The Networked Cinema of Attractions

As we talk about the moving image, I want to give you a sense of how at the outset of film recording there was simply recording. As the Lumiere's placed their camera outside their factory to record their workers, there was no sense of a point of view of a character, of someone inside the recording, there was only the camera persons seeing of the scene. It was not until 8 years into film recording that the close up, the reverse shot, the match cut, parallel cutting, tracking shots, the jump cut, the flashback and other devices came to give a grammar to film recording. All of these techniques created a point of view of character. That is showing a close shot of a person, the subsequent shot the audience would read as the point of view of that person.

But what if the camera person and the person recorded were the same person. This leads to the observation, what if we've entered a kind of new beginning of cinema, akin to the cinema of attractions as theorized by Tom Gunning.

Gunning's, term the “cinema of attraction is a cinema that displays its visibility, willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator."  This meaning that cinema could be created, not necessarily as an entertainment function but more along the lines that a film would attract its spectators by presenting something exclusive, something unique.  Gunning also states, “According to Eisenstein, theater should consist of a montage of such attractions, creating a relation to the spectator entirely different from his absorption in ‘illusory imitativeness.’  I pick up this term partly to underscore the relation to the spectator that this later avant-garde practice shares with early cinema: of exhibitionist confrontation rather than diegetic absorption.” 

Gunning compares both Lumière’s and Méliès’ films, along with other filmmakers of 1906, by stating that they all have “a common basis,” which he describes as “cinema of attraction.”  Gunning declares, “one can unite them in a conception that sees cinema less as a way of telling stories than as a way of presenting a series of views to an audience, fascinating because of their illusory power (whether the realistic illusion of motion offered to the first audiences by Lumière, or the magical illusion concocted by Méliès), and exoticism.”  With this said, the act of “cinema of attraction” does not disappear with a narrative domination, rather, it takes on an undercover approach.

  

To the avant-garde artistic circles of the time, cinema was exciting because of its radical "newness"- its ability to produce spectacle with immediacy and impact. When Gunning notes that, "It was precisely the exhibitionist quality of turn-of-the-century popular art that made it attractive to the avante-garde," he links early cinema's refusal of narrative to a refusal of the previous foundations of artistic communication.  To the progressive artists of the early 20th century, film had the ability to produce "exhibitionist confrontation rather than diegetic absorbtion" (66),

While making Revolution of Everyday Life I came to the point where in auditioning actors and meeting artists to be in the film, I began to question my very method of interviewing and auditioning them. Some thing was missing. There was this feeling that there was something more they wanted to tell me, to show me. But me being there, mediating them, got in the way.

I bought several HD flip cameras and asked those interested to take the camera home and to film themselves. I had a teacher at school, the brilliant Shirley Clarke, and the first thing she had us do in our class with her was was to go into a room and video tape ourselves. She wanted us to understand how video was different. And how there was nothing needed to do to create a recording.  This nothing you will discover is much more complex than you might imagine.

Soon enough I started getting the camera back with the recordings. Each participant was given the camera for two or three days and then they had to bring it back for the next person.

And these recordings were very fascinating. 

While the above are real time recordings the below videos are loops with post production sound.

GIFS become loops and make anonymous the authors of these videos. They are not present to us as in the first two.

If you look at Permutations Vol.7 which you find here, there are a number of multi-screen clips, which in this Volume are made from Hollywood films. The still frame below is from Peeping Tom, a British thriller horror film made in 1960 directed by Michael Powell. The film is a about a young man whose father had conducted psychological experiments on him as a boy by filming his reactions to stimuli to his nervous system such as putting a lizard on his bed and sitting at this mother's deathbed. Years later as a young man he re-enacts these experiments as a voyeur who murders women while using a portable movie camera to record their dying expressions of terror.

The shift away from the early cinema of attractions, to following the relay of the gaze, an identification away from the camera and to a character or narrator, has returned today in the always-on-camera recording and playback of the network.

We can characterize the vast production of both still and moving images in network culture as a new kind of cinema, a networked cinema of dis/attraction perhaps.

No longer is there the shot|reverse shot, the relay of the gaze nor is there the interrogation of being seen or constituted by the camera, made a subject by the camera. We now present, display and willingly and wanting exhibits ourselves to the camera.

Here is a clip from my first film Exploding Oedipus. You can see in the clip, the protagonist of the story wants to smash the mirror of himself, the narrative of himself, the camera recording of himself by making a movie. Film here is still working under the regime of representation. It is thought of as a story making machine. A mirror to oneself, a drama unfolding, a narrative authored by someone, not you behind the archive of millions of online recording trying to piece it together.

This new moving image exceeds cinema and television though born from it and as a new technical apparatus is unconstrained and employed for very new and unknown ends.

In Eternal Sunshine, a show I had at the Minsheng Museum of Art, I wanted to look at how cinema once constituted a subject. How we are interpolated into film and in identification see ourselves.  Today of course we are ourselves in what was once film or television through social media.

Here are a selection of stills from part of the exhibit called Still History.

And here is the film, Double Fantasy and a description;

Double Fantasy, an18 min dyptych with Jia Hongsheng, John Lennon, Jean Luc Godard, The Beatles, and the students of Tiananmen premiered at The Minsheng Museum of Art, Shanghai, 2011-12.

Double Fantasy was the title of a John Lennon and Yoko Ono LP released in 1980. It was a collection of songs wherein husband and wife would conduct a musical dialogue. In 'Double Fantasy: On Your Own,' Marc Lafia presents a dialogue between cultures and epochs through a series of pairings, prints, videos and sculpture.

The works trace a movement from social revolutions to private revolutions, from collective states to individual states of mind.

As distinct cultures prior to globalization looked to the other, a double of sorts was produced, leading to a series of productive mis-recognitions, phantasms and mirrorings. Actor Jia Hongsheng in Beijing believes John Lennon to be his father; Jean Luc Godard argues that the French Mao’s red book is the way to analysis and social change; the Beatles go to India and look to the Maharishi to transform their consciousness; and John and Yoko lay in bed in Amsterdam for seven days to inspire peace.

This looking to others not in the cinema of narrative representation but in this new networked cinema of attractions became the subject of my film Hi, How are You Guest 10497. In the film, the actress Raimonda Skeryte, joins myfreecams, 'a website providing live webcam performances by female models, typically featuring nudity and sexual activity often ranging from striptease and dirty talk to masturbation with sex toys. MFC is used mostly by amateur webcam models, or camgirls, who earn money for their performances on the site.Customers of the site can purchase virtual tokens, which can be used to tip performers or watch private shows.' 1

Using the method of self recording I started begin with in Revolution of Everyday Life I asked Raimonda Skeryte, whom by this time I made several films with if she would like to join the MFC service and make a film about it. Over the course of six months, sometimes with two cameras, alone in her apartment she recorded her daily life and what she saw on screen and those she interacted with as she became a cam girl.

Of course these recording are set up with a narrative structure but in the entire film except for one brief outing in Korean Town New York she only interacts with voices, text and images of the computer screen.

I want to show you the opening and the last seven minutes of the film, Hi How are You Guest 10497.
In this new cinema of attractions, the camera looks as much onto the world as it does inward and onto ourselves. We are the attraction and we construct ourselves as such.

This above picture is from Tinder, a social dating service where I stamped 'Liked' on this smart image of young woman off centered and looking out from the framed rectangle common to cineaste in looking through a virtual viewfinder.

The construction of our image for consumption, once the expert knowledge of madison avenue and media professionals is now a necessary and ordinary skill, though some are much better than others, such people we call today, influencers.

Now I want to show you the ending of Revolution of Everyday Life.  Because it asks the question how can we take all these private recordings and make through them a public, a politics, a collective. I made another version of this film called Revolution of the Present, asking the same question where I interviewed Michael Hardt and he spoke of the multitude as a new kind of public. You can see the trailer here.

These are two very different approaches to films about similar subjects and that is, is there something we share and want in common.  Can there be things we may want universally.  And do we go about gaining and living those things.

In the above image from Revolution of Everyday Life you see private actions and in time in the film a group forms that has a desire to create public actions. 

Before I show the ending I want to read you this quote about the film

'the revolution of everyday life, the film tries to offer an alternative to the problem of the impotency we are all in: to go back and become animals, monkeys, lions, swans, start again, recapture the moments of real existence. two woman love, fuck, hate, beat, shout, cry with no social context, why? to make sense of it all, shameless creatures who cant handle it all anymore, this is their protest, this is what maybe we all should do,but we probably can't unless we are true to our self or just crazy.' Lior Rosenfeld

In Revolution of the Present we see people from all over the world similarly take to the streets, become present collectively expressing there desires. 

In both films we must ask what is the efficacy of these actions. And more so how do the films work, what is fiction, what is real, what are the forms that constitute their arguments. And what is the new form of networked cinema, where the reader with every click creates the next edit, sutures their cinema of attractions. 

1. The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde By: Tom Gunning

2. MyFreeCams