'We shoot digital in the context of being part of the action'

Soviet Cinema under montage rules ( which are formatted by a take on dialectical materialism in way of contradiction) revolutionized film making and in effect paved the way for the modern feature film. If no October  then no Star Wars. In terms of intimacy and vox popery consider Vertov's extraordinary Man with a Movie camera (1929) which is my favorite. But the (silent) voices are of individuals engaged in a mammoth project.

Similar vox popery is standardly deployed by radical film makers like Peter Watkins.

Sampler: Culloden

He also did a massive film in similar mode on the Paris Commune.

Sampler: La Commune

I'm not so keen on Godard...

But since I've done a bit of both video and audio editing in socialist garb I think the main task is to edit rather than not. Thats' YouTubes burden isn't it -- video unedited and published raw? Spare us the extra bits...and terrible sound.

The problem - or the advantage -- with digital media is that you can choose to tell your story so many different ways by cutting and placing.

I thought Paul Benedek's re- telling of the Tent Embassy forum in Sydney recently

...is a very good example of gathering material and bringing it together.

I had considered and suggested that the SA form its own video club to encourage support and upskilling ... and deal with the ongoing problem of getting the stuff circulated , out there or (egads!) viral.

I had also experimented in the past with an online channel aggregation: VideoActiv and recruited videographers as far away as Poland.

Nowadays with these small very cheap video cameras (and phones) shooting videois so darn easy. Editing, however, is much more difficult. I shot some of mybest video on a digital still camera with a vid option.

The problem generally is not that there is not enough video being shot but that people don't shoot anything -- not even still photographs let alone good ones -- as part of their journalistic engagement. The advantage of the new small video cameras (and I got mine for $50!) and the standard digital still camera or phone is that you can choose to shoot either still or video material.

More often a slideshow is more engaging than a poorly edited video that took a week or two to pull together.

Then, when folk shoot stuff they then often lock it away on Facebook making it so difficult to 'share'.

So I suggest some simple rules:

(1) If you shoot video: edit it before publishing it.(Or edit as you shoot --
with a mind's eye for that magic "under 10 minutes" rule )
(2) If you shoot still images publish your photographs on Picasa and mark them
'public'.
(3) If you shoot still, reduce the size of your images before you upload them
.Much easier DIY.
(4) If you sound is crap -- don't use it on the video. Bring in text instead or
maybe risk a voice over. I prefer text.

There's an interesting technique (under Montage influences) pursued by the Canadian film maker Arthur Lipsett:

Sampler:Very Nice, Very Nice

which 'alienates' sound from images. I think it suits the audio recording conditions we often find ourselves in. In fact you run two montages not necessarily in sync with one another: image and sound.

I guess I see Lipsett (now deceased -- he suicided in 1986) as a later day Vertov.

Today if you use the right free apps you can download and edit any video on YouTube as well as download and edit just the sound from any video on YouTube.

On terms of Montage -- and vox popery -- the world's your oyster.

A good example of what you can play with is what Brendan Cooney does with Kapitalism 101: He often uses old cartoons with voice over.

And then of course in full pro mode is the excellent 'the story of stuff'...

I think the point about film that matters is the way it is manipulated to engineer POV. (This is why I like the cinema of Iranian film maker Abbas Kiarostami who's 10 and ABC Africa you just have to watch to see what's possible so easily shooting straight without engineering.

Hollywood as well as TV using several cameras, over the shoulder POV shots and smart edits drag you into the intimacies of the moment in the same way that the novel is a quintessential bourgeois form. Then there is the way acting is played for the camera...

OUR advantage is that when we shoot digital in the context of being part of the action and also politically engaged with the subject we potentially can access a purer more real voice regardless of how grossly amateur and unskilled we are. We simply don't have the skills or tools to manipulate or warp the story telling.

So rawness rules with a certain undeniable reality about it...and passion.

Peter Watkins on the Media Crisis -- from Culloden to America's Pravda

Culloden (1964)

For people of my generation you still may require a long memory to draw into its awareness Peter Watkins.

Inasmuch as Watkins registers in a broader consciousness it is because of his video docudramas made in the 1960s  especially    Culloden  which was shown by the BBC in 1964 - and The War Game (1965) which wasn't. In fact the BBC pulled it from showing on British tubes.

The film nonetheless went on  to win an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Watkins has been in exile from Britain since The War Game was banned but has continued to make his own style of film often in Scandinavia.

 I saw The War Game and Culloden decades ago and can vouch that,  as was the film maker's intention, they infest your mind well after the end titles have run.

Having just watched Culloden again I am a bit taken aback by the fact I have neglected this great film for so very long. But since copies are rare, I suspect I am not alone.

Culloden was Watkins' first full-length film. It was also his first use of his docudrama style in which actors portray historical characters being interviewed by filmmakers on the scene, "as though it was happening in front of news cameras".Watkins also "wanted to break through the conventional use of professional actors in historical melodramas, with the comfortable avoidance of reality that these provide, and to use amateurs - ordinary people - in a reconstruction of their own history." He accordingly used an all-amateur cast from London and the Scottish Lowlands for the royalist forces, and people from Inverness for the clan army. This later became a central technique of Watkins' filmmaking.
According to an estimate by the cinematographer for the film, Dick Bush, about 85% of all camerawork in Culloden was hand-held. This newsreel style shooting gave an already gritty reality a sense of present action. Culloden looked like a documentary of an event which occurred before the camera was invented. From this the film illustrates the recognizable documentary style of ‘cinema verite’. (reference)

I am in no position to rule on Watkins style -- much as it impresses , indeed, overwhelms me. I am also yet to catch up with The War Game  and his more recent films like La Commune (Paris, 1871)  -- made in 2000 -- and  Edvard Munch (1976). 

I guess over the decades I have seen  many documentary films. To be honest I don't always take to the form as they can be a very mixed bag of good intention and moralism seeded with factoring. To be honest I often enough prefer my documentation in audio format rather than being lulled into a manufactured belief by film. Outrage can come easily to film making. That may seem to make me out as a bit of a Luddite...  but -- to be honest -- I don't always trust film.

Here's an exercise: go edit a video and than try and say you did not manipulate the message to your personal preference/your POV spin doctoring. It's easy. Video is so plastic.

We could get into a McLuhanist discussion -- and I've spent a lot of time there -- mulling over media form and media message -- but in my followup on Watkins I came upon a essay of his -- The Media Crisis -- that is standout fascinating and very much to the point.

I suggest  you go read Watkin's essay which challenges the existing rigid and hierarchical processes of the mass audiovisual media (MAVM) , because it may make you engage in a rethink about what you watch...or, at least, how you watch it.

I'm thinking this through while I study the essay and work my way through whatever Watkins films I can access. But this segment from the revised introduction  to the essay captures substantial part of his argument:

Is documentary filmmaking being compromised as a result of the media crisis? Of course it is! Most documentary films - especially those made for TV - are now so uniformly formatted that it's difficult to tell them apart. One of the most striking aspects of the Monoform - along with the sheer mass of audiovisual material flooding out from cinema, TV, computer and mobile phone screens - is its ability to blur a/v messages, to meld individual subjects and concerns into one amorphous mass. It is this effect that undermines our sense of priority and personal involvement with global issues, and our ability to place events within a meaningful and holistic context. The fact that the greatest potential disaster of our lifetime has developed under our very noses, as we've sat on our couches being ‘served’ by the MAVM, is a indication of the efficacy of this system. We sat there losing the ability to tell the difference...

In an attempt to differentiate their work, a number of filmmakers are even elevating their own assault on the audience. A study of recent documentaries (The Corporation, Supersize Me, Michael Moore's films, others critical of George Bush and the Iraq War, etc.) reveals a style and pattern wherein the personality of the filmmaker is often as important as the subject of the film itself. And once again, the audience encounters a tornado of rapid editing; fragmented talking heads; twisting and cork-screwing camera work; clever digitized animation; and a theatrical in-your-face disrespect for the nearest corporate figures. All of which is heralded as cutting edge, radical and relevant - but which in fact barely masks a disingenuous and authoritarian relationship to the audience. Some of these films even claim to be critical of the media - but not only is their own language form centralised and hierarchical (a double-irony in the case of Manufacturing Consent, which features Naom Chomsky), they also never actually critique the form and process of the MAVM (including in their own films).

Oops! This seems like heresy does it not? Our beloved docoes

A little later, no doubt in frustration, Watkins asks, "Why does alternative journalism think that simply changing the agenda and the media-makers - leaving form, process, and relationship to the audience untouched - will solve the media crisis? "

This makes for radical reading delivered with  urgency...

But for all its intensity, I think Watkins drives home a salient point.  We may seemingly be delivered night after night exposés a'plenty in video form but all  that is expected of us is a heartfelt tut tut as though the world on screen  is foreign to the one we inhabit and could actively do something about.

Peter Watkin's Statement

• 1. Media Crisis - Use and Personal Prologue
• 2. Revised Introduction to Media Crisis
• 3. Role of American MAVM, Hollywood Monoform
• 4. European, Canadian, Scandinavian (etc.) MAVM
• 5. Media Education, Popular culture, Violence
• 6. Filmmakers, Festivals and the Repression
• 7. Role of the Global Justice Movement
• 8. Public-alternative Processes and Practices
• 9. Conclusion
• 10. Appendices
• 11. CNN - America's Pravda

Making a journalistic point via many media forms

We've banged away here in some large measure about multimedia and how platforms such as video and audio impact on how we make a point.-- could rather than do make a point.

If you are interested in this topic and want to quickly skill up,  Adam Westbrook is offering a free to download e-book on multimedia journalism. And the tips and wherewithall  about tech skills shared aint half bad.

Westbrook advances a business model but he nonetheless captures the gist of what' sat stake when he writes:

the journalist of the future is a reporter, a video journalist,  a photo-journalist, audio journalist and interactive  designer, all-in-one. They shoot and edit films, audio slideshows, podcasts, vodcasts, blogs, and longer articles.   They may have one specialism out of those, but can go  somewhere and cover a story in a multitude of platforms.

VIDEO Videojournalism -- new media and the activist milieu

I had been researching the various online options in way of advancing one's political perspectives. So I moved from cinema verite to documentary making to journalism -- but to a new type of journalism : video journalism

This new option is rather interesting phenomenon that warrants some scrutiny.

Video journalism or videojournalism is a form of broadcast journalism, where the production of video content in which the journalist shoots, edits and often presents his or her own material. While you may come across it appended to some TV news segments where it has been embraced keenly in among the British print media as a way to develop and extend their online news wares.

Of course this sounds very much like YouTube journalism -- and it is indeed a development from 'web tv' -- but its new enough to start now being formatted and theorised over so that now it is being taught at any number of journalism schools as standard upskilling.

In the person of figures like David Dunkley Gyimah -- video journalism has been generating its own stars.If you read your Gyimah you'll be taught that video journalism is the best thing since Caxton's printing press.

Perhaps there is a point to the assertion -- but if you can transcend the hype, especially in Great Britain -- you begin to wonder that if the pros and would-be-pros can do it, why can't we?

Of course that's what we do and have done for a few years now. The activist milieu got into using light portable cameras to produce short YouTubable videos a few years back and the phenomenon keeps growing apace such that if you go to a political event, especially a rally, you are likely to be able to find a video of it online the day after shot and published online by a fellow activist who attended with a video camera.

In fact, for some events, rallies and demonstrations especially , video has become the main medium of representing and recording them.

That said, now that the professional journoes are working the same territory in much the same way, that doesn't mean that our voice still can't get a hearing. It does mean however, that while we can ape the big boys as we can with publishing newspapers, the issue,as always, is distribution. (More on that at another time).

In this regard a post by Adam Westbrook -- The ultimate budget film making kit -- is well worth reading, as for now there is a lot of technological obsession among video journalists that can cost newbies well over $10,00 to match.

On the Activist Toolkit we may suggest a much cheaper budget than even Westbrook does. Of course spend more and you'll get better quality image and sound -- but the content is always going to be up to you and really content has to rule.

As the famous photojournalist of the 20th century, Robert Capa (he shot picture right) said, "If your picture isn't good enough, you're not close enough." Given Capa's life, I don't think he was talking just about inches or centimetres. I think he was talking about the issues and the politics. Indeed that's what we've got and the main stream media does not -- we identify with the content not just make it.

And in an ironic way, as the theorists are getting their teeth into the entity called 'videojournalism', they are trying to take that imperative of working close and generalise it as a principle. In doing so they begin to format protocols for the use of equipment that make a lot of sense. As Gyimah argues this ain't television -- this has a new language which is anti-aesthetic. He could have easily suggested there aren't any rules either just the time pressure of the finished edit.

As I've written here before, the everyday Venezuelans who make video at AlbaTV are doing it almost organically -- the working in close, the vox pops, the clip's narrative style,the primacy of content over form, etc. as they are working in a very populist mode where audience and videographer are more than likely in head space sync.

But there's one other element I think is worthwhile noting, and for me it has to be a key feature of these new tools/toys: formality collapses. In this regard I want to refer you to a conversation which I published in a post last year -- Ten: Abbas Kiarostami's new digital wave. While Kiarostami is an artist he works in a sort of cinema verite/reality TV style and in that understands how tool and subject get on or don't get on.

He has some potent points to make about these new Mini DV digital cameras that are well worth taking to heart, long before the videojournalist hype drowns us in expensive rhetoric.

In that regard his outlook is closer to videobloggers like Jay Dedman *(who toured here last year) than to the professionalised milieu of journalism.

However to get a feel for the point being made, any documentary film you think was terrific -- Fahrenheit 9/11, Super Size Me, Harlan County, Dont Look Back and An Inconvenient Truth to name a sample -- were all shot with maybe 3 or 4 person crews or more crawling all over their subjects getting the image and sound just so, with any number of set ups. (Although Super Size Me was possibly not shot that way). What Dedman and Kiaraostami are alluding to is something that is not 'in your face' -- that is relaxed in the way it sponsors a reaction from the subjects. That rachets down the formality and artificiality involved with 'looking into the camera.'

• My Videojournalism bookmarks on delicious

*Jay Dedman's theories about videoblogging were bought to Australia in may this year. I missed his talks but if you want to catch up, read his books or chat with him by joining the videobloggers egroup.

New site for Miro fans and web video creators

I am indeed a Miro fan as the new build is a great video and audio aggregator. On top of that, here's a chance to develop your own video DIY --Video WTF .

Also, if you don't know, on The Activist Toolkit (there's a link to it always in the tabs above) we've created an introductory section on Creating internet videos/TV which is often updated.

Web video is so very easy to create and even if you have only a digital camera or mobile phone -- YouTubing type video is within your reach. Your options are discussed on the Activist Toolkit site which carries a lot of Miro links.

Since I've been playing with video editing for a while now the often raised question concerns video editing software. Well if you get on over to the Creating internet videos/TV section, you'll be able to explore these two excellent options:

• Movie Maker Portable --
  the original version of Windows Movie Maker with more bells and whistles than the current one and totally free.
• VirtualDub ---
  isn't as easy to use as Movie Maker but once you've mastered it's interface editing is sure to be many times faster while offering you greater control over t your edit. A simply powerful free program that many people prefer to all the other editing programs with their high prices. At Ratbag Media we've switch to VirtualDub and use other programs only for occasional effects.

Hello Miro Fans,

Today we're launching a new collaborative community site for video creators to ask questions and offer answers for anything related to video production-- cameras, editing, publishing, and more. We think this will be an extremely useful site for the video community at large. It's called Video WTF, which we think really sums up how we feel when we're stuck on with a camera or editing problem.

We could really use your help getting this new community off the ground!

Here is the url: http://www.videowtf.com

There are three things you can do to help:

1. Tell your friends-- mention the site on twitter, blog it, and forward this message to anyone you know who is a video creator or video expert.

2. Ask questions! Have a question about video production? Stuck on something? Looking for the right tool? Ask a question.

3. Offer an answer-- take a look at the questions that have already been posted and jump in with an answer. Here are the questions that have already been asked -- http://videowtf.com/questions


The site runs on the same software that powers the popular programming help site, Stack Overflow. We think it will work very well for video creators.

VIDEO Farrokhzad & Kiarostami -- Iranian Cinema Rocks

I was searching for articles about Abbas Kiarostami -- the Iranian film director -- when I came upon this one --Forough Farrokhzad and The House is Black By Jason Price.

In it Price writes about an interview with Kiarostami which carried an amendment "that caught my attention and which I still remember, he wrote: "Taste of Cherry solidifies Kiarostami's position as the most important filmmaker working today. In art-cinema terms (though Americans don't know it yet) we are living in the age of Kiarostami, as we once did in the Age of Goddard". For those not into sixties passions, Jean-Luc Godard was a leading figure in French New Wave cinema renowned for his political engagements and cinema radicalism .Godard tried to apply Bertolt Brecht's theories of theatre to the screen.

He was also very much an in vogue figure among the sixties left.

But hey! the analogy is well made and to understand it you really have to watch some of the cinema of Kiarostami especially(see full list):

Taste of Cherry
The Wind Will Carry Us
Ten
10 on Ten

Needless to say, as I've written here before, I think Kiarostami is the bee's knees.

Anyway, my passions aside, Price's essay introduces us to a precursor of Kiarostami -- the Iranian poet and film maker, Forough Farrokhzad (pictured top right).

I haven't caught up with as much of Foroogh as I'd like to but I've been chasing down a copy of her 1962 documentary film The House is Black. There is a simply terrible print of it on Google Video. However there is a sample clip on YouTube which I've embedded below:

It's not a nice topic -- leprosy -- especially to watch, but consider how Foroogh has chosen to represent the lives of these sufferers. If you know your Kiarostami you can see the relationship between the two film makers -- something which, given Foroogh's reputation in Iran, has a potent political quotient.

I realize that many people won't 'get' Kiarostami's significance nor the harbinger to his work that is in the cinema and poetry of Forough Farrokhzad. But Price's essay, although pretentious in places, charts the significance at stake very well indeed.

And if you haven't taken in any Iranian cinema -- you don't know what you are missing. My 18 year old son has one absolutely favorite movie --Marjane Satrapi's Persopolis.-- another film from Iran.

So there's only one thing more to say:Iran rocks!

Video communication without intermediaries

Since I am savaged still by the handicap of feeling perennially crook, I am taking the opportunity to watch online video with as much abandon as sharing a download limit with a teenager will allow. I'm also utilising Miro to access movies I haven't seen in yonks.

(Psst: Torrents is the way...to go)

And in this state of existence I've come across two video streams that are media gems.

• Shadow World by David S. Kessler is a collection of documentary vignettes no more than 4 minutes long which celebrates the everyday of every one of us. And these short segments taken from people's lives and outlook are achingly beautiful. Kessler describes the project this way:
  

  The process is fairly straightforward. I walk the streets under the El tracks, camera and tripod in hand, mostly concentrating on the play and power that the El structure has on the buildings and streets below. I stop at points where I feel that its impact is the strongest, allowing the trains and the tracks to be the one reoccurring character that forces itself into each moment. The people I talk to are all strangers. I try to let them steer the conversation. There isn’t much (if any) prying to get them to tell me their stories. The intent is to appreciate that moment of interaction - whether something is revealed to me, a stranger, or not.
  The moments I capture are boiled down to three to four minute episodes. The straight cuts and removal of my own presence, all manufactured to create as close to a real-time depiction of that moment as possible, aiming to put the audience in my shoes as much as I can – challenging the audience to leave judgment behind and connect with these strangers as I have tried to, to appreciate the beauty and poetry in the shadows of everyday life.

• Albatv: is as far as I can make out a Latin American TV service distributed online as part of a broader news feed.Based in Venezuela it is part of the new push to democratize media in that country now in the throws of building 21st Century Socialism. As the AlbaTV web site informs us (and here we rely on Google for a translation):

  Alba TV plans to construct a different communication model, antagonistic to the dominant model of social communication, a task that can not be delegated but must be undertaken directly by the workers, peasants, indigenous people, the oppressed, because in this model of communication there can be no intermediaries.

  Such a mission may seem right on the money or the mark (or marx) but what struck me as I watched the short , punchy videos produced by Alba is that this is indeed "a different communication model." I've covered protests and campaigns with microphone and recording device; and I've begun to explore video as a communication medium -- so I've spent some real time in the context on which Alba works -- but Alba has created a form of video reportage that warrants study and emulation.
  The clips may seem rough cuts devoid of decoration and seeming carelessly edited. But when you watch one than another you begin to realize that it is video without pretense focused on communication without intermediaries. So, if you watch Alba -- as I urge you to, despite what may be your lack of Spanish -- the camera is in among the protests; the camera is talking with the people who struggle; the camera is not distant at all nor mediating the exchange through the manipulations of journalese. It has merged with the mass -- so to speak -- as a player in the struggle being represented. No intermediaries. If only this were the rule of law on YouTube! Or the way we lefty videographers always shoot our demoes and protests.
  So I'm saying that if you are wanting a crash course in making a campaign video -- AlbaTv is your Video Making 101.
  

The Silent Revolution -- video editing

Without Lenin, we wouldn't enjoy Hollywood half as much. The one idea the October revolution definitely gave us was the notion that a film is made in the editing suite as much as on the set. Think of the end of The Godfather, cutting between a baptism and the brutal assassinations of the heads of the five families - pure Eisenstein montage -- Johnathan Jones, The Guardian
Read more...

VIDEO: Dziga Vertov -- Man with a Movie Camera

Man with a Movie Camera, is an experimental 1929 silent documentary film, with no story and no actors, by Russian director Dziga Vertov. While an unashamedly 'art film' it is very powerful experience which utilizes a range of cinematic techniques designed to feature the star -- the Soviet Union itself.

You can watch the whole film on the Internet Archive but that file is without a soundtrack. So I've pulled all the segments available on YouTube together here which also includes a brilliant sound track -- the composer of which I cannot as yet discover as several scores have been written for the movie since its release.

I find the whole film mesmerizing...

"The film Man with a Movie Camera represents
AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC TRANSMISSION
Of visual phenomena
WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES
(a film without intertitles)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCRIPT
(a film without script)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A THEATRE
(a film without actors, without sets, etc.)
This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema – ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY – on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature."

VIDEO: From Eisenstien to YouTube Cinéma vérité via Marx

A Very Public Sociologist offers a informative introduction to early Soviet cinema.

Phil's post touches on the great film directors such as Sergei Eisenstein and references this sequence (below) which is the famous scene on the Odessa Steps. To my knowledge the sequence has been replicated in part a few times -- by Akira Kurosawa and Brian De Palma (The Untouchables), to name two.

The summary of Eisenstein's cinematic approach is very useful:

Eisenstein mounted his shots and joined them along various formal and thematic conflicting parameters - straight shots juxtaposed to diagonal ones, light/dark shots, and conflicts in the direction and rhythm of motion (right-to-left to left-to-right), camera distance conflicts (long shots to close-ups, etc). Through these juxtapositions of brief shots, which had a physiological effect on viewers, Eisenstein forged emotions and ideas. For him the illusion of continuity and the focus upon individual heroes encourage an anti-revolutionary false consciousness.

His most comprehensive and effective use of the conflict montage can be found in the Odessa steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin.The scene consists of a dazzling series of conflicting shots and editing that powerfully convey the horror caused by Tsarist troops walking in formation down the Odessa steps while shooting and dispersing a crowd of protesters. Such cinematic attractions over thematic concerns lead the spectator in the direction desired by the director.

He then goes on to compare Dziga Vertov to Eisenstein in a descriptive summary passage:

Vertov's oeuvre was different. He believed only documentary shots of real-life situtations in revolutionary societies can the truth be revealed. He tried to follow Marx and Engels who wrote "the turning of history into world history is not indeed a mere abstract art on the part of the self-consciousness, the world spirit or of any other metaphysical spectre, but a quiet material, empirically verifiable act." For Vertov "we hold the ability to show and elucidate life as it is, considerably higher than the occasionally diverting doll games that people call theatre. Vertov constantly compared the fiction film to witchcraft and drugs since for him fiction was nothing but a reflection of ideologies whose function was to turn the spectator away from his awareness of the real processes of production and from truth. He therefore disliked Eisenstein's fictional recreation of events, and called for the allocation of funds to documentary rather than fictional films. In shooting, Vertov preferred the use of candid cameras in places where his presence would go unnoticed. Only in such a manner can the filmmaker make "the invisible visible, the unclear clear ...; making falsehood into truth."

This may seem to suggest that Vertov was a bit of an ideological nutter. Nonetheless, his influence has been massive and if you watch the opening (many) scenes in Man with a Movie Camera (see clip below)-- driven by a powerful musical score -- it's easy to see why.

I guess you can call this 'revolutionary cinema' on several levels -content, style, influence -- but now that we are in the YouTube age and we all can so easily become men or women with our own movie cameras (and video editing programs that are many times easier and more powerful than any thing the Soviets ever had) , what are we supposed to think about these early cinema radicals, imbued as they were with a desire to make Marxism aesthetically practical ?

This was a preoccupation for many artists in the twenties and thirties and the quest extended to Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht in theatre, Kurt Weill and Dmitri Shostakovich in music -- to name but a few.

So when we come to today's digital options I wonder if we can draw any inspiration from Marx via these pioneering and so influential originators? Is the pursuit of style and form just an indulgent wank? Or is there some new conjuncture possible as we embrace the digital age online and learn to master its tools?

I think there is. Just as the 1936 essay by Walter Benjamin -- The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. -- predicts the democratic potential the digital universe offers us, maybe it's time we began to think this issue through with a bit more verve than simply marveling at the creative era that was ushered in by the 1917 Russian Revolution.

What we need to do , I guess, is create our own version of Cinéma vérité even if its just for the sake of 10 minute grabs on YouTube. All we need do is develop an attitude and style that ticks all the boxes we want to tick.

What could be easier? So off you go: go shoot some cinema.


The Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin

Man with a Movie Camera : Opening

Some notes on web multimedia

by Dave Riley

Unfortunately here in downtown Northgate in the shadow of the Golden Circle pineapple cannery I've been "much under the weather."

That's a very apt term -- "under the weather" -- because the 'weather' has been bearing down on me big time and, as fits my mercurial condition, it drives me "under" such that I spend most of my time abed.

So that's where I've been lately. (And for all else, that's where I could still be if I wasn't here.)

I get up now and then, play with computer this and that then return to a prostrate condition.

I can confidently say that in my weather vane experience something is afoot in this current meteorological juncture. We must be shifting from El Niño to La Niña or vice versa.

I am not looking forward to the Summer.

Multimedia options

That said, my advantage is that domestication offers me the option of fine tuning a lot of multimedia experiences. That's not multiMedium experiences but the likes of the other digital stuff on the web.

I've recently started to experiment with video and in the process of negotiating the DIY its becoming clearer about what sort of sequence you can readily publish on the web.

Technically you can publish and share anything on the web but to make best use of a medium requires a degree of savvy and knack because you live within bandwidth and concentration constraints.

In the work we do publishing LatinRadical the program's producer, Warwick Fry, always insists on shelling out any audio in 10 minute segments. Ten minutes will give you something like 7-15Mb to download depending on how you squish down the audio file. Warwick will even divide up a longer interview into two parts so long as it can be delivered under the constraint of this law of his.

But I think he has a case. We're so used to the television fomat of one half hour (actually less than 23 minutes of programming) or the radio cadence of hour slots/news/ station identification.... that it can be easy to fall victim to the limitless space available on the web.

There's no discipline except that of bandwidth.

The problem is that as you move up the digital ladder -- from text to images to audio to video -- your files become exponentially bigger.

The downside of this is that as you proceed up in size the chances of your output being read, listened to or watched decreases . Nonetheless the irony is that the fastest growing medium on the web requires the largest share of bandwidth: video.

The YouTube left

That's a conundrum -- that's the YouTube phenomenon for you. Logically I find this hard to comprehend. Why choose the most 'expensive' medium over the 'cheaper' ones?

On the activist Left the process proceeds one perplexing step further: there's this ready penchant to offer lectures in video format. I assume you've been to any number of talks, forums, lectures, conferences and such and you'll surely agree with me that essentially it's about someone standing up front and talking to you. They often talk by reading and rarely will they do much else but stand and deliver.

But hey! you gonna wanna watch it all in video, right?

So they talk for an hour and you'll want to sit at your computer desk and watch someone talk at you for an hour?

I reckon that's hooey. You may want to consider an image of the occasion but if you want to take in the talking stuff it is better to offer you a file you can download and listen to offline or a pop up version in flash format which will enable you to continue to surf while you listen to so and so expound. In fact you'll want to listen the same way millions listen to radio: while they do something else.

Some talks/lectures can be punchy and take off in video format like this one of the late (great) Peter Camejo:

But that's Peter -- he was a total experience.

Does size matter?

I'm a total audiophile in the sense I value the power of my ears to harness input. I was born before television was introduced in 1956 here in Australia and I've always valued radio not so much as a source for music but as a medium for talk and communication. Today I take in so much of my information though podcasted audio than I fear I'm becoming much more oral in my brain than textual.

In my experience on the left -- despite all those left magazine and newspapers, the core cultural tradition is aural . Generally the lot of us can talk the arm off a chair because we value argument. We appreciate the dialectic of point and counter point and nuanced debate.

And when you can have a person like Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro who can talk for 3-4 hours before a mass audience we tend to think that's really something.

Our problem is that the YouTube generation tends to be visually dependent and they tend to take notice more of something in video format --something seen that moves -- rather than something only written or said.

So this begins to explain why size doesn't matter so much and why video files can be preferenced above smaller text or audio ones on the web.

The medium is the message

While I did suggest that maybe it doesn't add very much to a lecture to share it in video format rather than as a sound file -- when you come to editing up a video as against an audio recording it so very evident that you are dealing in a very different medium.

The pressure to replicate the format of the six o'clock TV news with its short grabs is strong and flows almost as an imperative from the material before you. Good video editing is honing what you've got down to a bare minimum of representation. Hypothetically, out of an hour's footage you may choose to use just three minutes or less in the final cut.

[Of course you ain't gonna do that with the lecture you shot! You are still going to offer that as a whole hour video on the web!]

So there's a logic there that runs counter to Left habits where content is anchored in words.

If you consider video/audio offerings like Democracy Now! there's no real mix in play as the program is secured by talk and interview. Nothing radical there -- it goes out with more or less the same content and edit regardless of whether in video or audio format.

If you watch a John Pilger documentary or that of some other skilled video journalist more elements are in play. The history of documentary film making is still being aggressively made as any selective viewing of SBS or the ABC will indicate; or any visit to your local Activist Centre film showing. Video documentaries are a new and very powerful force which have opened up a major new dialogue on the left.

But we can't all go to film school nor do we have the resources to pursue a major documentary film project. There is a standard of presentation expected that doesn't come so easily as giving a talk or a writing newspaper article for Green Left Weekly.

So what is the utility of video on the left?

My preferred view is that any progress at the present time has to be via multimedia. I don't think you can rule one way or the other or insist that it has to be one medium or another as the way to proceed. So you gotta mix it up.

If I go to a demonstration I can be asked to write it up and maybe that's all of 250- 450 words. I can add to the description by also taking a few photographs of which maybe one will get in a hard copy publication. If I record audio of the event I'm going to pitch my edit toward what the speakers' said and I could probably format an edit that lasts all of 8-10 minutes for web use.

But if I shoot video and do a publishing edit I'm more likely to offer 3 minutes of passion and protests.

Although I can edit audio to capture a lot of militancy and a lot of passion -- the potent emotive medium is going to be that of video.

So I say there's this role for video as a means to share emotion on the left and to do it in a way that's not like the exposee approach of the 6 o'clock news.

However, because the new mini dv camera is becoming a pervasive tool there is another element that warrants consideration. It's sometimes called microcinema but that hardly defines its potential.

To give you an example, consider the film: Voices of Iraq.

Voices of Iraq segment

Voices of Iraq is a ground breaking 2004 documentary about Iraq, created by distributing small video cameras to the subjects of a film, thus enabling subjects to film themselves.

This is 'anti film' making which in its own way develops a new video language which is such an absolutely personal point of view. I've talked about this approach previously here in regard to Ten -- Microcinema and Ten: Abbas Kiarostami's new digital wave.

This isn't third person storytelling but as close to first person as you can get. And despite what I've been mulling about here I see a direct relationship between this kind of cinema and vlogging -- videoblogging. It's documentary making but it is of a kind that relates strongly to the tradition of oral history taking.

In my way I'm thinking of a Howard Zinn like rendering of political existence.

A People's History of the United States is a 1980 nonfiction book by American historian and political scientist Howard Zinn. In the book, Zinn seeks to present American history through the eyes of those rarely heard in mainstream histories. A People's History, though originally a dissident work, has become a major success and was a runner-up in 1980 for the National Book Award. It has been adopted for reading in some high schools and colleges across the United States and has been frequently revised, with the most recent edition covering events through 2003. In 2003, Zinn was awarded the Prix des Amis du Monde Diplomatique for the French version of this book, Une histoire populaire des Etats-Unis. Over one million copies have been sold.

So while audio is constrained by a certain expectation of content, video offers a real option for POV stuff that transcends almost the shallowness of the 6 o'clock news or, for that matter, the ready manipulation of Reality TV.

As I said, this all is but notes. While you should continue to "watch this pace" there's one other element that warrants mentioning . The irony is that because video is seemingly intrinsically more attractive than audio (to watch and to shoot), we are more likely to impact on the web that way rather than through recourse to recording sound alone.

Our only handicap can be if we persevere with some of the stolid habits that have already set in.

Microcinema and Ten: Abbas Kiarostami's new digital wave

by Dave Riley

Abbas Kiarostami is a renowned Iranian film director -- a key figure in that country's New Wave. Having not seen his films before I picked up Ten on impulse and watched it because of the way it was shot -- on two small digital mini cameras inside the single location of a Tehran taxi cab.

Ten focuses on ten conversations between the female driver and her passengers.

This may seem a bit Andy Warholish as though Kiarostami is cutting edge avaunt garde and is dedicated to being very much underground cinema and obscure. But Ten isn't like that. It's not indulgent at all.

In the DVD release I watched, the "Extras" included a fascinating documentary -- 10 on Ten -- a segment of which is reproduced above. And in it, Kiarostami explains how he uses cinema and the technology of digital video.

His perspective challenges the present assumptions we tend to make about the movies we see.

His is an attempt to embrace a very simplistic and pure form of human interaction -- expunged of so much of the artificiality that sustains a capitalist aesthetic preference where it seems so much value added.

The capitalist novel

Marxists have for yonks logged the historical development of the novel and how that literary form matched an evolving bourgeois ethos. Cinema, especially talking cinema, has taken up the aesthetic cudgels and asserted a rich narrative fed by so many aesthetic tricks that try to draw you in emotionally and engage you from the protagonists' point of view.

Acting(especially "Method" acting), cinematography, script and the like are all so much engineering designed to take your emotions on a journey: sometimes roller coaster, sometimes maudlin, sometimes horrific. Indeed the genre labels at your local video stores say it all --in effect tell you what you can expect from the commodity before you decide to consume it.

There's nothing wrong with that of course-- that's just good storytelling -- but the technical skilling up is such that the measure of a film tend to be its level of engagement generates with you.


The Alienation effect

An alternative tradition was argued for in Germany between the wars and in theatre, music and cinema a new aesthetic perspective was advocated -- one that is usually associated with the work of the playwright Bertolt Brecht and the music of composer Kurt Weill.

But its genesis and theory is much broader and its adherents tweaked its viewpoint from the struggle and passion of the revolutionary cultural and political experience of Soviet and Germany between the 1917 Russian Revolution and the rise of Hitler in 1933.

This aesthetic which is variously called "epic" or "alienation effect" -- called Verfremdungseffekt in German by Brecht -- was marginalised and then actively suppressed when Socialist Realism took hold of the communist movement world wide under Stalin's Comintern. (Folk like Pablo Picaso managed to experiment unharmed despite his communist affiliations.)

While Verfremdungseffekt was dedicated to didacticism -- it wasn't proffered as propaganda. Essentially this outlook sought to treat its audience with respect. Verfremdungseffekt assumed that its audience also thinks rather than simply feel.

I think the cinema of Kiarostami's Ten aspires to do the same. Rather than hold the audience hostage to artifice his attempt to utilize a simple means of story telling, of exploring with insight, reminds me so much of the perspectives formatted for Verfremdungseffekt .

Brecht and his colleagues tried -- and Kiarostami aspires I think -- to deliver the goods plainly and simply so that we don't get distracted by all these layered add ons -- most of which could be categorised as "special effects" -- the way actor's act, the way the set is lit, the way the film is edited and the camera is angled... secretly and unbeknown to the viewer's consciousness.

The digital promise.

Kiarostami's exploration also offers a rich and exciting promise: that the new media -- especially digital video in mini dv format -- empowers the rest of us to create 'art' with the same ease we would use to write a story. This option, known more generally as Microcinema is a massive antidote to Hollywood-think.

The term Microcinema can have two meanings. It can describe low-budget or amateur films shot mostly on digital video, edited on a computer, and then distributed via videotape, disc or over the Internet. Or it can describe a mode of low-budget exhibition—a small theater or screening series operated in order to show small-gauge filmmaking, artists works, shorts, and repertory programming.

Microcinema is a flexible term that can cover anything - animated shorts, bizarrely impressionistic video manipulations, hard-hitting documentaries, and garage-born feature-length movies. A classic microcinema offering is a film that probably would not exist if new technology hadn't allowed its creators to cut costs or inspired them to try something different.

Kiarostami's major contribution is that he is such a skilled artist that he has taken the Microcinema to a new democratic possibility.

While Kiarostrami has apparently adjusted some of his views since Ten that cannot undermine the inkling he tries to share with us in a work such as Ten and the documentary that accompanies it.

Make sure you catch both.