MESH
FILM & VIDEO CAIN & ABEL

I ONCE READ A TERRIFIC ARTICLE by David Thomson about, of all things, the moustache in film. Thomson looked at a whole range of films from different periods and genres, but concentrated only on the moustache worn by the male hero. It was a bit like the Surrealist game of irrational enlargement; where you choose to look at only one tiny thing in a film, but by blowing it up you try to discover in it all the secrets of the medium, and of your culture. Thomson's experiment worked on me, of course: for weeks after reading his essay, all I could see in whatever film I watched was the damn moustache.

Video in film - the appearance within a movie plot of video cameras, video playback, video editing - is a similar kind of topic. Start looking, and you see it absolutely everywhere, even in the least likely films. In a nondescript new thriller called Invasion of Privacy, a cheap Cape Fear rip-off, a serial killer pauses before approaching his bound and gagged victim to show her his beautifully shot and edited home video of perverse obsessions. In the sc-fi video Homewrecker, a computer that speaks with a woman's voice and runs everything within a domestic home has an eye - and it's a cold video eye, of course. In virtually every teen movie or family comedy I see these days, happy smiley people are sending each other home video letters, in which they narrate the story of their own life.

The place of video in film has changed a lot in the last ten years. A decade ago, at the time of Cronenberg's Videodrome, we had the classic gothic scenario in which video cameras were still menacing tools of a sinister state apparatus surveying our every move as citizens from a secret location, or beaming mind control signals into our heads. More recently, Atom Egoyan has continued the pessimistic analysis of video in films like Family Viewing, where everyone is alienated and narcissistic before camera and screen, turning their life into a bad simulation of tacky TV soap opera.

MORE ON THE UPBEAT, the late 1980s gave us a cycle of films that plugged into what I would call the public TV fantasy - the dream that video pirates or guerrillas could hack into the TV waves and broadcast fleeting but devastating subversive messages - as happens in the Schwarzenegger film The Running Man or Dennis Hopper's The American Way. In all these kinds of stories, whether optimistic or pessimistic, video is still fundamentally defined as television - it is something remote from us, and from our daily lives. And movies have often opposed themselves, in a rather romantic way, to television - as a hot, sexy, intimate, emotional medium opposed to a cold, empty one. Perhaps this is what Jean-Luc Godard meant when he had his alter ego writer on a blackboard. in the film Every Man for Himself the dramatic formulation- "Film and video, Cain and Abel".

But now, in the 1990s, with the widespread use of domestic video camera and VCRs, it seems we have entered a new 'user friendly' era, where the presence of video in film is not so sinister or remote. There's an obscure little film for young teenagers from the late 80s called Zits, which captures this transition well. The film starts as a mocked-up videotape, seen through the video camera's viewfinder. We see, in turn, each of the main characters best friends introducing themselves to this friendly camera eye. At a certain point, however, each interviewee asks the classic question: 'what's this for? Is it for a TV show?' For them, the presence of video still signals the immanent presence of TV land. But then, we see the hero of this story, invisible up till now, march up the aisle in an empty school hall, set his camera up on automatic, and step in front of it himself, to tell his own story. 'What's this video for?', he asks. 'It's for me!' And then the frame freezes on his grin and a pop theme tune gaily strikes up.

Thus begins the triumphant era of private, domestic video, at least as seen and represented in movies: Video ceases to be an emblem of the state, and instead becomes an instrument of the people. At least three distinct moments in people's relation to video are emphasised in current movies. First is the 'live' moment of filming. Second is the process of home editing, which is often achieved with unbelievably professional results, the sign of a bit of classic movie manipulation. Third is the moment of customised viewing, of controlled play-back, with the freeze button, slow advance, and backwards and forwards motion. There are many telling scenes of this in contemporary popular culture, from the black humour of the psychos in THenry: Portrait of a Serial Killer watching their murders back on video replay to Bart on The Simpsons, pinpointing with his remote control the precise moment that Lisa broke her would-be boyfriend's heart in public.

That example from The Simpsons indicates one of the complexities involved in scenes of video in films. Video is so well and so often exploited as a dramatic or comic device in current movies because it can be seen existing in a hazy zone between the purely private and the totally public. The private, or privatised end of this continuum is captured best in movies by scenes of people watching video alone usually some form of pornographic video. The public end of the spectrum is mass broadcast, TV land. As programmes of the Funniest, Naughtiest Home Blooperss type demonstrate, private video moments are not entirely immune from occasional mass scrutiny. But movies tend to emphasise and explore another kind, of situation between the public and the private: the moment that video enters the small-scale, immediate social setting of the family or the community.

I HAVE THE IDEA that when video appears in a film, it is usually as some kind of eruption - a moment of crisis or revelation where a video not intended or not expected in a particular social setting appears suddenly, wreaking - dire consequences. In Joel Schumacher's romantic comedy Cousins, a teenager who describes himself modestly as a, "multi media performance artist" presents a tape of home video moments to a vast, merry family gathering - leaving them to discover as they watch it that he has intercut shots of them all with scenes of starvation in the third world and other random atrocities. It's the guerilla video fantasy again - except this time in the context of an affluent, suburban loungeroom, not the public airwaves.

The same frisson of the private suddenly becoming public occurs m Paul Bartel's underrated satire Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, where a teenager in a similar family reunion setting threatens his aunt with a loungeroom screening of her star turn in a porno video that the kid has inadvertently stumbled onto in his privatised bedroom pastimes. And in a much darker vein, there are films in which a video tape is like a message from the dead, or from the dark side that completely destabilises the facade of normality: as in the. suicide video left behind by a sad intellectual in the British film Crystal Gazing, or the tape of a murder that a boy casually shows his mother in Benny's Video.

One of the most striking things about ·films in which video serves as a highly dramatic or comic turning point, is that what is captured and revealed on video seems to tremble as a piece of pure, unadulterated reality. This has happened before in cinema history, as films have successively defined themselves against, and in relation to, other media: like still photography, audiotape, super 8 and TV. Think of the still photos which reveal murder and madness in Blow Up and. Repulsion, the grainy, black and white 16 millimetre footage which shows the truth at the end of Ground Zero, the audiotape which reveals a hideous crime in The Conversation. Now it is the duty of video to hold this sacred truth which is often confrontingly literal, obscene, almost pornographic. When a bunch of unsuspecting innocents are possessed by ancient spirits in the horror film Prince of Darkness, it is in noisy, murky, scary snippets of video that glimpses of the terrible past are communicated to them.

Of course, not everything shot on video these days - as any technician will tell you - is doomed to be noisy, murky and scary. Increasingly, in the technology of how mainstream films are made, there is a strong presence of video and video processes. But these tend to be seamless and invisible processes, woven into the fiction in the classic Hollywood style. What I'm referring to is the way that filmmakers deliberately exaggerate a certain 'video effect' within a film - enhancing and overplaying the shaky camera, wandering focus, bad lighting, shallow space, raw sound recording, a general decentering of the action, and a certain dragged out, heavy sense of time passing which resembles nothing so much as Andy Warhol's experimental films of the 1960s. Indeed, when video appears in a film, it sometimes not only erupts into the plot and the lives of the characters, it also seems to take over the film itself, invading the screen and filling it up with its coarse, confronting texture, as in the Australian short Swimming, or at the moment of truth, of video verite, in Bob Roberts.

IN A BRILLIANT ARTICLE discussing the role that other media play within film ("The Film Stilled", Camera Obscura 24, September 1990), Raymond Bellour recently suggested that these singular moments of eruption or invasion can point in two quite contrary directions. On the one hand, there are moments of video in film that point backwards, regressively, to a lost, even archaic past. Here, video becomes a sad, deathly emblem of nostalgia in the lives of people who are finding it hard to get themselves together. This occurs in the current release Falling Down, where the relentless camera movement into Michael Douglas' family video in the final shot expresses the complete disintegration of his identity. But, in a completely different spirit, video moments can point forward to utopian, transcendent, sometimes mystical states and experiences. Bellour gives this trend in cinema the curious name of 'angelism' - and what's most curious about it is that he coined the word before seeing Sally Potter's Orlando, where, in its final vision, video texture fills the screen as a child's video camera discovers an angel hovering in the sky, singing.

If, in Orlando, video invades film, it is no longer a brutal invasion, but a gentle, reciprocal one. Bellour suggests that the overcoming of the feud between film and video as Cain and Abel will happen when all the media are mixed freely, creating new hybrid forms. We already see this in passages of films by Wim Wenders and Chris Marker where film images are lovingly revised and reworked through video technology, or in the extraordinary experimental film Parallel Space shown at the Melbourne and Sydney Film Festivals. In this Austrian short by Peter Tscherkassky, images from film, video and computer flicker together to evoke a mysterious but sublime mental state - the pulsations of a living memory. Not the cold, robotic, sinister video memory that brainy machines in science fiction movies tend to display, but something much warmer and poetic. This heralds a coming era not of video IN film, but video AND film not only a user friendly pastime, but more profoundly. a new form of audiovisual art.

This text was broadcast, in an edited form, on the Radio National program "Screen" on 2/7/93.

Spring 1993
© Adrian Martin June 1993. MESH Spring 1993. MESH film/video/media/art is published by Experimenta Media Arts.

Adrian Martin is film crtic for The Age (Melbourne) and "The Week in Film" (Radio National)