This documentary is an interesting exploration of the current revolution in film making away from celluloid (photo chemical exposure) toward digital exposure. It treats the evolution of the technologies, their respective strengths and flaws, and includes interviews with many directors and other people involved in film making, discussing the trend.
"Filmaking" has always been a somewhat insubstantial exercise, the "projection" of light through a film of chemical gauze; casting light, color and shadow on a blank wall. The one substantial aspect of the experience has until now been the film itself, the alchemaic artefact that gave film it's material reality, gave it its "there, there."
Now, the industry is abandoning film for algorithmic traces on a silicon chip, fleeting ever further into insubstantiality, into ephemeral abstraction. There is more freedom to create greater fantasy there, they say. This is what progress is, in it's lack of essence: slipping material bonds, consummating consciousness in a triumphant manipulation of and victory over matter, ultimately ascending to the point that we finally escape the constraints of matter altogether. Intellect and imagination slip their material bonds, and achieve gnostic transcendence.
So it is somehow oddly appropriate that Keanu Reeves - the star of "Bill & Ted's Excellent Time Traveling Adventure" (for isn't time travel one of the most fundamental subversions of this material space time continuum in which we are enmeshed?) and the Matrix Trilogy (one of perhaps the purest gnostic fantasies that Hollywood has yet graced us with) - is the auteur of this interesting documentary. Fantasy land is becoming even more fantastic, and even less substantial than ever before. And Ted is there to report back to us upon progress's inexorable march.
Until the 19th Century humanity kept its artistic and intellectual record on substantial matter such as paper, plaster, animal skin and canvas. Camera film is is different from these in that light is not reflected off it, but rather through it. It is also more delicate than most of these more ancient media, and it poses more difficult challenges to archivists who seek to preserve it. In 1902 there was an international congress of film makers, who in the spirit of the French Revolution and the positivist tradition, came together to set an international standard for film, guaranteeing that film making and projecting technology would be universal and standardized, ensuring that all film shot from then until now would all be accessible using the same tools, the same industrial paradigms. 35 mm film is always 35 mm film, and can be fed into any projector manufactured to that standard in the last century.
In the 1970's and 80's however, video tape and computer imaging was developed. In the rush of technological development there has been much that has been produced that no longer can be viewed, because in that short rush of evolutionary change we now no longer have the tools to access some of the things created only ten to thirty years ago. Imagine trying to access information stored on a floppy disc, an 8 track or VHS tape. Not so easy, these days. Such technology is all too quickly obsolete and the information recorded with it now inaccessible.
Because now rather than using film, or electromagnetic tape, or even paper, most imagery and text is being recorded on silicon chips, hard drives. What is the nature of this new medium? What are its weaknesses, its strengths? In this film Sad Keanu has found his voice, and while he gives quite a bit of time to advocates of film and critics of the dawning digital age, it's ultimately pretty clear that Keanu is proselytizing for the new order. It's hard not to be impressed by the power of the new technology.. Still, nagging questions linger.
For while it is true that the rush of technological advance has given us in some ways greater freedom - we can now watch movies on four inch screens that we carry in out pockets - it may be also true that we could be simultaneously eradicating our relationship with the past. The great paper libraries, archives and museums that used to be the main way we accessed knowledge and art - which meant interacting with the past, the authors and artists who created that record - are now largely obsolete, in that the record has been impixelated, recorded in magnetic patterns of 1's and 0's on an electric grid. It is both more immediate and manipulatable, while verging utterly insubstantial.
Is this new network more resilient than thousands of paper libraries - which while they can be burnt, can also be turned into samzidat? Is this new modality easier to censor and track? Is knowledge and art now simply more accessible, or is it also more easily repressed, tracked and eradicated? Is this brave new world an electronic tyranny like that of Tron, or an anarchic paradise like that in Avatar? Or something else, utterly different or something in between?
I seems we are about to find out.
A few closing thoughts concerning Keanu: I remember when I used to dismiss guys like him (or Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, Leonardo DiCaprio, etc.) as being somehow unserious. Feminists complain about how women's voices and pov's tend to get discounted. Try being a very pretty boy. That seems to me an even harder row to hoe, in terms of being taken seriously, somehow. Handsome man is not the same as pretty boy - most of them get discounted, sneered at. If there's a Tiger Beat spread of you out there, where you've been "lucky" enough to tap the collective libido of teenaged girls, you are finished. It's far, far worse than being a Playboy centerfold. No adult - male or female - is ever likely going to take you truly seriously again. Pity Justin Beeber and the Jonas Brothers, because when they hit their late twenties no one will ever pay attention to them again, and they won't know what to do about it. Expect to see them dishing to Dr. Drew on celebrity rehab in about a decade or so. That's how we treat our idols. Ours is a truly profane and irreligious society.
But wait.. Maybe not. Keanu is running counter the rule, here. Giving the reviewers at the New York Review of Books a reason to pay him some attention.. What is this? Perhaps beauty, character and intelligence are not mutually exclusive. As much as we ugly people may find it hard to accept, beautiful people may occasionally be serious and smart, too. Keanu has gone a proven it can be so, with this film.
Well done, Keanu. Bravo. Thanks for feeding my head. Now go do it again.
