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There was a time when all of these movies would have been sent back to the lab for more work. Alas, it is their luck -- though not ours -- to be released at a time when eyesores are being palmed off as "truthful," and willful amateurishness seen as the daring trend of the moment. The result is arguably the most unwanted movement in recent film history is here: the digital video plague. Actually, digital video filmmaking (or DV, as practitioners fondly abbreviate it) is far from a new thing. Of course, muddy imagery and shaky focus have existed as early as handheld cameras have been available, of course, but it was not until the Dogma 95 that they were elevated from signs of laziness and incompetence to the epitome of artistic purity. The Dogma 95 was a manifesto put together by a batch of directors in Copenhagen (including Lars Von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, and other cultural hucksters), a sort of rallying cry against the "corrupting" presence of style in cinema. Scoffing artifice off as decadent and falsifying cosmetics, it demanded a cleansing of the medium by going back to basics -- insisting on handheld cameras, location shooting and natural lighting, and forbidding the use of stars, dramatic plots, special effects, etc. It is difficult to decide whether it is a matter of naiveté or pure arrogance, but Dogma 95 has emerged as the biggest hoax perpetrated on film lovers in many a moon. The notion of style as debasing to art is ludicrous because it is exactly through creative shaping of reality that artists can bend the world to their own sensibilities and come up with valid work. The Dogmatic hipsters may talk the talk, but their pictures don't walk the walk -- Breaking the Waves, The Celebration, Mifune, and julien donkey-boy, once all has been said and done, have little to offer besides their own vow of chastity as an excuse for acres of headache-inducing ugliness. (The one Dogma 95 experiment I was truly impressed by, Von Trier's The Idiots, is radical for reasons that have little to do with its shunning of style.) The DV aesthetic (or lack thereof) that has infested a good deal of today's indies can be seen as a direct outgrowth of the Dogma 95, for years increasingly highlighting the original movement's vices while obfuscating its virtues. And video does have virtues -- its flexibility and briskness, but particularly its cheapness, which makes it accessible to struggling filmmakers trying to get their projects off the ground. Taking in consideration the steady degradation of visuals that has come as result, however, video's growing influence has done more harm than good to the film world. (Here I should confess a personal bias. I love style in movies. There is enormous satisfaction for me in watching a beautifully executed tracking shot, in the way the camera can saunter around the physical spaces of the screen, like the director's mellifluous pencil. As a result, I am suspicious of this stylephobia brought about by digital video.) Not that the unadorned image should not be used in film art. Roberto Rossellini (Open City, Voyage to Italy) has, after all, crafted some of the most sublime works in cinema by using absence of artifice as the key to contemplative analysis, and the power of John Cassavetes' rough and raw art (Faces, A Woman Under the Influence) could hardly be bettered by the addition of ostentatious camerawork. But today's video-happy sludge is thousands of miles away from these works. On the contrary, it points towards the ultimate bastardization of its ancestors' intentions and achievements: where the older works pointed toward a new way of looking at film by excluding technical tricks, the new ones simply equate pointing a video camera at something with "telling it like it is," with no further dramatization needed. In other words, they want to be congratulated just for existing. A movie like Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love, with its plot told mostly through ravishing use of color, movement, music, lighting, and décor, is the perfect argument against the video revolution. Wong's extravagant use of style here is infinitely more impressive than the puny reality of the DV auteurs, and much more courageous as well. When critics accuse filmmakers like Bernardo Bertolucci or Brian De Palma of lavishing too much style on unworthy subjects, I see people who really are far more comfortable with the word than with the image. If Bertolucci or De Palma purvey style "for its own sake," well, more power to them, because I can't think of a better reason for it. Why shouldn't filmmakers swim in style, as if it were innately detrimental to their art? Some of the greatest directors of all time -- D.W. Griffith, F.W. Murnau, Josef von Sternberg, Orson Welles, Max Ophuls -- were people who saw style not as an albatross around their necks but as the direct way they could grab the universe and shape it to their sensibilities.
I would love to be proved wrong about digital video. I've seen it used ingeniously (in Agnes Varda's The Gleaners
and I and Richard Linklater's Tape) and, once, even artistically (in Godard's In Praise of Love). But film is life. I hope
that, years from now, we can look back and laugh at the so-called digital movement for the timid, reductive fad that
it is and wonder, like with pet rocks or mullets, "What were we thinking?"
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