Author ········· Sam Wilkin
Published ······ February 11, 2020
Language ······· English
Published ······ February 11, 2020
Language ······· English
First as Tragedy, Then as houseburning.mov

The Mirror, Film, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia: 1975)
Does a low quality recording access reality differently than a high-quality recording? As the crow flies, the contrast between cinematic film and candid digital video may be rather conspicuous. The great specimens of the moving image, whether they be of the theatrical or the documentative nature—are all deposited onto the blessed kinetic substrate of photochemical film or the purity of HD digital video. Hold this condition in contrast to low-quality digital video: its large shuffling pixels considered a phenomenon solely a product of our incessant impulse to document. The film negatives that documented the apex’s of cinema seem to share not even the most remote kin with the 5MP recordings of high-school locker room fights. The inability for low-definition to capture the intricate details of life seemed not to inhibit its pieces from capturing atrocities with a forensic remove.
After the advent of digital consumer video cameras, the technical capacities and resolutions of the moving image began to diverge, the capacities of the long established film negative rose inits capabilities of documentation, development and restoration; while the resolutions of digital video began to plummet. Digital technology became incumbent upon the downscaling and affordability of physical hardware required to expose the most base digital recording. By the time of my entry into the 5th Grade in 2007, even most 11 year olds came equipped with flip-phones that sported a primitive lenses. Poor quality digital videos became ubiquitous—no longer was video relegated to the content deserving of a 35MM negative, instead, everything began to be documented. Low-Quality video became increasingly worthless not only through their poor quality, but through their omnipresence.
The 240p Experience
This is evidenced by the kneejerk initial reaction of fear or nervous excitement when a major news outlet broadcasts a shaky 240P video. To flip on the screen and to awaken the image to a shaky display full of artifacted blurry video is to have the content prefigured by the form. Recordings of this type are usually disseminated with the apology of “Breaking News” as to compensate for both the graphic content and the state of the video: which is customarily provisional until an instrument capable of higher caste of video documentation arrives on the scene of the incident, furnished with a newscaster and the appropriate emergency personnel. Within the raceways of traditional channels of media consumption—this is almost undoubtedly an image’s sole 15 second opportunity to be amongst the big shots of respected video formats.

This is not to say that the immaculate sensors of the upper echelon recording hardware are somehow slated with an inability to document atrocities, but rather, that the low quality image is only incapable of representing beauty. To posit the compressed 240P video into a dialectical opposition would be to present it across the 35MM photo-chemical exposure. While low quality seems suitable for documenting atrocities, its impotence seems disproportionate towards beauty. Whereas the 35mmm, rather than providing an effigy of reality though blurredpixels, ennobles the image to a degree higher than that of first-hand eyewitnessed reality—everything privileged enough to enter its cannon of light is ennobled to a timeless sublime. Where low-quality degrades reality, high-quality enriches it.
The Candid and the Theatrical
We can then compare this to that to the production of the cinematic image. The cinematic image is rendered possible by the “Film Set”, or the technical apparatus which surrounds the camera by way of an artificial backdrop, lights, meters, viewing tables, microphones and the like. What the film set seeks to accomplish is not recreation of reality—as anyone acquainted with the filmic medium knows the cinematic image is necessarily fake. What is retained from the filmic experience is not believability but rather invisibility2. The camera, the crew, the lights, the microphone, the hair and makeup—they are not seen. In fact, their existence within the film set is exactly what renders them invisible. The lights, for instance: by lighting a set that emulates that of the outdoors via large towers with beating LEDs attached: we —the non-peripheral viewer bounded by the confines of the aspect-ratio of the camera —are offered a view of the outdoors graced by beautiful sunlight in a quaint rural Austrian suburb, rather than an artificially lit studio in California.
“the equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice, the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology ... The shooting of a film, especially of a sound film, affords a spectacle unimaginable anywhere at any time before this. It presents a process in which it is impossible to assign to a spectator a viewpoint which would exclude from the actual scene such extraneous accessories as camera equipment, lighting, machinery, staff assistants, etc.—unless his eye were on a line parallel with the Lens.”3

Reality and Exposure
By only depicting only the most base, surface levels of light—the digital valley becomes a vessel, free from subjective motives. Its allergy to beauty renders it incapable of being the vessel for politicization. It's an image of forensics, not an image of hope.5
Postmodernism and the Digital Image

The Brechtian Image
Brecht’s concepts of alienation pivot around the notion ripping the audience from their emotional viewing position, and instead placing them at a remove from the drama; this distance would allow the viewer to view the work more critically rather than dramatically oremotionally. This viewpoint offers the audience to analyze the events within a theatrical production as symbolic—in a way returning the events and actions to their allegorical elevation through imbuing them with remote meanings, rather than mere imitations of reality.6
I propose that the most truthful accommodation of Brecht within contemporary mediums lies in the digital valley. A new Brechtian language in which the distancing from the material is done not through theatrical or thematic devices, but rather one that posits itself in omnipresence within the raw material of the viewing experience itself. By being incapable of beauty, the digital valley is an image that restricts the viewer from losing themselves in a drama—it positions the viewer in a brechtian state of distance. The digital valley only accommodates the raw mechanics of light, the surface, the topical depiction of reality. The underbelly of emotion, of drama, is immune to the digital valley. The rich filmic images of modernism were succeeded by digital consequences of postmodernism. But through this impotence, it equally distances us from the events it depicts, it allows for interesting variations of dramatic production that don't rely on the invisibility of the camera.
New Forms
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Hito Steyerl, "In Defense of the Poor Image - Journal #10 November 2009 - E-Flux," Eflux, no. 10 (November, 2009).
- There are obvious divergents from this rule, Cinema Verite, and later Dogma 95 experimented with both the dissolution of the film set, and in some of its more divergent examples, the role of HD video.
- Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936), 13.
- Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
- Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late CapitalismDuke University Press, 1991)
- Bertolt Brecht and Eric Bentley, "On Chinese Acting," The Tulane Drama Review 6, no. 1 (1961)