29 septembre 2011

Schématisme industriel (Stiegler)

Hollywood, capitale du schématisme industriel

Il n'y a de "culture" et d' "esprit" qu'à partir du fait de la technique. Adopter un tel point de vue est lourd de conséquences quant à la critique que l'on peut tenter du concept d'industrie culturelle élaboré par Horkheimer et Adorno.
Pour caractériser cette industrie, ceux-ci font référence à ce que Kant nomme le schématisme des concepts purs de l'entendement. Le kantisme distingue deux sources sans lesquelles aucune connaissance n'est possible pour le sujet humain : la sensibilité et l'entendement. La schématisation, opérée par l'imagination, est ce qui permet leur unification, c'est-à-dire, du même coup, l'unité de la conscience elle-même. Or, les industries culturelles étant des industries de l'imaginaire, Horkheimer et Adorno décrivent l'industrialisation de l'imagination comme une extériorisation industrielle du pouvoir de schématisation, et par là même, comme une réification, comme une chosification aliénante de la conscience connaissance :

L'industrie a privé l'individu de sa fonction. Le premier service que l'industrie apporte au client est de tout schématiser pour lui. Selon Kant, un mécanisme secret agissant dans l'âme préparait déjà les données immédiates de telle sorte qu'elles s'adaptent au système de la Raison Pure. Aujourd'hui, ce secret a été déchiffré.
La Dialectique de la raison (T. Adorno, M. Horkheimer; 1974)

L'imagination unificatrice serait en quelque sorte court-circuitée, éliminée par l'industrialisation de la culture a-brutissant littéralement ses clients-sujets, et aliénant le plus radicalement qui soit le libre sujet de la raison - qu'elle assujettirait, précisément. Dès lors, la "marchandisation" générale des biens culturels serait nécessairement aussi la libération de ce que la société porte en elle de plus irrationnel - de moins "culturel" et de plus "déraisonnable" : de plus barbare.
Horkheimer et Adorno accusent ainsi le cinéma de paralyser l'imagination et, plus généralement, le discernement du spectateur au point que celui-ci n'est plus en mesure de distinguer perception et imagination, réalité et fiction - discours qui pourrait s'appliquer aujourd'hui tel quel à la réalité virtuelle ou aux jeux électroniques :

Plus [l'industrie culturelle] réussit par ses techniques à donner une reproduction ressemblante des objets de la réalité, plus il est facile de faire croire que le monde extérieur est le simple prolongement de celui que l'on découvre dans le film. L'introduction subite du son a fait passer le processus de reproduction industrielle entièrement au service de ce dessein. Il ne faut plus que la vie réelle puisse se distinguer du film. (Id.)

Il y a donc un schématisme industriel, et il a une capitale : Hollywood.


La technique et le temps. 3. Le temps du cinéma et la question du mal-être (Bernard Stiegler; 2008)


17 septembre 2011

French critics legacy 6


V.F. Perkins interview on Film as Film [1972]
(at Kino 8½, Saarbrücken, Germany; Media Art and Design Studiengang; 2011?)
V.F. Perkins: "I wrote Film As Film when I was a lot younger, quite a long time ago, and in a rather special context, that is difficult for people now to grasp. It came about from my writing in a magazine called Movie, which I've benn on of the co-founder of, which have taken a very oppositional stance in relation to prevailing notions of what constitutes cinema, good movies and so on. I was quite a lot under the influence of Cahiers du cinéma in France. [..] The book [my editors] initially wanted from me was a book about how to appreciate a film, what is the medium of film, what makes film an art. And, partly under the influence of André Bazin, a number of us came to think quite differently and to relate somewhat different ideas about film to a different range of texts. Nobody in the older tradition would have thought it was worthwhile discussing a film by Otto Preminger. [..] A range of films that came out in the mid-fifties, which were very dissmissively, at best, received by the generality of film reviewers. Key instances: Orson Welles's Touch of Evil, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind, Nicolas Ray's Part Girl. These all stroke me at the time, and strike me today as major products of aesthetic and dramatic intelligence in the medium of movie. And it made us very angry that these films were dismissively received, that on the other hand we could see a contrast over in France, Orson Welles was being interviewed in a way he could respond about the depth of his intentions with Touch of Evil. No such questions were being asked in America or in England. Particularly from the interviews in Cahiers du cinéma, one got this sense that filmmakers were highly articulate to themselves (not necessarily in words) about what they were doing at every moment with the film they were making, and they were capable of responding intelligently to an intelligent approach from critics. So that anger on behalf of the artist, we wanted Vertigo to be recognized as a major achievement, of an artistic soul. And felt it to be disgraceful that Hitchcock was demeaned as a merely very effective commercial filmmaker, who as it happened with Vertigo, had made a commercial flop. So the kind of anger that provoked obviously means that, not only you have to argue for the quality of Vertigo, you have to argue for the kind of cinema that Vertigo represents, that the old aesthetics is somehow incapable of comprehending. [..] So that relationship between taste, critical understanding and a development of generalised notions of aesthetics is very important. And it's kind of easier to achieve under the pressure of anger, enthusiasm of some kind, than it is simply as an abstract theoretical engagement of some kind. [..]"     
Apparently you need to be 75 years old to remember the legacy of French critics... Youngsters at "New Cinephilia" have too short an attention span for such a long and respectful memory. They believe they made themselves out of thin air, and their ego is so big that they have the nerves to bad mouth and reject to original cinéphilie, cause they are so much better than French cinéphiles, totally oblivious of the fact nobody watches artfilms or foreign films in their country (see reality check here), and that their individualist practice of home-cinephilia doesn't do anything to expand film culture outside of the hardcore cinéphile niche to the general population... That's the difference between the combative generation of old film culture scarcity, and the complacent generation of new film culture over-abundance. 


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15 septembre 2011

Stanley Kubrick (Dunton/Siety) 3

Une conférence de Joe Dunton (22-04-2011) 1h15'32"
L'intemporelle qualité visuelle des films de Stanley Kubrick est une des raisons pour lesquelles le public du monde entier continue d'être si fasciné par cette œuvre singulière. Le style cinématographique de Kubrick sert strictement la narration en donnant forme à des atmosphères et en intégrant à la perfection décors, jeu d'acteurs et mouvement. Kubrick reste imperméable aux modes visuelles, tout comme aux engouements de l'industrie du cinéma.
Il débute sa carrière en tant que photographe. Puis il s'adonne à des productions aussi diverses que des films à petits budgets et des épopées réalisées au sein des studios, jusqu'à ce qu'il devienne un « réalisateur total » maitrisant l'entièreté de son art. La plupart des cinéastes laissent les choix des objectifs et des lumières et autres équipements de prise de vues à leur directeur de la photographie, en leur confiant ainsi le style et l'aspect visuel du film. Ce n’est pas le cas de Kubrick qui travaille toujours avec des artistes et des techniciens de renom, mais qui se tient prêt en permanence à utiliser les innovations techniques et les procédés qui l'aideront à trouver la solution parfaite. Tout au long de sa carrière, il achète, modifie et teste des équipements de prise de vues très divers.
En quoi cette passion de Kubrick pour les techniques de prise de vues influence-t-elle effectivement ses images ?
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Conférence d'Emmanuel Siety (18-04-2011) 1h17'36"
Dans L’Image-temps, Gilles Deleuze voyait en Stanley Kubrick, à l’instar d’Alain Resnais, un cinéaste « de l’identité du monde et du cerveau ». En partant de Shining, nous questionnerons et prolongerons ce rapprochement en avançant trois autres noms de cinéastes explorateurs d’états limites du monde et de la conscience : David Lynch, Michael Haneke et Gus Van Sant.


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13 septembre 2011

Moviebarcodes

Imagine every frame of a film cut out from the reel and stack together in a pile, and you're looking at that pile from its side, as light passes through it effortlessly. Each slice, each stripe sums up the general colour tonality of the frame, and spreads it vertically along a 1 pixel wide image. As if that frame was compressed horizontally to occupy a one dimensional space. The vertical dimension for each frame is preserved, so what is on top of the stripe is what is actually on top of the cinema screen, conversely, what is at the bottom is at the bottom. But the lateral visual information is entirely compacted into 1 pixel, so it's only the average colour that transpires on the edge of each slice, at every height. Think of it as the visual genome of a film. It shows the cutting frequency very well, the change of sets, or sets colours, with the repeat of a similar overtone, or the brutal changes in colours. We can identify clearly the chapters of a film, if they are designed with a different overtone. And we could also measure the rhythm of a narrative, whether it goes back and forth to the same places, or if it cuts endlessly to different types of frame composition.

3 Couleurs : Bleu (1993/Kieslowski) ASL=12.1"
3 Couleurs : Blanc (1993/Kieslowski) ASL=10.6"
3 Couleurs : Rouge  (1993/Kieslowski) ASL=11"
Kieslowski's colour-based trilogy is the prototypical example to show the possibilities of the barcode analytical representation. When you look at these images, you think they aren't that different, it's all dark, brownish... but compared to all the other films in the databank (movie barcodes), there is more uniformity. A random film barcode looks very chaotic, disorganized, visually at least. At closer look, we do notice the few rays of eponymous colours, and a general tone throughout the film profile. A cold brown, blueish, for Bleu. A light brown, with more exterior scenes (the stripes with a white top), for Blanc. A warm brown, redish, for Rouge. The vertical stripes are very slim for all 3 films, indicating a lot of cutting, axis changes, cutaways... (compare with CCC barcodes to see how long takes show up) while maintaining a certain visual continuity by controlling the overall colour ambiance of the set/location within each shot. Although at this scale, it is hard to really pinpoint clear chapters, or sequences, that would stand out with a special overtone, or a different cutting pace, or separate sets. However, Rouge seems to show the most long takes, apparent because of some stripes tending to "smear" laterally (horizontal continuity).


Hero (2002/Zhang Yimou) ASL= 3.3"
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004/W. Anderson) ASL= 7.4"
Delicatessen (1991/Jeunet)
Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001/Jeunet) ASL= 7.2"
Blade Runner (1982/Scott) ASL= 5.3"

Brazil (1985/Gilliam) ASL= 7.2"
Hero is a very distinctive example of colour-coded mise en scène. The successive chapters are directly visible on the barcode. Black, Red (exterior), Dark Red (either night or interior), Orange, Bright Blue (interior), Light Blue (exterior), Dark, Green, Black, Red, Black. This should describe the exact plotline (I don't remember it), as the film is intentionally designed around episodes heavily identified by one dominant colour for each sequence.
Wes Anderson also likes to insist on particular colours in his films. The barcode profile of Life Aquatic is much brighter than most other films, and the green and blue scenes stand out in the timeline (probably the underwater sequences).
By contrast, Jean-Pierre Jeunet is more of a monochrome guy, the retro look associated with the sepia tone, particularly dark in Delicatessen, and brighter, golden in Amélie. Note the relative tonal uniformity, traducing a conscious coordination between the set designer and the director of photography to sustain a certain atmosphere throughout the films.
Blade Runner is rather dark, taking place mostly at night and in dark interiors. But the neon-blue hue, characteristic of Ridley Scott's retro-futuristic outlook leaves an unmistakable signature uniformly from end to end. The bright blue sequence at the beginning must be the neon-lit frozen lab. But what is the light brown scene right at mid-film?
Brazil also shows a stratification in "colour chapters", instead of the uniform dark brown overtone other movie barcodes feature. I'll have to check but it seems 5 or 6 dream sequences appear with a light blue tone. There are 5 other sequences with a earthy monochrome (red-brown). And also 5 grey parts. 
Again examples of films with normal cutting, with an Average Shot Length ranging from 3 to 7 seconds.


2001 : A Space Odyssey (1968/Kubrick) ASL= 13"
A Clockwork Orange (1971/Kubrick) ASL= 11.5"
Aguirre, the Warth of God (1972/Herzog) ASL= 11.8"
The long takes are more apparent on these three than in Kieslowski's trilogy, even though their ASL hits the same range. 
2001 opens and end with long credit sequences in pitch black. We can see the gold tone of the apes in the long desert opening scene, followed by the famous space station docking scene (pitch black), and the space station interiors in reddish tones. We can spot the confrontation with HAL in the computer core room, bathed in red light, towards the end. Later, the gold shots of Jupiter, and the multicoloured trip sequence (in bright blue). Then the scenes in the alien reconstituted bedroom (grey and light blue tones).
A Clockwork Orange changes a lot of dominant colours, and shows a lot of noticeable long takes (horizontal continuity).  
Aguirre is entirely shot outdoors in the forest, the greenish-beige overtone is consistent throughout the film, alternating brighter and darker shots, without any remarkable chapters identification.

Dogville (2003/LVT) ASL= 6.8"
In The Mood For Love (2001/WKW) ASL= 12.4"
Lost Highway (1997/Lynch) ASL= 7.2"
Essential Killing (2010/Skolimowski) 
 Source: Movie barcodes

We know Dogville takes place on a black soundstage and we see it on the barcode. But it doesn't appear as monotonous as we would guessed it. There are flashes of light marking different chapters.
We might remember the vivid colours of In the Mood for Love, but they are only touches within the frame, and the general overtone remains a pretty uniform brown (because of interior scenes). The red opening title sequence and closing credit sequence stand out in plain red. And the white cartons introducing the 2-parts story, one after the opening credits, and one right in the middle, divide the film very neatly.
Lost Highway is also a 2-parts story, but we cannot as easily denote its partition in visual terms. I suspect the swap to occur at the very thin blueish line, in the prison, followed by the outdoors scenes of the car mechanics sequences. 
Essential Killing's barcode reads like a book. The opening sequence in Afghanistan (sand canyon). Followed by a dark-blue sequence of the interrogation and transfer by plane. A white seizure (was it the dream sequence?). Then the escape by night. And the middle half of the long chase in a snowy landscape appears in light grey, with one brief interruption during a night scene I suppose. The last fourth goes back to nightscape, before the ending in the snow again.



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10 septembre 2011

Movie fingerprints (Brodbeck)




cinemetrics by Frederic Brodbeck (Vimeo) 18 July 2011 
Frederic Brodbeck's bachelor graduation project at the Royal Academy of Arts (KABK), Den Haag
cinemetrics is about measuring and visualizing movie data, in order to reveal the characteristics of films and to create a visual “fingerprint” for them. Information such as the editing structure, color, speech or motion are extracted, analyzed and transformed into graphic representations so that movies can be seen as a whole and easily interpreted or compared side by side.
→ not to be confounded with cinemetrics (ASL database by Yuri Tsivian and Gunars Civjans)





See also:

Lignes de temps (IRI; Feb 2006)


Moviebarcode (21 Feb 2011)
Brazil (1985/Terry Gilliam)

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06 septembre 2011

Belle de Jour (Simsolo)


Mêlant adroitement rêve et réalité, Luis Buñuel brosse un portrait de femme ambigu et troublant, que l’exercice du vice transfigure. Une adaptation subtile du roman de Joseph Kessel, datant de 1967, hymne à la beauté de Catherine Deneuve dont le visage consumé par la luxure et la culpabilité reste inoubliable. Noël Simsolo est réalisateur, essayiste et critique. 

02 septembre 2011

Attendance history - World cinema stats (23)





Source: CNC; MPAA; Screen Digest


The golden age of the Hollywood studio era peaked in 1947 with 4.7 billion of yearly admissions. With the advent of TV, the yearly attendance for theatrical screenings dropped by 78% in only 17 years (reaching 1.02 billion in 1964). Clearly Americans went less to the movies. This is what I call a crisis for the cinema audience!

Meanwhile, the UK (which reached an all-time peak of 1.6 billion in 1946) lost 1.278 billion (also -78%) in 17 years (1946-1963). Futher plummeting to a lowest point in 1984 (54 million), just before the invention of the VHS, and has slowly climbed back up ever since. Only a slight plateau being experienced since 2002. We notice how the UK mirrors quasi-perfectly the variations of the market dictated by the USA, precisely because the distribution is so directly dependent on Hollywood imports.
France also peaked in 1947, although I'm curious to know why it only reached 420 million (a 1/4th of the peak number in the UK, country of a comparable size! also less than Japan, Italy and Germany! however the situation is reversed today and France leads the European pack) The notable difference is that the UK (like the USA) was not occupied by Germany during the 6 years of WW2 leading up to this golden age apogee. Anyway it is also interesting to emphasize that with such a lowest score of "mass appeal" within the general population, far from the score met in the UK and the USA, the cinéphile population in France achieved SO MUCH more in term of developing and improving serious film culture. And the cultural gap is obvious today. How come, with such an overwhelming enthusiasm/popularity for this medium (4 times higher in the UK and 11 times more in the USA, a bigger country though) amongst the general population, these 2 countries didn't find as many hardcore cinéphiles to educate the rest of the population in seeking art and worldwide diversity in their daily consumption on the big screen??? They got a larger total fanbase, and within this pool of consumers they still managed to get a lesser ratio of artfilm lovers vs. mainstream consumers... This is baffling. Contrary to the USA-UK twins, the postwar crisis didn't start immediately in 1947, France enjoyed a relatively stable plateau between 1947 and 1957, a period when all the golden-era Hollywood films blockaded by the Germans during the war, were finally screened. This coincides with the boom of the ciné-clubs and the Cahiers-Positif emergence. The phase of decline, until 1971, dropped 58% (239 million), in 14 years, remaining above the British level in the following decades. Since its lowest point in 1992 (116 million), it also enjoyed a progressive crescendo until today.
The stats for Japan I have do not track back as far as WW2, but there is a delayed peak (if not the all-time apex) in 1958 (1.1billion) corresponding to the rise of the Nuberu Bagu (the Japanese New Wave, the only one that predates the French Nouvelle Vague). There is also a dramatic drop until 1970, a relative plateau until 1953 and a slow but steady recovery since 1996.
There is also a delayed peak in 1955 for Italy (corresponding to the neorealist craze), and a much less dramatic decrease until 1974 (corresponding to the Modern cinema boom of Italian masters such as Antonioni, Fellini, Rossellini, De Sica, Pasolini, Leone, Bertolucci...) only losing 34% in 20 years. Then a quick fall, losing 77% in only 10 years.
The European Union (27 members) also shows a lowest point around 1988, and a steady progression since, paralleling the American numbers.

Now compare this genuine, visible debacle, to the virtual "pseudo-crisis" that paranoid Hollywood executives think they are being victim of today. The competition with VHS, DVD, VOD and BluRay is serious and also visible (bar chart superimposed; not just the numbers for American sales/rent but a worldwide survey). Since 1981-83 with the VHS (sale+rental), which was relayed by the DVD (sale+rental), and marginally by VOD, the competition traditional big screen theatres must face is fierce. And the unquantifiable black market of VHS piracy first, then online piracy, is probably a serious competition as well (at least in numbers, if not in direct customer conversion).
Yet, with all that, and the continued prosperity of TV (which channels offers have expanded exponentially since 1964!) Hollywood still managed to grow 17%... where is the so-called crisis??? Shouldn't we be looking at negative numbers there with such a multi-front competition? The American attendance didn't drop like in the post-war era, didn't even stagnate during that alleged "crisis" which would be understandable, NO, on the contrary, in spite of all adversity... it grew instead of plummeting.
Surely, the Hollywood executives would love this curve to climb steeper (instead of stabilizing around 1.5 billion since 2000), but shouldn't they feel grateful for what they have, a stable situation, rather than a drop of over half of its total, in comparison to the post-war demise?
Seriously, is it more likely the DVD market or the online piracy that broke the ascending curve around 2003???

Of course there are other hidden factors to take into consideration, like the population growth since 1947, the fluctuations of the ticket price, the variation of the purchase power, the quantity and quality of Hollywood films (since 95% of these numbers go to American-made movies), and the more appealing upgrades of theatrical premises, the explosion of marketing techniques, the lowering age of the target audience, the crave for event-releases, the appeal of sequels...

Moreover, if its the big screen sector that suffered (the proper way to experience a film), the cinema industry still makes money with the VHS-DVD-VOD-BluRay rental/sales... and sells broadcasting rights to TV for showing films on the small screen. It's more a crisis of the exhibition circuit than a crisis of the profits made by studios! And, I suspect, a bigger profit than ever before, due to the rise of ticket price, the spectrum of exposition and especially for Hollywood, the hegemony on the worldwide market of its blockbuster releases (although the average production budget also exploded since the Golden Age...)

But considering the evolution of the cinema consumer habits in the past 30 years, sharing its attention with TV, internet and videogames, from my point of view, I believe that a +17% growth is a good job. So stop saying that online piracy is stealing all your profits! Your profits are long gone since 1947... the epoch of cinema reigning supreme at the top as the sole popular mass entertainment is over. Today it's about sharing. Sharing space, sharing time, sharing investments, sharing exposition, sharing revenues... 
Let's not forget that, while online piracy DID NOT KILL whatever remained of the cinema industry in the 70ies, the internet helps bring more people to movie events around the world, in many subtle ways, most of which are not retributed by the studios. The buzz around new releases, or re-releases is in great part assumed by thousands or millions of unsung heroes, bloggers, forum-activists or YouTubers who spread the word like a publicist would do, only without getting paid for their job. We don't hear the studios campaigning for the grateful remuneration of everyone who contributed to make a publicity campaign a success. No. For this they don't owe anything... but if they're caught "stealing" the video of a trailer, they get banned right away! 
It's time to call for net equity. Give and take. This is the end of the total profit, controlled entirely by studios, 1 view = 1 fee. This cannot persist in the XXIst century, at the age of MULTIMEDIA and MULTIUSAGE. Fees shall adapt to the various uses. And gratuity should also be considered in certain cases, when the regulation is impossible/absurd/unfair and where the compensation in publicity/notoriety comes back to the studio through indirect ways. 


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