Material Media-Making in the Digital Age

Material Media-Making in the Digital Age

Material Media-Making in the Digital Age

Daniel Binns

First published in the UK in 2021 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds,

Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2021 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2021 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copy editor: Newgen KnowledgeWorks

Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas

Production managers: Aimée Bates and Georgia Earl

Typesetting: Newgen KnowledgeWorks

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78938-349-2

ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78938-350-8

ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78938-351-5

Printed and bound by TJ International.

To find out about all our publications, please visit

www.intellectbooks.com

There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue, and buy any titles that are in print.

This is a peer-reviewed publication.

For Adrian Miles

This is all your fault. We miss you.

Contents

List of Figures

Foreword: Cherish the Thought Adrian Martin

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Maker, Material

1. Hollis, My Smartphone and Me: Practical Lessons from Historic Avant-Garde Cinema

2. Time I: From Clip to Continuity

3. Time II: From Continuity to Fluidity

4. Sound: From Added-Value to Cohesion

5. Fragments: The Remnants of Media Practice

6. Messy Cinema: Casey Neistat and the Affordances of the Vlog

7. The GIF: Silent but Digital

8. A Purely Digital Form? Streams and Atmospheres

9. Dronopoetics: Telepresence and Aerial Cinematography

Coda: Lessons from the Cutting-Room Floor

References

Index

Figures

1.1 Kaspar Koenig by the window, Hollis Frampton (dir.), Surface Tension , 1968. USA. The Film-Makers’ Coop.

1.2 A handheld walk through New York City, Hollis Frampton (dir.), Surface Tension , 1968. USA. The Film-Makers’ Coop.

1.3 ‘Castle in France’ text on screen, Hollis Frampton (dir.), Surface Tension , 1968. USA. The Film-Makers’ Coop.

1.4 Abandoned structures, Emily Richardson (dir.), Cobra Mist , 2009. UK. LUX Distribution.

1.5 Streaking red glitches, Lauren Cook (dir.), Trans/Figure/Ground , 2016. USA. Self-distributed. https://www.laurencook.org/.

1.6 Screen capture of the Fairlight (sound edit) screen for the film stuff in Da Vinci Resolve, Daniel Binns, 2018. Copyright the author.

1.7 A long building shot in black and white, Daniel Binns (dir.), stuff , 2018. Australia. Self-distributed. https://vimeo.com/309045191.

2.1 A toy train speeds towards the camera, or Train arrives at Gare de la Table , Daniel Binns (Binns 2017a).

7.1 Workers descend stairs underground, Fritz Lang (dir.), Metropolis , 1927. Germany. Universum Film (UFA).

8.1 A tree with flowers in the foreground, the physicist (Tessa Thompson) fading into the background, Alex Garland (dir.), Annihilation , 2018. UK and USA. Skydance Media.

8.2 The protagonist (Thom Yorke) sits on a white floor while pieces of white fabric and paper fly around, Paul Thomas Anderson (dir.), Anima , 2019. USA. PASTEL.

8.3 Kate Berlant, David Harbour and Alex Ozerov on screen in a televised play, Daniel Gray Longino (dir.), Frankenstein’s Monster’s Monster, Frankenstein , 2019. USA. Netflix.

8.4 Still from a cinemagraph, featuring Joaquin Phoenix lying on top of a ship’s bridge, the ocean flowing far beneath him, Paul Thomas Anderson (dir.), The Master , 2012. USA. Weinstein Company. https://i.gifer.com/Asuw.gif.

9.1 Photograph of the city of Boston taken from a hot-air balloon, James Wallace Black, 1860. Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/190036381.

9.2 Distant drone shot of a low building, surrounded by desert, Ivan Sen (dir.), Goldstone , 2016. Australia. Bunya Productions.

9.3 Top-down drone shot of a vehicle, a man and a tree, Ivan Sen (dir.), Goldstone , 2016. Australia. Bunya Productions.

9.4 Top-down drone shot of two men, guns raised, moving through a series of demountable buildings, Ivan Sen (dir.), Goldstone , 2016. Australia. Bunya Productions.

9.5 Drone shot of the drone pilot, Daniel Binns (dir.), Come Fly with Me , 2017. Self-distributed. https://vimeo.com/243570502.

Foreword: Cherish the Thought

The question, really, is not ‘how can we marry media theory and practice, at long last?’ The true question is why we ever thought it was a good idea to split them apart in the first place.

The divide between theory and criticism in most of the arts (and especially in the teaching and/or training of them) yawns like a seemingly unbridgeable abyss. How did we arrive at this sorry pass? Every day we encounter the resistances, the complaints, the justifications and the so-called common-sense arguments on this battlefield. Music departments have the respected branch of musicology, for example – but I have heard music students literally object to their professors: ‘I’ve no time for theory – I need those precious hours to practise my oboe!’ Theory is the irrelevant cherry on their cake of practice.

When it comes to art (painting, sculpture) and film/media, one is more likely to hear the ‘individual inspiration’ excuse dimly inherited from the long and venerable, even dusty tradition of Romanticism. ‘If I have too much theory in my head, I will be affected and unduly influenced, and I shall no longer be able to spontaneously create!’ More cynical students in these fields, believing the same credo but keeping it silently to themselves, decide to play the theory-game only as much as they reckon they need to in order to win their degree: externally, they spout a few theoretical keywords (‘the gaze’, ‘hybridity’, ‘decolonization’ and whatnot) while, internally, they desperately seek their personal muse. Good luck to them.

Even a mainstream American director as smart and sophisticated as Blake Edwards (of the Pink Panther movie series fame) chose to put this old ‘keep that theory away from me!’ chestnut into modern, neurosis mode. Once, swatting away questions from an Australian interviewer about how scholars and critics had analysed his work, he essentially replied: ‘OK, I’m a neurotic, and I don’t understand myself at all. I’m a fine mess! But I don’t want to be cured. My problems and neuroses are me – they compel me to write and direct the way I do, and I’m successful at what I do. If you analyse me and tell me what I’m really all about, then my career is over! Get outta here!’ (original emphasis).

And boy, was I ever surprised on the day at the progressively minded Rotterdam Film Festival, circa 2002, when I timidly introduced myself to one of my all-time cultural heroes, the essentially avant-garde (but feature narrative) French filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux – who, I figured, is a pretty serious and intellectual guy. ‘I know you possess several books, catalogues and journal issues where I have written admiringly about your work, Monsieur Grandrieux, and I just wanted to ask you’ – at which point he cut me off with a polite but firm gesture. ‘Look’, he patiently explained, as if to an ailing child. ‘You seem like a nice guy and I’m sure your work is good. I’m glad you’re doing it, I appreciate it, it helps my career along in places like this festival. But I’ve never read it. I never will read it. I make my films from impulse, from intuition, you know? I can’t have your words about themes and signs and meanings bouncing around my skull when I pick up my camera on the set. I just don’t read any of that stuff about my own work, by anyone. I just can’t. Sorry, man’ (original emphases).

Perhaps only in the professional sphere of creative writing courses – and I am sure not always without difficulty, even there – have theory and practice reached some plateau of rapprochement, or at least détente. Writing – whether of fiction or non-fiction – seems to come with the obligation to know and play with at least some basic rules, structures, procedures. This can be rationalized by the sceptics as the essential, prerequisite craft skills needed to do and achieve anything in an artistic area (such as music or dance) – but the best teachers of writing (usually, of course, already practitioners themselves) know that it’s but a small step from the craft of the well-turned sentence, the sequencing of paragraphs or the appropriate word choice to the theory of point-of-view, the ethics of creating fictional characters and the ambiguity of meaning.

Theory is a word that appears to scare many people from the outset, before they’ve even attempted to grapple with it. This prejudice has been hardwired into us by the surrounding western society, it seems, from birth. Theory is too rational, too systematic, too prescriptive, too calculated, too elitist, too inhibiting! It goes with the general caricature of the figure of the intellectual we see all the time in ads, sitcoms, talk shows, David Williamson plays: the egghead, all brains and no heart, graceless and foolish, stupid in the ways of human nature – or else, and more frequently in these post-Weinstein days, a conniving, manipulative, abusive manipulator, a Hannibal-like mind-fucker. (I was once asked to audition for a panel-type chat programme – on ‘quality’ TV! – where there would be four or five hilarious, ‘edgy’ comedian-types, and one serious critic-type – that is, me – to provide a bit of necessary gravitas to the quick-fire discussion of arts and current affairs. Quickly realizing I would likely become the butt of every joke in every episode, I politely declined the offer.)

It shouldn’t be so frightening, really. Theory is thoughts, ideas, concepts, histories, extrapolations. Cherish the thought! Theories of all kinds naturally arise in and around the making of any art object. I deeply dislike the binary opposition that people often pose between text (the art work itself) and context (the ways in which it is taken up, used, read within the social-political world) – because that, to me, simply reformulates the hard and fast distinction between a practice which is unthinking (wholly spontaneous, intuitive) and a theory that then goes to work on art, from its Olympian distance, with the muscle of its complicated, cerebral procedures.

Let’s scamper back to those little rays of light and hope offered by the moments in the transmission of musicology or creative writing when doing and thinking in art more naturally connect, without undue or contrived forcing. For the ancients like Aristotle (remember him?), that’s what, indeed, the whole field of poetics was all about: procedures for making. And procedure here does not mean rule. It refers to experimentation, not necessarily in a lofty, avant-garde sense (although that, too, is permitted), but certainly in the sense of trying-out, tinkering, sketching, drafting, taking a look at the provisional outcome and then thinking about where to go and what to do next …

There are two books called, after old Ari, Poetics of Cinema. Both of them are good. One comes from the scholarly side, by American professor David Bordwell (2007). He’s fascinated to discover the often officially unspoken secrets of filmmaking craft, especially in the more-or-less mainstream area of narrative genres. Sure, there are formulae, conventions, standard structures underpinning these movies – the kind of structures we see roped and tied down in ‘how to write a successful screenplay’ manuals – but there is also almost infinite wiggle room for inventive variation, even at times outright subversion of these so-called codes. For Bordwell, the constraint of communally shared and recognized procedures among filmmakers leads to an invigorating one upmanship. And it is up to scholars to trace back and understand the conditions of this hothouse creativity.

The other Poetics of Cinema book (1995) is by a great and prolific filmmaker, Chilean-born Raúl Ruiz (1941–2011), who is completely welcoming of theory – that is, theory on his own, magpie terms, drawn from traditions ancient and modern, profane and sacred, commercial and metaphysical. Where Bordwell leans toward cognitive psychology as his principal orientation, Ruiz is more of a natural-born surrealist. Cinema is both an amazing history of precedents and an enduring blank canvas for him, something that we can always reinvent from scratch. The practical exercises he set for his students (such as ‘stage and film a sequence that makes sense when played both forwards and backwards’) boggled their minds – and all our minds surely need boggling these days.

The common denominator linking these tomes of audio-visual poetics is also shared by Daniel Binns in the book you are about to read, Material Media-Making in the Digital Age. That common denominator is play. Play can involve everything from the highest, most honed craft skill to the most casual, seemingly unfocused messing-about. In every case, the framework is the same: let’s make a move and see what happens. Does something in the game itself change; do we encounter something surprising, unexpected? All throughout, the theoretical mind seeks to question what has been handed to us, assumed as a given convention: why does one kind of framed shot (a close-up, say) have to be associated with one particular mode or significance, and not its complete opposite? Can we take things that are already mind-numbing clichés in the mainstream industry – like the ubiquitous drone shot mapping out the grid of a big city at night – and turn them into more mind-boggling propositions concerning the relation of sight to feeling, humanity to landscape, space to time? This is just what Chantal Akerman or Jean-Luc Godard did from their very first short film exercises: playfully interrogate the tool, the technique, the technology, the second-hand form or convention – and, in the process, bend it right out of shape until it becomes expressive of a new idea, a new sensation, a new emotion. Material Media-Making in the Digital Age offers many helpful hints as to how to kickstart such a process.

Every book that, like this one, offers a transversal view of film and media creation also provides – wittingly or not – an auto-portrait of its maker. The examples chosen to form the corpus of examples and case studies reflect a special, lived history of cinema, such as is constituted by the unique, unrepeatable viewing experience of every single individual. I am not talking about an identikit profile of the writer’s tastes and opinions, a reconstructed chronology of their travels or anything so banal. Rather, it’s about seeing through the surface of the argument to the deeper logic of how – experimentally, playfully – this individual has pieced together the possibilities of cinema (past, present and future) for themselves. That’s influenced by factors of time and place, of opportunity and absence, of history and generations and all that, of course; but the outcome is always idiosyncratic, personal in a beyond-whimsical sense.

This also means that, to meet the book at hand, every reader must step outside their own pre-constituted history of film and media, and even of cinephilia itself. Cinema according to Binns is not (primarily) Classical Hollywood, or 1960s New Waves, or the more recent World Cinema associated with Abbas Kiarostami or Kelly Reichardt. Where my personal touchstones include Akerman and Ruiz, Philip Brophy and Bérénice Reynaud, Otto Preminger and Ida Lupino, international film festivals and Positif magazine, Daniel spreads himself around works, figures, tools and occasions as diverse as Maya Deren and Hollis Frampton, Annihilation (2018) and Ivan Sen, Giuliana Bruno and Sean Cubitt, Leandro Listorti’s The Endless Film (2018) and Casey Neistat’s YouTube videos. I’ve never even heard of some of this stuff! But that’s all well and good; we all need to move beyond our comfort zones, which can too easily become prisons rather than maps.

The good news in this is that there’s no single cultural canon, no royal road to the meeting place of practice and theory. Material Media-Making in the Digital Age, however, can inspire, help and encourage you to beat your own path there.

Adrian Martin, August 2020

Acknowledgements

Endless thanks…

… to my colleagues in the Media and Cinema Studies programmes at RMIT University, Melbourne, a haven of creative practice and screen production research at the bottom of the world. Also at RMIT, friends and confidantes in the Critical Intimacies Group and Screen & Sound Cultures Research Group.

… to Bruce Isaacs, Anne Rutherford, David Carlin, Darrin Verhagen and the late and much-missed Adrian Miles, for your support and inspiration throughout this process – but particularly for reassuring me that this kind of research is necessary and worthwhile.

… to Mum, Dad and Annie, for tirelessly supporting me in spite of not really understanding how I’ve managed to fashion a career out of watching movies and staring into space in cafes.

… and to Jess, for everything.

Publications and conferences

An early version of Chapter 9, ‘Dronopoetics’, was published in volume 4, issue 1 (2019), of the Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture. My thanks to the editors for their permission to include a much-revised and expanded version in this book.

Various parts of this research were also presented at the following conferences and events, and I am greatly indebted to the organizers and delegates for their acceptance and feedback:

• Pop Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand; annual conferences held in July of every year between 2015 and 2019

• Camera-Stylo , University of Sydney, Australia, June 2017

• Screen Studies Association of Aoteoroa Australia New Zealand; annual conference, Melbourne, Australia, November 2018

• Inhuman Screens , Sydney, Australia, August 2018

• Guest lecture, Panteion University, Athens, Greece, June 2019

• Dial S for Screen Studies , University of New South Wales, Australia, November 2019

• Sightlines, RMIT University, December 2019

Introduction: Maker, Material

I place the bags on the ground. Their fabric is firm, tough, with slight signs of wear. I arch my back, stretch out the aches, as it’s been quite a walk from the car. I look up, around, take in a gulp of fresh air. I bend down, unzip the long bag and take out a tripod. I extend its legs, one by one, and sit it on the ground, wiggling it so that the feet dig slightly into the soil. I open the shorter, fatter bag and take out the camera. It’s a sizeable machine, now quite dated, but I know that the glass in the lens and the larger image sensor both bring a certain something to the image that newer cameras lack. The camera locks to the head of the tripod with a heavy and satisfying click. I slide a lever that opens the lens cap, power on the camera and like many before me – stretching back through the history of the moving image, even back to the hooded photographic cameras of the late nineteenth century – I lean forward, close one eye and place the other on the viewfinder, to see the world as the camera does.

*****

A jump in time to a different place. The air in this place is not fresh, but putrid, thick with the palpable density of exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke. Like many of the others jostling around me, my head is down, and I am staring at a social media feed on my smartphone. I’m not really paying attention, just mindlessly swiping as I walk. Someone pushes past a little too close, not quite a shove, but there is contact, and I am jolted from my hypnotic connection to the little machine in my hand. I then hear, above the din and racket of all the other urban sounds, something that doesn’t quite fit. Think about a lion’s roar, and replace the organic soul of that sound with something mechanical and ambivalent. The sound makes me do that rarest of things in the modern world: look up. A hot air balloon. The only object in an otherwise cloudless, perfect blue sky. I am struck deeply by this object floating above me, so much so that I stop dead in the middle of the street. No one notices, the stream of people simply divides around me like a river around a rock. I stare for a few seconds, then feel an urge to record this moment to think about later. I feel the weight of the smartphone in my hand and then lift it up. In one motion it goes from my side to being pointed at the sky, with the camera app opened. I rotate the camera such that the orientation is landscape, and I hold the record button for 30 seconds or so. The frame is handheld, of course, but I hold it as still as I can, such that the only thing really moving in the frame is the balloon across the sky. Later, after I’ve posted the video to a social media stream myself, someone comments with the word ‘peace’.

The maker and their materials

This project has been in progress for several years. It began very differently, as a piece of film philosophy, but has since transformed into a reflection on the changing media landscape, and how makers and thinkers might understand and utilize these changes. I’m not trying to theorize the shift to the digital, nor am I trying to wax on and on about convergence and new media – though these are recurring themes in the work. No, my intention is to work through some key issues by thinking, reading, writing but most importantly, by making.

In my teaching, particularly, I’ve always wanted students to consider what theory affords us, but also what it holds back. This holding-back is sometimes by necessity: journals have word limits for their articles, or might otherwise restrict tangents through editorial processes. But the holding-back can also be about setting parameters for a discipline or for a way of looking at things. Towards the end of my doctoral research, I found myself increasingly drawn to those thinkers, researchers, who seemed to want more and who found themselves pushing at the boundaries of their areas of study, by making connections that may previously have been prohibited or discouraged for various reasons.

While I am a media studies graduate and teacher, my main object of study and fascination has always been film. My doctorate considered formal representations of combat within war films, so a great deal of textual analysis was involved, followed by contextualizing that analysis through discussion of historical and social movements. That approach established what was then expected of me and my output as an academic. But something was missing, and that something was my creative work: my making.

Indeed, it is the maker and, most importantly, the making, that is absent from a great deal of scholarship trying to grapple with the huge changes occurring throughout society and technology as we race towards the middle of the twenty-first century.¹ In this book, I suggest that it is with doing, making, activating that we might understand these changes much more than just thinking about them.

What are the materials we use to make things in the immaterial age of the digital? Technological changes require different stuff, and these new materials should also change the way we think about what we make. So what are the new formats – the new crafts, modes or styles of expression – that these material changes afford us? To ask the same question in a slightly different way: how do we find a path through a landscape where media forms are no longer discrete, either materially or conceptually? This book argues that a first step might be getting to grips with what’s behind all of this, looking at what remains from earlier technologies, identifying what’s changed. And then working to craft a creative practice and intellectual perspective from this material understanding.

For me, this book represents a turn to creative practice research after some years wandering in the wilderness of theory and philosophy. My intention is not at all to awkwardly clunk theory and practice