Au-Cinema Films

Epilogue

• How To Do Each Aspect Of Making A Movie
• Make Money With Portrait Photography
• One Click Cover Letter Creator Software

Digital Video and New Forms of Narrative in Mike Figgis's Timecode

As I conclude this book on the art of narrative film techniques, I am aware that the medium I have been writing about may well be on the verge of becoming extinct, a casualty of a new technology which threatens to replace it—digital video. Since we are only at the beginning of a new technological age, the question of how new electronic ways of creating moving images will ultimately affect our moviegoing experience and the form future films will take is impossible to predict. It is true that at the time of this writing, films shot with digital cameras and then transferred to 35mm film and projected on the big screen lack the beauty, illusion of depth, and luminosity of live-action footage shot with 35 mm film. Reviewers of digital films seem to work overtime in coming up with clever ways to describe how lifeless and charmless digital images can be, especially when the film is shot by a digital camera and then transferred to film. In a review of the film Sordid Lives (Del Shores, 2000) for example, the reviewer writes: "The transfer from digital video to 35mm lends the film the vaguely underwater look of a sunken sitcom."1 For now the consensus seems to be that films shot in digital video are simply not as visually satisfying as those shot on film. However, Lev Manovich makes the interesting point in The Language of New Media that digitally created images are potentially superior to celluloid images in the amount of information they can convey about their represented objects. They only appear less satisfying because they have been dumbed down, and the amount of information they convey about the object subtracted. This is so they will resemble celluloid images (the standard by which we measure the reality effect) and hence seem more real.2 In any case, while digital images may well lack the beauty of celluloid images in the present, experts in the field claim that it is only a matter of time before we will be unable to tell the difference between movies shot in 35mm and movies shot with a digital camera.

Whatever the present limitations of digital images, the commercial success of digitally animated computer-generated films such as Pixar's Toy Story (1995) and Toy Story 2 (1999), and Star Wars—Episode 1, The Phantom Menace (George Lucas, 1999) suggests that these images are at least good enough to trigger strong emotional reactions from the audience if the stories the films tell are well-structured and compelling. While the colors in Lars Von Trier's digitally shot (and transferred to 35mm film) Dancer in the Dark might be less vibrant and the texture of the images less nu-anced than they would be if the film had been shot and projected in 35mm, the emotions expressed through the face and singing voice of Icelandic pop artist Bjork (as a blind woman who sacrifices her life so that her son can get an operation that will save his eyesight) make the film as moving as any film I have ever seen in any medium.

Even the most passionate proponents of the superiority of celluloid-based images over new electronic media have to admit that digital technology has numerous advantages over film technology, not the least of which is that making movies on digital video costs less than making them on film. One can shoot on digital video for a very small fraction of what it costs to shoot on 35mm film, and this does not take into account the additional expense of developing the film and making copies. Additionally, movies made on digital video are easier to edit. Most celluloid films are now transferred to digital form in order to facilitate editing. With sophisticated editing software one can edit images on a computer with the same ease that one can arrange and rearrange the words in sentences or paragraphs using a word processor. The process of creating special effects digitally, while not necessarily less labor-intensive than doing special effects on film, has the potential to be more spectacular and convincing. Finally, once film theaters are equipped with digital video projectors, the distribution of movies in the theater will be cheaper and easier. No longer will heavy cans of 35mm film need to be physically transported to theaters all over the world, nor will the quality of the film image deteriorate because of the stress on film prints being repeatedly run through scratch-inducing film projectors. Once films are digitized and theaters are retooled, movies can be beamed into theaters directly from satellites. The digital revolution might be just as momentous for the cinema as was the coming of sound.

Despite the fact that few theaters are equipped with digital projectors and the number of commercial feature films shot on digital video remains small, a few filmmakers are experimenting with the possibilities of digital technology for opening up new forms of narrative expression. Mike Figgis's Timecode is an interesting case in point. Released in the year 2000, it was the first American studio film shot entirely in digital video.3 Rather than using digital technology to create imaginary beings or spectacular special effects, Figgis exploited the potential of the new medium to tell a story in a radical new way.

Figgis shot Timecode in real time with four synchronized digital cameras, each assigned to photograph the action of one of the four simultaneously occurring segments of the plot. The script was "composed" on music paper in a string quartet format (one line for each of the four plot actions), with each bar representing one minute of time. The film's twenty-eight actors and four camera operators were given the general outline of the plot and could improvise within that structure, but they were equipped with synchronized watches so that they could keep their appointments with predetermined moments in the plot. Since the film was shot in real time, the running time (ninety-three minutes) exactly corresponds to the time it took to shoot the film.

As might be expected, shooting the film in four simultaneous takes in real time was a risky venture. Any number of mistakes could be made by the camera operators or the actors. Mistakes that occur in films made in the traditional way can be corrected by reshooting a scene. One mistaken action in a film shot in real time in long, unbroken takes cannot be corrected unless the entire take is done over. On the other hand, films shot in bits and pieces take weeks, months, or sometimes years to complete. Timecode, because its action takes place in real time, took only ninety-three minutes to shoot. Thus it was possible for Figgis to shoot the entire film in the morning, break for lunch, watch the footage with the actors and crew, and then reshoot the film on the same day, fixing mistakes and incorporating new ideas. According to Figgis, it took fifteen tries before he was satisfied with the results. The DVD version of Timecode (put out by Columbia Tristar Home Video) includes not only the final release version of the film but Figgis's first attempt, allowing viewers to compare the two.

The innovative way in which Timecode was shot (in real time in one take with four cameras) is matched by the unique way the action is presented on the screen. The film appears on a screen divided into four quadrants, each of which presents the footage of one of the four cameras. As a result we see all four segments of the film's plot simultaneously. The viewer is repeatedly reminded that the actions are simultaneous by the frequent appearance of clocks, cell-phone conversations between characters located in separate spaces, and the plot device of having earthquakes occur from time to time, which shakes up the action in each of the four quadrants simultaneously. (Since Figgis obviously could not count on the occurrence of actual earthquakes, he had his camera operators create the impression of earthquakes at appointed times by means of jerky movements of their handheld cameras. The players were instructed to act accordingly.)

Timecode could only have been made with the new digital technology for a number of reasons. In the first place, photographing a feature-length narrative in real time, in one long take, unbroken by edits or cuts, is technically impossible in the film medium, since the film camera has the capacity to hold only enough film for an uninterrupted ten-minute take. The digital camera, in contrast, can shoot up to two hours without interruption. (Video technology also makes it possible for directors to shoot in long uninterrupted takes lasting up to two hours, but the inferior quality of the VHS video image, while sufficient for television distribution, is not suitable for commercial distribution on the big screen.) Even if film cameras were capable of shooting prolonged actions without interruption, the film and developing costs would make Figgis's kind of experimentation impossible. Working in the expensive medium of 35mm film would have mitigated against the actors' and camera operators' freedom to improvise and experiment because mistakes would simply have been too costly. It is too hard to take risks if too much money is at stake. Though Figgis had to pay his actors to go through fifteen versions of Timecode, at least the cost of tape and equipment was negligible.

Having discussed the technical factors that made Timecode possible to make, we can now look at the new kind of narrative experience Figgis's experiment in digital media offers the spectator. Timecode begins with narrative information appearing only in the upper right quadrant of the screen, while screen credits and random images appear in the other three quadrants. In this way Figgis allows the audience to acclimate to the new style of narrative. A woman whose name we later learn is Emma (Saffron Burrows) is telling her therapist about a dream in which her hus band, Alex (Stellan Skarsgard), is bleeding to death from a wound and she is helpless to stop the blood. As the woman continues to discuss the problems with her marriage, the action of the quadrant on the upper left portion of the screen appears. Lauren (Jeanne Tripplehorn) approaches a car, deliberately lets the air out of one of its tires, and retreats to her limousine. Soon after, the owner of the sabotaged car, Rose (Salma Hayek), discovers the flat tire and somewhat grudgingly accepts a ride to Los Angeles in Lauren's limousine. While this action occurs, the bottom quadrants of the split screen are filled in. They focus on action in various spaces of an office building that houses the Red Mullet film production company.

As the plot evolves, we learn more about the characters and how they are related to one another. Alex, the wounded man described in the dream, is the depressed alcoholic head of Red Mullet Productions. Rose is an aspiring actress who is having an affair with Alex, hoping to get a part in one of his films. Lauren is Rose's possessive lover who has lured her into her limousine by means of the flat tire so that she can put a listening device in her purse and hence keep her under constant surveillance. At the end of the film, as the result of her discovery of Rose's affair with Alex (by means of her eavesdropping), Lauren shoots Alex in a fit of jealous rage. Alex ends up dying in a pool of blood, making Emma's dream at the film's beginning prophetic.

Although it might seem that an action unfolding in four separate quadrants on the screen would be utterly confusing and hard to follow, several factors keep viewers oriented. First of all, Figgis employs the sound track to help focus our attention on important plot elements. We never hear the dialogue from all four quadrants simultaneously. Rather, the volume of the sound shifts from one quadrant to another, cueing us into which quadrant of the action we should focus on. Secondly, the action is carefully composed so that events important to the plot take place in only one, or at most two, of the quadrants at one time. Until she murders Alex at the end, Lauren's action is confined to the upper left quadrant of the screen. Mostly she stays put in her limousine, accusing Rose of being unfaithful or, after she puts the bug in Rose's purse, reacting to what she hears through her headphones. Emma, Alex's wife, whose actions primarily occupy the upper right quadrant of the screen, announces to Alex that she is leaving him, and then spends a lot of time walking from place to place, leafing through books in a bookstore, or in fatuous conversation with Cherine (Leslie Mann), an aspiring actress who has auditioned for a part at Red Mullet Productions and, it turns out, was once Emma's lover.

The more crucial actions take place in the bottom two quadrants of the screen. These are devoted to the action of Rose's sexual tryst with Alex, and then Rose's miraculous (unrelated) discovery by a director who gives her an audition for the leading role in a sleazy Red Mullet production, The Bitch from Louisiana. She gets the part. As the tacky title of the film within the film suggests, aside from being an experiment in film narrative, Timecode is a satire on a rubbish-producing Hollywood production company. The bottom quadrants contain scenes in which Red Mullet executives pitch potential Red Mullet films. In order to make the point that this studio manufactures crap, Figgis has one of its executives seriously pitch a film entitled Time Toilet about a janitor who discovers that a toilet is actually a portal to the past and can hence send twentieth-century excrement back into important moments in history, such as the assassination of Lincoln.

Because the top quadrants of the screen are less demanding of our attention, we can concentrate on the more significant action taking place on the bottom half of the screen. At some of the most crucial points in the plot, two cameras focus on the same action in the bottom quadrants, which the audience sees from two slightly different camera perspectives. The overlapping view of the same action, aside from offering some purely aesthetic effects which I discuss later, also gives certain moments of Timecode doubled emphasis, to insure that the viewer does not miss something important. This being said, Timecode nevertheless involves more active participation and attention, and calls for more tolerance for confusion from the spectator, than is demanded in conventionally constructed film narratives. But for those who are willing to make the effort (and even better, to see the film repeatedly), the delights of watching a narrative in real time on a split screen are manifold. The DVD version of the film does more than simply offer the viewer an opportunity to watch the film multiple times; it also has a special feature which the viewer can use to remix the film's sound. Thus we can go through the entire film choosing which quadrant we wish to hear. Timecode's digital construction makes possible an unprecedented form of audience interactivity. Through our ability to remix the sound, we can modify our experience of the film with each viewing.

Probably the most obvious pleasure derived from Timecode's presentation of four slices of the narrative action simultaneously is the heady feeling of omniscience we get as spectators. The use of crosscutting in the conventional film narrative affords us a kind of omniscience as well, but one that is more limited. In conventional crosscutting, the action un folds linearly, one image at a time. In The Birth of a Nation, for example, while Flora is going alone to the well while (unbeknownst to her) Gus is in pursuit, we see first Flora and then Gus in alternating images, one at a time on the screen. Although we are given the illusion of omniscience because we know more than Flora does, we are in fact totally at the mercy of the director, who gets to choose what we see of the actions, and in what order we see them. Figgis's use of four synchronized cameras to record the actions of the plot simultaneously in real time, combined with his split-screen presentation, allows the spectator to view all the actions of the plot simultaneously. Thus in Timecode, when Alex is having a tryst with Rose and unbeknownst to him a studio executive is trying to discover where he is, spectators can switch their attention at will back and forth between the two quadrants of action. Because of the spatial, as opposed to the linear, montage in Timecode, we get to "edit" what we see ourselves. Even though Figgis's sound track does guide our attention, as I noted earlier, because of Timecode's spatial montage our attention can never be completely coerced. Godlike, we can transcend human limitations in time and space to perceive at a glance actions taking place simultaneously in real time in four separate places.

Figgis doubles our pleasure in the unprecedented omniscience he gives us by creating a plot that revolves around a jealous lover, a woman who has a desperate desire to know what is going on in places where she cannot be present, but who has only a limited means of satisfying her desire. In order to keep an "eye" on Rose, she bugs Rose's purse. But Lauren can only hear what Rose is doing, while the viewer can both see and hear what Rose does. We also have the power to watch Lauren's reactions as she listens in on Rose's life. The complex spectatorial fun of Timecode reaches a climax, as it were, when Rose and Alex are making love behind a screen upon which the studio executives are watching screen tests featuring various couples who are quite vocally making love. Because the screen is transparent, we can see the images of the couples having sex on both sides of the screen in the bottom two quadrants of the film. The spectator can delight in reading Lauren's face (in the upper left quadrant) as she listens, puzzled, to the sounds emanating from the screen (of people making love) which presumably (and as it turns out, temporarily) block her ability to know that Alex and Rose are in fact making love.

Figgis's experimental technique allows his audience to have a great deal of fun at Lauren's expense because our voyeuristic capacities are so superior to hers. He also allows us to feel superior to the movie execu tives who do not have our knowledge that just on the other side of the screen on which images of couples are engaging in sex is a "real" couple making love which we can watch while they cannot. But even as Figgis gives the film audience an erotic charge by putting us in a superior position of voyeuristic surveillance and by madly multiplying images of sex which we can watch to our heart's content unobserved, he also makes us hyperaware of our own perverse pleasure in voyeurism by confronting us—a movie audience watching sex on the screen—with the image of a movie audience within the film simultaneously watching images of sex on the screen—the movie executives. By turning the screen momentarily into a kind of mirror for the audience, Figgis confronts us with our own perverse voyeuristic desires.

In addition, Figgis makes us self-conscious about looking by occasionally focusing the camera, usually in the bottom right quadrant of the screen, on the image of two huge eyes, which appear to be painted on one of the buildings in the vicinity of Red Mullet Productions. The effect is that the screen is looking back at us, putting us under a kind of surveillance. Interestingly in this regard, the first image we see of the Red Mullet production headquarters is the screen of a surveillance monitor split into four quadrants revealing disparate spaces of the building (elevators, stairwells, the lobby, and the reception area) which we see simultaneously in real time, mirroring the split screen we are watching in the theater. By means of these self-reflecting images—eyes which look back at us as we are watching them, images of surveillance cameras that remind us of how we too are often being watched—Figgis undercuts the spectator's illusion of voyeuristic supremacy even as his four screens increase our voyeuristic capacity. (See figure 73.)

At the end of Timecode, through another kind of mirroring device, we are made to confront our ghoulish fascination with screen violence. As Alex lies dying in an ever increasing pool of blood, Ana Pauls, the young director who has come to pitch an experimental film to Red Mullet Productions, calmly photographs the spectacle with her digital camera, thereby mirroring the actions of the digital cameraman who is recording the actions of the film we are watching. Not surprisingly, the experimental film Ana has come to pitch is a film shot with no editing in real time, a film whose form, therefore, exactly mirrors Timecode's. We see a framed image of Alex dying (in Ana's viewfinder) within the framed screen image of Alex dying. Here Figgis doubles his images of death just as he has doubled his images of sex, in order to call our attention to the attraction of filmmakers and audiences alike to morbid

Figure 73. Figgis undercuts the spectator's illusion of voyeuristic supremacy even as his four screens increase our voyeuristic capacity. (Timecode, 2000, Screen Gems.)

images of screen violence. Through such pointedly self-reflexive moments in Timecode, Figgis continuously implicates its audience in the dubious desires that make Red Mullet Productions a successful company, desires which Figgis (whose own production company is called Red Mullet) simultaneously satisfies and parodies.

Timecode offers a fascinating synthesis of the pleasure of a mainstream film narrative with that of the radically self-reflexive postmodern experimental film. While it tells a conventional Hollywood story involving a love triangle, with lots of sex and violence, and gives the audience an unprecedented illusion of omniscience by allowing us to observe multiple elements of the plot simultaneously, the novelty of the film's experimental form is always something of a distraction, taking precedence over our absorption in the narrative and identification with the characters. The film deliberately pits the reality effect of a film shot in real time, with the actors giving naturalistic improvisational performances, against stereotypical character types and a hackneyed plot. The effect is quintessentially postmodern in that Figgis appears to be saying simultaneously that what you are seeing is for real and that it is all totally ridiculous.

Aside from this postmodern play on the boundaries between reality and fantasy, Timecode also has an intriguing aesthetic dimension. At times we can forget altogether about the plot and focus on the fascinating effects of seeing multiple actions taking place simultaneously in real time. Thus, the spatial juxtaposition of an image of Rose and Lauren sitting in the back seat of the limousine in the upper left quadrant of the screen, juxtaposed with an image in the bottom left quadrant of the limousine, seen from the outside, pulling up in front of the building that houses Red Mullet Productions, is oddly satisfying, aside from any plot implications, simply because we know that two cameras are capturing the same moment in time from different perspectives, one from the inside and one from the outside of the same car. In another instance involving the limousine, we see the reflection of the lower half of Cherine's face in the upper right quadrant of the screen in the mirrorlike surface of Lauren's limousine window. Simultaneously, in the upper left quadrant, we see Lauren inside the limousine looking out at Cherine through the window. (The window has a mirrored tint, so that the occupant of the car can look out but those on the outside cannot see in.) When Lauren partially lowers her window to speak to Cherine, we see, in the upper right quadrant of the screen, Lauren's eyes (as seen looking out of the car window) combined with the reflection of Cherine's nose and mouth. Here Figgis achieves a composite image of two women, an effect reminiscent of the famous moment in Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966) when the faces of two women merge into one. (See figure 74.) Such images offer a purely formal satisfaction that comes from being shown a familiar world in an unfamiliar way.

At certain privileged moments, the formal design of Timecode serves the narrative. Because two cameras are shooting simultaneously from inside and outside of Lauren's car, when Rose finally opens the door to leave its confining space, she steps not just out of the car but also into a new quadrant of the split screen, moving from the upper left quadrant to the lower left quadrant. Here the effect is oddly exhilarating because she is liberated from Lauren (for the moment) both on the level of narrative and on the level of the formal design of the film. She has literally moved into her own space.

Another instance in which the spatial configuration of the images in the four quadrants serves the narrative occurs just after Rose and Alex (occupying the bottom right quadrant) have made love and are sharing the birthday cake Rose has brought Alex. Lauren, Rose's jealous lover, and Emma, Alex's discontented wife, appear in the top left and top right quadrants of the frame. Thus we can either shift our attention

Figure 74. In the upper right quadrant Figgis creates a composite image of two women, an effect reminiscent of the composite face in Ingmar Bergman's Persona. (Timecode, 2000, Screen Gems.)

back and forth between the couple and Lauren, who is reacting to everything they say (because they are bugged), or we can "cut" our attention to Emma (who, we remember, has forgotten Alex's birthday) as she wanders numbly through the stacks of a bookstore.

In the example I alluded to above when comparing spatial montage to conventional crosscutting, the juxtaposition of Rose and Alex in the room behind the screen and the image of the studio executive who is searching for Alex creates suspense as we wonder whether Alex and Rose will be discovered. But unlike the way the action proceeds in a traditional film in which the director has control over what we see and when, in Timecode the viewer is free to decide which of the four quadrants to watch and in which order. If we are alert and proactive, we can find many moments of irony, drama, and suspense throughout the film because of the intricate ways the images in the quadrants relate to one another, in form and content. There are multiple ways of finding significant connections (both formal and plot-based connections) between the actions of the various quadrants. What is important is that we are given a choice.

To the extent that Timecode's experimental form gives the viewer greater freedom of choice over what to focus on, it adds a new wrinkle to an old debate in film theory: which is the best way to present an action in film—in long takes or short shots (that is, montage)? As discussed in chapter 3, the "realist" film theorist André Bazin disagreed with the position of "expressionist" film theorists such as Sergei Eisenstein who argued that editing, or montage, was the foundation of film art. Bazin preferred the style of filmmakers such as William Wyler, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Robert Flaherty, and the Alfred Hitchcock of Rope,4 because they curtailed their use of editing, relying mostly on the moving camera, long takes, and composition in depth to explore the dramatic possibilities of letting actions on the screen unfold seamlessly in real time and space. Bazin especially praised the early style of Jean Renoir who, he writes, looked "beyond the resources provided by montage and so uncovered the secret of a film form that would permit everything to be said without chopping the world up into little fragments, that would reveal the hidden meanings in people and things without disturbing the unity natural to them."5 Montage, according to Bazin, is too manipulative: it imposes the director's meaning on a filmed event in too obvious or overt a manner. Bazin was also wary of montage techniques because they often distort the natural relationship between an object or character and its context in order to construct false or misleading temporal and spatial relationships.

Figgis calls attention to Bazin's critique of montage in Timecode by having the experimental film director Ana Pauls announce that "montage has created a fake reality." She claims that her film will capitalize on the capacity of digital video to create "a film without one single cut. No editing. Real time." She is, as mentioned above, describing a film, very much like Timecode, whose revolutionary style allows us to contemplate exactly what happens when the realist dream of creating an entire feature film without cuts is actually fulfilled.

From this perspective, Timecode reveals that the dichotomy between the montage style and that of the long take is a false one. Although there are no literal cuts in Timecode, there is a great deal of camera movement that achieves many of the same effects as cutting. The moving camera in each of the four quadrants is highly selective, directing the viewer's attention to details of the mise-en-scène or to close-ups of faces in a way that achieves the same effect as editing.

When a dramatic event occurs in the film, for example, a pan to the reaction on a character's face elicits almost the same response as a cut to the same reaction would have done. I suspect that Mike Figgis, by beginning Timecode with Emma in close-up telling her therapist about a dream in which the central image is a cut (the word she repeatedly uses to refer to Alex's bleeding wound), is making an in-joke, announcing from the start that there is no such thing as a film without a cut. A narrative told in real time in one long take can be every bit as manipulative of our attention as a narrative told with heavy editing. André Bazin's dream of cinema's potential to present a world with the seamless unity and ambiguity of reality through the use of long takes is revealed in Timecode to be an illusion.

As we have seen, however, Timecode in some respects is in fact less manipulative than most mainstream films. Although our attention is very much directed by the camera's point of view within each quadrant, we can nevertheless see all four quadrants simultaneously. As a result, we have far greater freedom to choose which actions to focus on than we have in a conventionally edited film. This is what makes Timecode both demanding and exciting. The spatial montage of Timecode, not its use of the long take in real time, fulfills Bazin's wish for a film form that gives the viewer a freedom to interpret the filmic world in a way that is often foreclosed by linear montage.

Perhaps the ubiquity of computer screens in our lives, which demand that we switch our attention back and forth between multiple windows, to say nothing of the split-screen capacities of televisions which allow viewers to watch the action on two or more channels simultaneously, may be developing a hunger in the spectator for more complexity on the cinema screen as well, a hunger that Timecode satisfies. Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media predicts that the next generation of cinema will increasingly add multiple "windows" or split screens to its language. But the relatively poor box-office reception of Timecode suggests that Mike Figgis's experiment in presenting an entire film in a split-screen format is still far ahead of its time.6 While its box-office take the first week it appeared on screens was respectable,7 the film disappeared from the screen after only two weeks in Berkeley, California, a place where one would imagine there would be a large audience for experiments in film form. Clearly, audiences, no matter how acclimated they have become to computers with multiple windows and the split-screen capacities of their television sets, are not yet craving multiple frames on movie screens.

The traditional cinema with one screen has not yet exhausted its creative possibilities and perhaps it never will. But Mike Figgis's grand experiment with the capabilities of digital cinema is a successful failure.

Those who give the film their full attention and the multiple screenings it deserves will find aesthetic delight in the way its four streams of seamlessly interacting images attain the formal beauty of a musical fugue, thus conveying narrative information in a subtle and challenging new way. Timecode provides us with a preview of one possible way the language of the cinema may evolve in the digital age of the moving image.

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