For film theorists and critics, from André Bazin to Siegfried Kracauer, the concept of idexicality of how cinematic technique can enhance reality has emerged theories that position realism as the essence of cinema. The unique opportunity available to film is the proper disclosure of reality using raw materials. Thus, the cinema is the discovery whetting the appetites for the aesthetic qualities that “are to be sought in its power to lay bare the realities” (Bazin, 8). However, these aesthetic qualities can be complicated by the fact that cinema is taken up in the pursuit of constructivism – dream, fantasy, illusion – particularly when films have transitioned into the digital age. A mutual anxiety over the relationship between real-world referent and hypermediated representation lies at the postmodern notion of the simulacrum and the ontological nature of digital media (Sperb, 16). Hence, spectators of digital cinema can be placed under an illusion, especially when the aesthetic artifacts bear an indirect reference to the representation of reality, possibly resulting in spectatorial estrangement. We then begin to ask: what does the pronouncement of realism mean in digital cinema? Can we lay our responsibility for the resurrection of reality with the use of digital media? Has cinema abandoned its earliest predilections, including aesthetics and narrative, whilst turning to digital audiovisual production or postproduction that seems to represent a break with the real? Is the digital technology – in its self-claimed process of capturing reality – breaking with the old photographic origin? How does the use of digital media vary in the establishment for different styles of aesthetic? These are easy questions to ask but difficult to answer.

 

  Given its versatility of digital medium, the nature of digital video cameras movement and sound design allows for the revelation to a humble truth and on the other, renovates strict formalism (i.e. the long take) that reminds us reality can exist in an experimental form. Evident are two films in the compliance with Dogme 95, The Idiots (Lars von Trier, 1999) and Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000), and Russian Ark (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2002). In this paper, I focus on von Trier and Sokurov’s approaches on how the virtues and limitations of digital medium have been enthusiastically embraced and exploited. The discussion is also not limited to which the aesthetic norm is adhered but how it arises from different visual representations of real and fictitious that may spark a specific relationship between the digital medium and the spectators.

 

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Minimized Aesthetics and Post-Produced Aesthetics

  In the search for genuineness in cinema, the Danish film movement, tellingly the Dogma 95 movement, was inaugurated by directors, Lars von Trier and Thomas Binterberg, who regarded it as a form of desired amateurism. By renouncing special effects and refinements of filmmaking process, they introduced an indisputable set of rules known as “The Vow of Chastity”, with some highlighted:

1. The sound must never be produced apart from the image or vice-versa.

2. The camera must be handheld. Any movement or mobility attainable in the hand is permitted.

3. The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable.

4. Optical work and filters are forbidden.

5. The film format must be Academy 35mm.

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  By insisting on rules that prohibited the cosmetic effect of technological devices, a cinema as authenticity and truth is expected:

The main goal of Dogma 95 is to achieve a purification of film language by avoiding a lot of otherwise well-established technical devices since these are seen as creating an undesirable filter between the profilmic setting and the actual film…Technical manipulations disrupt the filmed subject and turn it into harmless pieces of decor or easy entertainment… The Vow of Chastity express a longing for a kind of cinéma vérité, films without the traditional trickery of filmic illusions. (Christensen, 113)

 

  It is evident that Dogma 95 configures a rejection of a postmodern stance that fools around on dichotomy – the real and the fictitious – to ensure that viewers can be chary of the film as an artifact. With this regard, the fervent use of handheld digital video cameras thus becomes the trademark of Dogma 95’s films – demonstrating a very grainy and documentary effect with little postproduction in sequence when blown up to 35mm. The shaky-cam, with leisurely voluptuous sensuality, has been utilized for immediacy of actuality, as the close-ups mar in the characters’ emotional authenticity that aligns with the spectators.

 

  Dancer in the Dark effortlessly reconciles the aesthetic disjunction between bobbing camera movements, fragmented editing, continuous long takes of musical numbers, contrasting colours and lighting. Shot with a hand-held digital video camera, the cinema vérité style makes the viewers a hypocritical participant rather than observer. The opening sequence in which Selma (Björk) and Kathy (Deneuve) are rehearsing ‘My Favorite Little Thing”, an am-dram production of The Sound of Music, is directed in an elliptical style. Taken from significantly low camera angle, it ratchets up the realistic moments as if the viewers were under the stage in the room, watching the characters doing their practice. The shot delivered by the handheld video point of view is, despite seemingly blunt directness in the viewing experience, presented as an almost pure vision without mediating any bodily context. In this way, the point-of-view shot in handheld position intensifies a sense of realism by “objectif[ying] the far more complex nature of perception and sensation [and] in the reduction of embodied being to a largely visual representation of pure experience” (Zimmer, 91).  Combined with the jerky close-up and the lack of distracting artifices, our focus is directed instead to Selma’s unnatural coordination of singing and dancing, whilst at the same time, adding to the realistic parameters that Selma’s spontaneous movements and body language flow out naturally. By revealing Selma in a shaky close-up that focuses on her unadorned blemishes, messy hair and frumpy clothes, the trembling camera represents itself to provoke spectatorial psychological realism – fear, sympathy, bewilderment – the viewers are able to read the emotions across the characters’ face heightened by intimate cinematic features.

 

  The angle is then delivered and interwoven with hushed cuts, drawing us to the conversation between the producer and the choreographer, then a precipitous cut to the second singing, followed by Kathy’s worrying expression (e.g. Fig. 1). The sequence plays out in less than three minutes and opens up in a rather fragmented manner, in which the viewers can sense Selma and Kathy’s comradeship. Von Trier employs the similar minimized technique to document the contentiously onset relationship between Selma and her son Gene. The conversation on banal subjects is demonstrated, again in a fragmented fashion – when Selma asking Gene, “are you tired?” and receiving his response, “why are you always asking me so stupid questions?” comes to a discontinuous shot of Selma showing her musical dances. The unpredictable cut-editing and mobile nature of handheld camera upset the conventional linear structure of time. In short, the handheld camera with gritty wooziness, inconsistent jump cuts and unconventional close-up, that compose the aesthetic code of realism, suggests the avoidance of automatized reception and minimization of gloss that represses the subject’s real humanity such that the digital medium can become “signs of the documentary... that the filmed subject exists independently of the filming” (Christensen, 118).

 

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  Another von Trier’s film, The Idiots, involves spontaneous realism with the use of handheld camera and the absence of artificial lighting that invokes a sense of roughness in aesthetics:

The images are rough and at times directly unpleasant to watch due to its ugliness and apparent carelessness in matters of colors, composition, lighting and content. Sometimes it is even difficult to determine what is being shown on the screen in that too direct lighting from windows disturbs the images. (Christensen, 35)

 

  In the restaurant scene, Stoffer and Henrik’s “spassing” retardation has captured the attention of Karen, a miserable woman who just lost her child. When Stoffer latches on to her and firmly clasps her hand to the car, she shows no resistance nor repulsion on believing that it is a sham. Above this, it is an aesthetic of performance. The framing and cutting refuse to present the characters a part of a larger visual picture, they are not the décor; the handheld movement dodge around the character to valorize the emotional truth for the spectators. When Stoffer goes up to Karen, the camera rests on a close-up to her facial expression – genuine and sincere – which is then jumped to the waiter’s reaction to these idiotic behaviors, the surrounding faces of uneasiness, then again back to Karen. The dizzying possibilities of editing make it more important when the filmmakers find the best possible place for the camera in the digital cinema. As Jens Albinus (16), who plays Stoffer, says in an interview:

It’s also got something to do with the function of the camera in Dogma. The camera is much more than a window or a gateway for the audience; in Dogma the camera is a participant that has a temperament and an emotional life of its own. Sometimes the camera is a little inquisitive; sometimes it is a little inattentive. Sometimes the camera is there, sometimes it isn’t but it is very much about creating landscapes that the camera can investigate.

 

  Yet, film does not merely reflect emotional realism, but constructs alternative realities without the need to looking and feeling “real”. Russian Ark, which embraces the digital medium to tell history in a radical new way, helps depict this duality of digital techniques.  

 

  First and foremost, the whole film, as Sokurov stated, is taken in one breath in which HD Steadicam shot was used to cover more than one and a half kilometers. It can be seen as an oscillation between perceptual realism of long takes and the aesthetics of Eisenstein’s montage techniques. Reconceptualizing the long-take by making no attempt to avoid editing, the digital effects deconstruct the assembled illusion of historical reality. In the scene where Custine is leading the viewers to a bombed-out room of the Hermitage during the Germans’ 900-day siege of Leningrad, an old man is found making his own coffin from the empty frame “left after the Soviets had removed the artworks to protect them from looting or destruction” (Ravetto-Biagioli, 82). Whilst the man is aggressively accusing Custine (as well as the viewers) of stepping on the deadly spirits that are nowhere to be seen, as a contrast to scenes before entering this room, the lugubrious lighting, sable colours and artificial snowing effect in the room well inform us that the scene was edited in post-production. The intention is two-fold: to invoke a sense of coldness as Custine enters the room, asking “why is it so cold here?”; and to make the viewers concern with not only representations but truths of the historical allusions. 

 

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  The ending scene of the oceanic image is also made possible with digital effects, that hints to the recurring representation of Hermitage as a cultural ark. Featuring an endless sea, it reveals the romantic statement Sokurov conveys in his narration – the finality of his quest. Overall, instead of capturing the momentum of reality, Russian Ark bears an aesthetic of post-production in a continuous long take, constructing a reminder of artificiality within the film, of the fact that we should question the images produced in digital film, as it can “provide neither a method for producing a world-view nor any clear emotional intensity that could lead to an intellectual understanding of that totalizing picture” (Ravetto-Biagioli, 82). 

 

Sound Design

  Sound design can imbue a film with a sense of realism or surrealism. Dancer in the Dark harks back to the application of the MGM musicals in the 50s; however, the digital medium separates the authentic sound and fictitious songs, casting a dogmatic spell on the already-miserable condition of Selma. The launch into an ephemeral musical that bursts through the prosaic routine of Selma’s life, is her imagination, found in the rhythms of an industrial society – the sound of train and machines. Though as seen violating the dogmatic rule where no sound should be produced, the musical numbers, alongside her choreographed pirouettes which were taken with 100 stationary digital video cameras, serve as a surrealist counterpoint for Selma.  A more saturated colour scheme is applied to her fantasy sequence. Plus, the surround channels in the sound design, which are most of the time dormant and lifeless, engage the sing-and-dance scenes more dramatically. This disjunctive contrast allowed by digital technique and music has made it even unbearable for the viewers to engage Selma’s harsh reality. Hence, the sound design that uses musical, vacillates between the desire to a utopia life vision and the savage-yet-realistic tragedy beneath the saccharine Hollywood strings.

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  The sound in The Idiots was overall recorded synchronously with the image without the umbilical structure between the camera and any voiceover or audio recording. Notably, the off-screen presence of an interviewer, Lars von Trier, structures a sense of authenticity which mimics the documentary tone. But the ambiguity of having the director as the interviewer may have the potential to “break the illusion of documentary as well as the illusion of the filmic make-believe (Christensen, 43)”. The authenticity is therefore very perplexing – for we already know that they are all fictitious characters; but the voice from the director, interspersed with the interviews, adds in some authentic moments that may possibly blur the boundaries between what is the real and what is the constructed. 

 

  Russian Ark features a richly textured soundscape, weaving together Sokurov’s I-voice to converse with the European representative, Custine. Before the eyes of a visible image, a voice is displayed with a black screen:

I open my eyes and sees nothing. I only remember there was some accident. Everyone ran for safety as best they could. I just can’t remember what happened to me. 

 

  By immersing into the director’s I-voice, the viewers are oriented into the position of the first-person point of view. Thus, the I-voice belongs not merely to the director but the viewers, functioning as “a pivot of identification, resonating in us as if it were our own voice, like a voice in the first person” (Chion, 51). The I-voice then converses with the French diplomat, Custine, who despises Russian culture. With their conversation making the peregrination through the part of the Hermitage when Custine keeps ignoring native and oriental artwork, the I-voice preserves a sense of nationalism, and repeats Custine’s criticism. By placing the voice of a European visitor a more superior position, and the I-voice subtly defensive, however ironical is, Hermitage is the place that houses the history and wonders of Europe, now haunted with the soundtrack of a floating mist of whispers, rustles and creaks of harpsichord. The next question is: what does these anonymous voices represent?

 

  As the camera progresses, the viewers are led by the moving spectacle to the banks of the River Neva, which appears to be “breathing”. We hear the music and the sound of waves interweaving into the soundscape, creating a dream-like moment alongside the hypnotic voice of the narrator. These techniques, do not represent physical reality but create an alternative that challenges the autonomous representation of history. The anonymous voices, sailing between Asian and Europe and getting lost in the unforeseeable future of the Soviet, will continue to float along the river.

 

  Technology has enabled spontaneity and immediacy in film for capturing the most authentic; and simultaneously changed cinema’s ontological relationship with the world. The exploration of digital medium seems to have bilateral meanings to the functions of films: Dogme 95, while fully recognizes the fictitious nature in their subjects, utilizes the handheld camera and appropriates lighting that aesthetically accentuate the reality at the expense of “what is representing”; and the post-production added to a single-shot long take in Sokurov’s constructs a new code of cinematic representation, wandering between history and imagination beyond our intimate senses.

 

Comments from Professor

A+

This superb essay presents a sophisticated argument with regard to how the relationship between reality & artifice has been modified in digital cinema for both practitioners and film audiences alike.  The analysis of the chosen texts by Von Trier and Sokurov is wonderfully attentive to detail, with well-chosen textual examples as well as secondary readings that help bolster the argument.  The discussion of sound design in all three films is likewise insightful in its observations, particularly with respect to the musical.  Outstanding work!

 

Works Cited

Bazin, Andre. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”. Film Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 4, 1960, pp.4-9.

Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema, Columbia University Press, 1999, pp. 49-57.

Christensen, Ove. “Spastic Aesthetics – The Idiots”. A Danish Journal of Film Studies, no. 10, 2000, pp. 35-46

Christensen, Ove. “Aesthetic Illusions – The Aesthetics of Dogma 95”. A Danish Journal of Film Studies, no. 10, 2000, pp. 111-122.

L. Nagib, C. Mello. Realism and the Audiovisual Media, Springer, 2009, pp. 21.

Oxholm, Jan. “The ultimate Dogma film. An interview with Jens Albinus and Louise Hassing on Dogma 2 – The Idiots”. A Danish Journal of Film Studies, no. 10, 2000, pp. 11-34.

Ravetto-Biagioli, Kriss. Mythopoetic Cinema: On the Ruins of European Identity, Columbia

          University Press, 2017, pp. 82.

Sperb, Jason. Filckers of Film: Nostalgia in the Time of Digital Cinema,

           Rutgers University Press, 2015, pp. 14-16.

Zimmer, Catherine. Surveillance Cinema, NYU Press, 2015, pp. 90-91.