Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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Issue 13. The Forgotten Surrealists: Belgian Surrealism Since 1924 |
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Soft Cinema. Navigating the Database. |
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Author: Jan Baetens Lev Manovich & Andreas Kratky, Soft Cinema. Navigating the Database. |
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Soft cinema is not just another example of what the computer can mean for the cinema. Conceived and designed by the widely acclaimed author of The Language of New Media (MIT 2000) and many pioneering studies on the stakes of the digital turn (often very generously offered to the web-community at the author's website: www.manovich.net ), it is the much expected practical proof of the theoretical, and overtly polemical, stances brilliantly defended in articles, lectures and interventions that bear a real difference with many other theories on the digital. First, Manovich has always argued that the digital revolution did not start with the computer, but with film, more particularly with Soviet montage, which "invented" in a sort what digital culture is now standing for. Second, he has no less opposed the idea that this revolution is technology-driven: without of course minimizing the importance of the technological environment, Manovich has always stressed the necessity to keep away from McLuhan's technological determinism, which indeed continues to nourish much thinking on cyberculture. Third (and this is of course the aspect of Manovich's thinking we owe this DVD to), the author has always linked, as tightly as Saussure did with signifier and signified, the hands-on approach of the practice-led researcher and the more speculative approach of the theorist.
Willingly or not, Soft Cinema will therefore be read as an "ars poetica", the practical illustration of a key work in recent critical thinking on visual and digital culture. This situation defines both the strengths and the weaknesses of Manovich's and Kratky's project. The work's theoretical pedigree will undoubtedly prove helpful when deciphering, interpreting, and evaluating the multilayered character of the three short stories gathered on this DVD. Yet it will also make the viewer aware of the limits of this new way of film-making, which most readers of The Language of New Media thought to be more innovative than what they are offered here. There is indeed a problem with this work, however exciting and seducing both the images and the story-building of the three short stories may be.
With the notion of "soft" cinema, Manovich insists on what is new in contemporary computer-generated story-making. Whereas "hard" cinema starts from a storyline, which it illustrates by scripting, shooting, and editing images, "soft" cinema constructs its stories by putting together, sometimes randomly, sometimes by following some constrained algorithms, visual bits and pieces that are drawn from an ever expanding database. The result of such an approach is, if I may allow myself such a rude simplification, twofold: on the one hand, the screen is no longer occupied by a single-screen image, it is now composed by a mosaic of simultaneously moving images; on the other hand, the succession of elements is no longer predetermined and fixed. Moreover, each showing (and therefore also each viewing) of the material will be different from each other, since the selection of the database units is not made once and for all, but remains endlessly open to an endless number of combinations.
The strange thing, however, is that the practical result of the soft cinema procedures does not produce something that strikes the viewer as very different from what "hard" cinema has familiarized us with. On the contrary, the three short stories by Manovich and Kratky seem very respectable in all respects: simple stories, easy to follow, nice images, pretty to look at, and so on. In other words: although this cinema is "soft" and "liquid", it is still cinema, and even very conventional cinema at that. In a certain sense, one might say that it is not even cinema, since the images lose here all autonomy, and therefore all raison d'être : the story is simply dictated by a verbal or visual voice-over. Soft cinema has stories that one can "read" either by listening to the narrator's voice, or by reading a text scrolling over the screen (in the case of the third story, voice and text are combined). In a slightly exaggerated manner, one might say that Soft Cinema resembles television and radio more than cinema: you can close your eyes and be sure that nothing essential will be lost (except the aesthetic quality of the images, which is remarkable).
The very traditional character of the Soft Cinema stories is also displayed by other features. It is for instance astonishing to observe that the stories always have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that beginning, middle and end appear always in that order, whatever the selection executed by the soft machine. Images, therefore, do not seem to exceed a purely illustrative role: they change from one version to another, but without changing the storyline they embellish. Die hard moviegoers will be relieved, but this relief is certainly not what soft cinema is theoretically looking for… The stories themselves are often well-known, sometimes filled with nothing more than narrative stereotypes of the hard-boiled genre, in other cases very close to the unacknowledged reworking of high-cultural examples (in the first short story, Mission to Earth , one may find uncanny references to Chris Marker's famous movie The Jetty ). And the art-historical and literary influences detailed by Lev Manovich in the accompanying interview (he mentions Mondrian for the mosaic-screen, financial television for the use of subtitles, high-modernist writers for the use of interior monologue) all reveal Manovich's bizarre rearview progress.
In conclusion: this first step toward soft cinema is too soft. It makes us long nostalgically for the daring leaps of hard montage cinema. Yet this disappointment does not mean at all that the soft cinema project is not necessary, or that it would be impossible (after all, authors such as Peter Greenaway are moving forward in the same direction, with results that one may have good reasons to find, at least until now, more challenging and audacious). But Kratky's and Manovich's collaboration does not yet offer us what soft cinema promises to do: to make things new, and to keep them so.
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