The Rotterdam Film Festival
By James Decker
The Rotterdam Film festival has provided a service of inestimable
value. It
has looked straight into the twelve-thousand-eyed beast that is Online
Digital
Cinema, Animation, and Narrative, and it has fallen in love with fewer
than a
hundred of those long-lashed, singed, lopsided, and transfixing beauties.
It's amazing. The festival's Web site organizes selected works according
to
nine categories based upon aesthetic criteria rather than by analogous
genre.
The Dutch make it look easy to organize and identify quality in emergent
media. Don't be fooled. It is not easy to process and react to the
range of
Online cinematic offerings. The sheer variety among selected works
pulled
together at www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com/exploding/
does make it possible not
to panic, and not to declare too many "design rules" for
best practice in
digital cinema. The field is wonderfully wide open. It becomes interesting
to note how different works refer to, depend upon the vocabularies
of, and
satirize different established media. When there is no obvious container
for
their message; no primetime equals "mainstream", later equals
"unmarried", and
no PBS equals "affluent" to work with. So, these digital
works must create a
vocabulary or comment on one they expect their audience to be familiar
with.
Four gems were selected by the film festival from the 31 sixty-second
films at
www.stopforaminute.com. One for each day of the month. Unfortunately,
sixty-seconds does not shape up to be the binding/liberating sonnet
form of
digital cinema. Most films exceed their sixty seconds and the constraint
seems
a gimmick at any rate. When artists set themselves a limit, such as
the
anonymous pop artists The Residents did with their "Commercial
Album"
masterfully concluding each piece at fifty-nine seconds precisely,
it is
possible to see the kind of mastery that form ought to elicit from
content.
The Residents proceeded to purchase radio ad time and aired their
strange
songs as advertisements as comment upon the commercialization of American
popular music. Stopforaminute films by comparison make weak critiques
of
culture and it's sixty second forms. Michael Stipes preening one more
time
before our eyes, for example, does not qualify as satire.
What works or "reads well" in online cinema is the sense
that some
intelligence is in control of your screen. When the screen becomes
a
well-worked canvass, you find yourself studying it's moves. This is
aided by a
limited formal rhetoric that the viewer can hope to learn but never
manage to
guess. Works like Stephanie Owens' Video Mixer let the viewer construct
and
edit cinematic clips, educating us as viewers and inviting us to become
producers. If all goes well (and broadband exposes mainstream media
as a
redundant experience) then digital cinema will help us tap in to concepts
that
we didn't know could be shared with others. BrainGirl might surprise
us with
the idea that our minds are as shamefully hidden as our genitalia.
Jogchem
Niemandsverdriet's www.nobodyhere.com/justme
might revive sincerity as a
language and go nuts with ways to speak it. Amy Talkington could critique
intelligence itself in The New Arrival, or Darren Aronovski's
could compose a
Requiem for a Dream. I say "could" because audiences
will have to find
them first.
Mainstream broadcast media has worked tirelessly to establish itself
as the
ubiquitous shared experience. Circular self-reference seems to have
replaced
self expression-an accepted feature of "postmodern" culture;
but, as
interactive, two-way, media break communication back down to the level
of
tropes, the possibility of referring to common human sexual, intellectual,
anonymous, morbid, and political experiences re-emerges. In more languages
than just "American," these experiences may cross cultural
boundaries. And I
expect they will be lucrative additions to (not as replacements for)
current
materialism. Culture and entertainment are not synonyms for advertising.
That
may be news to some, and you and I may have to pass on before such
changes
come about. But that twelve-thousand eyed monster, it hasn't even
blinked
yet.