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THE GUARDIAN |
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COMMENT |
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THE GUARDIAN |
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COMMENT |
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Moving
images Media studies is often denigrated as useless. Yet at the same time people complain that we don't know enough about the effects of television and movies on children. We need to understand the "affects" of moving images - how their forms move us directly, emotionally. In a sense we need philosophies of film before we can have sociologies of media. And film images are being investigated not only by theorists and philosophers, but also by artists and film-makers. In her recent video work, Family History, Gillian Wearing recreates an afternoon-talkshow set, and forces open its nature as a brightly coloured "idealised home". Daytime TV looks as though it has been designed by seasonal affective disorder researchers, with bright lights and colourful furnishings that create a feeling of cheeriness. Daytime soaps also come with their own bright ontology about life and relationships, with camera movements that relax us and close-ups that make us think we are getting a direct access to emotions, creating a kind of false engagement. So how do we combat this menace in our living rooms? If kids are mentally soaked by the moving image, and by its frequent changes of form, they need a concept of film that gives them a critical mode of attention towards these forms. Showing them how films "think" about their characters and spaces (using framing, movement, editing) could be a first step. They can then apply this to the media that surround them. They might then recognise and resist the propaganda of exploitative visual media (over-branded pop videos, seductive advertising, the visual hypnotism of late-night cash-quiz shows). Traditional film-makers are also revealing the constructed nature of cinema films. The opening shot of Michael Haneke's Hidden looks like a bland establishing shot, but is then revealed as the point of view of an unseen observer - and in this movement from omniscience to subjectivity the film helps us understand how all images are created: that media images hide as much truth as they reveal. But the thinking of film can be also be creative and beautiful. In the opening image of The Constant Gardener, the film does something strange. Justin is saying goodbye to Tessa in an aircraft hangar, and the film keeps them in half-darkness, with a bright runway and plane in the background. As she leaves him and moves outside, the film increases the light and softens the scene so that she and the plane become a blur, with Justin still clearly defined in the foreground, watching her disappear, almost literally. In this moment of film-thinking we seem to receive an understanding of the relationship between Justin and Tessa - we feel a certain divorce between them. Film seems to be thinking right in front of us. Consider the empathetical framings of The Child, the questioning movements of Magnolia, the egalitarian images of Time of the Wolf. The point is that both the daytime chatshow and the video news report also involve this choice, this belief about what they show (or do not show, as in the lack of images from Helmand). If we begin to understand how film "thinks" we will start to understand how moving images affect our life and being. As the Hungarian film theorist Bela Balazs wrote back in 1945: "We must be better connoisseurs of the film if we are not to be as much at the mercy of perhaps the greatest intellectual and spiritual influence of our age as to some blind and irresistible elemental force." · Daniel Frampton is a film-maker and
editor of the salon-journal Film-Philosophy. His book Filmosophy
has just been published and his documentary Tehrani will be
shown in London next month
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006 |
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