Miscellanies

The following pile of paragraphs tie together surplus idea-pieces. Some will be nurtured into healthy adolescents; others will die on the page. The collection represents a cross-section of my current interests and thinking and should be read in that light.

Mixing formats, mixing metaphors
Filmed space versus taped space. Particle versus progressive scan. A three-dimensional environment will appear different whether filmed on celluloid or taped on video. Each format captures images differently. The viewer Then there’s the wildly varyingly scale of projected film and screened video… I attest there is an emotional reaction to filmed space, a poetry of space. It is a rare phenomenon, and sometimes it’s accidental. Directors of space are primarily a European bunch: Resnais, Antonioni, Fellini, Greenaway and Kalatozov. We’ve see it in Welles, Reed, Snow, Jancso, Ruiz and Tarkovsky. We’ve also seen it in the cinematography of Vierny, Di Venanzo and Urusevski.

I’m formulating theories about the differences between film and digital video (DV), how the viewer’s sense of space and time is different between the two formats. DV for instance, does not represent the illusion of a three-dimensional space like film does. Projected film still provides most effective illusion of depth and atmosphere. Film transferred and played back on video looks comparatively flat. All-video looks flatter still. Therefore, one’s sense of the space is different. Mixing these two formats allows for a play on spatial dynamics: the same space recorded on film and video with the same camera setup, the same lens and same lighting will nonetheless produce two different feelings, two different senses of spatial depth. This shift between the two formats is a metaphor for shifts in time—space representing time. Is it possible to create a poetics of time?

Film represents space in a different, more concrete way than video. DV is immediate, a real-time feeling. Time on film is more metaphorical. So, to use two different formats (film and video) is to use two different representations of time. I would like to further research this proposition by using DVCAM and Super-8. The contrast would be further heightened by the use of B&W in super-8 and colour on DV. Also, DV is sync sound, Super-8 is silent, or non-diegetic sound.

Mixing formats produces new spatial-temporal relationships

Using two formats within a single piece creates an argument of forms. The qualities of each format are galvanized when contrasted with the qualities of the other: colour appears more vibrant when placed alongside black and white; silence is more silent when placed between sounds.

Dominant time, recessive time
Of course, the aim of all this theorizing is to make poetic objects. Therefore, these two times will become the stuff of fiction, imparted with mythic depth. When I say mythic depth, I’m referring to both a deeply-felt respect for the instructions of the past and a fertile and flexible projection of possible futures.

Let’s imagine a lop-sided, erratic time without chronographic representation.

Let’s imagine a hierarchy of dominant and recessive times.

In my fictional woods, I’ll assign the idea of dominant time to DV. Technically this means full-colour image and synchronized stereo sound. Digital video is, of course, current technology, or technology without perceivable limits. Well, there are limits, but we tend not to think about them. The format is not romanticized or poetic. Once the new replaces the old, the old technology is recognized by its limits. Limits are how we define things. For instance, early video formats like 8mm or Hi8 are immediately recognized and defined by their perceived limited image clarity, colour palette, video noise and dropouts, etc. Since DV is current technology, we tend not to define the format by its limits; we are more likely to be wowed by its apparent limitlessness.

Walking further in the woods, we’ll come across the notion of recessive time to film. Technically: Super-8, black and white, no sound. Culturally, film is the old guard. Nostalgia exists for old forms, dying or lost technologies. The limits of the old formats are readily recognizable. Everyone recognizes they are romanced, poeticized. The format itself is becoming a metaphor for another time. It makes sense to make a metaphor out of a form that is itself a metaphor.

A note on sound: since the Super-8 is silent, any sound used will be non-diegetic. Either silence, non-diegetic music, or, more relevantly, sound from the DV source. We could say the sound from the dominant time frame of DV invades or bleeds over to the recessive time frame of film.

So, where does all this lead? To a woman named Anna Morgen…

Story idea: Anna Morgen or A Highly Significant Blank
A highly significant blank… that’s what Raymond Llull experiences the moment his lover Anna Morgen disappears from one of the two timeframes Llull lives in.

(Raymond Llull was named after Ramon Llull, the Catalan priest who, in 1275, invented ars combinatoria, a text-based logic machine. Llull was often teased for the sleepy phonetic of his name. This was further complicated when, at fourteen (an age as clumsy as a newly-birthed giraffe’s hoofy hesitations), Llull briefly felt the joy of making anagrams. When he found that “RAYMOND LLULL” could be rearranged to spell “NORMALLY DULL” his wonderment lastingly recessed in a moment of brutish crumpling.)

Llull lives on the coast. His circular house affords him views of the reliable waves and the frowning shore pine. He is a famous actor, portrayed by the actor Roderick Cameron (here comes some self-voiding fiction). Llull/Cameron is/are rehearsing a rollicking version of Jules Laforgue’s Hamlet. Llull/Cameron/Hamlet’s Ophelia lives across the town in a house shaped like a stone sail.

They rehearse and make love.

They rehearse at making love.

Their world is a fiction (within a fiction (within a fiction)).

One day, Llull’s egg timer rings twice. At first he thinks it’s just a mechanical malfunction. But the timer rings twice again the next day, this time with a greater lag. He thinks nothing of it. More discrepancies occur: he misses steps, his music skips, the lights flick on for a moment after they’ve been switched off…

What’s in a name?
To offer you some idea of how I’ll go about writing this project, here are some of the word games and literary precedents I’m using:

Anna Morgen
The piece is named after the main female character, Anna Morgen. “Morgen” is the Dutch and German word for “Tomorrow”, hence Anna Tomorrow. This can be read within the parameters of the science-fiction genre: Anna Tomorrow; an Anna from the Future, an Anna 3000. Or, of simple anticipation, considering Samuel Johnson’s line “We live from anticipation to anticipation, not from satisfaction to satisfaction”. “Morgen” is also “Morning” in German. Anna Morning (one can make an Eric Rohmer joke here: “Anna in the Morning, Chloe in the Afternoon”). Anna is the Latin form of Hannah, from the Hebrew meaning “grace”. Anna Morgen is the anticipation of future grace.

Anna is a palindrome, too, suggesting a return or a circumvolution. It also evokes the first syllable of the word anagram.

Anagrams have a role in composition with the name of the main male character, Raymond Llull.

Raymond Llull is an anagram for normally dull (poor Raymond!)

Llull is also a palindrome.
Llull is phonetically identical with the word lull.

The name Raymond Llull is a tiny variation (actually a return to the Germanic root) of Ramon Llull, the Catalan priest who invented ars combinatoria in 1275. Ars combinatoria is a text-based logic machine in which universal truths (and falsehoods) can be created following certain procedures.

The name Raymond also refers to Raymond Queneau, novelist, poet and founder of Oulipo, a workshop of potential literature based on pre-established restrictions derived from Alfred Jarry’s ‘Pataphysics—the science of exceptions, imaginary solutions, equivalence, and imperturbability. Georges Perec’s A Void is perhaps the most famous example of Oulipian literature—an entire novel written without once using the letter ‘e’.

Time travelers
The precursors for this work include Chris Marker’s La jetee, Alain Resnais’ Je t’aime, je t’aime, Stewart Brand’s The Clock of the Long Now, Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, and HG Wells’ The Time Machine.

The bulk of these precursors belong to the science-fiction subgenre of the time travel story, typified by a character’s journey through time to (a) pre-historical epochs or (b) defining moments in the history of civilization. They share the model that time is a singular, constant and forward-moving line that the time traveler jumps to different points on. The traveler’s actions on these points in time affect and alter the course of history. Time is constant, history isn’t.

I propose a wrinkle on this model: a story of two analogous yet not quite parallel times occurring simultaneously. The time traveler moves back and forth from one time to another. These lines begin to diverge, atomically at first, causing shifts, like minute repetitions or leaps forward (see support material). As the timelines diverge more, the leaps across time become greater in distance. A bigger leap means greater discontinuity. A small discontinuity is perhaps bearable, but the greater the discontinuity, the greater the confusion.

Duration is subjective. We say that time progresses “slowly” or “quickly” in relation to a baseline, usually clock-time. Time drags, time races but it is always one greater time. But let’s imagine that time is composed of countless little times stitched together so perfectly that we don’t notice the seams. Now imagine if one of those threads began to run…

A scenario sample
I haven’t written the scenario for this project yet, but if I had, it would read something like the following:
1) DVCAM: abstract vertical seascape shot with a long lens (the camera is tilted 90 degrees). Sunrise over the Atlantic. A sliver of red runs down the centre of the frame as the sun rises (ala Matthew Barney–his abstract vertical images were the best thing about his films… why not steal from him, since he was a prodigious thief himself!) Long take pre- and during sunrise. Sound of muffled wave action, distorted (as they might sound echoing in the ear chamber of a dead man). Perhaps pure electronic wave sound (a modulated sinewave, for instance). It should be unclear as to what the image is at first…

2) DVCAM: Countershot: C/u of corpse’s face half-buried in the sand bathed in sunrise light… dead eyes staring out to sea. The camera is again tilted 90 degrees so the face, although lying in the sand, appears vertical on the screen) Sound of wave action clear and naturalistic.

3) S-8: Same face, now very much alive, the camera is no longer tilted, so the face is vertical, as in the previous shot… a match cut. The eyes look behind the camera to the ocean… a fast tilt up as the figure rises, maintaining his head in the frame, camera pans 180 following the figure as he walks towards the shore (the camera will be placed low… the level of a sitting figure’s head). It is no longer sunrise… at least midday… vertical, strong sun. Sound of wave action carries over from the previous shot… appears diegetic, yet the figure’s footsteps make no sound, nor are the sounds of the wave breaks in sync.

Proposal: Transvalue Innovation
I wish to experiment in the serial reorganization of classic cinema. My first series will be derived from Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura. The series will be called Transvalue Innovation (an anagram of the words Antonioni’s L’Avventura). Each segment will be edited around a serial theme, for instance a serial edit of all shots without human figures; a series of figures facing away from the camera, etc. The idea behind this experiment is to impoverish cinema of its basic trope: the human figure.

Musical Notes
I wish to continue developing an old experiment of mine. In my film Chimera Cinema, I edited the images in tight syncopation to a recording of Anton Webern’s 5 Pieces. I then erased the music, leaving a visual-rhythmic trace of the audio track. I sought visual correlatives to some of the musical motifs: repetitions, counterpoints, changes of tempo, the balance of sound, and emotional emphasis. Currently I am listening to a recording of Morton Feldman’s Patterns in a Chromatic Field in an attempt to repeat the experiment with greater complexity and integration.

©Michael Mills 2005