[Frameworks] Forbes editorial about Kodak

[Flick Harrison]

The fact that people have been wrongly declaring film dead for so long doesn't make it immortal.

What the filmados here are missing in their stampede to denounce Aaron is that film's possibilities in 1890, or in 1960, were much more open than the possibilities now.  Film cracked open the world when it was invented.  "Like writing history with lightning."  Experimental films have had a global network of projectors to inhabit, placed there and maintained by industrial forces which have long since left the format to the mercy of the elements.  Those elements are creeping in, slowly but surely. 
 
My 1970's grade-school memory of the whittering projector and its warbling soundtrack are inextricably tied to my appreciation of the medium. The clatter of the mechanism when the loop went awry is intrinsic to my approach to the form, as a viewer or maker.

No one going to school in the west today has that deep-seated sense of film as a social machine.  Their experience would be more about the internet going down when they want to watch a "movie," or the teacher being unable to get the computer to speak to the LCD projector.  Their budding artistic senses absorb these aesthetic accidents as part of their digital society.  What Bruce Sterling calls the "Gothic Chic" of the analog, mechanical world is but a retro steampunk fantasy to them.

Whole societies will skip over film and go straight to digital, the same way they've skipped over expensive landline infrastructure and gone straight to cellular phones.

Film's possibilities continually expanded until digital came along.  The resultant slow death of the celluloid industry is not the death of the artistic importance of film directly, but rather a severe logistical and social handicap on the future of the medium itself.  It's now an orphan at a dead end.  The effort to make a film will treble or quadruple when the big companies stop making stock, and that will discourage or prevent a lot of young artists from getting into it.

As photography disrupted portraiture (and perhaps identity itself), telegraph disrupted geography, etc etc, video (and now digital) has consistently moved into film's turf... the same way science has stepped on religion's toes.  The moving image was once entirely the territory of film (after motion pictures eclipsed zoetropes and such tinker toys) until video came along and drank its milkshake.  

What do I mean?  You could once explain everything you didn't understand by saying "god works in mysterious ways," but eventually science comes along and narrows the scope of things that can alone be explained by the supernatural, until that scope contains nothing but the philosophical and spiritual.  Film is almost there now.  It's a good place for an artistic tool to be, of course, but it's much smaller than the zone it used to occupy.

I mean really, do you think "The Kiss," "Workers Leaving the Factory," "The Sprinkler Sprinkled" etc needed film's formal qualities to work?  Wouldn't they have been perfectly fine on video?  I mean, most of early cinema was one long youtube party for a nickel.

How many people are donning the robe these days compared to the number signing up for science & tech?  That doesn't make the importance of spirituality any less - you could argue the opposite - but it means the field is getting thinner and the best and brightest are more likely to see the possibilities and reach their full potential in the scientific.
 
Film itself is but one clunky, beautiful, expensive, mechanical, risky, poisonous, painstaking method for capturing or creating moving images.  Every day, video gets easier, better and cheaper, and to think that this DOESN'T correspond to a decreasing artistic need / interest in film itself is wishful thinking.
 
An artist interested in moving images today can choose from dozens of tools and methods, including, as Aaron argues, a collapsing film infrastructure.  Lots of people LOVE film, and for good reasons, but many of the film oldies on this list came to love it when it was a much more significant player in art life. 

But for all that the members of this list love film's historical and aesthetic contexts, they seem to be in denial that its current context - or maybe, say, five minutes from now - is as a dead medium.  That's new, and it wasn't true 15, 10, or even 5 years ago.  When I entered film school in 1994, film wasn't dead.  I remember how excited I was to shoot a student project on the new Vision stock.  Final Cut Pro arrived in 1999, but film continued to be the choice for mid-budget indie features for quite some time, especially for finishing.

Until recently mainstream festivals still demanded a film print, almost as a financial / logistical bulwark against the rising tide of product.  Good riddance to that aspect of film.

BTW, video has a history almost as long as film ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEi4Os3NNpM ) and both are but blips in the long march from cave-paintings to satellite art.  To cry cultural superiority over digital or video artists because you've met a few Philistines on your daily travels is just madness in the face of the future, and as for context, you might recall this was how film art was (dis)regarded in its early days.

OMG THIS IS TOO LONG STOP ME....

-Flick


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* WHERE'S MY ARTICLE, WORLD?
http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Flick_Harrison

* FLICK's WEBSITE & BLOG: http://www.flickharrison.com 


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