Dir. Dziga Vertov / Asif Kapadia
We take for granted the artifice of film. Film, that is, a movie, a motion picture, is simply a quick succession of still images played in sequence. These sequences convey motion, the passage of time, and can be edited after the fact to create anything the director wants. The magic of cinema is the ability to manipulate images to create moving art. Now, this can happen in a Hollywood effects studio, where Chris Pine's Kirk will have a little touch up to make him the hero we know and love - a stunt rope edited away here, a blemish digitally removed there. That is art, the creation of a Hollywood hero, and don't let anyone tell you different. But what is oftentimes more difficult, and what the best filmmakers can achieve, is the editing of the real world, before it is captured on film - the immaculate staging and framing of Ozu, whose sets were constructed in such a way that they are almost symbiotically linked to the camera placement. One could not exist without the other to create the final, stationary shot.
Ozu is a wonderful example as he is at arguably the furthest extreme of moving image on film. Ozu's films are like those magical photographs of Harry Potter, the frame remains stationary, but the composition of the shot (or photo) allows the actors within the frame to play out the most human of drama. Ozu's films are windows into the worlds he has created. There is no clear opposite end to this spectrum, as once the camera moves, it has gone 360°, even if it doesn't use the entire spectrum available to it. You could say the quick-cuts of Greengrass in the Bourne films, which then includes those like Megaton who take it to the nth degree, nullifying any composition at all, and indeed, coherence. Found-footage movies are interesting spin-offs here as they are composed by a filmmaker and yet they are also not, as the freedom of movement creates spontaneity - almost filmic jazz, where no two takes will be the same.
Frankly, what you will discuss down this road is the entirety of cinema and the field of cinematography, so it's best to talk about the early avent-garde genius of Dziga Vertov before we get carried away. The 68 minute movie (available on wikipedia in full) is not just a classic of cinema, but an educator. The film displays a dizzying amount of camera and editing trickery to simply document a Russian city and its people. It was both a culmination and ongoing experiment of the Kino-eye movement, which Vertov wrote at length on, and was used as a manifesto, alongside the other Kinos, to show how the camera would reflect the truth of the real-world. A political statement of Marxism as science - fascinating to read the passion of Vertov for this concept, even more fascinating is viewing his experimental films, which convey the concept. Film schools are built on this stuff, and lectures given. I've no doubt you could fill a semester or two discussing each technique used by Vertov in the film and what effects he wanted them to have.
There is a sequence early in the film, where, after seeing Vertov film a group of men and women in a horse-drawn carriage, the so-far moving images suddenly stop. The horse's legs frozen mid-gallop. The carriage riders no longer move but stare at each other, frozen. The entire hustle and bustle of the street cut to a single frame. Before moving film, this was the artform to capture life - photography. That field also has rules of composition, and indeed motion pictures are by their very nature slaved to photography. What Vertov succeeds at doing here at a practical level is display to us the mechanics of the capturing of film, which is shown directly, as we see the editor at work, splicing these still images, on physical film, together.
But emotionally, my god, what he does is a revelation! Life and death in the palm of our hands, nestled between running metal, captured on chemicals. The cameraman atop a moving car, filming the carriage - motion, excitement, the very thing Hollywood has perfected, like a roller-coaster the simple act of moving quickly gets you going. The added dimension of the cameraman being filmed to show us his actions, adding a meta notion to the camera-as-eye, as the cameraman filming a moving object is filmed by another cameraman atop another moving object. The street, full of people, going about their lives, frozen in time. It's something I touched upon in my piece on Chaplin's The Circus. As the moving image becomes still, life is stripped away, and we are left with but a taxidermy of the real-thing. A butterfly collection is beautiful to look at, like a collection of photographs, but it is static, dead, an approximation of the beauty of a live butterfly in motion.
But Vertov goes further, as this entire emotion is only felt due to his editing of the sequence, an irony that I'm sure he grasped. Despite the documentary reflecting life as-is, the story it tells is done in the editing room - look no further than Charlie Brooker's demonstration of narrative editing of reality-TV. The spirit of film as a great step forward in our ability to capture life is playfully shown by Vertov in his experimental stop-motion sequences, his double-exposures, and techniques that to this day make you ask: "How the fuck did a guy and his camera do that in the 20's?".
Skipping over 85 years of filmaking, not least the entire genre of documentaries, we've reached Amy. Nothing has changed, yet everything has changed. Life is now captured by hand-held phones of the late 90's/early 00's, the picture quality worse than that of film as digital capturing of moving images are traded-off and balanced with the ergonomics of a multi-use media device. Over the course of Amy, phones become steadily smarter, starting to offer high-quality image capture and even motion-picture capture of a decent quality. As we begin the film with artifacted, low-meg phone footage of house-parties and teenage fun, and digital camera footage of an up and coming young Londoner, shot by her similarly young and up and coming manager, the world is ok. It's actually surreal to be utterly back in the 00's British world, with Tony Blair, crappy flip-phones, CD sales topping charts, DVDs as something new, fashion becoming that much more dated by the hour.
Unfortunately, as the fame of the talented Amy Winehouse grows, the attention of those with more sophisticated technology comes a-calling. Paparazzi cameras now capture every public moment of Winehouse's life, in high quality, ready to be printed in crappy magazines, and crappy newspapers who dwell on the lows of the vulnerable star. Vertov, I think, would have embraced the earlier form, and I like to think he'd have done some fantastic work with it. There is a true-to-life beauty in those early videos of Winehouse, often done by herself, occasionally turning the camera to capture her own face, in raw detail. There is no Hollywood removal of pimples, dodgy mascara, or tear-stained make-up. Vertov's vision would have had to include this, and today, the everyday artistry of a Snapchat story, as how is that not the capturing of life? Every embarrassed look away from the camera, every knock-out performance in an underground bar, everyday life.
There's a sequence towards the end of the film, where Winehouse leaves the hotel she is at to visit her husband who's in jail. What Kapadia does, as the director of this succession of images, both moving and still, is convey the extent to which Winehouse's life was not her own. Traditional moving image, i.e video footage from the phone of one of her entourage is replaced by a rapid succession of still, paparazzi images. The clicking, flashing, cacophony of noise and light is reflected, literally by Winehouse, as she is lit in that sickly bright way, separating her from her surroundings (the poorest imitation of a show spotlight), and reflected in her dead eyes. This is someone numb to the invasion of her privacy, no longer able to react to this machine-gun-like barrage on the senses in any way but getting to her destination as quickly as possible. We see the tragedy of her life in Kapadia's selection of images. There are enough photos taken of Winehouse stepping outside the doors of the hotel, to the door of her car, to actually, almost stop-motion-like, show us the movement.
It uses the editing of film, here entirely digitally created, to make us feel that experience of the paparazzi hell. But the irony is, is that Winehouse as a subject thus allows us to fully understand her experience, due to this widespread documentation, both within and without. Quite simply, Kapadia has all the footage he needs to make his film from photos, and video footage shot by the paparazzi, the journalists, from the reality-TV show following her life (to make her father a quick buck), her friends and family, and of course, Amy herself. But Amy Winehouse was not a filmmaker, and as true to life as her phone-calls, texts, photos, and videos are in a Vertovian sense, the self she chose to express is found in her music. As the credits roll to her cover of Valerie, white words on black like a tombstone, we can mourn her with a greater understanding of her troubles, her passions, and the meaning behind her music.
No comments:
Post a Comment