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CLIP CULTURE
Could the short movies on video-sharing sites such as YouTube ever rival movies at the cinema?
In parallel with its own exponential growth, my fascination with YouTube has galloped into a raging obsession. Whole evenings, theoretically dedicated to writing, have been hijacked by a terrible need to click onto the Internet browser, and from there the lure of YouTube is inevitable. What’s not to be fascinated by? However slick or however rickety, the best of these mini-movies have an unmediated quality, a realness that is completely lacking in anything available in the cinema or on TV.
For a growing number of people, time spent surfing the web exceeds the time spent watching TV, so who knows if this way of making and watching movies might not become a huge and serious rival to the mainstream. Many contemporary films-makers have become fascinated by the video aesthetic, and by camera work with a deadpan surveillance feel, which has risen in parallel to this Internet revolution.
The cinema, though, does have something in common with the confessional, video blog aspect of YouTube. The popularity of the horror film The Blair Witch Project was inflamed by a vast, grassroots Internet campaign which mischievously suggested that the film’s horrors were real. Plus there’s a cousin to this blurring of fact and fiction in YouTube – confessional blogs which turn out to be faked by ingenious actors. In the past, some documentaries that you could see on TV or at the cinema had YouTube qualities, in that the footage was shot by the participants themselves, although they needed a professional cinema practitioner to bring it to light. If the unhappy heroes of these films were making their videos now, they would probably bypass these directors and take them straight to YouTube.
Where straight cinema and YouTube come more closely into parallel is the use of the continuous shot: the persistent, unjudging, almost uncomprehending gaze; an unedited, deep-focus scene in which our attention as audience is not coerced or directed. The true YouTube gems are not the digitally carpentered mini-features. The most gripping material is raw, unedited footage in one continuous take. Outstanding examples range from domestic events in the home to windows on international events. Watching these, and going through the events in real time, is riveting yet disturbing at the same time.
Many film directors have tried exploiting this eerie, hypnotic, disquieting quality. But they should look further than this, as they might all be fascinated by, and even learn something from, what I think of as YouTube’s comedy genre: bizarre things captured more by accident than design, which often have a sublime quality. One such clip of a woman falling down a hole was captured by CCTV; the camera is apparently fixed above a bar in a busy pub. Someone opens up a trap door directly behind a woman serving drinks, with results that Buster Keaton himself would have admired. The scene is shot and framed with unshowy formal perfection; a professional director and crew could work for months on a slapstick scene and not get it as right as this. It’s something in the way the woman disappears so utterly from view.
Unlike the cinema, where we have to wait for reviews, you can get your material reviewed on YouTube instantly since there is a ratings and comments section for each video. Just as the videos are more real than movies, this type of reviewing is also more honest. Cinema reviews make comments on the predictable elements, such as plot, setting, actors, etc., but YouTube reviews are boiled down to the essence of entertainment appeal. Are you interested enough to watch it to the end? Would you recommend it to your friends? Do you go back in and watch it again?
The cinema of YouTube has, at its best, an appealing amateurism, unrestricted by the conventions of narrative interest or good taste. It is a quality to be savoured, and quite different from documentary or attempts at realism in feature films. What makes it so involving is that the viewers extend this amateur process in choosing, playing and sharing the files. Consequently they supplement production with a new type of distribution. It’s this that makes YouTube so addictive and unless the cinema learns from it, it may be outclassed.
CLIP CULTURE
Could the short movies on video-sharing sites such as YouTube ever rival movies at the cinema?
In parallel with its own exponential growth, my fascination with YouTube has galloped into a raging obsession. Whole evenings, theoretically dedicated to writing, have been hijacked by a terrible need to click onto the Internet browser, and from there the lure of YouTube is inevitable. What’s not to be fascinated by? However slick or however rickety, the best of these mini-movies have an unmediated quality, a realness that is completely lacking in anything available in the cinema or on TV.
For a growing number of people, time spent surfing the web exceeds the time spent watching TV, so who knows if this way of making and watching movies might not become a huge and serious rival to the mainstream. Many contemporary films-makers have become fascinated by the video aesthetic, and by camera work with a deadpan surveillance feel, which has risen in parallel to this Internet revolution.
The cinema, though, does have something in common with the confessional, video blog aspect of YouTube. The popularity of the horror film The Blair Witch Project was inflamed by a vast, grassroots Internet campaign which mischievously suggested that the film’s horrors were real. Plus there’s a cousin to this blurring of fact and fiction in YouTube – confessional blogs which turn out to be faked by ingenious actors. In the past, some documentaries that you could see on TV or at the cinema had YouTube qualities, in that the footage was shot by the participants themselves, although they needed a professional cinema practitioner to bring it to light. If the unhappy heroes of these films were making their videos now, they would probably bypass these directors and take them straight to YouTube.
Where straight cinema and YouTube come more closely into parallel is the use of the continuous shot: the persistent, unjudging, almost uncomprehending gaze; an unedited, deep-focus scene in which our attention as audience is not coerced or directed. The true YouTube gems are not the digitally carpentered mini-features. The most gripping material is raw, unedited footage in one continuous take. Outstanding examples range from domestic events in the home to windows on international events. Watching these, and going through the events in real time, is riveting yet disturbing at the same time.
Many film directors have tried exploiting this eerie, hypnotic, disquieting quality. But they should look further than this, as they might all be fascinated by, and even learn something from, what I think of as YouTube’s comedy genre: bizarre things captured more by accident than design, which often have a sublime quality. One such clip of a woman falling down a hole was captured by CCTV; the camera is apparently fixed above a bar in a busy pub. Someone opens up a trap door directly behind a woman serving drinks, with results that Buster Keaton himself would have admired. The scene is shot and framed with unshowy formal perfection; a professional director and crew could work for months on a slapstick scene and not get it as right as this. It’s something in the way the woman disappears so utterly from view.
Unlike the cinema, where we have to wait for reviews, you can get your material reviewed on YouTube instantly since there is a ratings and comments section for each video. Just as the videos are more real than movies, this type of reviewing is also more honest. Cinema reviews make comments on the predictable elements, such as plot, setting, actors, etc., but YouTube reviews are boiled down to the essence of entertainment appeal. Are you interested enough to watch it to the end? Would you recommend it to your friends? Do you go back in and watch it again?
The cinema of YouTube has, at its best, an appealing amateurism, unrestricted by the conventions of narrative interest or good taste. It is a quality to be savoured, and quite different from documentary or attempts at realism in feature films. What makes it so involving is that the viewers extend this amateur process in choosing, playing and sharing the files. Consequently they supplement production with a new type of distribution. It’s this that makes YouTube so addictive and unless the cinema learns from it, it may be outclassed.
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