Review of Soft Cinema
A review of the recombinant narrative engine, Soft Cinema, by Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky
Abstract:
Much has been written about the transformative impact of digital technology on contemporary cinema. But while digital imaging – from the large-scale visual effects spectacles of the studio blockbuster to low-end vector-based animation – may be comfortably positioned on a continuum with other “revolutionary” imaging technologies of the previous century (Technicolor, 3D, high definition video, etc.), the Soft Cinema media-processing engine created by media theorist Lev Manovich and designer Andreas Kratky proposes a somewhat more radical intervention into the evolution of cinema as a storytelling apparatus. Indeed, as Manovich notes in his introduction to the recently released DVD Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database, conventional cinema is anachronistically rooted in the logic of the industrial revolution and its assembly-line mentality for delivering sequential narratives. By contrast, Soft Cinema emerges more or less organically from the logic of the computer database and the revised patterns of production/consumption that characterize the digital age.
Published in The Moving Image 2006
Experiments in Interactive Panoramic Cinema
This paper was the result of a presentation delivered by Steve Anderson at the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) conference in San Jose, California. Written with Scott Fisher, et al.
Abstract:
For most of the past century, cinema has been the premier medium for defining and expressing relations to the visible world. However, cinematic spectacles delivered in darkened theaters are predicated on a denial of both the body and the physical surroundings of spectators. To compensate, filmmakers have historically turned to narrative, seducing audiences with compelling stories and realistic characters. This paper describes a year-long investigation into the narrative potentials of interactive immersive cinema that sidestep the narrative preoccupations of conventional cinema, instead focusing on notions of space, movement and embodied spectatorship using an experimental, 8-camera panoramic cinema apparatus.
Published in SPIE Conference Proceedings Volume 5664, March 2005
Media Mapmaker: An Interview with Rick Prelinger
An interview with film archivist Rick Prelinger, focusing on his recent work as an artist and activist at the forefront of the copyright wars.
Abstract:
For over two decades, his name has been synonymous with “Ephemeral Films,” but ever since Rick Prelinger turned over his collection of 50,000 advertising, educational and industrial films to the Library of Congress to be (ironically) preserved as part of our national heritage, he has continued his work as an artist, activist, litigant and librarian at the forefront of the copyright wars. In addition to serving as president of the Internet Archive and co-plaintiff (along with Brewster Kahle) in a pro-public domain lawsuit against the US government, Prelinger completed the all-public domain feature film Panorama Ephemera, which has received acclaim at festivals around the world. Most recently, he and his partner Megan Shaw Prelinger have opened an “appropriation-friendly” library in San Francisco that houses some 40,000 volumes. In all of these efforts, Prelinger remains committed to the value of cultural preservation, contemplation and recombination and a thoughtful engagement with the artifacts of the past.
Published in Res Magazine Sep/Oct 2005
Open Source: Cinema in the Public Domain
An article examining the historical, political and technological implications of the open source movement for cinematic production.
Abstract:
February 24, 2004. Also known as Grey Tuesday. Over 100,000 copies of DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album are downloaded from hundreds of sites across the Internet. An estimated million copies of this celebrated remix of the Beatles’ White Album with Jay-Z’s Black Album are traded over peer-to-peer networks within 24 hours. A symbolic gesture perhaps, but the electronic civil disobedience of Grey Tuesday eloquently speaks to both consumer frustrations with increasingly restrictive copyright laws and the growing power of peer networks to subvert the enforcement of those laws. Clearly the battle lines have been drawn for the culture wars of the 21st century. At stake is the continued existence of a meaningful sphere of free culture called the public domain. The battle promises to be epic, bringing cherished American ideals of originality, creativity and the ability to profit from one’s labor into seeming conflict with equally powerful desires for freedom of speech and expression. And what happens when the movie industry finally has its own Grey Tuesday? In spite of its demonstrated ineffectiveness, the MPAA appears determined to follow the music industry’s shock-and-awe strategy of indiscriminate prosecutions. All of which means more lawsuits, more bitterness, and ultimately, more effective tactics of resistance.
Published in Res Magazine Jan/Feb 2005
Select and Combine: The Rise of Database Narratives
An article examining the movement toward new storytelling sensibilities in interactive artwork at the intersection of cinema, video games, and networked computing
Abstract:
With the flick of a mouse, we glide effortlessly down the gloomy corridors of Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel, floating past cavernous ballrooms and windows overlooking elegant gardens and swimming pools. Around each corner and behind each door, ghostly figures replay events from a past that is at once real and imagined. A Kennedy died here, along with countless villains and plots of Hollywood noir. The number of possible paths through this story space seems limitless. Even familiar rooms tell different stories with each visit and earthquakes periodically rumble through the dilapidated building, triggering a barrage of images and hurling us into new spaces and times. This is the world of Pat O’Neill’s Tracing the Decay of Fiction, a DVD-ROM made in collaboration with the Labyrinth Project at USC’s Annenberg Center for Communication, which for the past five years has been a key player in the loose global network of digital artists and designers charting new territories in the field of interactive database narrative.
Published in Res Magazine Jan/Feb 2004
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Review of The Five Obstructions
Review of The Five Obstructions, directed by Lars Von Trier and Jorgen Leth
Abstract:
Ever since the widespread publication of photographs showing American soldiers torturing Iraqi captives in the Abu Ghraib prison, Michael Moore’s Oscars night exhortation that “we are living in fictitious times,” somehow no longer rings true. The times we are living in seem all too real and, against all expectations, the proof seems to lie in a few dozen grainy digital photographs e-mailed from half way around the world. For a long time now, postmodern culture has comforted itself with the thought that our age is defined by the simulacrum, an exact copy for which there is no original. But even in the midst of a media culture obsessed with remakes and franchising of familiar products, the works that transcend are those which bother to explore in a non-trivial way the relations between people; reality and artifice; old and new, the mixed-up muddle of construction, conceit, authenticity and belief that is contemporary media.
Published in Really Good Films 2003
Review of 28 Days Later
Review of 28 Days Later, directed by Danny Boyle
Abstract:
Cinematic fantasies of the ultimate human Apocalypse, it seems, no longer require nuclear holocaust, alien invasion or hurtling asteroids. In Danny Boyle’s terrifying thriller 28 Days Later, the end of the world as we know it is just one ill-conceived lab experiment and four weeks of rapid infection away. Wrongly pegged as an updated contribution to the zombie-horror genre of the 1970s, 28 Days Later in fact owes more to Hitchcock than to George Romero. Boyle, who directed cult favorites Shallow Grave (1994) and trainspotting (1996) seemed to have succumbed to the world of big-budget Hollywood with his critically reviled The Beach in 2000. With 28 Days Later, however, Boyle reasserts himself as one of the UK’s most compelling directors and a master of edgy suspense.
Published in Really Good Films 2003
Review of The Legend of Suriyothai
Review of The Legend of Suriyothai, directed by Chatri Chalerm Yukol
Abstract:
What would an epic film trumpeting early American history, financed by George W. Bush, starring a favorite White House aid, and featuring the American military in all its glory look like? Oh, and the film would be directed by one of the Bush daughters… It’s a scary thought to be sure, but such a film would parallel the story behind the grand Thai epic, The Legend of Suriyothai, an extravagant history film that has become that country’s box office king, beating out the likes of Godzilla and Jurassic Park II upon its release in 2001, and which is now making its way to American movie screens.
Published in Really Good Films 2003
Dissolving Boundaries: Pat O’Neill Experiments in Hollywood
A profile of industry iconoclast and experimental film legend Pat O’Neill
Abstract:
A new film by Pat O’Neill is to the experimental film world what a planetary alignment is to astrophysicists, a rare and momentous event, promising a glimpse into the workings of laws of light and movement – perhaps even a new way of seeing the world. For O’Neill to complete two projects at once – a 35mm film The Decay of Fiction and a DVD ROM Tracing the Decay of Fiction – is more like a supernova colliding with a black hole: the convergence of two extraordinary phenomena in a single moment – a nearly inconceivable occurrence from a man who thinks nothing of waiting an entire year to photograph a ray of sunlight shining through a window at a particular angle.
Published in Release Print September 2002
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Seeing Is Believing: Unseen Cinema
Seeing Is Believing: Unseen Cinema unearths a new history of the early American avant-garde.
Abstract:
The most interesting histories are those that dispute prevailing narratives or reclaim a past that is in danger of being lost. Indeed, the essence of historiography is discursive and cultural struggle – the preservation, revision and contestation of a consequential past – not the accumulation of polite facts in academic volumes. Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893-1941, a joint project of Anthology Film Archives and the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt, offers one such undertaking. Curated by Bruce Posner, the travelling program of films – a staggering 22 hours’ worth – is a rare attempt at both historical revision and preservation, and if things go well, one that is likely to provoke both controversy and interest in this long-neglected corner of film history.
Published in The Independent July 2001
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Steve Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media and Director of the Ph.D. program in Media Arts & Practice in the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He co-Edits the interdisciplinary online journal Vectors and is the creator of the fair use advocacy site Critical Commons. As a scholar-practitioner working at the intersection of media, culture and technology, his research interests include historiography, the theory and history of emerging technologies, documentary and experimental film and video, and interactive media design.