Cinema Militans Lecture

Toward a re-invention of cinema

by Peter Greenaway

28/09/2003

Cinema died on the 31st September 1983 when the zapper, or the remote control,
was introduced into the living-rooms of the world.

Cinema is a passive medium. It might well have fulfilled many of the expectations of
an audience of our fathers and forefathers prepared to sit back, watch illusions and
suspend disbelief, but I believe we can no longer claim this to be sufficient. New
technologies have prepared and empowered the human imagination in new ways.
There is, as we all well know, brand new audiences out there who make up not just a
television generation, but a post-television generation where the characteristics of
the laptop are persuasive and generate new demands and create new benchmark
standards. The ideas of excessive choice, personal investigation, personal
communication and huge interactivity have come a long way since September 1983,
and the act of cinema has had to exist alongside and be a partner to a whole new
world of multiple-media activities, which have all intrinsically metamorphosed cinema
itself. Interactivity and multimedia may well be words that are too familiar anymore
to be truly attended to, but they are certainly the major contemporary cultural
stimulants. How will cinema cope with them, because it surely must. If the cinema
intends to survive, I believe, it has to make a pact and a relationship with concepts
of interactivity, and it has to see itself as only part of a multimedia cultural
adventure.

Once upon a time, cinema -- after avoiding the issue, refusing to encompass it,
pretending that the patient was not sick and the object not broken, so why try to
cure one, and mend the other? -- faced and tackled and adapted itself to a new
technology of sound. The long existing, world-dominant entertainment technology of
the so-called silent cinema changed almost overnight, and in essence it died. And it
is virtually entirely buried. Who now watches silent cinema? Buster Keaton and
Charlie Chaplin on television, and a small minority of film enthusiasts.

Whether we are going to like it or not, the same may well soon happen to so-called
sound cinema.

This is a Militans Cinema lecture. I can afford to be militant. I have been given some
license to be provocative, disrespectful, irritated and angry. And militant. The terms
of this platform expect it of me. And I have been given this license for a second time.
Last time I tried to make a little entertainment. With pictures and projected
alphabets. And a few thorns. This time I want to make a heavier polemic. With
thorns. Because my complaint is that now, after 108 years of activity, we have a
cinema that is dull, familiar, predictable, hopelessly weighed down by old
conventions and outworn verities, an archaic and heavily restricted system of
distribution, and an out-of-date and cumbersome technology.

We need to re-invent cinema.

Every medium needs to constantly re-invent itself. We need now not to put new wine
in old bottles, and certainly not to put old wine in new bottles, we need to put new
wine into new bottles. You are allowed to recognize the wine, which is human
ingenuity and imagination, and you are permitted to recognize the bottles, which is
cinema, though I am convinced we shall be needing to change that name.

Current state of the cinema's demise.

First, a brief run through of some of the current factors we all know about cinema's
demise.

Cinema in cinemas is undoubtedly not the popular art it used to be. In the 1930s,
1940s, 1950s, it is said that European families saw two films at the cinema every
week. We can easily agree that you would be hard pressed to find a European family
that would see cinema now in cinemas twice a year.

Statistics from the heart of the major Western film industry in Hollywood state that
75% of people see their cinema on television, 20% buy their cinema as video or
DVDs, and only 5% view their cinema in places called cinemas.

In this country, I am told, the average Dutch citizen watches only two feature films
in a cinema every three years.

The head of Kodak has stated that his company will not be manufacturing celluloid in
10 year's time.

The poverty of official cinema distribution means that I cannot, and you cannot, see
any film of your choice in any cinema of your choosing this afternoon, or even next
week, and probably not next month, and possibly never. It is easier for me to see a
minor painting by Caravaggio in a small Umbrian town than it is for me to see
Kubrick's "2001" in any cinema that would represent that film in the way it was
manufactured to be presented.

Four thousand feature-potential films have been made in the U.S. every year for the
last four years: 350 get some cinema distribution, 50 hit sensible distribution figures
in 80 U.S. cities, lasting for about -- on average -- 10 days in a cinema. That is one
reasonably distributed film for every week of the year. Twenty feature films a year
hit the big time, 10 hit the very big time and four make it super big time. Four out of
4,000. Where do all the undistributed films end up? The usual places are "straight to
video" or television, a third of them are dumped, though most filmmakers would not
be so blunt as to admit it.

European newspapers were noisy in their complaints this year that the Cannes Film
Festival was of poor quality, and followed it up soon after by saying that the Venice
Film Festival was not much better. These two festivals are traditionally supposed to
be a litmus paper to the life and health of the inventive cinema world. The reaction is
no surprise. There is precious little invention in the cinema world, because traditional
cut-and-paste, narrative, illusionistic cinema has had its day. We must move on. We
must re-invent cinema.

It is a fact that there are more and more film festivals instituted every year,
programming greater and greater numbers of festival films which are never seen
again, films which have no hope of any cinema distribution; there is less and less
informed film criticism in our newspapers, fewer and fewer serious programs about
cinema on television, a fall in readership of film magazines, and greater and greater
creation of media courses in the universities of the Western world. Confusing and
apparently contradictory statistics? Well not necessarily. It would seem that
something very similar happened at the decline of opera and classical dance as
major cultural forces -- although happening over a longer space of time -- an excess
of attention as the quality and proliferation declined, a propping up of the institutions
by the dismayed, that the energy had evaporated, and a deterioration of quality and
insight as the means of production apparently seemed easier.

Mallarme suggested that all the world is created to be put into a book. He might now
say that all the world is created to be put into a film. Everyone wants to make
movies. It is a sign of overkill and a state of exhaustion, resulting in banality and
repetition. And we have arrived at a monoculture, single model of cinema all over
the world. Hollywood product is made in Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai, Rotterdam and
London, and especially in London.

Perhaps we can say that the cut-and-paste, narrative, chronologically plotted,

illustrated-text, illusionistic cinema has played itself out. If you believe it is still alive.
Consider that they say a slow-moving, herbivorous and not very bright dinosaur,
shot in the head on a Monday, is brain dead for a week, and can manage to wag its
tail until the Friday, before the last breath leaves its body. Friday will soon be upon
us.

However, however, however, all of which is no great cause for alarm or

despondency, tears, sadness or nostalgia, but probably for jubilation, because it is a
situation fitting to a recognizable pattern, and the exhaustion invariably coincides
with rejuvenation. We should rejoice that the dinosaur is soon to be a fossil. We
await those small creatures in the forest floor who will soon take over the world.

We have every right to be optimistic about the future as long as we are prepared to
acknowledge "cinema is dead, long live cinema." We can believe in the phoenix.

A medium is governed and shaped and perceived by the characteristics of its

technology. The aesthetic-technology of cinema has lasted 108 years -- but if cinema
essentially expired on the apocryphal 31st September 1983 -- then, from 1895 to
1983, is 88 years, the length of three generations. It would seem that the life of
many aesthetic-technologies might fit into an exaggerated three generation lifespan,
covering the activities of invention, consolidation and then a throwing away in
anticipation of a new cycle. The prime time of fresco-painting technology in the
Renaissance spans Giotto, the inventor of the primary technologies, through
Michelangelo, the consolidator, to the restless Carracci brothers who experimented
with oil-based techniques in association with the wet plaster, and essentially
corrupted its primacy to make way for a significant change. The basic fresco
characteristics existed before this cycle, and persisted after it, but the major
significant work in the medium is created within this span of time.

Similar arguments can be put forward for the subsequent painting technologies of
egg tempera painters on wood panels -- van Eyck to Durer -- and the first and
second waves of post-baroque canvas painters -- Bernini, Velasquez, El Greco -- and
then the painters of artificial light -- Caravaggio and de la Tour, David, Goya
and Delacroix. Cinema has responded to the theory very well. If you are a European,
Eisenstein invents the language, Fellini consolidates the language and Godard throws
it away. If you are American, then the cycle might read Griffith, Orson Welles and
Cassavetes.

In all cases, the medium might continue wagging its tail, but in homage to, or in
admiration of, a tradition, or to further mine fields already strongly prospected, or
simply to enjoy the well-oiled machineries of production structures and studio
facilities, there will be revisionist filmmakers, as in the 1973 to 1986 period --
Coppola, Kubrick, Scorsese working the Fellini-Welles vein -- and Woody Allen, the
Coen brothers and Wenders working the Godard vein, and then the post-revisionists
of the late '80s, further trading, pastiching and homaging like Tarantino, Stone and
Scott.

Running parallel to the last throws of the old medium, the technology changes -- out
of a desire for change itself, or because the bending of the medium creates various
breaking points, or out of a wish to repudiate the past, or because the stretching of
the previous technology generates huge improvements along the avenues
of cheapness, swiftness, greater accessibility and greater ease of handling, and
sometimes even because of the introduction of a brand-new base-energy source,
which in the case of the moving picture industry, as in music, has been first
magnetic tape, and then, as in so many other fields, the full explosion of the digital
revolution.

If this theory of the three generations of invention, consolidation and rejection will
not suit your perception of the progress of 108 years of cinema, cinema as an entire
medium has always been slow and sluggish and resistant to vigourous change. Even
a well-respected cinema director like Scorsese basically makes the same films,
structurally and narratively, as Griffith, the founder of narrative in cinema. There are
better emulsions, smarter equipment and superior publicity, but the same structures
with beginnings, middles and ends, moving from a position of negative behaviour to
positive behaviour on a largely Christian morality program, have not changed;
revenge ordained and completed, wrongs righted, retribution obtained, success
rewarded, innocents exonerated, finishing with happy closures -- these are
structures that are repeated over and over and over again -- and they are structures
that have previously been invented, employed and elaborated by the 19th century
literary giants, Dickens, Balzac, Zola, Tolstoy.

When we are brought to realize that most cinema is illustrated text, we then have a
further demoralization, to discover that of all these texts illustrated by cinema, few,
if any, have advanced to even the early years of literary excitements of the 20th
century. None, for example appear to have approached James Joyce.

The distances of language change and development travelled in cinema are slight
compared to what has happened in the other media in the same 1895 to 1995
period. Consider the changes that have occurred from 1895 to 1995 in music --
Strauss to Stockhausen via Schoenberg, or Debussy to Reich via John Cage; in
literature -- from Hardy and Mann to Borges and Perec. And getting closer and closer
to cinema, consider that, in the theater, Chekov is alive in 1895, and by 1995, we
have experienced Osborne and Pinter, Brecht and Beckett. And closer still to the
ideals of a pictorial cinema, in painting, van Gogh, Gaugin, Cezanne, Malevich and
Klee are all alive and well and kicking in 1895, and we have now have traveled to
Warhol and Keifer via Matisse and Duchamp, Picasso, Rothko and Jasper Johns. It is
difficult to imagine such changes in characteristics, language, attitude, perspective
and immense plurality, in the march of cinema from 1895 to 1995.

Is this such an unfair comparison?

Consider the huge energies, the vast sums of money, the one-time large public
audiences, the huge crowds of manufacturers and the sheer number of movies made
throughout this century of years -- with these factors doesn't it seem we could have
expected greater developmental thrust and pull and range of practice?

However, it is now too late. The game is over. We have lost our opportunity. We
must roll over and start again. And we can.

I believe the last time we saw radical cinema-language change and novel cinematic
invention was with the German cinema in the mid and late seventies -- Herzog,
Straub, Fassbinder and the early Wenders. After that, there has been little radical
experiment and radical invention. Maybe there could not have been anymore,
because by 1980, television had finally won the battle for the moving image
experience.

After 1980 there is little evidence of investigative finances being put into the cinema
media. The money, and the energy that always follows money, was being placed
elsewhere, and the really interesting inventive minds of the moving image went to
places where life was more stimulating -- video experiments, Web-mastering,
multimedia investigations, video clips, animation -- the feature film was no longer
the vehicle for major synthesis and change, the all-embracing symphonic form that
encapsulated the total vocabulary. We can easily believe that Bill Viola is worth 10
Scorseses.

However important the factors are of social, political, economic and cultural pressure
-- the absolute strength of the medium is in its aesthetic, its relationship of language
to content, its relevance to now, the ability to stimulate and entrance, provide
stimulus to dream, legitimize imagination, set fire to possibilities, indicate what
happens next, encourage wholehearted participation -- and I would say -- encourage
wholehearted participation to the point of the panic of overexcitement. I believe
cinema as we know it now, simply fails to do this. And I believe this, in some good
measure, is due to four tyrannies.

The four tyrannies

In association with the cinema celebrations of 1995, with some considerable anxiety
and some deep disenchantment about contemporary cinema, I planned an
investigation into film language to see what about it was investigative, useful,
autonomous and worthy of preservation, and, primarily, unique. What could cinema
do, after a century, that no other media could do?

I constantly saw cinema as being easily deconstructed back into other media forms
where what it had to say, could be said as easily and probably more forcefully and
more efficiently in other ways.

We considered ten characteristics that seemed especial to cinema -- light, the text,
the frame, projection, props, music, scale, time, actors and the camera, and
embarked on a series of citywide exhibitions, under the generic title the Stairs. We
succeeded in placing a large exhibition in the streets and squares, parks
and buildings of Geneva focused on the frame -- erecting 100 wooden staircases
across the city where a viewer was invited to climb a short flight of stairs to an
eyepiece to examine a framing of the city, a wide-shot or a medium-shot or a close-
up. The staircases remained in the city for 100 days, and the framings were available
to all for 24 hours a day in sunshine and rain, moonlight and fog.

The scenarios of this living cinema-film of 100 viewpoints for 100 days were anything
that might happen. You could watch a man take a dog for a walk. You could, if you
were lucky, watch a dog bite a man. If you were exceptionally fortunate, you could
watch a man bite a dog -- the ordinary, the unusual and the extraordinary.

The first motive was to consider why cinema, along with all the other plastic arts,
views the world within the confines of a rectangle, a parallelogram, within the
boundaries of four right-angles? And when we do so indeed, what might that mean?
And do we need to continue to do this, and how was the act of framing relevant to
the act of filmmaking itself? And which single frame is the most relevant and is it
possible to get the timing of the framing right? Was the single frame necessary,
could we break it, explode it, could we re-invent it? What were the advantages and
what were the disadvantages? And the most important question -- was action, event
and activity within the single frame separable from the single frame itself?

In 1995 we were privileged to place a second exhibition in the series in the city of
Munich, and the subject was the act of projection. On the cathedral, the town hall,
the opera-house, shops and shopping malls, offices, the police station, gasometers,
churches and theaters, we made screen projections to simulate the essence of
the cinema experience -- 100 illuminated screens -- pursuing a chronology of cinema
history from simple black and white 1895 Lumiere projection through to color and
the experimental ratios of the 1950s and '60s, to the advent of the television ratios
-- 100 cinema screens alive with projected light all the hours of darkness.

This time the motive was to demonstrate the central cinema experience, the
projection of light across a distance onto a framed space to be viewable
simultaneously to a mass audience.

The exhibition in the series of the Stairs dedicated to props, the significance of the
inanimate object in cinema -- can you imagine a gangster movie without a gun, a
telephone and a car, a Shakespearian feature without a skull, a dagger and a crown,
Othello without Desdemona's handkerchief -- was eventually turned into an
exhibition in Vienna called One Hundred Objects to Represent the World, and then
into an opera of the same name that travelled the world.

No single characteristic of cinema is entirely separable from all the others, and I was
beginning to see the characteristics as tyrannies, which were confining, straight-
jacketing, even abusing the cinema, tyrannies that were perhaps destroying any
further emancipation of the idea of the moving image in cinema. I finally saw those
major tyrannies as the tyrannies of the frame, the text, the actor and the camera.

The tyranny of the text

Every film director, with precious few exceptions, has to have a text before he or she
can have an image. From Spielberg to Godard, Lynch to Tarantino, Kubrick to
Fassbinder. With the cinema that we have developed -- though of course, it need not
have happened that way -- it is impossible to approach a studio or a producer with
three paintings, four prints and a sketch-book of drawings, and expect to be
rewarded with support to make a movie. The cinema is supposed to be an art and an
industry of the image, yet we have a text-based cinema. Every film you have
watched you can see the director following the text, and if you are lucky, making
pictures as an after-thought. No surprise of course. We are all very sophisticated,
even across all the language barriers, at making and using and receiving texts,
written and spoken. Our educational systems are based on forcefully feeding the
letters of the alphabet to reluctant children, and then to press home a necessity to
amassing an understanding of words. As adolescents the reading procedures become
more sophisticated, and as adults, continually persuaded practice, hones and refines
and focuses our abilities -- a systematic universal act of education in the word. You
have a tongue. It will not speak comprehensively on its own, it needs training. Few,
in proportion to the mass attendance at the textual altar, attend art school, design
school, receive architectural training. You have an eye -- can it truly see without
being trained? Just because you have eyes, does that mean you can see? And if you
can see, can you project and communicate your meaning indeed to those who also
have had no extensive training of the eye?

Would you, could you, presume to write a sensible comprehensible letter, leave
alone a novel, without undergoing intensive training in text?

It could be said that most of us suffer from considerable visual illiteracy, persuaded
upon us by a text-obsessive educational insistence. Hence the reliance on the word,
not the image. Derrida famously and wittily suggested that "the image always has
the last word" -- it is of course a false statement, the word always has the last word,
and anyway isn't a word an image?

In England and America, there is great and vigourous support for a writer's cinema.
We do not need or want or desire a writer's cinema. We need a cinema-maker's
cinema. The cinema should not be an adjunct to the bookshop, servicing, illustrating
literature.

The last three dominant significant cinema events have been "The Lord of the Rings,"
a book -- three books -- "Harry Potter," a book, probably eventually, four books, and
"Spider-Man," at least that is supposed to spring from a semi-visual source, a comic,
but essentially an illustrated book.

In pessimistic moments, I would argue that you have never seen any cinema, all you
have witnessed is 108 years of illustrated text.

The tyranny of the frame

We view all the plastic arts through a rigid frame. Since painting separated itself
from architecture at the end of the Medieval period, it regulated its parameters, with
very little exception, to fit four right-angles. And theater, with a proscenium arch,
copied painting; opera and ballet arranged its scenarios and choreography to be
seen in association with theatre's proscenium arch stage-space, and cinema copied
the theatre, and television copied the cinema, and then there are photographs
squared up for painting-picture-frames and to fit the right angles of a book. This
wholesale practice has become so traditional and orthodox, it is not questioned.

Retrospectively, it is the view through a window, though we are thinking now from a
contemporary window point-of-view, since the major horizontal aspect window ratio
of a cinema screen could not have been matched architecturally by a window much
before the middle of the nineteenth century. But the analogy is important because
traditional cinema insists on creating an illusionistic space to give audiences a
window experience -- a surveillance through a window frame out into a parallel
universe connected to that which the audience physically experiences as it sits in the
cinema.

There is no such thing as a frame in the natural world -- it is a man-made, man-

created device, a diagrammatically sharpened and regulated reaction to his own
irregular horizontal view of the world bordered by the brow and the cheek-bones
when the face is held rigid and the eyes kept steady. It is an ironic curiosity that the
Japanese have tried to reverse the game by forcing man-devised frames into
landscape design using the sea horizon as the absolute horizontal, and planting tall
straight-trunked trees to make the vertical frame-lines -- ironic and curious, since
Oriental picture-making has steadfastly, until it came in contact with Western
practices of seeing, eschewed the frame, not finding it at all necessary to use a
frame to contain and shape the world.

And the frame in the cinema has ever restrictingly tightened. There used to be
several aspect ratios open to a cinematographer, especially in the years of pre-
standardization, and again when cinema tried to fight the effects of television with a
rash of experimental ratios in the '60s and '70s, but now we have been steadily
reduced to that most convenient of aspect ratio frames, the television frame of the
ratio 1 to 1.33. And all professional film practitioners know the contortions and
humiliations that cinema has had to experience to get its non-television ratio
demands onto the television screen with letter-boxing, cropping, reducing, panning
and scanning. Such has been this so dominant industrial practice that few television
viewers are even remotely aware that they are not watching the real thing, but some
particular television-convenienced version.

If the frame is a man-made device, then just as it has been created, so it can be un-
created. The parallelogram can go.

The tyranny of the actor

To acknowledge and overcome the third tyranny, the tyranny of the actor, is perhaps
not going to be so popular. It could be said that we delight in being tyrannised by
actors. And I am going to have some difficulty in following through the premise that
the cinema is not, and should not be a playground for Sharon Stone or a
Sylvester Stallone or even a Nicole Kidman or a Robert de Niro, though in 108 years
we have allowed and permitted it to be so. So many films are set up to create a
space for an actor to perform, that it would seem sometimes that the cinema is a
vehicle for their appearance alone.

There are many genres of painting in which the actor is absent, or reduced to the
concept of a figure in a landscape. I am not advocating a cinema where there are no
actors, where the human figure is not by inference the centre of our interest, but I
will argue that the actor has to seriously share the cinematic space with
other evidences of the world, has to be, in essence a figure in a landscape which is
likely to give attention to space, ideas, inanimacy, architecture, light and colour and
texture itself.

The legitimate supremacy of the actor in the viewing space is a characteristic of

theatre, where the demands on his dominant visibility are essential to give credence
to the suspension of disbelief in a patently symbolic world, but like it or not, the
cinema should not be a species of recorded theatre, and the actor has to relinquish
any supremacy he rightly might believe is his for the taking in the theatre.

It is of course not so familiar a condition to the actor who is led to believe by his
profession that the camera should persistently centre his contribution, especially
since we have created off-screens systems to excessively promote the actor and
surround him with agents and managers, a sympathetic production system and a
Press and publicity organisation who appear to need his public relations power. I
have had actors complain that they are too much subject to the insistence of the
frame, that their movements are too bounded by the demands of the composition,
that they have to arrange their contribution to be subservient to a tree, a still life, a
lighting space, shadows, darkness, various devices of invisibility, that I am more
interested in their legs, feet, body, their given physical anatomy, the way they wear
and shape their clothes, the physical space they occupy, the gestures they make, the
pose they take, their weight on the floor, their relationship to a wall or a
ceiling, rather than their face or their interpretation of a psychological role, or their
skill at interpreting a narrative imperative. It is true I take many of my cues and
precedences from painting where there are other considerations than human
performance, but I believe the actor should take his contribution in association with a
sense of ensemble with the world and certainly ensemble with the cinematic
language. We have developed a cinema where the identification of an actor's
emotional and psychological performance is considered to be the key to an
audience's response. This is limiting, reductive and undersells the visual potential of
cinematic language.

The tyranny of the camera

If the tyranny of the actor is difficult to accept, then the fourth and last tyranny is
perhaps even more of a blasphemy -- for it is the tyranny of the camera. We have to
get rid of the camera.

The camera is a recording device. It gives us an image of the world that is mimetic,
it reproduces what we put in front of it. The camera is not a painter. It has entered
the cinema equation too high up the Richter scale -- say at Richter six, where it
would have been better to have entered at Richter zero -- which of course is
contradictory because there would have been nothing there, which of course is what
my proposition is all about.

Two quotations. One from Picasso: "I do not paint what I see, but what I think." The
second from Eisenstein, certainly the greatest maker of cinema, a figure you can
compare with Beethoven or Michelangelo, and not be embarrassed by the
comparison, and there are few cinema-makers you can elevate to such heights. On
his way to Mexico, Eisenstein, traveling through California, met Walt Disney, and
suggested that Walt Disney was the only filmmaker because he started at ground
zero, a blank screen.

The connection between the two quotations is suggestive. There is a necessity in a

curious way to bypass the lazy, mimetic, passive recording eye -- human or
mechanical -- and jump straight to the brain, the imagination, the seat of creation.
And it is suggested that we have now the tools, and we can easily imagine the tools
we shall have tomorrow, to make this happen. We should not want a cinema of
appropriation, of mimesis, or reproduction of the known world, not even a cinema of
virtual reality, but a cinema of virtual unreality.

The Renaissance contribution to the modern world in visual terms is usually couched
in terms of forever and forever successfully reproducing reality. From Giotto to
Masaccio, from Masaccio to Uccello, from Uccello to Raphael, from Raphael to
Giorgione -- you can choose your own chain of ever-rising realism.

It has been an upward success story in getting painted images to look more and
more like the natural world -- the gradual controlling of the technologies of
chiaroscuro and scale, sculptural modelling, linear perspective, aerial perspective,
anatomy, in order in the end, to reproduce what we already have around us. Is that
such a success story? Should not the energies have been spent in more worthwhile,
investigative pursuits, to pursue the possibilities of the inventive human imagination,
probably the most complex and self-regarding phenomenon in the universe?

The real world is always going to be more real, more exciting, more terrifying, more
dangerous, more appealing than the world that can be reproduced by the camera.

Should therefore cinema eschew ambitions of illusionistic recreation of the known

world -- its major pursuit -- and attempt to manufacture the imaginative world
alone?

My militant response then to the current circumstances of a dying aesthetic

technology called cinema, jolted into the necessity of accepting the novelties of inter-
activity and the revitalised possibilities of multimedia, is to shake out these tyrannies
of the frame, text, the actor and the camera, and try to place product in the firing
line of these polemics.

Cinematic benchmarks

It is an arrogant assumption to think we can make cultural benchmarks, significant

artefacts with which to measure the state of a total practice. Benchmarks, I suspect,
are made only after the event. Did Dante know that he was making profound
significance with "The Divine Comedy," a work that self-confessedly suggests
an attempt to unite the angels in their heavens with the stones on the road? Did the
van Eyck brothers in Ghent with their triptych of the "Adoration of the Lamb," or
Michelangelo, with his view of known beliefs on the Sistine ceiling, know that they
were both manufacturing works that would attempt to put everything in one place,
ordered, systematic and comprehensible? Would Shakespeare and Cervantes have
known that their cultural contributions would occupy the same sort of significance.
And did Joyce in writing "Ulysses," the most influential but least read of the 20th
century's novels, know that, by gathering together every known trope of narrative
and storytelling and exposition of experience in words, and thereby having to invent
a new sort of word exposition to realise it -- did he have consciousness of the bench-
mark he was making?

It maybe that the first total cinema masterpiece benchmark was Eisenstein's
"Strike," made in 1924. From the start of cinema on the 20th December 1895 to
Eisenstein's "Strike" in 1924 is very nearly 28 years -- the length of a generation. If
the new post-cinema-cinema began on 31st September 1983 -- until now -- that is
20 years somewhere between next Tuesday and next Wednesday -- we have 8 years
to go to make the first masterpiece bench-mark of the new visual technologies.
The Tulse Luper Suitcases project hopes to address and answer and find, in a deeply
investigative way, some answers to some of these concerns and anxieties. It
certainly revolves around, and desires to exploit, interactivity and multi-media. The
project is manufactured for exploitation in the cinema, on television, on one or more
websites, as a serious collection of DVDs and in association with a library of books,
with links to the making of theatre and opera, exhibitions and installations in
museums and galleries.

To date, after 13 months of manufacture, there are three hours of highly wrought
cinema material shot, edited, and hopefully to be projected on HD television, though
as you will see tonight, two hours exist -- because the industry is slow to take
advantage of the revolution around us -- on 35mm film. There are two published
books, a play performed in German at the Frankfort National Theatre, and soon to be
rehearsed and performed in 12 cities in Holland, and two exhibitions, one in Milan
and one currently in Ghent. In the next thirteen months, there will be three new
exhibitions - in England, Leipzig and Berlin, two theatre productions in Lille and
Bremen, and three more hours of HD material, bringing us up to seven episodes in
the 16-episode Tulse Luper saga.

The ambition is to make an integrated product viable and comprehensible in different

forms for the first decade of the 21st century, that centres, as its cement and
superstructure, around the life and times of its central character Tulse Luper, whose
activities are multifarious, though perhaps like us all, he is a professional prisoner.
Matching the atomic number of uranium, his life-history covers 92 years. He is 92
tomorrow, the 29th September.

The whole project is an attempt to make a gathering together of today's languages,

to place them alongside one another and get them to converse, and as far as
cinematic language is concerned, to find ways out of the above stated tyrannies.

Considering the tyranny of the text

In the first place, though it still begs my anxious questioning of the creation of a
visual medium through text, the substance of "The Tulse Luper Suitcases" was
written out indeed in words, albeit with a text of some complexity that makes it looks
more perhaps like a vertical and horizontal musical score than a conventional film-
script.

It is not an adaptation of a book, or a play, or any phenomenon that saw light first
as literature of any description. On the argument of "If it itches, scratch it" -- the
text therefore is much in evidence. I give you frequent doses of the text on screen.

There is a very necessary content reason for this, since it soon becomes evident that
the film is happening, so to speak, as it is written, and is, in essence, the deliberate
product of a writer, though quite how that shapes up, I do not want to reveal just
yet, for that would give away the whole containing conceit of the thing.

Text usually shapes the cinema narrative and certainly provides the cinema dialogue.
Conventional cinema seeks to conceal that written textual origin. In the Tulse Luper
Suitcases there is no hiding of these origins, and the film is so full of narratives that
narrative is often negated by excess, and certainly narrative is constantly interrupted
and fragmented by side-bars and listings and sub-narratives, as to make
conventional narrative continuity problematic.

Since it would seem text and image are a pair, often of unequal status, and there is
much evidence to suggest they have co-existed in painting for much of its history -
do not try to break up the unequal, uneasy marriage but seek to exploit it.
Acknowledge that most of the images seen in cinema began as textual
descriptions, deliberately use text as image, employ calligraphy and typography to
define text as that very thing. Contemporary advertising has made of the
combination of text and image, an art of its own, and cinema might do well to
imitate and develop its exploits.

Considering the tyranny of the frame

Abel Gance with his film "Napoleon" in 1927 developed a three-screen projection,
and intimated possible ways to use it. Wide shot, medium shot, close-up; back, front
and side; landscape, portrait, still-life. To synchronise three 35mm projections in
1927 was not so easy and the technological experiment essentially stopped with
Gance.

There was a wait of some forty years before the technology and thus the possibilities
of the language could be resurrected. There was a spate of films in the 1980s where
it became not uncommon, more than once associated with movies featuring Steve
McQueen, but noticeably the device was a decoration to the narrative not substantial
to it, and rarely added more than retinal excitement. Special feature events like the
Tokyo Olympic Games with large sums of money to exhibitionistically flaunt,
engendered essentially non-narrative multi-screen experiments, by offering only
more sheer retinal stimulus and pattern-making, and such language is now the
stable diet in pop concerts and video-walls, though rarely structured in other than
illustrative and decorative ways.

The conventional cinema cinema still cannot perform multi-screen projection, and
until such time it can and will, the single screen can suffice to be spliced, split and
fragmented. Multiple screens imply a sense of choice. It is not easy to look at all
screens with equal attention simultaneously, choice for major attention has to made,
though those choices can be conducted and orchestrated by the director. New digital
technology minimises Gance's difficulties, though as suggested with a single screen
agenda.

"The Tulse Luper Suitcases" endeavours to utilise and develop a multi-screen

language in the various ways Abel Gance anticipated and certainly to take it beyond.
Superb steadiness, immaculate framed edges are digitally edited on High Definition
tape at increasing near real-time editing speeds. Before, during, after; past present
future; fast, slow, slowest, repetitions, reprises, across screen devices of
innumerable continuities, developing a language that equates more with human
experience in its interactions between reality, memory and imagination.

One of the greatest potential excitements is the ability and freedom now to fashion
the frame to suit the content. Very crudely, a snake travelling across the grass
suggests a long horizontal frame, a giraffe, a tall vertical one. And morphing such a
snake into such a giraffe can be accomplished with hands-on ease. The frame can be
cut and cropped with various layers of density, overlap and metamorphosis.

Pre-Renaissance painting, having no imperatives to depict the real, played with

subjective scale, and with condensed and simultaneous time, both considerations
being relevant to the dictates of theological ideals.

Christ, at the Last Supper, being the most important figure at the table, was
depicted physically larger than his disciples. Adam and Eve were tempted, ate the
apple, plucked the fig leaves and were expelled from the Garden of Eden all in the
same interconnected single space. These are expressionistic devices long explored by
painting, and to a certain extent by flourishing comic-book arts, and certainly with
renewed interest in the last 150 years after the long years spent pursuing the
chimera of reproducing the apparent reality of the eye, real time and true scale.

The digital revolution technologies can re-explore these issues to make -- to use a
convenience concept-word -- an animated cubism. Making for a God-like ubiquity,
you can see both sides of the wall, insides and outsides, downstairs and upstairs,
macrocosm and microcosm, all at the same time. The historical key markers to
a philosophy of the moving image can be profitably revisited and revitalised -
Muybridge sequential photography, Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, and
Marey's multiple-image fencers, dancers and athletes can resume significance.

The frame has come alive.

It is no longer a passive jail of four right angles.

Considering the tyranny of the actor

The tyranny or conventional dominant contribution of the actor has been considered
for some time in the feature films I have made over then past twelve years within
bounds of what could be described as a cinema of passionate detachment. It can be
characterised by being sparing of close-ups, a desire not to cut the body unless
absolutely necessary, and to be aware of the human figure as a strong compositional
element within a self-conscious frame, any gestures or actions that are not
sympathetic to the visual composition within a frame, will probably be rejected or
simply not seen, or if considered a valuable contribution, re-shot, or reformatted to
give them visual compositional significance. The camera views I normally employ
would rarely be person orientated. For example I would never use an over-shoulder
shot in a two-way conversation and viewpoints are constructed from the ideal
position of the camera not the eye-line or viewpoint of the character.

In "The Tulse Luper Suitcases," the use of the actor has been taken further in such
directions, which I believe, and certainly many of the actors believe, gives greater
scope to their contribution, whilst still holding them firmly within a space that denies
orthodox actor dominance.

One of the major metaphors of the project is the saying that there is no such thing
as history, there are only historians, that history, in effect, is a highly subjective
business recorded with vested interests. Napoleon could have behaved like this, or
like this, or like this. That this conversation could have been delivered like this or this
or this. That this interpretation of the event could have been melodramatic or
sentimental, melancholic or yet again pathetic. Consequently we have tried to give a
cinema audience alternatives, certainly in keeping with the interactivity choices laid
down in our ambitions, but also to demonstrate that there is no singular verity. We
have often given these interpretations simultaneously or overlaid them with one
another in a cubist-like phenomenon, editing and layering techniques which could
probably only be achieved with the help of the new technologies.

Conventional cinema editing in true cut-and-paste chronology style, gives you one
event at a time sequentially. The cinema has never been good, unlike the theatre for
example, at simultaneity. The narratives as a consequence often behave like musical
scores, deliberately full of repeats and reprises, variations on a theme, returns to
explore thematic areas further and in greater detail, often using different actors to
play the same role, to interpret the same material. So much is this a characteristic
that, within the dramas themselves, the actors are often viewed as actors, though
staying inside the film and not outside of it. We see their auditions. We often show
different takes of the same action, a characteristic of cinema rarely seen by viewers
but extremely commonplace to actors themselves and certainly to all those involved
in the making of a film. So although the conventional virtuosity of the actor on
screen is denied or at least abrogated to eradicate the tyranny of his contribution, a
respect and an acknowledgement for the actor's essential presence is certainly
championed, even extravagantly championed.

Considering the tyranny of the camera

The spectrum of visual possibilities in the manufacture of the moving image is large,
and traditionally the feature film only uses a small section of that spectrum,
sufficient to realise an illusionist drama. Mixed visual genres in the cinema are not
common. I suppose the combination of live action and the cartoon, noticeably
celebrated in a film like Who Framed Roger Rabbit is an example, though it was an
experiment not over-enthusiastically copied, and it was a drama that afterall pursued
illusionist conceptions, another window-on the world construction, and any Tex Avery
self-conscious anarchies, any breaking of the frame techniques, stayed within those
conventions.

The days of strict adherence to the Platonic verities, observing singular time, singular
place, singular treatment and singular subject, are long gone, and eclecticism is
legitimate and honourable. It would be difficult to see how it could be otherwise in an
information age with encouraged encyclopaedic thinking.

The supermarket of visual and dramatic possibilities is huge. I believe cinema should
seize the opportunity to shop vigourously in the supermarket.

Watching virtually any four minutes of CNN News demonstrates what television has
been doing for a long time, using a whole range of communication languages
simultaneously. The introduction of more and yet more multiple pictures, lines of
moving text, titles, sub-titles, inter-titles, animated diagrams, animated maps, insert
talking heads, split screen conversations, has not noticeably created apoplexy in
viewers, and though curiously I suspect consciously unaware of the gesture, it is
becoming common now for the screen itself to be self referenced with fixed company
logos -- which really do demonstrate to the viewer that he is watching a screen, and
not merely what is conveyed through it.

We have developed habits of visual selection. Largely we take what we want. We can
ignore English-language moving text of stock market reports in Tokyo, whilst we
focus our attention to watch animated diagrams of hurricanes in Florida, though
peripherally we are aware that communications of the world are coming at us fast
and furiously. Whilst feature films, Hollywood-style and art-house style, have been
pursing the straight and narrow, television has been revelling in communication skills
for a long time. Godard suggested that "We look up at cinema, but down at
television", a pointed reference at anatomical reality, but also at snobbish sloth. It is
curious that cinema so long regarded as a vulgar medium by the traditional arts has
adopted its own snobbisms in the face of competition.

It is a commonplace now that post-production is extremely sophisticated and

permeates practically everything we see on screens -- not just the ubiquitous
dinosaur that is so believable, children are convinced they exist somewhere outside
Jurassic Park and demand to see them at the zoo, but clandestinely, polishing up
politicians, sexing-up entertainers, erasing mistakes, changing colours, brightening
gloomy days, and of course the opposite, adding blood and smoke, transposing grief
and pain from one location to another to suit public relations and political
expediency. Many years ago, although admiring the technique, we were shocked at
the way unwanted politicians disappeared from official Soviet Politburo photographs,
such technical manipulations now are commonplace. The ethics are decidedly
problematical. But the language, almost what we could call an anti-camera language,
is extraordinary.

My fascination and inclination, being interested in process and wishing to

demonstrate that process, as well as to give you end-results, solutions and closures,
is to use it. If I am making a project whose central metaphor is "there is no such
thing as history, there are only historians", I need to use it. And indeed every
possibility of communication by visual image is used. Drama elaborated, Chekovian,
kitchen-sink, vaudeville, pantomime, cinema-verite, surveillance, operatic,
melodrama, soap-opera, stripped down to a black box, worked up to a David Lean
exuberance, pastiche amateur theatricals, talking heads, stand-up comic. And such
uses of the actor's trade are interspliced and elaborated with animated maps and
diagrams, cartoon simplicities and cartoon complexities, static and animated texts,
multiple typographies and multiple calligraphies. This is an anti-Dogme film. It
exuberates and celebrates new cinema language.

Finale

Cinema died on the 31st September 1983 when the zapper or the remote control
was introduced into the living-rooms of the world. Cinema as our fathers and
forefathers knew it was a passive elitist medium, made expensively for the
patronised many by the condescending few, with a distribution system that has
made its own product virtually unviewable. Now we can break the monopolies, really
start with an art of the moving image with viewer participation that can truly
empower the imagination, diversify interminably, cater for all, and not patronise
audiences. What was cinema? Rows and rows of people sitting still (and who in any
other human occupation sits still for 120 minutes?), all looking in one direction (the
world is all around you - not just in front of us), in the dark (man is not a nocturnal
animal). With a cinema with characteristics like this, perhaps the sooner dead, the
better.

Let us rid cinema of the four tyrannies of text, the frame, actors and the camera. But
what are we talking about anyway? You haven't seen any cinema yet, all we have
seen is 108 years of illustrated text, and, if you have been lucky, perhaps a little
recorded theatre.

Now a cinema of what you think and not what you lazily see is truly possible. Let us
seize that nettle and begin the art of the moving image all over again. Every medium
needs constant re-invention.

Let us now re-invent that cinema. We can. We now have the most amazing new tools
to do so. Now we need the desire and the courage. And this new medium of the
moving image will almost certainly not be experienced in those strange high-street
pieces of architecture called cinemas.

So-called cinema was invented in 1895. It took 29 years, with Eisenstein's "Strike" in
1924, to make the first benchmark masterpiece of this new aesthetic-technology of
film. If a New Moving Image aesthetic-technology was baptised on 31st September
1983, then we still have a few year's grace to invent its first
benchmark masterpiece.

Well-aware of the dangers of the discrepancies of what I say matching with what I
make, I offer you the first toe in the water of an ocean of possibilities in the multi-
media, interactive project of "The Tulse Luper Suitcases" -- cinema, television, Web
site, DVD, library -- as a candidate for that benchmark position.