For those who watch my little videos on this site, you might sense an interest (obsession) with multiple, simultaneous frames. What I am doing here is experimenting/sketching toward some more involved narrative projects. The last two vlogs were done quickly with material I shoot whenever I can. The focus is on clear linear progression - a camping trip and a backyard project - "narrated" with multiple frames hopefully evoking some emotion through a play of frame position and duration. My particular interest is in how multiple frames can be used to construct narrative space.
Lev Manovich's writings on spatial montage are a big inspiration. Also video artist
Marc Lafia's In search of a Poetics of the Spatialization of the Moving Image (
part 2, part 3 and
part 4) which expands the discussion by questioning the need for "montage" in the spatialization of cinema. He writes of simultaneous time events that do not necessarily ask to be stiched together in the mind of the viewer.
"How then to talk about something that is moving but fixed always there like architecture but always changing not loops but infinite scores -this then is a very different aesthetic object. What we might talk about is patterns, forms, perhaps even temperament, I am not sure. But certainly the older technologies of cinema and television as well as all visual
instrumentation, technical and social can be reconfigured to bring forth
something new? "
-Lafia
The possibilities are limitless. Installation art, cross-platform storytelling, generative montage, remix video are already such active modes of new cinema practice, why bother with traditional narrative at all? Why keep the boxed rectangle at all? The frame - the box that reveals and conceals - is the most potent tool of narrative cinema. The long take, continuity and discontinuity, the graphic relationships between shots, the shock of the edit - all of it relies on the dynamics of the frame. D.W. Griffith's Biograph films are still a revelation of the complex relationships that can grow of discrete bounded shots. In most movies, multiple frames are used to expand the traditional montage sequence and the parallel action sequence. In other words it has become a now familiar technique for that part of story that wants to be flooded with events - a flight of memory or imagination, the rush of an action sequence, the summary of a series of events. I am always dissapointed by comic book inspired movies flirtation with multiple panels - such potential missed.
There is of course Mike Figgis' TIMECODE that explores simultanaeity of multiple perspectives, but - as a humble viewer speaking - does this new form only speak to our dispersed/fractured sense of experience? I have not seen Julie Talen's PRETEND, but her
writings about it and other "multi-channel" films opens up other possibilities.
Eija-Liisa Ahtila's films/installations and
Peter Horvath's online work are just beautiful and do so much to open the possibilities of the multiframe narrative. It is interesting that both these artists are exploring mental spaces - story developing at least partially in the mind(s) of character(s). This seems only natural - the border between inner and outer as a very productive playing field for multiple frames. For example, the popular tryptich (which Horvath, Ahtila use alot) can give us a subject, an object percieved by the subject and the cut-away (extended space - real or imaginary).
Narrative art requires a certain amount of precision. The juxtaposition of frames is designed to evoke emotion, story information, thought etc.. Even when the direction of such feelings/thoughts are not precisely guided by a clear storyline. Claire Denis's extraordinary, mysterious and very nonlinear
L’Intrus is built out of precise cuts. And it is the relationships between all these frames/shots (not only sequentially but in the spatial consciouness of the view) that the film comes alive. When we sit down to watch a movie, we secretly want to be transported to a space - to be filled and played by images so that a world is constructed in our heads. Spatial cinema has always been with us.
So why do we not see more multiframe works? Much of the answer has to do with the growing sophistication of an audience. Movies haven't caught up. But also complexity, density and reduced frame size do not alway play well in a theater. If you miss something there is the frustration of not being able to rewind. Online cinema, or cinema that is ment to be viewed with control at one's fingertips seems to be the best "venue" for this kind of experimentation. Lets say that in one minute of screen time, you attempt to narrative six simultaneous minute long events - the viewer would have the opportunity to go back, but also zoom/click in for a closer view? (HD video will help here!)
Frames within frames can build interesting spatial relationships around size, direction and duration. So, a character might be lost in thought and tangential frames appear as items of that thought. Or suspense created by obscure spatial relationship between frames. Or simply complicating the POV shot. Variety of durations and speeds of frames seems to be very useful for narrative, evoking scale. A fast multiframe montage through a cityscape, might sit next to single long take of a tree evoking a hectic state longing for balance and calm. The compactness of poetry vs. the steady development of prose. Narrative cinema is ready for another leap.
The questions I am struggling with is how to write for such a narrative cinema. The traditional screenplay format doesn't work, because so much of the narration is happening in the visual patterns generated by the multiple frames. What I have found (my personal little break-thru) is that the film must be composed as a storyboard. The what-happens-next emerges out of the patterns of frames on the page - not, say, the dialogue. Figgis used a music score, but he was working out the timing of quadrants. With a storyboard, then the "script" can be constructed and the frames given some handy code. See
Eija-Liisa Ahtila's DVD and book of scripts (selling for a bargain price!) for how she handles three changing screens with narration.
So back to the work, more later.
Also see:
Click image to view video