information movies

movies: images changing over time (moving images) with or without sound.

I have been thinking about the crisis movies are experiencing today because of new media (predominantly video games). it is similar to what painting went through at the advent of photography: when painting became unnecessary and was thought inferior for representation, practitioners were forced to recognize what was essential to their medium, the material and viewing conditions themselves (color, surface, exhibition, etc.), not subject matter.

since both movies and new media fit the definition given above we must amend it in order to differentiate what used to be from what is new. here, it is tempting to discuss the difference between film and digital technology, or the dissemination of movies over the internet, or the overwhelming popularity of games like halo 3, but what truly sets new media apart is not format or exhibition but interactivity, the ability for the audience to participate in what is seen and heard.

this also changes our understanding of the definition of movies, by making explicit what was only implied before: moving images with or without sound that are non-interactive. until now, this third characteristic of the medium was irrelevant to the definition because there was no other, interactive medium from which to differentiate what was just images with sound. but this quality, or lack thereof, was always an essential, if latent, part of the movie experience.

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in october 2005, speaking against simultaneous theatrical and home release, m. night shyamalan said to the showeast convention of cinema exhibitors and distributors:

"I'm going to stop making movies if they end the cinema experience. if there's a last film that's released only theatrically, it'll have my name on it. this is life or death to me. if you tell audiences there's no difference between a theatrical experience and a DVD, then that's it, game over, and that whole art form is going to go away slowly."

but it is the remote control, not the DVD, that makes what he calls the "theatrical experience" of movies, but we understand is the non-interactive experience, different. alfred hitchcock, to whom shyamalan is often compared, put it this way: "the length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder." it is not the popcorn and throat-clearing we usually associate with the theatrical experience that makes it essential, not sitting in the "common dark," but sitting itself as opposed to playing and pausing. it is being creatively passive, which does not mean intellectually passive, to the experience of the movies.

recently vadim sent me this article about the slow pace of andrei tarkovsky films, which some say are boring and the author argues offer spiritual improvement. in the light of our new definition of movies, it becomes clear that tarkovsky's insistence on long shots and long movies (andrei rublev, tarkovsky's film about the 15th century icon painter, runs 205 minutes) derives directly from non-interactivity. indeed, a movie's pace and length are only relevant so long as the viewer cannot pause, rewind or fast-forward. difficult, if not impossible, to watch straight through, tarkovsky's movies challenge and raise his audience's consciousness by being defiantly non-interactive: long and boring.

* * *

from this new understanding we arrive back at the beginning, the crisis between movies and new media; but now there is a line drawn in the sand, on one side interactivity and on the other non-interactivity. there are already moviemakers who have chosen sides: on the DVD of timecode, which consists of four 97 minute-long shots shown simultaneously in splitscreen, the pause and rewind functions have been disabled. and the DVDs of david lynch's mulholland drive and inland empire have no chapters to navigate by. on the other hand, michael lew of the MIT media lab europe created office voodoo, "an algorithmic film with a real-time editing engine" that responds to viewer input.

for now, however, the majority of movies exist in the in-between zone; on youtube and ipods we have navigable progress bars, on the DVDs shyamalan spoke out against we have chapter breaks, angle and zoom control. but skipping ahead or pausing a movie to get a glass of water is a far cry from massive online role-playing games; it is only interactivity lite, the worst of both worlds. but as movie ticket sales continue to fall and video games proliferate (halo 4 and 5, wii II) , their will be a radicalization of non-interactivity. shyamalan's dream, or nightmare, of movies that are released only in theaters, -- and they won't be multiplexes but art-houses and museums -- will come true. and there will be stranger, as yet unimagined forms of exhibition.


I will continue to think and write on this subject and welcome comments and ideas.
-george