New Narrative styles in the digital age

by Ahmed Hassouna

    In the last two decades, a great deal of technological variations and alterations took place in the production of audio visual and other innovations that affects the culture of the new era, it therefore affected the cinema and its narrative and gave it new potential for advancement. It was clear that Images and sounds are turning to digital instead of being Analog.

    These changes occurred in all stages of video and cinema production. The first and most obvious change occurred in the pre-production and post-production stages.

Frame forge

    It started with the appearance of desktop computers in the 80's, with a number of software that helped filmmakers to prepare their scripts, break them down, create budgets and schedules, as well as other forms that help one to prepare for shooting, even for an electronic Story-board to draw their shots.

  

Final Cut Pro

    Later on, the desktop video came to being where you could do video editing on computer instead of the traditional way, i.e. Digital editing vs. Analog editing.
This step revolutionized editing methods and how one viewed editing, moving from linear editing to nonlinear editing. The professional standard existing on Avid was designed for professionals and in order to be an integral part of the professional editing system, i.e. connected to beta-cam and digital beta-cam VCR, professional sound equipment etc..
    This had a strong effect on cost production allowing for performing more complex effects and transition with the fraction of the price of the old system.

    At the same time on the consumer level, a great deal of effort was exerted to create a desktop video editing based on a normal computer with a digitizer card to capture the footage and software, which encouraged young filmmakers and amateurs to use it, for the production of quality video work with niche effects and transitions.  However, the quality was still far from the professional standards.

Sony HD Camera

    The real revolution took place with the introduction of HDV for professional and the digital mini DV in the mid 90's. The HDV achieves a quality that is considered to be equal to the 35 mm. The digital mini DV Camera gives a reasonable high quality satisfactory to new independent filmmakers as well as established filmmakers.

    The invention of Fire wire, a connection between Camera and computer to capture digital video and output the final video revolutionize for the second time, where the distinction line between the professionals and the non-professional blurred, and for the first time in the history of cinema, Filmmakers are able to use the same cameras and/or editing machine and software to make home movies, an independent film. The possibility of transferring this digital material and screen it in 35mm, opens the door for professional director to get advantage of the low cost and the different aspect of the film if needed.

Lars Von Trier

Digital cameras such as Sony vx-1000, DP-150 DVcam, the Trv-950 and the Canon XL1 are used for a number of movies like The Idiots and Dancer in the Dark (Lars Von Trier), Time Code (Mike Figgis), The Celebration, Bus Stop (Spike Leigh), and El-Madina (Yusri Nasr Allah), and others.
The Mac Machines and Final cut pro is considered now the number one editing system for serious independent filmmakers and professionals due to its low cost and efficiency. For example, a well-known editor like Walter Murch who edited Apocalypse now uses Final Cut Pro to edit Cold Mountain.

    The next revolution was the introduction of HDV in the consumer and the pro-sumer market as an option for the Mini DV Cameras; however it is still at early stages before the filmmakers may know the full effects. The professional HD camera makes it possible for George Lucas to continue his block buster movie Star Wars and helps artistic directors such as Peter Greenaway to achieve new multi-layering images in films like The Pillow Book.

    Parallel to these developments, the appearance of the Internet, Chatting on line, Video games and Mobiles have changed the sources by which people gather information and means of communication with each other. All these changes had its impact on the existing culture, which enhanced what is called postmodern culture and globalization, where Digital culture is an important and integral part of it. Thus the democratization of low cost movies, distributing it over the net, to encourage the creation of new narrative forms. The same occurred with music and it created different spectators by large numbers, who may be living in remote areas, and able to watch a movie made by a filmmaker who lives in a far away small village, somewhere in this world.

    The Classical Hollywood narrative cinema started to be less dominate, as part of the old system of production-distribution and started to adapt new systems to allow for less rigidity. Also, as an opportunistic capital system, in order to maximize its profit through adoption of independent filmmakers, merging them in the main stream while using the Internet as distribution and screening venues.

    The use of digital mini DV, minimize the cost of filming by replacing film stocks with digital tapes.
One can use higher ratio of filming which allows for the high potential of improvising, whether on the actors, style, or narrative; and avoiding being under the mercy of star system.

The Idiots

   A good example demonstrating the utilization of these tools by a director is Lars Von Trier in The Idiots (1998). He shot with Sony VX-1000, hired non-professional actors, and had the time to experiment with style. Even the existence of these digital cameras was one of the reasons that led to the creation of the Dogma movement in Denmark, where Lars Trier is considered to be the main figure that put very rigid rules for avoiding group work production in the traditional system.

Dancer In The Dark

As a creative person, Lars Von Trier couldn't go so rigid; consequently he directed his next film Dancer in the dark with well-known actors, featuring Catherine Deneuve and the renowned pop star Bjork.
    He used different digital cameras, but mainly depended on the Sony TRV-900 cameras, following some lenses modification. Van Trier used around 100 cameras to shoot the musicals in the film.

    This couldn't be accomplished through a classical Hollywood production structure. The richness of the material put the director in a position of an internet user, who has a variety of instant material and has to look for what he needs through a good search engine, in order to locate what he is looking for and achieve his objective.

    The engaging of spectators in choosing what to see and what narrative to follow appears in Peter Greenaway's Pillow Book (1997) and in Time Code (2000).

The Pillow Book

    In The Pillow Book, the director goes to Japan to finish his production as he decided to use HDTechnology, to have multi-layers of images and superimposing text.
The screening of different images at the same time on the screen but at different time through timeline of the film creates a virtual time for the spectators and gives him the chance to follow the time or the events he wants to have.

Time Code

    In Time Code, The film is constructed from four continuous 90-minute takes, which were simultaneously filmed by four cameramen; the screen is divided into quarters and the four shots are shown simultaneously.
This gives the viewer the opportunity to decide on which story to watch.

    The film depicts several groups of people in Los Angeles as they interact and conflict while preparing for the shooting of a movie. The dialogue was largely improvised, and the sound mix of the film is designed so that the most significant of the four sequences on screen dominates the soundtrack at any given moment.

    Mike Figgis wants also to give the spectators the freedom on the DVD version, to choose one of the stories with its own sound to hear it. It is an interactive cinema to a certain extent, where you give the spectators the choice of what they wish to see.

    Some may argue that the use of multiple Cameras is a tradition in Hollywood cinema, and splitting screens where you can follow different actions existed from a long time like Napoleon (1927), by Abel Gance. However, it is important to note the imagination of the makers, which usually goes beyond the technological advance.

    Now we can say that it has become possible and acceptable by a wider audience, and more coherent with our contemporary culture, that will view such experiment more frequently, which may be a prevailing wave in Narrative cinema.

    It reminds us with the Jump cut when first was introduced by Godard in his film breathless (1969), and turns out to be a trend that disappeared for a while, followed by a strong come back; such as in Lars Von Trier's   films and other directors.
The cutting in time (Jump Cuts) is on the increase, rather than the classical editing, which is cutting in space.  All these modifications lead to a loose narrative, character oriented plot, while cause and effects presence is less important than before.

Lost Highway

    The restructuring of narrative by the spectators appears strongly in the films of David Lynch, Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2002). His main characters in these films are mentally disturbed people and we see the events through their own vision. They rearrange things; modify it, turning themselves into different characters. They are able to exist in more than one place like where the mystery man hands his phone to Fred and ask him to call him at his home and to Fred’s surprise, he found him answering the phone; or being able to change the gender from male to female.
The narrative is true only through their reality. Their life is quite closely knitted around some internet users, who chat on line in virtual rooms, where a new identity is created, changing his gender and maybe his whole life, in order to communicate with other people and satisfy his own personality.
 He can be in more than one virtual room and has the capacity of being to several different people all at the same time.

    Both films create a form of resistance on how to interpret the meaning of the film, while allowing the spectators to construct their own narratives.

     Both films go beyond the traditional ways of narrative and how to deal with it. As an example, in a Turkish film called Shattered Soul, where a number of mysterious murders take place, involving a woman with the symptoms of multi-personality. The film couldn't go beyond the action thriller and physiological genre mixed with the strong presence of Turkish melodrama in it.

    The virtual reality greatly enhanced by the digital technology and culture, helped in blurring the distance between the virtual real and the real.

Where The Truth Lies

    In Where The Truth Lies (2005), by Atom Egoyan, Karen O’Connor, the heroine comments on a flashback based on a diary by one of the main characters describing a wild orgy, by being a complete imagination of the person and it didn't happen.

 

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance

    The Multiple voice over and point of views are extensively employed in some films, such as Where The Truth Lies and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005) by Park Chan-Wook, where a lady gets out of jail to avenge herself. She has numerous numbers of voice over and flashbacks, which created a very complex film with different style, using layers of images and text.

    This type of pastiche becomes a part of the digital culture and similar to the customized feature in software, where you can use a variety of different styles and forms, and combine them together with the help of ready made parts or ready made templates that are  modifiable.

    In the end, we can see how the digital technology and culture had a strong effect on filmmaking and its narrative and how it push its boundaries forward to new horizons.

   تم تقديم هذه الورقة بالسمبوزيوم الدولي حول رهانات الكتابة السينمائية و السمعية البصرية و تحديات الثقافة الرقمية- المدرسة العليا للسمعي البصري و السينما في تونس  و ذلك في الفترة من 20 أبريل إلي 22أبريل 2006