SOme COnclusions and the future

What potential changes will New Media bring to the future of films and film studies? Well to understand the future let us first look at how we got to were we are. Traditional film studies depended on physical film screenings as well as textbooks both of which had problems.

Actual film is very difficult to transport and preserve as well as very costly to purchase. Many interpretations of the scope and nature of film were very biased, based upon the limited amount of films that the interpreter had been able to see. Streaming of video on sites such as Netflix and Youtube have made it possible for more people to see and equally importantly be aware more films than could have been dreamed possible a few decades before. This situation has meant that new film theories have been created as older ones have increasingly been seen as irrelevant; Roland Barthes must be smiling

Traditionally film text focused on directors or actors, while these text were often useful they gave most readers a very narrow knowledge of film.  Sites such as IMDb have allowed those studying film to see every single crew member on a movie they are interested in as well every other film that crew member worked on, this would have been impossible in say 1990.

There are some potential downsides to using New Media for film studies. Twitter allows an instant release of information with little if any filter this can mean real problems if a film crew wants to keep their location secret in order to make shooting easier. Even worse for anonymity is what the recent Wikileaks releases have shown us; if you send something electronically there’s a good chance someone who doesn’t believe it should be confidential might find and release it. 

Mark Twain’s concern over abundance leading to many works being left out of the marketplace is still valid.  While Netflix has been a great site in allowing for the streaming of videos it does have limitations.  You can only view those which films are available, and while the amount a films available for view is enormous it’s not unlimited. Netflix is likely to becoming the model for the industry, so expect emerging sites for movie sales and rental to be increasingly download based. However since the number of movies is growing exponentially it will be impossible to stream every single one of them. So there are still going to be a lot of movies that are forced out and given few alternative methods for distribution.

There is one problem brought on my New Media that may seem like futile nostalgia but I’ll state it anyway; all New Media has the real potential of making seeing a movie in a theatre a very unimportant experience. I know speaking for myself this very true, I’ve seen literally hundreds if not well over a thousand movies but most have been on DVD. Now you can stream movies directly to your TV how much longer till studios start releasing their films in theatres and for streaming on the same day? To me it seems foolish to wish things were different or hope for some past that is long gone. However just as the book has certain positive attributes that can never be replicated by the Kindle seeing a movie streamed onto your TV will never perfectly replace the theatre.[1] So don’t try to bring back the past but maybe burn a candle or at least digitize one for it.

Netflix now allows you to stream films directly not just to your computer but to your TV as well.  All you need is a video game system  (all three majors work), or an approved cable box.  In a few years there is a real possibility most movies will simply be download directly to your cable box or hard drive. I don’t think this process will completely replace going to the theatre but it is coming so we should prepare for it.  We won’t just be getting streamed movies but likely a program similar to the DVD with interviews, trailers and other sorts of extras. We’ll likely be able to for an additional fee send our downloaded movies to other people on the service. So while today transporting movies is costly and difficult involving changing formats and region coding in a few years it will be significantly easier. Today I write to friends in other countries asking them to pick up copies of obscure movies for me which then have to be mailed, in the years they might just send me an attachment.

One thing that will always bother me about most film books is their lack of visuals.  Too many books are obsessed with theory; they spend a brief amount of time summarizing a movie then ramble on about what it means. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just show a clip from the movie you were talking about or better yet the whole film. I wonder how much longer till we start selling a computer program instead of a textbook to study film. A program of this sort could have a multiple movies stored on it, you could read an essay on a film then watch that film immediately and decide if you agree with the essays assessment. Educators could make a program in which they talked about important principles like say lighting; the program would then have available several clips showing the dos and don’ts.

You can be a Luddite if you want to but New Media is here to stay. Some people think this is bad; they feel that New Media will destroy traditional methods of film studies as well as destroying the theatrical experience. There is also concern that even with new methods of distribution being available there still tends to be a handful of very large distributors making a lot of the decisions.

The accusation that New Media could destroy traditional film studies does seem somewhat fanciful considering that it is the same argument that has been used against virtually every technological advancement since at least the book.  As for distributors controlling which films are seen, this is always a problem. Mark Twain had to worry about this situation and it is almost guaranteed that aspiring filmmakers of today will have to worry about it as well; the marketplace no matter how large you make it will always have limits.

All of those who take any interest film studies may have difficulty recognizing it in a few years. Distribution of films otherwise overlooked has allowed film narrative to be rested away from the critics. Every time we see a new movie we have to try and figure out where it fits into the narratives that have been constructed. The more films that are seen, the more they help to show the greater number of flaws in existing narratives. If we are willing to toss out these inaccurate narratives then we may discover New Media has allowed us to gain a true understanding of film. 

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[1] Rich, Motoko Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html?_r=1  

Moretti and Genre

Film Noir, Blacksploitation, Mondo Film, Jidaigeki, they’re all film genres; they and others have come, gone and even been revived over the past few decades. As Moretti has pointed out studying genres of popular art can often be used to understand social trends in the cultures or nations from which they emerged. Critics have usually controlled film history. Those movies which are considered to be artistically significant get written about the rest get forgotten. The forgotten films are often genre pictures crime, horror, or musical films; often however there are more of the genre films produced and they usually out gross the artistic ones.  New Media more specifically sites such as IMDB, Wikipedia have allowed us to see all the films produced in any country in a given, sometimes even their box office receipts. With such information we can gain a film history controlled not by critics but by the film viewing public.

Moretti’s work encourages us to see how genres come and go over time. Often when critics are busy praising movies they deem artistic they fail to acknowledge the ones they consider mere entertainment. Using some of Moretti’s ideas allow us to gain a better understanding of film, studying not just the movies we liked but the ones which were liked by the general public.  For purposes of this essay I intent to discuss the cinemas of Italy and Russia but specifically Soviet Era films; I feel that while the cinemas of these two countries are widely studied around the world there are many misconceptions which Moretti’s methods and the massive amount of information available through New Media can now begin to remedy.

Italian cinema is often lauded as one of the great film cultures around the world. The Neo-Realist movement is considered the first important movement in post world war two cinema. Additionally directors such as Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni are admired from film schools around the world; while these films are great movies saying that they embody all of Italian film is a gross understatement. Italian cinema also has a long history of popular films in genres like action, crime and horror, this includes popular directors such as Dario Argento and Sergio Corbucci and Genres such as the Spaghetti-Western. Trying to divide art and entertainment has often plagued film studies, however with advances in new media and some of the ideas of Moretti a better understanding may soon be possible.

Let’s use composer Ennio Morricone to show some connections between high and low art in Italian cinema.  If you click the link for his IMDB page I’ve provided you’ll see a rather large career stretching back some fifty years. Now if you click on some of the titles you will see that they stretch the full range of genres from emotional dramas, to brutal crime pictures, to sweeping historical, and some truly gruesome  horror films. Morricone composed scores for films across all genres and as a result his career shows how certain genres came and went. He began composing mostly dramas, as these went into decline he began composing for crime and horror films, when these and Italian film in general went into decline by the 1980s he like many Italians working in the film industry started working in American films, he returned to Italy in the late 1980s when Italian films started to become popular again; this popularity is credited to a film Cinema Paradiso which he composed the music for.

You may find yourself asking how does this tie into Moretti and more importantly how does this all tie to new media. While Moretti seems fascinated by the fact the genres come and go over time with a pretty strong consistency he doesn’t seem that interested in drawing conclusions. His main focus seems to be on creating models or templates through which further study could be done.  By using Ennio Morricone’s career as a starting point we can see the years in which certain genres appeared and others diminished. Taking these dates we can compare them with actual historical events and see if there are any new connections, which can be drawn. None of this would have been possible without sites like IMDB and Wikipedia, they and other sites organize films by composer something that few if any traditional film books do. Directors often (but not always) stick to the genre in which they first find great success; crew people however bounce around going from one genre to the next. Therefore studying the oeuvre of other crew members give you a better idea of the when which genres were doing well and which had ceased to be at different times.

Russia is another nation whose films are often misrepresented by critics and film theorists. A teacher of mine at film school Paul Warner informed me that there were never any action movies made in Soviet Russia and that the majority were art films, he probably never saw the following list. This list shows that a film called Pirates of the Twentieth Century was the most popular Soviet film as far as ticket sales, by the way it was a Kung-Fu film.  If you looked up the articles of all those films which were listed you’d find that four were by the same director Leonid Gaidai; most of Gaidai’s movies were satirical, musical, comedies; imagine a Russian Monty Python.  Now without the list and future lists which will hopefully exists the points which I have tried to make would be impossible to prove. New Media allows film historians to see which films and more specifically which genres actually were popular instead being forced to believe the statements of ill-informed film professors and historians.

Moretti’s theories on genre present some truly fascinating opportunities when applied to genre. We are being increasingly able to see when certain film genres first appeared as well as when they went into decline. A few years ago researching Italian or Russian film in such a way would have required 50-100 books most of which weren’t in English. Today it can be done in a variety of languages thanks to a few websites. Another method created by all this studying of genre is studying box-office receipts; such studies like the one I linked allow us to see what actual people were going to see this gives us a much better perception of how film was viewed by a culture. While Moretti’s books doesn’t really discuss financial success of genres I feel that using such information follows Moretti’s spirit by using a piece of typically ignored data to try and understand historical trends. By studying genres we can gain a better understanding of how film has actually evolved not how critics would have liked it to. This understanding would have been impossible without New Media. 

To Tweet or not to Tweet

Twitter, whether you love it or loathe it, the service and its seemingly ever-present 140 character messages are here to stay. For future generations studying film this presents a real possible Boon. Imagine not just reading about a director or actor’s opinion on a film but having their exact words. However Rosenzweig warned such a situation could easily lead to unimportant information obscuring, that which is actually useful to historians. Another problem, for film production at least is that information can be disseminated so quickly; film productions like to keep as much as possible under wraps, and twitter is likely to make this job more difficult than ever before. Most of the opinions on twitter seem to over praise or over scorn it; while I find myself more often in the later camp I can’t say I know for sure because it will be many years before we can truly assess the impact. Twitter has been around less than ten years, but it’s very clear if one reads a newspaper magazine, or news site that it as well as other new media is changing the way information is released and received.  Much as the book altered the way altered human ideas of knowledge and memory by making knowledge permanent and transportable twitter alters knowledge by making it immediate.

The press, in particular film critics has often been a big frustration for filmmakers over the years. A bad review of a film or a story detailing a troubled production in a major newspaper or magazine can destroy a film’s chances before it even gets to theatres. As a result of this most major studios keep extremely tight controls on their production hoping to prevent any bad publicity. Twitter means a harsh review could be handed out for a movie while a critic is still viewing it, imagine a website being set up so that you could see the audiences opinion of a movie as they are watching it. Another problem is that because twitter is so public the anonymity and secrecy some film crews need to do their work is becoming increasingly more difficult. Film crews have often gone to great lengths to hide their production, the crew of Return of the Jedi created the fake film Blue Harvest that appeared on all official production materials.

With Twitter the cat is often out of the bag, a friend of mine from film school who worked on the film Fair Game related to me a story of a specific incident involving twitter. While the Fair Game crew was in New York the needed to film a scene that required a mostly empty street, they spent a week location scouting and found a street that would be empty at the time of day they needed, they gathered the crew necessary and went to the location. Several photographers and film fans greeted them; this cost the production around 10,000 extra that day alone. It seems a production assistant excited to be working on his first feature decided to mention the location in his twitter account; he was fired and the rest of the crew was strictly warned against future events. Such leaks have always been a problem on film sets and thanks to twitter the problem is only likely to be amplified exponentially. One could try and prevent this but to do so you would likely have to shut down the Internet so best of luck.[1]

Well just so you don’t think my whole intent is to be harsh on twitter, I have thought of some positives. Twitter because it is instant and archived allows to know things in real time, for future generations it makes it infinitely easier to know what historically important directors and actors were thinking; as well as how their actions were viewed by their peers. It also gives potential future archivists a lot of material to work with; provided the filmmakers of today are tweeting.

Another great feature of twitter is that anyone can use it; while presently this may mean a lot of information of questionable value a few years from now the gains are potentially enormous. Most directors and actors began their careers at the bottom of the industry totem pole; for aspiring directors this means the position of production assistant, for actors being an extra. Now most people working on a film today will not become a famous director or actress but some will, wouldn’t it be great 30 or 40 years from now to find out what they were thinking as they began their career?

So is Twitter a good or negative force for film? Well I don’t think one can say either way definitively since there is decent evidence for both sides. On the negative side critics now have more power then ever to destroy the work of hundreds with just a few characters. Additionally crews filming on location now have to worry about every single crewmember becoming a possible albeit an unintentional leak to the press.  Finally while Twitter does allow for a nearly unlimited amount of tweets to be stored such abundance can as our readings this year have shown lead to unimportant information crowding over that which is useful.

On the plus side archiving will open up many possibilities for future historians. Instead of having to track down actors and crew members hoping that they have a good memory of a film the worked on Twenty or more years before you now can have their exact words.  We also have the words of people who today might not be that important to the film industry but in a few decades could be up for an Oscar.  The main difficulty with studying Twitter is that it’s reasonably new and we really can’t tell how much of an impact it will have in the future, but we can be sure someone will tweet about that impact whatever it may be.

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[1] Twitter/LoC archive, http://sexdrugsandintellectualfreedom.com/2010/04/22/twitterloc-part-i/ retrieved 12/08/2010.