches him making out with Maggie over the android Cassandra-- the kiss provides the spark of life that animates her. Well, the police arrive eventually, but not until Maggie's convict cronies fight over her, a sweaty, bare-chested, tight-pantsed tussle that results in a concussion for the loser and Maggie's rape and death. Max kills her assailant, then, with the help of Cassandra, he kills Dr. Daniel as well, ripping out his head to reveal the sparks and wiring that show him to be an android as well. Cassandra and Max assume the roles of "Dr. Daniel" and "his assistant," a ruse that provides them the protection of seeming human and an escort to Max's fantasy world - Earth.

The sets are an excellent feature of the film, opting for the standard multi-light displays, and automatic doors (can I get these in my apartment yet?) but executing the details with great style. Sadly neither the internet nor an analogue figures in this futuristic tale. There is a great example of adopting the aesthetics of a competing technology, however. Apersonal favorite aspect for me is the rhyme between the video-games that Max loves to surreptitiously play and the joystick and green-screen interface that he uses to (FIRE!) incinerate up the first police ship that arrives. Though the film asks for our compassion towards Max, the rhetoric of violent video games leading to violent behavior is already set in place. The mise-en-scene completely gives way to emulating a video-game screen in this sequence, but it isn't only film that is forced to make room for its big-eating little cousin. The soundtrack, too, includes a track by The Fibonaccis called "Sergio Leone," and it sounds just like a level track in a video game. Sergio Leone is played over the credits, and, of course, the font used is similar to that typical of 1980's video games.

There are two lengthy intertextual bits as well, in each case a lengthy clip of a film Max watches. The first clip is an intercut of the lengthy animation scene in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), and the second is of Jimmy Stewart as David Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life (1946), dawdling in front of Mary's home, a conflicted suitor. Each clip has a clear correspondence to the narrative -- the animation of Cassandra (and the entailed animation of Max and Dr. Denis) and Max's clumsy but successful attempts to woe Maggie -- but I suspect a deeper reading into the implications of these quotations would bring a greater understanding to the film as a whole. There is a third reference, in Don Opper's performance and in the paratextual claim that he cops a "Chaplain herky jerk walk."

Oh, that reminds me, I'm supposed to be watching City Lights (1931). I wonder how it will read if I listen to The Fibonaccis at the same time!

Fletch

I just finished reading Gregory McDonald's '74 "beach boiled" detective story, Fletch, which follows the memorable I.M. Fletcher, feature reporter for the fictional News-Tribune, as he stumbles upon evidence, sleeps with the wives of other men, and, through a combination of persistence, memory, and coincidence manages to solve two crimes and escape to Rio with three million dollars.

The book would be fun to teach with a Chandler or Hammett novel, as McDonald is clearly revisiting their twist on mystery. The sunny location, replete with beach scenes and tennis clubs, provides the glare in which corrupt institutions - corporate, law, and media - go about their seedy business. Drugs take center stage as the victimizing agent which result in the death of a 19 year old prostitute and the extra-judicial imprisonment of a former school teacher and a young man, as well as the degradation of a number of other characters who people the beaches where Fletch lives undercover.

The questions are obvious, and guide my ruminations: How does Chandler's LA differ from McDonald's? In what ways do the heroes differ? The morality? And what historical and cultural changes have precipitated these reformulations? What is suggested by the persistence of the outsider investigator, the hero of questionable morality who nonetheless solves the crime - and, of course, such questions beg the acknowledgement that Fletch tidily closes his cases and even profits, a feat of which Marlowe was not capable.

Then there is the film(s). We know what fun has become of Chandler's novel: Bogart, Bacall, and Howard Hawks in '46; the Cohen brothers' infamous "Dude" in '98. Fletch ('85)was also adapted for screen, a character driven comedic piece starring Chevy Chase in the midst of arguably the high point of his career, 1985, shortly after Caddyshack ('80) and Vacation ('83), contemporaneous with European Vacation ( '85), and Spies Like Us ('85), and barely a year before Three Amigos ('86). Fletch Lives ('89) was a sequel based entirely on the previous film rather than any of the subsequent McDonald books (there were seven in the series), which suggests the vitality of the screen iteration. In what ways does Chase outshine McDonald? What is the effect of playing up the comedy and playing down the tragedy, and what may have instigated that decision?

Bringing it all together, how do Bogart, Chase, and Jeff Bridges reflect evolving masculinity in the city of Angels? Or, if the masculinity route feels played-out, how about evolving conceptions of crime and criminality, even morality?

It might even be profitable to bring in some supporting films. Produced in the '70s but taking place in the 30's, Chinatown ('74 - and a personal favorite) may productively add to discussions of morality and masculinity in the detective genre, as might Training Day ('01). As a series, I'd consider screening these films in order of production (Big Sleep ('46), Chinatown ('74), Fletch (''85), The Big Lebowski ('98), and Training Day ('01) ). Even given the retrospective nature of Chinatown, going by the decade will likely inspire good discussion. Of course, there is also the auteur element - both in terms of director and actor - which would be easy to discuss in regards to such powerful, popular, and (occasionally) controversial films.