Distrust That Particular Flavor

William Gibson’s Filmless Festival

BUILT IN THE LATE TWENTIES heyday of the early studios, the Château Marmont boasts a fine deep mulch of Hollywood psychogeography, a wealth of ghosts. It’s hard to imagine doing anything in one of these bungalows that someone hasn’t already done, but maybe we’re doing it tonight: We’re holding our own private festival of digital video, screening films that were shot without the benefit of, well, film.

First up: Dancehall Queen, a feature from Jamaica that we’ll watch with its co-writer and editor, Suzanne Fenn.

Suzanne was a member of Jean-Luc Godard’s Dziga Vertov Group, circa 1970–71, where she functioned as the embodiment of Liberated Woman. Trained by the great documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens, she cut Errol Morris’s Gates of Heaven, all of Michael Tolkin’s movies, and films by Percy Adlon, Louis Malle, and many more.

Dancehall Queen, shot in the Jamaican ghetto of Standpipe, is an all-digital production, the result of Chris Blackwell’s initial moves toward creating a modern movie studio/industry in Jamaica, based on the way digital cameras and editing pare down and open up the filmmaking process. That is, the way they reduce costs to a point where films can be feasibly geared to smaller audiences, thus allowing the development of true indigenous cinemas. It’s the third-world version of what Americans call “guerrilla filmmaking,” extending the same vocabulary of techniques and strategies: on-the-fly street shooting, more nonprofessional actors, and so forth.

What becomes apparent, listening to Suzanne and then watching her film, is that Dancehall Queen couldn’t have been made without this technology. In a milieu of ambient squatters, working with conventional equipment and a large crew is virtually impossible. (There aren’t even any viable authority figures to bribe.) The technology opens up the world in a new and global way: If you can go there, you can shoot there. For all her Euro-film pedigree, Suzanne is not the type to be held back by nostalgia for an old media platform, and Dancehall Queen uses the new technology to great effect, plunging the viewer into the outrageous color, hypnotic energy, and desperate socioeconomics of the Standpipe ghetto and its club scene.

As the film ends I glance over at my daughter Claire, 16, and see that she’s excited, too, even though the movie’s dialog is in a variant of English that would send American video distributors running to the nearest subtitle house.

Suzanne tells us that her next feature, also shot digitally in Jamaica, is called Third World Cop. I tell her that’s the best title I’ve heard this year, and then we slot our second film, Hal Hartley’s The Book of Life. Featuring singer P. J. Harvey as Jesus Christ’s backpack-toting personal assistant, it was shot in Manhattan for French television on the proverbial shoestring.

On the final day of 1999, an immaculately suited Jesus and a Bukowskiesque Devil warily circle each other through a series of sleazy bars and chilly law offices, trying to cut a deal that centers on Christ’s PowerBook. This contains the biblical Seventh Seal: Unlock the file and the Judgment Day program will launch, and then all hell will break loose. Christ also unexpectedly finds himself on a quixotic last-minute mission to save the soul of a saintly waitress who has run afoul of the Devil’s negotiating skills. The film displays a fine nervous energy, heightened by loose-limbed camerawork, Hartley seeming to relish the so-called limits of digital filmmaking: His images smear, blur, judder, pixelate, and twist. It’s a weirdly compelling grammar he assembles, and the film is funny, tender, and vertiginous.

I check Claire again. I’m using her as a tunnel canary, those birds that miners employed to warn them of poisonous gases. If she goes comatose, we’re definitely off the track in terms of a crucial target demographic. Will this stripped-down mode of production hold the attention of a teenager raised on studio product?

It looks as though Hartley’s grabbed her, handheld and all, so now we’re ready for Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, a Danish film, digitally shot, that won the Jury Prize last year at Cannes.

Vinterberg was proud to put The Celebration forward as an example of the principles codified in Dogma 95, a manifesto calling for location sound, natural lighting, and other new realities of digital filmmaking. The movie, staged in a very large and handsome chateau, explores the inner psychic recesses of the deeply troubled annual reunion of a very large and extraordinarily dysfunctional Danish family, and it seems… very long. After twenty minutes of Danish gloom I look over and see the tunnel-canary effect kicking in, big time. Claire’s about to opt for bed and a head-clearing hit of MTV.

The Celebration is triggering my own Joe Bob Briggs reflex, but maybe that’s because watching a triple feature is pushing it for me. Or maybe it’s because the movie is 105 serious minutes of what Variety calls “arthouse,” fraught with incest and repressed memories of child abuse. It definitely would’ve been a tough pitch in Burbank.

Still, though I may not be enjoying it tremendously, I can honestly be glad it exists. Vinterberg has probably made exactly the film he wanted to make — a lot of it, at that — and any technology that empowers this uniquely personal process is ultimately going to do some good.

So Claire goes to bed, The Celebration ends, Suzanne and my friend Roger depart, and I go out to the patio to smell the eucalyptus and think about dreams and platforms and how platforms affect dreams and vice versa.

Digital video strikes me as a new platform wrapped in the language and mythology of an old platform. Lamb dressed as mutton, somewhat in the way we think of our cellular systems as adjuncts of copper-wire telephony. The way we still “dial” on touchpads. We call movies “film,” but the celluloid’s drying up. Film today is already in a sense digital, since it’s all edited using an Avid.

But people still come to Hollywood, and I know that some of the people driving the cars I can hear now, out on Sunset, desperately want to make movies. As I turn in, I think of the Garage Kubrick and wonder what he’d make of the films we’ve just seen. Probably not much.

The Garage Kubrick (he never quite managed to be assigned a name) is a character who somehow escaped the focus of my latest novel. He was there in the notes, but he didn’t make it to the literary equivalent of the screen. He had already demonstrated his unwillingness to take his place in my book when I learned of Stanley Kubrick’s death. The character was based not on Kubrick himself but on certain theories about Kubrick’s methods and intentions that were put forward by a friend of mine, a young British director who once worked for him. Kubrick, my friend opined, didn’t care how long anything took, and would have been happiest if he’d been able to construct virtual sets and virtual actors from the wireframe up. The idea took root in my college-film-history recollections of auteur theory — which has it that the director is, absolutely, the “author” of a given film, just as the writer is the author of a book.

Whether this is literally true is arguable, but the world, in my experience, is filled with wannabe auteurs, and my imagination conjured one particularly focused and obsessive example.

I thought of the Garage Kubrick when I went to Sundance for the first time and saw young filmmakers doing what young filmmakers apparently must do to get attention for their work — the public part of which seemed to involve shuffling in a tense sort of lemming-lockstep up and down the main drag of Park City, talking on two cell phones at once and looking near-fatally stressed. The private part, the deal-making part, I assumed (based on experiences of my own) would be worse. Or simply wouldn’t happen.

Watching the Sundancers cultivate cell-phone tumors induced a certain empathy. I felt for these people. And that feeling fueled my fantasy of the Garage Kubrick.

Who is maybe fourteen, fifteen at most, and is either the last or the very first auteur — depending on how you look at it.

The Garage Kubrick hates everything that Sundance, let alone Hollywood, puts people through, and he won’t have Slamdance or Slumdance either, or any of the rest of it.

The Garage Kubrick is a stone auteur, an adolescent near-future Orson Welles, plugged into some unthinkable (but affordable) node of consumer tech in his parents’ garage. The Garage Kubrick is single-handedly making a feature in there, some sort of apparently live-action epic that may or may not involve motion capture. That may or may not involve human actors, but which will seem to.

The Garage Kubrick is a control freak to an extent impossible any further back along the technological timeline. He is making, literally, a one-man movie; he is his film’s author to the degree that I had always assumed any auteur would want to be.

And he will not, consequently, come out of the garage. His parents, worried at first, have gone into denial. He is simply in there, making his film. Doing it the way my friend assumed Stanley Kubrick would have done it if he’d had the tech wherewithal.

And this, come to think of it, may be why the Garage Kubrick never made it into my book; I was never able to imagine him letting go of the act of creation long enough to emerge and interact with any other characters. But characters who miss the bus have a way of haunting their authors, and now, falling asleep at the Marmont, it comes to me: He’s back, and I’m going to have to figure out where he fits in with this new technology. And whether or not we can, or if we’ll want to, get there — where I’ve imagined him — from here.

We start the next day with blueberry pancakes and a couple of compilation tapes of digital short subjects, animations in one style or another, that remind me of Siggraph demos. The Garage Kubrick would recognize these, I suppose, as units in the language in which he’s learning to sing opera.

At this point, Claire’s real-life media needs start to manifest. She needs digital, but not film. She needs Japan-only PlayStation games and Final Fantasy associational items. We get on the road to Monrovia, where she’s found the physical retail locus of a website called Game Cave. Game Cave turns out to be a much slicker, more contemporary operation than the fanboy pod-mall outlet I’d imagined, and while Claire makes her selections I consider that this place, rather than anything more conventionally cinematic, is where the Garage Kubrick is likely to emerge.

Maybe an entire culture of these people will emerge, since building digital sets from scratch might prove too difficult for most individuals. Maybe a specialist market selling things like templates for an American suburb, or mall interiors, or car chases. These could then be tweaked into more specific shapes by the individual enthusiast. Some people might find that their most valuable asset is the set they’ve developed, which they can rent to others, to modify, layer over, cut, paste, and sample.

Which has me scratching my head in Game Cave, as the concept is so strangely like aspects of contemporary Hollywood: an “industry” on the Net.

The Garage Kubrick mutters at me, wipes his sweaty hands on his dirty chinos, and goes back into the garage. He doesn’t want this. He’s the Author.

Back at the Marmont, we’re watching 20 Dates, a film by Myles Berkowitz. “There’s the place where we bought the Austin Powers teeth!” Claire says, delighted.

20 Dates was shot, more or less, in this neighborhood, so we score a very localized kind of déjà vu, an inverse vérité. We sit here, watching video of places a few blocks away, and feel — pleasurably — less real.

20 Dates cost around $65,000. With its Candid Camera aesthetic, it feels more like television than the other features we’ve screened, but in some ways it seems more radically itself. We watch the director tape his way through his twenty dates, looking for true love. Which he eventually, against serious odds, claims to find, so that in the end 20 Dates somehow feels a lot like the Hollywood product it tells us it’s trying not to be.

Still, Myles made his movie and has an audience, so we chalk up one more to digital.

I suspect the Garage Kubrick was probably assigned projects like 20 Dates in fifth grade: Go out and make a film about your neighborhood, about people, about how you feel about girls, whatever. He did, but he hated doing it. He already knew what he wanted: high narrative tension, great sets, unforgettable characters, the texture of his own imagination turned into pixelflesh. He wanted the garage, that fertile darkness, unspeakable embrace with whatever artifact of convergence waited for him there.

Next up, after a lunch break, is Bennett Miller’s The Cruise, a black-and-white documentary from New York that has attracted a sizable audience. This interests me more than it does the tunnel canary, who opts for the pool. I sink into the world of Timothy “Speed” Levitch, a tour guide on Gray Line buses, who looks a bit like the late John Lennon and can be almost as irritating as Myles Berkowitz. This is one of those idiosyncratic films about an idiosyncratic guy in what is still, in spite of everything, a pretty idiosyncratic city. I’m a fan of this sort of thing, and if there were a channel that ran such films all day — like Real One in my current novel — I’d surf it. The Cruise is, as they say in festival brochures, a very personal film, and very personal films are notoriously difficult to fund. If digital were any more expensive or any more technically demanding, these images probably wouldn’t be here.

What do the films we’ve been watching have in common? A technology that facilitates motion capture and assembly, and does indeed put the tools of production into the hands of just about anyone with a serious hankering to make a film. But that’s a simple observation, rather like saying that anyone with Microsoft Word can produce a book that looks, well, exactly like a book.

“Digital is an inexpensive way to make films,” my friend Roger decides, as we watch the onedotzero3 cassette, a compilation from a recent digital-film festival at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, “but it’s a very expensive way to do club graffiti.”

We’ve come out to Roger’s place to access his multiformat VCR, our English tape being in PAL, but now there’s a problem with the tape, or with the VCR, or with how the two interact: The imagery, a lot of which resembles clip art, is in black and white. It’s supposed to be in color.

I feel guilty watching it this way. This is grossly unfair to the filmmakers, although it does seem to underline the idea that most of what we are watching here has been created either as a background for serious clubbing or as neurologically specific tools for the appreciation of proscribed substances, or both. If we could crank these images up to wall size, with full Dolby, I’m sure they’d jangle a few synapses. But largely abstract content, in monochrome, on a standard-size monitor, is simply an exercise in design.

The tunnel canary isn’t comatose, but she’s not watching, either. She’s teaching herself to juggle with three large lemons from the tree in Roger’s front yard.

Sleep eludes me. The Garage Kubrick is muttering, keeping me awake. Does anybody really need him? Will he ever happen?

I remember the people I’ve heard complain about the very texture of digital images, filmless film: how it lacks richness, depth. I’ve heard the same thing said about CDs. Someone once told me that it was Mark Twain who turned in the first typewritten manuscript, and this was generally thought to be a Bad Thing: Work composed on a machine would naturally lack richness, depth.

But surely, says a very American part of me, things (if not people) can get better, and what the early stages of one technology take away can be restored in a later stage, or by a newer technology piggybacking on the first.

And my Garage Kubrick wants full fractal richness. He wants to control the very texture of the dream, down into its finest grain, its tightest resolution. He wants to build his characters from the ground up, from the inside out. He thinks not in terms of actors but in terms of models for motion capture. His medium is entirely plastic, to a degree that has never been possible before. And isn’t, I remind myself, possible today.

But it might be eventually. It seems to me, really, that it must be one day.

Digital cinema has the potential to throw open the process of filmmaking, to make the act more universally available, to demythologize it, to show us aspects of the world we’ve not seen before. In that sense, it will be the “eyes” of the extended nervous system we’ve been extruding as a species for the past century.

To think in terms of entertainment, or even of art, is probably to miss the point. We are building ourselves mirrors that remember — public mirrors that wander around and remember what they’ve seen. That is a basic magic.

But a more basic magic still, and an older one, is the painting of images on the walls of caves, and in that magic the mind of the painter is the mirror, whatever funhouse twists are brought to the remembered object. And that cave is also my Kubrick’s garage, and whatever he’s driven to cook up in there will simply be another human dream. The real mystery lies in why he is, why we are, willing, driven, to do that.

Some of us will use digital film technology to explore all of those places, all of those people, in the world we’re still trying to discover. If the Standpipes of the world cease thereby to be invisible, out of sight and out of mind, it will have all been worth it right there.

And others, like my own Garage Kubrick, will use the same technology to burrow more deeply, more obsessively, more gloriously, into the insoluble mystery of the self, even as the Château Marmont outlasts the media platform and the studio system that gave it birth.

I fall asleep imagining someone building a virtual Marmont, and in one of the bungalows, a character is falling asleep….

My novel Pattern Recognition was gestating, as I wrote this, the “Garage Kubrick” morphing from protagonist (or antagonist, or possibly just agonist) to MacGuffin, though I didn’t know it. Pattern Recognition would eventually manage to be published just ahead of the launch of YouTube, a very good thing considering certain of its plot points.

In a world with YouTube, it’s probably much more difficult to induce a magazine to put you up in the Marmont to watch digital films, so that was good timing as well.

Over a decade later, digital cinema seems to be going where I thought it would, though with the paradoxical problem that lack of broad theatrical release is still taken to mean that your film didn’t really happen. Unevenly distributed future, that; the towering edges of the footprint of the previous media platform… I imagine the true Kubricks to be going about their business regardless.