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Magazine
THE STATE OF THE NATION
New future aesthetic
K. HARIHARAN
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Filmmakers need to grow beyond screening constraints and liberate the rigid frame that has regulated film viewings so far.
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Direct interaction: A scene from “Minority Report”.
If the 20th century was projected by inflexible framed images on the silver screen, the 21st century will relieve itself of these two spatial limitations of the frame and the screen. By sheer coincidence the cinema of 20th century has been regulated
for the most part by two giants — namely Arriflex, the big motion picture camera manufacturer, and Kodak, the primary film material resource. Together they have basically determined cinema’s aesthetic paradigms. While Arriflex spelt out film aesthetics in terms of compositional formats, depth of field, focus etc; Kodak determined colour tones, contrast, sound reproduction capabilities etc. In short, the basic film language of 20th century cinema was dominated by the demands of technology riding on a massive wave of consumerism and an equally dominant star system.
Real cinema
The 21st century will hopefully see the emergence of real cinema along with its proper ‘authorship’. So far, the idea of a good or bad filmmaker/author has largely been polarised on two fronts, namely the box-office collections on the one hand and exclusive jury awards on the other. While the elite festival circuit located authorship on the level of ‘perceived’ complexity handled by the film director, the box office meters were largely centred on stars and entertainment values! So if a film was considered entertaining it had very little chance to get into the good books of the critical juries! This absurd divide now meets its nemesis not because of sensible critics but more due to the intervention of simpler and accessible imaging technology. The ubiquitous DV camera makes the whole business of acquisition and transmission of images and sounds so facile that anybody can be empowered to become a filmmaker today. The very technology that provided cinema its ‘complicated’ façade has also provided cinema with its epitaph!
Celluloid cinema will soon be extinct. In the next few years, over half the number of film theatres across the world will have digital projection facilities. In this transition period, the digital camera and projector will however appear to be merely replacing the celluloid mechanisms. But the true change will emerge when cinema’s fraternity of filmmakers begin to revisit the fundamental mode of digital imaging, namely the Pixel. This highly discreet, randomly accessible measure needs to be addressed within its own paradigm in order to evolve the new aesthetic for the future.
For how long can viewers be passively bound to their seats with no way to interact with analog projection? For how long can filmmakers tell stories within the limited aspect ratios of the screen? So, for a start, filmmakers have to liberate the rigid frame that has regulated all film viewings so far. Quite like the way that painters and sculptors have managed to grow over thousands of years without being shackled by any convention in order to address the space of their art works, filmmakers too need to grow beyond the screening constraints. In some ways, this change is already happening without us actually noticing it! Today we watch a large number of films, actually meant for the big screen, on small screens thanks to DVDs. We skip chapters, zoom in, frieze frame, alter colour tones and impose subtitles without seeking to know whether the filmmaker/author preferred their work to be viewed in such manners. A variety of video installation artists all over the world are also exploring these new frontiers providing several clues to the future of cinema!
Radical technology
The Pixel-based imaging and sound technology radically alters the way in which stories can be told and experienced at the same time. A clue to this kind of imaging is provided in the opening sequence of “Minority Report”, a futuristic film made by Spielberg. Images are projected from nowhere onto frameless transparent glass sheets allowing the viewer to directly intervene and interact as we see Tom Cruise shifting frames around in order to piece together a mystery. A little later we see Cruise playback holographic images of his late wife as the camera tracks behind to see her in a 3D image. Honestly, this is not far away for us too!
There are two important factors at play here. On one hand we see the strong parallel role of Democratic institutions and the democratisation of the media, making it difficult for us to say as to which is the bigger leveraging force. Media or politics? Secondly, quite like the way that universities of the 16th century and resultant public education drove the myth out of the god-sent written text, making every citizen into a ‘writer’, the information technology boom of the 21st century has empowered all of us to think and recreate thoughts in digital images and sounds. There will still be those puritans who shall lament the loss of exclusivity and emergence of mediocrity. All we can say is that by making more people literate the world of literature has not become poorer. So why should we expect cinema to become mediocre just because it is now available to all and sundry? And something tells me that we, in India, are better poised for this quantum leap than many of our developed nations.
More creative ways
Diversity is going to play a key role in the handling of digital media technology. Thanks to living in a nation with multiple languages, religions, ethnic groups and cultural traits we will find it easier to relate to parallel strands of thoughts in a simultaneous manner. This multifaceted mental faculty that we take for granted can actually be the key to the foundations of digital thought, namely the ability to random access, interactive functioning and discreet logic. And along with an enormously complex oral tradition, which gives us the power to improvise and transcend narrowly written codes, we can enter the realm of cinematic entertainment in more creative ways. Film and media schools all over the world are experimenting with new ways of dealing with digital imaging and sound especially in the field of animation, an area sorely neglected in Indian cinema. While most of them feed such ‘talent’ into industry ‘placements’, there is bound to be quite a lot who would have empowered themselves with a new language to encounter the dumbing-down after effects of ‘globalisation’.
I am reminded of a Mani Ratnam film screening, which had an enormously popular song by Ilayaraja. The viewers whistled and clapped all along and, when the song got over, a few of them stopped the projection and got the operator to rewind the film and project it all over again! In a few years this will be taken care of by interactive digital screens, which will take care of our highly pro-active audiences! After all, aren’t films meant for our rasikas?
The writer is the Director, L.V. Prasad Film and TV Academy.
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