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Mobilising stillness: From database tostory, via still and moving-imageWyn Masona

a University of GlamorganPublished online: 03 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Wyn Mason (2012) Mobilising stillness: From database to story, via still andmoving-image, Journal of Media Practice, 13:2, 143-162

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jmpr.13.2.143_1

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143

JMP 13 (2) pp. 143–162 Intellect Limited 2012

Journal of Media Practice Volume 13 Number 2

© 2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jmpr.13.2.143_1

Keywords

cinematicCrossingdatabasefilm-makingmoving-imagestill image

wyn MasonUniversity of Glamorgan

Mobilising stillness: From

database to story, via still

and moving-image

abstract

The article explores the concept of ‘database film-making’ (i.e. first compiling a creative database of images in order to later construct a narrative in post- production, rather than following the more traditional pathway of film-making via scriptwriting), arguing that approaching a film from a database perspective can potentially increase its cinematic qualities. The article builds upon ‘Database as a symbolic form’ (2001) by Manovich, along with cinematographic writings by Kracauer, Bresson and Tarkovsky, and presents a schema for mapping a spec-trum of film-making practice from script-based to database. The author takes his own short film Crossing (2008) – co-directed with film-maker/photographer Ian Wiblin – as a case study of an image-led fiction film. The film’s database consisted of both stills and moving-images, which were juxtaposed in a variety of ways; the article reflects upon this methodology, listing the variety of techniques utilized and how the meanings generated could only have emerged from adopting a database approach to storytelling.

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1. Available to view online at: https://vimeo.com/45702075

IntroductIon

New media artist Manovich in his article ‘Database as a symbolic form’ (2001) considers the relationship between database and narrative – between the ‘staticness’ of database and the mobility of narrative – and coins the term ‘data-base cinema’ to describe the work of film-makers like Vertov and Greenaway. He uses the term ‘database film-making’ to refer to a method of film-making that involves first compiling a database of images before later arranging them in post-production into a narrative. Manovich revisits twentieth-century film-making from a twenty-first-century new media perspective, presenting Vertov’s Chelovek s kino-apparatom/Man with a Movie Camera (1929) to his fellow new media practitioners as a prime example of an appropriate balance struck between database and narrative:

Thus, in the hands of Vertov, a database, this normally static and ‘objective’ form, becomes dynamic and subjective. More impor-tantly, Vertov is able to achieve something which new media design-ers still have to learn – how to merge database and narrative into a new form.

(Manovich 2001: 24–25)

The term ‘database film-making’, borrowed from Manovich, can in turn also inspire film-makers to reconsider their own methodologies – especially if one considers the compiling of a database to be a creative and intuitive act, rather than a calculated one. As Manovich points out, practically all films are partially constructed from a footage database that is accumulated during the shoot, with the final edit representing only one of all possible films that could have been produced from the raw material; but there is an enormous differ-ence however between commencing with narrative and commencing with database. If a film’s narrative is pre-conceived, then it is essentially re-created during the edit; if it is not pre-conceived, then it is created during the edit. There are many reasons why script-led film-making is the conventional, dominant mode of practice (mostly connected with financial imperatives, but also a reflection of cinema’s continual dependence on the conventions of other, older and more literary art forms, most notably theatre – Bazin ([1967] 2005: 87), but one wonders if it is at the expense of more inherently cinematic modes of storytelling. In this article I will argue that a database approach to film-making can contribute towards a film’s ‘cinematic-ness’, that is, a cinema that fully deploys what is specific to cinema, a cinema that celebrates its visual artistry rather than one confined to ‘literary’ inspired practices. To illustrate this claim I shall take one of my short films, Crossing (2008), as a case study – co-directed with my university colleague, film-maker/photographer Ian Wiblin – a film that took the compiling of a data-base, incorporating still and moving-images, as its starting point, from which story was assembled.

Crossing: Fragments of a relationship (2008)1

The film (22-minutes in duration) is set on the hills above the town of Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales, and follows a man and a woman who separately take the same short cut across an isolated mountain top, walking from one valley to the next – leaving the road at the beginning, crossing the mountain and then returning to the world of roads and cars at the end. Post–World War II

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European art cinema, especially Antonioni’s 1960s trilogy, L’Avventura/The Adventure (1960), La Notte/The Night (1961) and L’Eclisse/The Eclipse (1962), formed a common influence on both Wiblin and myself. There were two main aspects to Antonioni’s work that interested us. Firstly, we were inter-ested in his minimalist storytelling. Stripping a film of its external dramatic conflict allows more space to investigate internal conflicts, which Antonioni explored visually, using landscape and architecture to hint at his characters’ emotional, psychological and spiritual realities. For example, the geometric, modernist buildings of L’Eclisse dwarfing Monica Vitti’s character, suggesting how emotionally and spiritually overpowered she feels. Secondly, common to art cinema in general, we were interested in Antonioni’s use of ambigu-ity. In his article ‘The art cinema as a mode of film practice’ ([1979] 2002), Bordwell describes art cinema as a practice that adheres to two key principles: realism and authorial expressivity. By realism he means using real locations, dealing with real problems, and as examples he cites contemporary ‘aliena-tion’ and ‘lack of communication’ (Bordwell [1979] 2002: 95–96) – themes that Crossing also focuses upon – and using realistic (i.e. psychologically complex) characters; and by expressive he means foregrounding ‘the author as a struc-ture in the film’s system’ (Bordwell [1979] 2002: 97 – emphasis in original). Realism and authorial expressivity, according to Bordwell, are two seem-ingly contradictory impulses, which is resolved within art cinema through the device of ambiguity. When a film’s form digresses from the classical mode, it can be read both/either as motivated by realism and/or as authorial commen-tary. During the initial planning stages of our project, we found a correla-tion between our shared appreciation of art cinema and adopting a database approach. Database foregrounds realism, because the initial process of collat-ing photographic material is unhampered by plot concerns, and in some ways is more akin to documentary than fiction film-making. And it also easily facil-itates what Bordwell called authorial commentary because, in not shooting with story intention in mind, we provide ourselves with a broad database of material that can, not only be used to construct story content, but can also be used expressively.

Just as Antonioni achieved in his trilogy, we wanted to suggest the characters’ inner worlds specifically through landscape, inviting the audi-ence to create meanings primarily through visual implication and asso-ciation. Consequently, there was to be no dialogue and performances were to be as non-indicative as possible. The more neutral the perform-ances, the wider the creative choices available to us in the edit, and also, in not being able to read gestures as overt signs, the audience, in its need to decipher meaning, is obliged to become more reliant on noticing and read-ing landscape. Crossing was filmed on Merthyr Common, which Wiblin, as a landscape photographer, had been drawn to because he was fascinated by traces of the Industrial Revolution that litter this coarse, mountainous terrain. Our intention was to set characters within the landscape and to use the industrial relics as a way of alluding to the characters’ inner histories, pointers to their emotional, psychological and spiritual selves. Thus, on the one hand our aim was to chart the impact of socio-economic history upon the landscape (documentary film-making), but also, simultaneously, paral-leling this with the impact of personal history upon the characters’ inte-rior landscapes (drama). Taking a database approach presented storytelling methods that are almost inconceivable within the context of conventional screenplay writing.

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THE DATABASE

The first step we took in designing the contents of our database was decid-ing to shoot the two actors, the ‘man’ and the ‘woman’ separately, so they would never appear in the same shot. This decision was made on the grounds that it represented a visualization of our ‘lack of communication’ theme, but also because it would provide us with greater choice in post-production as we constructed the relationship between the characters. If the man and woman were never seen in the same frame, not sharing the same time and space, it also presented possibilities for various alternative interpretations of our fictional world – for example, that maybe one of the characters in fact only exists in the other’s imagination as fragments of memory. In addition to actor shots, another key element to our database was landscape shots – GVs (general views) is what these shots would be called if this film were a

Lost and found

The practice of creating ‘found footage’ films, where already completed productions are viewed as raw data to be creatively re-edited, is a clas-sic form of database film-making. The found footage film-maker wanders amongst the world’s film and video archive as a flâneur, making surpris-ing observations, celebrating chance encounters, and in the process speaks back to mainstream media (Horwatt 2009: 88). An early example would be surreal artist Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1935), where shots of the American actress Rose Hobart are intercut with a nature documentary. In purposefully ignoring the intended context of the original footage, space is created for unexpected connections, for enchanting incongruences to emerge and consequently for the multi-dimensionality of the images to be released. Certain types of documentary film-making, most notably observa-tional, operate in a similar fashion, where a proportionally large amount of material is first filmed without initially knowing precisely which storylines/characters to pursue, only for the narrative thread to slowly appear as the shoot progresses, and then finally crystallized in post-production. But how can a ‘found footage’ aesthetic be appropriated for fiction film-making? How is it possible to be surprised by one’s own footage, for there to be space for accidents and haphazardness with material one has designed and directed oneself?

The answer lies in loosening one’s grip on intentionality. This however runs counter to the classical tradition of drama construction in western civiliza-tion, which evolved from Aristotelian ideas such as, ‘the incidents and the plot are the end aimed at in tragedy, and as always, the end is everything’ (Aristotle, Horace and Longinus 1965: 40), that is, having one’s end goal in mind from the outset, which is not an uncommon advice offered in screen-writing books (e.g. Tierno 2002: 33–35). In taking this path what one is in danger of losing as a film-maker is not only the inherent multiple mean-ing-ness of photographic imagery but also the unforeseen connections made through montage, when cutting from shot A to shot B can gener-ate a richness of unimaginable, unpredictable nuances and connotations. Creating a thematically linked database of scenes and images suggests a way for fiction film-makers to connect with the ‘cinematic-ness’ of their own footage, to wander as a flâneur amongst one’s own material.

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documentary. Our landscape shots, however, were specifically designed to communicate the inner world of the characters, using external reality to into-nate internal reality. Hence, the database thus far consisted of three separate elements:

Moving-images of her• Moving-images of him• Moving-images of landscape•

Another film-maker who influenced us was Marker, the French experimental film-maker, especially with his short film La Jetée/The Jetty (1962). All the shots in La Jetée are filmed photographs, apart from one brief moving-image shot

Cinematographic writing

With script-based productions, a significant part of the writing takes place before the shoot; with database film-making, the ‘writing’ takes place afterwards. The process of editing a film, where there is neither story nor script to refer to, feels like learning a new language, as one image at a time is selected, placed and considered, before proceeding to the next. Creating something without conventional structures can be a painstakingly slow process, especially when negotiating a large database of material.2 In edit-ing a script-based story one arranges and rearranges signifiers to best communicate a story; in editing a database film it is as if one is creat-ing new signifiers, discovering en route what they might signify. The term ‘cinematographic writing’ conveys this sense of slowly constructing meaning during the process of film-making, rather than beforehand. It is a term borrowed from Bresson, who used the word cinema to refer to film-making practices that owe more to theatre than film, whilst reserving the term ‘cinematography’ for film-making that thoroughly exploits the uniqueness of the medium. It is possible to revisit sections of his Notes on Cinematography (1975) and read it almost as a manifesto for database film-making. For example,

Two types of film: those that employ the resources of the theatre (actors, direction, etc.) and use the camera in order to reproduce [i.e. script-based film-making, W.M.]; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create [i.e. database film-making, W.M.].

Cinematographic film, where the images, like the words in a diction-ary, have no power and value except through their position and relation.

To create is not to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are.

CINEMA draws on a common fund. The cinematographer is making a voyage of discovery on an unknown planet.

Cinematography: new way of writing, therefore of feeling.(Bresson 1975: 2–12 – emphasis in original)

2. In addition to video footage, we had several thousand still images as part of our database. It is worth noting how digital cameras have made it far easier for a stills film such as Crossing to be made. All we had to do was to import the photos en masse from the camera into the computer, whilst Marker, in making La Jetée in the 1960s, had to laboriously develop the photos, make a print of each one, film them individually with a movie camera and then process this footage, before finally being able to start editing.

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of a woman’s eye opening and blinking as she awakens (which corresponds with the moment the film’s time travelling protagonist succeeds in truly pene-trating the past). As a film-maker, Marker has consistently been interested in photographic (and cinematic) images as containers of memory – Sans Soleil/Sunless (1983) being another prime example – and in La Jetée, in particular, of photographic images as fragments of memory, which may be revisited and reassembled to create new meanings. Not only was La Jetée itself conceived and produced as a database film, but it also incorporates ‘database’ settings within its story content, most notably the museum.

We are instructed to look at the fragments that endure, at the partial nature of things that survive over time. Almost like a warning (a siren?), these images […] speak of the incompleteness of our experiences of the past. Statues and ruins, like photographs, are only part of the story. But, significantly, their partial form allows our own supplementation, our own interpretive creations, to take root.

(Harbord 2009: 16)

We made a connection between Marker’s museum fragments and the remnants of heavy industry on Merthyr Common and decided to also include stills photography within Crossing, and to use the interplay between still and moving image to suggest revisitation through memory and its accompanying potential for rewriting the future. This led us to add digital photography to our existing moving-image database; we would record everything twice, once with moving-images and once with stills; the entire shoot therefore would be duplicated:

Still images of her•Still images of him•Still images of landscape•

actor IMprovIsatIon, FIlM-MaKer spontaneIty

The walk across the mountain included four locations: a road junction over-looking a valley, an old quarry, a disused railway line and finally a lake, lying next to a winding road that led down to the town of Merthyr Tydfil, seen in the distance. In conceiving our project as landscape-based rather than script-based, our aim was for the story to gradually emerge from the specificity of site. With this in mind, on arriving at each location, we instructed the actors (Caroline Sabin and Gerald Tyler, both highly experienced devised theatre practitioners) to wander around, to familiarize themselves with the space and then to interact with the landscape. We observed their interactions with the site, discussed their responses and negotiated what we considered to be the most intriguing actions to shoot. As we were filming in sequential order, all in the course of a single day, it was possible to construct the content step by step, allowing one encounter to follow the next. Filming the actors sepa-rately, one at a time, with one actor observing the other’s responses, enabled a visual dialogue to develop between them, creating a cause-and-effect chain (his male gaze impacting upon her, hers impacting upon him). One could say that the performers’ improvised responses to one another formed the basis of a narrative, but when filming, it must be emphasized, we were mindful not to permit this linear development to become too prescriptive. With montage

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3. Similarly, in pursuing practice-as-research, as my university colleague, poet Philip Gross says, research questions can sometimes only be formulated once the answers are found.

Crossing, Scene 1

As a way of sharing the process of cinematographic writing within the context of database story construction, it is useful to refer to some of Crossing’s scenes in detail. First I shall transcribe a scene, taken from the opening sequence and presented in pseudo-screenplay format, followed by a reflection upon the choices and rationale employed during editing. The aim is to demonstrate how there are many ways of arriving at a narrative film: script→image is one, while image→script is another.3

EXT. DELAPIDATED BUILDING – DAY

Details of a rundown, abandoned building: cracks in the plaster, holes revealing the bricks beneath, a wall with patched up cement holes.

Finally, an image of the building’s half-opened rusty, steel doors, the entrance overgrown with weeds – out of which flies a little bird, its wings flapping desperately, noisily.

Throughout, the rhythmic sound of grasshoppers chirping.

One of our intentions with this opening scene was to set the general mood of the film – slow, contemplative, displaying attention to detail, promoting a particular attentiveness in the viewer. All the shots are close-up, detail shots, so the building is initially not seen in its entirety, which creates an ambiguity: what kind of a build-ing is it – a warehouse, an abandoned house, was it once a home, etc.? It is a place that evidently at one point served a purpose, with an attempt made to repair it, but it has since been abandoned and disregarded. During editing we are attracted to the physical reality captured in these shots, but are also fully cognizant of the suggestive power of images, and their potential to evoke associations that will be resonant later in the film. We are encouraging viewers to be mindful of the inseparable connec-tion between the material and the non-material. Representational photography is of this world, depicting whatever is to be seen in front of the lens, but at the same time the objects represented are always filtered through consciousness. Our editing rationale is to embrace the physicality of what is portrayed, which is heightened, thanks to our data-gathering approach to shooting, but also to imbue the images with non-material meaning (i.e. development of plot, character and theme). We are both allowing space for images to release their meanings, enabling the pictures ‘to yield all their psychological correspondences’ (Kracauer 1960: 71), but also, simulta-neously, consciously pursing story intrigue.

What about the accompanying sound of grasshoppers? In Crossing we aimed to give sound the same database treatment as image. The film was shot entirely mute, but on the day of the shoot we employed a sound recordist to visit each of the loca-tions separately from the camera crew, to compile a database of sound files – one of which included the sound of grasshoppers. Sounds were recorded, similar to the images, primarily to capture their essences, for their pure aesthetic qualities, not for their story relevance. The sound of grasshoppers chirping is connected with the open, empty space of a mountainside, and feels incongruent placed alongside the ‘urban-ness’ of the opening images. It has a subtropical association (connot-ing the sound of cicadas): suggestive for example of the disused building being a hothouse, a place of great pressure. If sounds in a film depart from a direct connec-tion with external reality, then viewers may find meaning in considering the inter-nal reality of the characters. In our image-making, in order to maximize the film’s potential meanings, we generally aimed to create uninflected shots, with regard to both composition and actor performance, but contrastingly in creating the sound design we found that meanings multiplied if sounds were heightened. Peculiar to note (as Tarkovsky once did – 1986: 162) that hyperbolizing images can potentially diminish their multiple meanings, whilst hyperbolizing sound can augment them.

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editing in mind, our approach throughout was to gather as ‘neutral’ a data-base as possible that could be creatively combined in post-production.

Being free from the strictures of following a pre-planned dramatic form not only allowed space for performer improvisation, but also enable the crew to work more intuitively. In shooting documentary one is usually conscious of the need of either presenting an argument or structuring a story, and similarly with drama one is conscious of narrative needs, but adopting a database approach is qualitatively different, as one’s focus shifts from the general to the particular, from the demands of a story or character arc to the demands of the moment. What is required on set from a database film-maker is being receptive to impactful images, to images that resonate not so much with story but with the film’s themes. Consequently, one is more present to one’s environment, be it the action of the actors or the pictorial possibilities of the location. For example, when we shot the actors with a stills camera we sometimes halted the actions midway in order to photograph from various angles; we did so without concern for constructing a particular visual sequence, but simply as individual stand-alone images. Similarly, when we photographed or filmed the landscape without the actors, we were operating, in what only can be described as a heightened state of awareness – eyes, ears and mind wide open, alert to the abundant potentiality of unimagined images. As film-makers we were operating primarily as image-makers, rather than storytellers. In not searching for shots that adhered to pre-formulated ideas – story-bounded, for example, in the form of a shot list or a storyboard – the landscape, with its history and unexpected idiosyncrasies and possibilities, was allowed to impact directly upon us (as film-makers, and eventually in turn, hopefully upon the viewers). This spontaneous way of working is akin to what the fine art photographer experiences, and the fact that this feels unusual and slightly uncomfortable within the context of fiction film-making is indicative of the dominance of conventional script-led production practices.

story→IMage, IMage→story

Reality, as such, does not only have one meaning, but multiple meanings. Photography, due to its representational nature, is intimately tied to the phenomenological world and is subsequently capable of retaining much of its inherent multiple meanings; this is what Kracauer powerfully argued in Theory of Film.

Plot insists that images carry only one meaning – whatever is significant to the narrative. Take away the plot and one is left with images that are indeterminate, their multiple (poetic) meanings left intact.

(Kracauer 1960: 68)

In a plot-driven film (drama or documentary) an image often functions as illus-tration, specifically conceived and executed to communicate a particular narra-tive point. However, when an image is uninflected, freed from a limited narrative reading, it can display its multiple meanings, which is what Kracauer equated with ‘cinematic’ or ‘poetic’ (terms which are often used interchangeably in his writings). Films can arrive at their ‘cinematic-ness’, their overriding connection with reality, by different routes, some via database and others via script (only that database films, arguably, are more predisposed to do so).

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In order to place Crossing within a more general film practice framework, I have constructed a diagram to illustrate the relationship between database and script-based film-making – see Figure 1. In making a script-based film one starts with a story and creates images to tell the tale, moving from story to image, from screenplay to film or video footage. In the diagram ‘Story’ is placed above ‘Image’ in order to imply the idea of imposing a concept upon reality (stories after all are metaphors for life, and the word metaphor contains within it the Greek prefix meta-, with its accompanying association of denoting something higher). Some script-based productions journey further away from the written word than others, hence the varying lengths of vectors A, B and C. I equate vector A, for example, with the crudest form of soap opera, where the script is more or less shot as presented, partly because this is what the produc-tion teams can achieve within the usually highly restrictive shooting schedule. Within this type of film-making images are at their most illustrative and least cinematic, where shots dutifully deliver the one necessary meaning of the plot, before cutting to the next (Kracauer 1960: 69–71). Vector C, however, sits at the opposite end of the script-based spectrum; here, film-makers, by not holding on so tightly to story and by incorporating uninflected shots in their films, are able to foreground the multiple meanings of images, and succeed in

Figure 1: Script-based and database film-making.

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converting a screenplay into a cinematic film. In order for script-based film-makers to achieve a cinematic aesthetic, it is necessary for them to undergo a process of adapting or translating from written word to images, that is, by visually re-conceiving, reinterpreting and reinventing the script. Generally speaking, many classic art cinema productions would fit into this category: for example, the work of Antonioni, Bergman and Ozu. Contemporary examples would include films that have been called contemplative or slow cinema, for example, Reygadas’s Stellet Licht/Silent Light (2007). Meanwhile, vector B lies between A and C, representing the various film productions that fall some-where between either end of the script-based spectrum.

Database film-making, by contrast, starts with a collection of images from which a story is constructed, with some productions journeying closer towards story than others, hence the varying lengths of vectors D, E and F. However, it is highly unlikely that any database film will contain as much story content as a script-based film. This would be true even for films placed in category D, whose vector travels furthest towards story; with database films story is more likely to be alluded at, rather than explicitly told. A classic example would be Tarkovsky’s Zerkalo/Mirror (1975), which can be understood as a database film. In working on Mirror, Tarkovsky claims to have consciously abandoned his previous film-making practice, by not writing and following a traditional screenplay.

When we started work on Mirror we made it a deliberate point of princi-ple not to have the picture worked out and arranged in advance, before the material had been filmed. It was important to see how, under what conditions, the film could take shape as it were by itself: depending on the takes, on contact with the actors; through the construction of sets, and in the way it adapted to places chosen for location.

We drew up no prescriptive plans for scenes or episodes as complete visual entitles; what we worked on was clear sense of atmosphere and empathy with the characters, which demanded, then and there on the set, exact plastic realisation. If I ‘see’ anything at all before shooting, if I envisage anything, then it is the inner state, the distinctive inner tension of the scenes to be filmed, and the psychology of the characters. But I still do not know the precise mould in which it will all be cast.

(Tarkovsky 1986: 122–23)

As a result, and in common with all database film-making, a great deal of the cinematographic ‘writing’ took place in the edit. Tarkovsky recalls in Sculpting in Time how an enormous amount of work went into editing Mirror, how there were around twenty or so separate versions of the film, none of which worked.

The film didn’t hold together, it wouldn’t stand up, it fell apart as one watched, it had no unity, no necessary inner connection, no logic. And then, one fine day, when we somehow managed to devise one last, desperate rearrangement – there was the film. The material came to life; the parts started to function reciprocally, as if linked by a bloodstream; and as the last, despairing attempt was projected onto the screen, the film was born before our very eyes.

(Tarkovsky 1986: 116)

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Crossing, Scene 2

EXT. MOUNTAIN ROAD – DAY

A middle-aged man appears over the brow of a steep road, walking along a pavement – his face at first distorted due to the heat rising from the asphalt. In the background, cloud shadows drift across the valley. Then, on the other side of the road, a middle-aged woman strolls along, a bag upon her shoulders. In the valley beyond lies a village, with passing vehicles.

Pause: a frozen image of him glancing at her; a frozen one of her glancing at him.

Finally, he walks in front of the dilapidated building, now fully revealed as an abandoned, industrial warehouse. In the background, up on the barren hill-side, there is a pine tree plantation.

The sound of grasshoppers continues throughout.

Intercutting between the man and the woman allows the audience to compare and contrast the two characters – their gender, their physical-ity, their attire – inviting viewers to consider how identity is constructed with little information to support any definitive conclusions about who these characters may be and what is the nature of their relationship. The entire action of this scene, like all the scenes in the film, is duplicated with photographic stills, so during editing we were faced with a very broad choice of where to include them, if at all, and to what end. In this scene it was decided that only two photographs were to be used: close-ups of the characters’ faces. Scene 1 has already indicated that this is to be a highly visual film, where space is provided for viewers to scrutinize, read and interpret images without overt authorial guidance, and Scene 2 continues in the same manner. Inserting photographs of the characters at this point is one way of encouraging viewers to continue with this scrutiny, signalling the significance given to detailed observation within the film’s language system, and noting how stills photography can often provide a greater opportunity for close inspection of minute detail than moving-image. Viewers are invited to accept what the film is now estab-lishing – that there is no single narrative to be found, but rather a series of poetic, visual fragments which the viewer is free to interpret, and, in doing so, ‘write’ their own meanings. The fact that the usual conven-tions of explaining character and their situations are withheld, however, impacts on viewers in another way. It encourages viewers to become highly sensitized to filmic style, because in doing so they may be able to glean meaning from what Bordwell called authorial commentary (‘the author as a structure in the film’s system’ – Bordwell [1979] 2002: 97 – emphasis in original); and juxtaposing stills with moving-image repre-sents filmic style writ large.

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The passage from database to story can be arduous; however, what can be gained is finding a certain balance between story and life. Mirror contains sufficient story content to engage the viewer’s imagination, but there are also gaps, and for viewers to thoroughly connect with the film it is neces-sary for them to invest their own life experience. ‘Never try to convey your idea to the audience – it is a thankless and senseless task. Show them life, and they’ll find within themselves the means to assess and appre-ciate it’ (Tarkovsky 1986: 152). Evolving from script-based to database film-making means embracing a mode of storytelling address where the film-maker situates the viewer in co-authorship. The database film-maker must arrive on location with a receptive mind and rely heavily on intuition as a guide, and similarly the audience, in viewing a database film, needs to draw upon its own intuition and creativity. There is an implicit acknowledgement within database film-making that there are many sides to a story, just as there are many meanings to an image, and it is this that makes it, arguably, a more democratic, less prescriptive, mode of address.

At the other end of the database film-making spectrum is vector F, a film-making practice that hardly involves story. In this category are films that consist of images that retain maximum multi-dimensionality, completely resistant to the pull of narrative (which is sometimes challenging, due to the innate human leaning towards story). Certain fine art films would fit into this category, for example, Warhol’s Screen Tests (1965), where no attempt is made to construct story from a data of close-up shots of young people looking into the lens. Films in this category use the linear medium of film to explore the aesthetic of stillness. Between D and F is vector E, representing films that fall somewhere in the middle between the two polarities of those that use data-base to construct narratives and those who resolutely avoid doing so.

Crossing would be situated in category D, as we were consciously attempt-ing to construct from database as complete a story as possible, but were mindful of not wanting the narrative to be too linear, as to compromise the film’s cine-matic potential. If such a thing as a ‘golden mean’ exists somewhere between image and story, then that was what we were aiming for.

the Interplay oF stIllness and MoveMent

Crossing is a film of many parallels: first, the parallel journey of the two char-acters, the man and the woman; then the parallel journey of characters and audience; the parallel development of story content and film form; and also the contrapuntal use of image and sound. The most significant parallel of all, however, is that of still and moving-image. Neither Wiblin nor I had previ-ously made a film where all the footage was duplicated with photos, so we did not know in advance how the two might meaningfully combine, we could only experiment as we proceeded. In revisiting the film now it is possible to analyse the different techniques used, but none of these were systematically theorized at the time – as we assembled the film our focus was predominantly on content not form.

Placing a single still image within a sequence of moving-images.• An example of this has already been provided with reference to Scene 2, where close-ups of the characters were cut into the sequence of the man and woman walking up the road. The technique highlights a particular moment, giving it special status, so it stands out as the key image of a sequence. At the time

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of editing, Wiblin connected this technique with the Latin word punctum, as adopted by Barthes to discuss the reading of photography. Barthes contrasts studium, which he used to refer to his general interest and enthu-siasm in reading an image, with punctum, used with reference to a certain penetrating, wounding point within a photograph that personally touched him as viewer/reader, allowing him to deeply connect with its contents. He particularly liked the term punctum because it also hinted at punctuation:

[…] the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points.

(Barthes [1980] 2000: 26–27 – emphasis in original)

As we edited, a moving-image sequence became our studium, into which we inserted a still image as a punctum, which functioned as punc-tuation, emphasizing a significant moment within a scene. Ideally, if a single still image placed within moving-images functions as a punctum, then more powerful still would be if there were also a punctum within that still image, a punctum within a punctum.

Placing a single, brief moving-image within a sequence of stills.• This is the inverse of the above and an example in the film would be the series of photographs of the man walking along the top of the embankment, abruptly intercut with a short, jerky, hand-held shot of him from a slightly different angle (the same technique used by Marker in La Jetée). Within our story this was used to suggest the woman’s presence and, specifically, her point of view as he is suddenly jolted out of his inner reverie and becomes aware of her. It also communicates that, particularly within a stagnant (static) world, change (movement) can feel radical and violent. As a filmic device it functions, in a not dissimilar manner to our first example, as another punctum moment.

A sequence first seen in moving image is repeated in stills (or vice versa).• There are several instances of this in the film, for example, when the woman climbs onto the pile of stones and concrete sleepers. It functions as a double-take, where viewers are asked to revisit a moment, but are invited to view it differently the second time. We know that our eyes are particularly attuned to noticing and reading movement, for example, the subtle changes of a human face; when this is combined with the moving-image’s inherent capacity for recording movement, the result is an overwhelming tendency towards a movement-centred viewing experience. Focusing predominately upon movement in a film (e.g. a character’s actions and gestures) occurs at the expense of the image as a whole. If viewers are first shown a character action in moving-image, their story curiosity is satisfied (they know what happens next), but then if this very same action is repeated in stills, the viewers’ focus shifts towards the pictorial, allowing them, maybe for the first time, to become conscious of visual language. This particular technique can be connected with Deren’s comparison of vertical and horizontal investiga-tion, made in the context of contrasting poetry and drama:

A poem, to my mind, creates visible or auditory forms for something which is invisible, which is the feeling, or the emotion, or the

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metaphysical content of the movement. Now it also may include action, but its attack is what I could call the vertical attack, and this may be a little bit clearer if you will contrast it to what I would call the horizontal attack of a drama, which is concerned with the development, let’s say, within a very small situation from feeling to feeling.

(Deren 1963: 56 – emphasis in original)

Moving-images are apt at providing horizontal information, pushing a story forward, while photographs are equally apt at providing verti-cal information, enabling viewers to penetrate deeper into a moment. As Deren noted, a Shakespearean monologue can momentarily pause the action in order to poetically investigate the emotional and thematic nuance of a specific moment of drama, similarly so too can a series of stills add poetic reflection to the linearity of a scene.

Using still imagery to depict movement.• This of course is what photogra-phy does especially well, capturing a fleeting moment. Stills photog-raphy is capable of capturing gesture in its purest, distilled form, often more efficiently than moving-image. For example, in Crossing there are a series of stills of the man climbing the quarry slope; in the first photo-graph his hand is foregrounded, resting by his side; in the second, this hand is now at the edge of frame, but gesturing backwards, as if he is pushing the woman away, rejecting her – a telling gesture that a moving-image would not have captured (see Figure 2). Photography can also freeze a moment that is too fast for moving-image to grasp; we used this in Crossing with photographs of splashing water, for example, where the man slaps a railway sleeper into a puddle – see Figure 3. (In complete contrast, there are certain movements that are far too slow for either still or moving-image to portray, but worth mentioning because it constitutes a key element of the film: the depiction of decay. From the dilapidated building at the beginning, to the rust-covered railway buffer, the wooden sleepers, the old stonewall and even the rocks, all are slowly decompos-ing. Crossing uses both still and moving-image to register this, not by means of a special filmic device, but simply through repetition. Indeed one possible reading of the film would be to suggest that what the characters

Figure 2: A telling gesture – photos from Crossing (performer: Gerald Tyler).

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Figure 3: Water sleeper – photo from Crossing.

come to realize during their journey is that all things must pass, including themselves and their individual dramas.)

Using moving-image to depict stillness.• For example, this is seen in landscape shots where movement is almost imperceptible, like the shot of the rail-way buffer as the breeze gently caresses the grass. The constant juxtapo-sition of still and moving-image invites viewers to scrutinize images for the slightest movement (is this one a photograph or film?), demanding a highly attentive viewing mode that draws the audience into the film, deepening its involvement. As a formal device it perfectly complements minimalist drama, where the focus is not on overt, dramatic action but upon secret, subtle alterations of the human heart.

There are two conflicting ways of reading the interplay of still and moving-image within a fiction film-making. On the one hand, one can connect still-ness with ‘staticness’ of character, with the inability to transform and progress, and, consequently, view movement as change. On the other hand, one can consider stillness more positively, as symbolic of characters connecting with an internal stillness (emotional, psychological or spiritual); and movement, in the form of dramatic, emotional upheavals, as a distraction from this inner peace. Crossing does not systematically adhere to either of the above approaches, but continuously shifts between them.

the story

As a celebration of both the basic possibility and artistic value of transform-ing the essential ‘staticness’ and verticality of database into the dynamic, horizontality of story, it is necessary to briefly summarize Crossing’s narrative drive (although the following represents only one possible reading amongst

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Crossing, Scene 3

EXT. OLD QUARRY – DAY

Various rocks and stones: some are enormous slabs that emerge from deep in the earth, ancient, reminiscent of prehistoric creatures, while others are large stones, lying on the surface – seemingly half by accident, half by design.

The woman enters the old quarry, walks into the centre and places her foot on one of these large stones.

Pause: her boot on the stone, the back of her neck, then her profile as she glances over her shoulder.

Slow, contemplative music plays throughout: piano, saxophone and bass clarinet.

Every film has its own editorial language, which is often only discovered through practice. It was as we were editing the above scene that the filmic language of Crossing was formulated and the creative potential of database film-making fully appreciated; it was here we started to explore Bordwell’s art cinema tension of realism versus expression. The scene opens with detailed shots of rocks as an intro-duction to the location, and then finally a wider shot that reveals the amphitheatre-like form of the old quarry as the woman walks in, all relatively traditional; but then we cut to the detailed photo of her boot on the stone – this is the edit that took us by surprise (see Figure 4). In some ways the edit is jarring: it cuts from wide shot to close-up, it breaks the 180˚ rule of continuity editing (by ‘crossing the line’), and also at the same time it cuts from moving-image to still. The wide shot is essentially from the perspective of an objective onlooker, but the close-up jumps to a subjective point of view – either that of the character or of the authors. Either way, it is hard to articulate. Does the edit shed light upon the character’s interior world? Maybe there is a correlation between the heaviness of the rock and the weight of her inner world; or is it the dead, greyness of the stone in contrast with the surrounding bright green of the grass that signals the shot’s meaning? And is there a connection to be made between the stillness of a photographic image and the stillness of the rock; does this contribute to the edit’s resonance? Next we cut to another photo, this time a close-up of her neck. We also find this cut to be pleasing, but again without know-ing exactly why. The smoothness of skin contrasts with the roughness of the stone: if the stone is somehow representative of her interior world, then it is at odds with her exterior self. In this shot one notices that her dress is grey and rough textured, reminiscent of the rock, and that her neck, warm and pink, emerges from it, almost triumphantly. In the previous photograph the grass is vibrant; in this one it is her skin that is alive and at odds with the dullness of its surroundings. Can the sequenc-ing of these images be suggestive of her potential spiritual rebirth, of an emergence from the deadness of the rock – a rebirth reinforced by the moving-image that soon follows? This demonstrates the porousness of the text, that meanings can be extracted, but are never certain, always slipping away from definitive explanations.

Writing with pictures in this way is akin to writing poetry, where one image can flow to the next, gathering mood and metaphor along the way. Leaning towards theatri-cality, a tendency that Bresson wholeheartedly resisted, takes cinema away from its essential poetic nature, whereas leaning towards new media (a database aesthetic) provides a method that invites random connectivity, where visual language adds richness and depth to the dramatic exploration of character and theme.

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many, because the film after all is specifically designed as an open text). Fundamentally, for me, it tells the story of a couple who are coming to terms with their recent separation. They are metaphorically revisiting the abandoned territory of their relationship, separately, but also, inevitably and inescapably, inseparable from one another. In the old quarry the woman turns to look at the man, but he immediately rejects her gaze, turning dismissively away. This is a defining scene, embodying the heart of their drama: a hurtful dance that both parties are destructively attached to. They journey along the exact same route, but negotiate the territory differently. They first follow the course of a disused railway (tracks running in parallel), but it leads to a buffer, the end of the line, symbolic of the end of their relationship – see Figure 5. As they pass the buffer, they both touch the cold, rusted steel, almost as if they were eulogizing their hurt. Beyond the railway buffer, the embankment continues, now track-less, without its raison d’être, but old habits, as we know, die hard.

There are various defining moments for both characters along their devel-opmental journeys. One of these for him is throwing stones at an electric-ity pylon. He is below, buried in the embankment, while the pylon, with the indifference of the outside world, passes by overhead, oblivious to his rage. A defining moment for her is when she runs away from him, sprint-ing anxiously, consumed by fear. Is she afraid of being attacked, of being

Figure 4: Externalizing the internal – video still and photos from Crossing (performer: Caroline Sabin).

Figure 5: End of the line – video still from Crossing.

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raped? Or, more internally, is this the turning point where she finally stops pursuing him, the point that leads to self-awareness and change? They arrive at a striking location, where two majestic, Victorian stone walls – abandoned and unseen by the world – face each other across the embankment; two walls left standing, useless, staring silently across the divide, where once there was a bridge. By this point the characters have arrived at a place of stillness. The demons that possessed them at the beginning have now retreated, whatever fragments of their relationship remained have been proc-essed, rearranged, and a new equilibrium has been established. She no longer seeks his gaze; instead she stares intently at a square stone, which sits at the very centre of the wall, somehow corresponding to her new-found sense of belonging and tranquillity. Finally, the story resolves as we take leave of the characters by the lakeside, both of them staring at a peculiar pattern on the surface of the water, where the weeds grow, creating stillness among the otherwise restless, choppiness of the waves – see Figure 6.

During the course of the story, in parallel with the characters, the audience are also required to undertake a journey; that of letting go of an attachment to the classical mode, and consequently to develop an increased receptiveness to the understated language of landscape and imagery; and perhaps appreciat-ing that images are capable of creating emotional responses independent of dramatic constructs. Through close inspection of outer, physical reality, view-ers discover images that reflect inner realities, both the interior worlds of the characters and their own.

suMMary

The above story can only be told in film form, because the story itself is inex-tricable from the landscape. The images created on Merthyr Common repre-sent the essence of the telling; and this is what makes Crossing quintessentially cinematic, untranslatable into any other art form. The idea of ‘cinematic-ness’, championed by twentieth-century film-makers and critics such as Vertov, Deren, Bresson, Kracauer and Tarkovsky, is closely linked to the multiple meanings of images – a quality to be celebrated for its intimate connection with reality, for its truthfulness, its poetry and uniqueness of artistic expres-sion. Cinema’s capacity for creating multiple meanings is also to be celebrated

Figure 6: At one with stillness – photo and video still from Crossing (performer: Caroline Sabin).

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for its democratic, anti-authoritarian storytelling potential, where viewers are encouraged to construct their own interpretative spaces. Manovich, in coining the term ‘database film-making’, allows us to revisit previous cinematic theo-rists and practitioners and appreciate the close tie between cinematography and database. The term ‘database film-making’ also invites practitioners to experiment with various database methodologies, and, in doing so, enhance cinematic potentiality. Crossing is presented as one such film, as it constructed a narrative by first collating a database of shots and scenes, rather than by writing a script. Still and moving-images formed a key ingredient of this data-base, which, in the edit, were juxtaposed in a variety of ways, designed to complement story content, character revelation and thematic exploration.

In order to produce a cinematic film, one either starts with a script and, in the process of shooting, reinvent the material so that the images become essences in themselves, able to command attention beyond the restrictive dictates of plot; or alternatively, one starts with a database and constructs a story from images, allowing space for them to retain their dimensionality. If one’s point of commencement is the mobility of story, then a cinematographic film-maker (in the Bressonian sense) must translate this raw material into moments of stillness, moments that are able to transcend the flow of narrative. Conversely, if one’s starting point is the immobility of database, its inherent ‘staticness’, then a narrative-centred, cinematographic film-maker’s objective is to mobilise the stillness of images. We took up this challenge quite literally with Crossing by incorporating a database of still images. In addition to its narrative possibilities, database film-making has a propensity for mobilizing viewers’ creativity by means of poetic allusions, which is intrinsic to the art of cinematographic writing.

reFerences

Antonioni, M. (1960), L’Avventura/The Adventure, Italy: Cino del Duca.—— (1961), La Notte/The Night, Italy: Nepi Films.—— (1962), L’Eclisse/The Eclipse, Italy: Cineriz.Aristotle, Horace and Longinus (1965), Classical Literary Criticism (trans. from

Greek and Latin by T. S. Dorsch), London: Penguin.Barthes, R. ([1980] 2000), La Chambre Claire/Camera Lucida (trans. from French

by Richard Howard), London: Vintage.Bazin, A. ([1967] 2005), What Is Cinema? Volume 1 (trans. from French by

Hugh Gray). Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California.Bordwell, D. ([1979] 2002), ‘The art cinema as a mode of film practice’,

Reprinted in The European Cinema Reader. C. Fowler (ed.), London: Routledge, http://smile.solent.ac.uk/digidocs/live/Furby/Text/Bordwell_2.pdf. Accessed 6 December 2011.

Bresson, R. (1975), Notes sur le Cinématographe/Notes on Cinematography (trans. from French by Jonathan Griffin), New York: Urizen Books.

Cornell, J. (1935), Rose Hobart, USA.Deren, M. (1963), Poetry and the Film: A Symposium, Film Culture, No. 26,

pp. 55–63. Date of Cinema 16 symposium 1953, http://www.virtual-circuit.org/word/pages/Poetry/Symposium_Poetry.html. Accessed 6 December 2011.

Harbord, J. (2009), Chris Marker: La Jetée, London: Afterall.Horwatt, E. (2009), A Taxonomy of Digital Video Remixing: Contemporary Found

Footage Practice on the Internet. Published online in Cultural Borrowings,

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Iain Robert Smith (ed.), Nottingham: Scope E-book. http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/cultborr/Cultural_Borrowings_Final.pdf. Accessed 29 March 2012.

Kracauer, S. (1960), Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, New York: Oxford University.

Manovich, L. (2001), ‘Database as a symbolic form’, The Language of New Media, Cambridge: MIT, http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/archive/courses/warner/english197/Schedule_files/Manovich/Database_as_symbolic_form.htm. Accessed 1 December 2011.

Marker, C. (1962), La Jetée/The Jetty, France: Argos Films.—— (1983), Sans Soleil/Sunless, France: Argos Films.Mason, W. and Wiblin, I. (2008), Crossing, Wales: University of Glamorgan.Reygadas, C. (2007), Stellet Licht/Silent Light, Mexico: Mantarraya

Producciones.Tarkovsky, A. (1975), Zerkalo/Mirror, Soviet Union: Mosfilm.—— (1986), Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (trans. from Russian by

Kitty Hunter-Blair), Austin: University of Texas.Tierno, M. (2002), Aristotle’s Poetics for Screenwriters. New York: Hyperion.Vertov, D. (1929), Chelovek s kino-apparatom/Man with a Movie Camera, Soviet

Union: VUFKU.Warhol, A. (1965), Screen Tests, United States.

suggested cItatIon

Mason, W. (2012), ‘Mobilising stillness: From database to story, via still and moving-image’, Journal of Media Practice 13: 2, pp. 143–162, doi: 10.1386/jmpr.13.2.143_1

contrIbutor detaIls

Wyn Mason is a film-maker and Senior Lecturer at the University of Glamorgan’s Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries in Cardiff and is course director for MA Scriptwriting. His recent research interests centre upon poetry-films, poetic cinema and interactive film-making.

Contact: University of Glamorgan, Room CA416, The Atrium, 86-88 Adam St, Cardiff, Wales CF24 2FN, UK.E-mail: wmason@glam.ac.uk

Wyn Mason has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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