BAZIN vs. YOUTUBE

What Would the Pre-Eminent Film Theorist Think of the Digital Internet Age?



Ever heard of Martin Scorsese? What about Francois Truffaut, or the most influential film theory journal Cahiers du cinema? They all have one thing in common: Andre Bazin. Mentor to Scorsese and Truffaut, founder of Cahiers, and confidant and counselor to such greats as Orson Welles, Billy Wyler, Jean-Luc Goddard, Bazin was to the analysis of modern cinema what Socrates was to Western philosophical enlightenment. And like Socrates, whose prized students were Plato and Aristotle, it is the protégés of Bazin whom we remember – Scorsese and Truffaut. But, it is Bazin who single-handedly made modern realism cinema what it is today, not through unmanageable intellectualism, but through an essential understanding and expression of what “real” film should be. So accessible, applicable, and influential is Bazin to this day, that Mike Myers of all people quoted him at the 2005 Oscars when describing what the purpose of film is. But what might our modern day film Socrates think about our modern day digital film-sharing society? What would he say about YouTube?

When André Bazin wrote his seminal works on film theory in the mid-twentieth century, a typical film was shot on 35mm celluloid by one of five studios. The cast and crew were under slave-like contracts to that studio, and when the film was finished, prints were copied and sent out to cinemas where they were exhibited to audiences for a price. Today the situation is much different. Millions of films a day are shot digitally by amateurs, processed for digital Internet exhibition, distributed by the amateurs themselves on video share sites like YouTube – and they are free. This week’s most-viewed film on YouTube garnered almost 1.2 million viewers in two days. The number one box office film in theaters, on the other hand, drew only about 160,000 .

But more importantly, the aesthetic consequences of digital technology and the short-form content forced upon these amateur Internet filmmakers – fixed long takes, sync sound, analytical editing, and deep focus – are all tenets of Bazinian theory, and are precisely why Bazin would exalt YouTube and this new, digital film-sharing society.

THE YOUTUBE AESTHETIC


In realist film theory, contrary to the formalist theory before it, the goal of filmmaking is not to form reality, but to “capture life as it unfolds.” André Bazin called this the “unveiling potential of film,” the possibility to depict “a likeness of the real.” The digital medium – as a direct result of its technology – compels filmmakers to adopt a “hyperreal” aesthetic, comprised of the characteristics above, and great potential to capture the “objective real.”

The Long Take

Bazin believed that the filmmaker owes it to the complexity of reality to refrain from false subjective manipulation and overwrought formalist mediation. He knew that the camera couldn’t precisely mimic the experience of life as seen through human eyes, but he purported an honest and sincere attempt at this nonetheless. According to Bazin, one way to do this is through long takes. Indeed, long takes lurk at the heart of Bazinian and Neo-Realistic theory. They are the documentary-like technique that, as Bazin says, “allows us to see.”

An explicit distinction in Bazin's thinking about the long take lies between the type that uses the moving camera, and another type of long take with a static camera. Both are a part of Bazinian objective realism, and both are encouraged by digital new media. Almost weightless cameras, and video stock available at a fraction of film’s cost, allow filmmakers outside the major studio gates to achieve mobile long takes a la Hitchcock’s Touch of Evil by freeing the camera from cost-prohibitive dollies, cranes, and stedi-cams. The other kind of long take, based on stillness, which Bazin encourages above all others when combined with the use of deep focus, permeates virtually all of the mass Internet video-shares. Here it is not the mobility of digital cameras or affordability of stock, but the advent of the webcam and the reality of its intense, motionless gaze. Returning to an early-cinema proscenium look, the webcam just sits there, and allows real life to unfold before it – a tenet of Bazin’s philosophy.

At the time of writing, the most viewed film of all time on YouTube, Evolution of Dance, is six minutes of a man dancing onstage. From Elvis Presley’s hip-shaking moves to the urban gyrations of today’s boogies, the performance is captured entirely with a static camera. From somewhere mid-auditorium, viewers watch through the eye of the camera as unadulterated reality plays out before it. Indeed, this video comes overwhelmingly close to mimicking the human gaze from the audience, and moreover, it’s not only a film that Bazin could endorse, but with over 67 million views, it’s proof that there is something to the Bazinian notion that still, uncut shots speak to the purpose of film perhaps better than any others. Of the fixed long take, Bazin writes, “This in fact means that a scene has to be played independently of the camera and with complete dramatic reality.”



Sync Sound

Another aesthetic consequence of digital technology and the Internet age is the complete integration of acoustic and visual space, and therefore a more “accurate,” less mediated, reality. Bazin realized how important a step sound was toward realism, eliminating the need for “denaturalization” that was synonymous with silent cinema. He also realized the important psychological role sound plays in achieving the impression of reality, and the impression of space and depth that were so important to him. This is precisely the reason digital media is the preferred mode of capture for 'reality' television and documentary films. “Digital video is like an x-ray technology. It sees through fiction.” Like a sponge, digital cameras absorb simultaneously all things before them, making it possible for filmmakers to avoid creating a film world, and capture the real world more.

Another all-time top YouTube film with over 30 million views and counting is Hahaha. In this clip, a stedi-camera captures a baby who simply can’t stop laughing. Again, it is shot in a long take that allows the glee of the child’s laughter to mount till the viewer can’t help but guffaw too. But integral to the comedic success of this clip is the immediacy (and indeed, the imperfectness) of the digital sync sound, particularly since the mic is attached to the camera, and as the camera recedes from the baby, so does the sound dampen. This leaves no question that the laughter and the image were captured simultaneously and are utterly untainted, and the purity of this embalmed moment is precisely what enables the viewer to find it so hilarious. Language should “resound within a closed space; in a closed setting it dissolves and disperses irretrievably,” says Bazin. One must “satisfy the two contradictory qualities inherent in cinematographic and real space.”



“Real” Editing (a.k.a. Decoupage)

Additionally, the capturing of sync sound affects editing. According to Bazin, the mandate of sync sound is to shirk symbolic and expressive cutting, and embrace a more analytical, lifelike style, which he calls decoupage. Digital capturing’s inherent sync sound, therefore, forces a more realistic approach to editing. Bazin describes editing as a “series of either logical or subjective points of view of an event.” Dealing with sound films, he lists three motives for cutting: (1) As a purely logical descriptive analysis of the narrative, (2) as a psychological analysis from a character's point of view, and (3), as a psychological analysis from the audience's point of view. According to Bazin, only the first of these promotes realism. Psychological editing invents meaning through juxtaposition of the images and not through the images themselves. This is trickery.

Another YouTube top ten clip with slightly more than 26 million, The Mysterious Ticking Noise, exemplifies this, Bazin’s demand for analytical editing. As the title indicates, the success of this clip is dependent on sound, and upon the decoupage that the sound forces upon it. The clip contains five characters irritated by a ticking noise. They slowly erupt into a wild chant and are then dispatched by a hidden, ticking pipe bomb. With a run time of over two minutes, the film has only four cuts. Compare that to the average Hollywood film, which contains roughly 60 cuts per minute!

In Ticking Noise, and in accordance with Bazinian theory, the cuts only occur when they are compelled by the sound. When all five characters are chanting, it’s captured in a static five-shot. When two characters chant, the clip cuts to only them, then back out again. This audio-mandated editing mimics much more closely the way a human might “self-edit” the scene if they were there in person. Bazin, of course, agrees, “that the sound image, far less flexible than the visual image, will carry montage in the direction of realism, increasingly eliminating both plastic expressionism and the purely symbolic relation between images.”



Deep Focus

Still another realist consequence of digital cinema technology is persistent depth of field, an aesthetic Bazin wrote an entire article about, called “Pour en finir avec la profondeur de champ.” Anyone who’s used a digital camera can attest that for better or worse, the focus is sharp from fore- to background. This, Bazin would embrace.

According to Bazin, directors such as Orson Welles, in Citizen Kane, and William Wyler, in The Little Foxes (both working with the cinematographer Gregg Toland), expanded depth of field and cinema’s potential for objective reality. Bazin believed depth of field was imperative to the cinema of realism because, (1) it maintained the unity of space and the relationship between the objects within that space, and (2), gave the spectator the freedom to direct his or her own control over the viewing process, including what to look at, in what order, for how long, and how to glean meaning from their self-controlled gaze. Together, these two characteristics of deep focus maintain the ambiguity of space - the existential ambiguity present all around us in life – that was so important to Bazin. “Deep focus,” Bazin said, “liberates the spectator from the coercion of montage.”

Yet again, YouTube and the requisite aesthetics of the digital Internet age come through with a shining example of this Bazinian tenet. OK Go, with over 26 million views, is a performance film in which a group of four men tackle a dangerous synchronized dance atop six strategically placed (and running) treadmills. Again, the camera is static, but the crisp digital deep focus allows the viewer the freedom to watch any of the four performance artists, whether they are on the first treadmill in the foreground, or on the distant machines in the deep background. “Thanks to the depth of field, at times augmented by action taking place simultaneously on several planes, the viewer is at least given the opportunity to edit the scene himself, to select the aspects of it to which he will attend,” writes Bazin. “[This is] everything that really matters in cinematic realism, the kind of realism that proceeds from an aesthetics of technology and reality.”



Clearly, the aesthetics of YouTube and of mass amateur cinema today are expressly in keeping with Bazinian theory. Fixed long takes, sync sound, decoupage, and deep focus – all directly linked to digital technology and short form video sharing – are techniques that increase objective realism and minimize subjective mediation.

Furthermore, since Bazin viewed the invention of new technology not as a result of fresh knowledge, but as being triggered by a cultural will, it stands to reason that YouTube, short form video sharing, and digital cinema (not to mention the explosion of reality TV) combine to prove that Bazin was right: realism is the purpose of cinema, because judging by the popularity of YouTube, realism is what the masses want. After all, as Bazin himself writes, “The individual transcends society, but society is also and above all within him. So there can be no definitive criticism of cinematic art which does not first take into consideration the social determinism, the historical combination of circumstances, and the technology which determines it.”