Since television overtook the silver screen as the main mass medium for moving images, cinema has suffered cyclical dips and audience attendance has continued to fall. However, one may also argue – and rightly so – that the new media, such as television, video and digital technology, have all had a positive economic and artistic impact on film. The caméra stylo or ‘camera pen’ aspirations of the French Nouvelle Vague, for example, have now become a reality due to mobile phones.
Ever since its introduction in the early 50s, television has been an important source of income for the film business through its purchasing of films to fill time slots, and since the 80s, it has even become a major source of (co-)financing for film production. This reliance has grown with the advent of ‘home entertainment’, thanks to the immense popularity of video cassettes and then DVD.
The World Wide Web arrived in the mid 90s at the same time as the introduction on the market of semi-professional DV camcorders. DV cams not only democratized film making, but also greatly reduced the costs of production. And thanks to the Internet, the distribution of films has never been so cost-effective, as witnessed by the ratio between the amount of money spent and the number of viewers reached.
While there is no doubt that the Internet is more than just an extension of the traditional business model, it is also legitimate for anxious film makers to want to know the extent to which the Internet is truly the future, their future. Will the Internet generate a substantial income and also solid financing possibilities? It therefore would seem obvious that it is both timely and necessary to take a closer look into the potential of the Internet. While Cinema Reloaded, the festival's crowd-sourcing online platform, looks into the future of cinema, Back To the Future? sets out to examine the past experiences of cinema in its complex dialectic with new media and new technologies.
With its selection of 12 films, Back to the Future? has no pretension of being comprehensive, for there are literally thousands of films to choose from. Rather, it aims at offering an insightful overview, with all twelve of the films exemplifying ways in which cinema has responded economically and/or artistically to specific new media of their times.
Dial M For Murder (1954), a classic by Hitchcock rarely seen in its original 3D format, Good for Nothing (1960) by Yoshida Kiju and Dangerous Encounters: 1st Kind (1979) by Tsui Hark are three pertinent examples of how, in different ways, television has offered cinema unprecedented opportunities. Because of the threat of TV, Hollywood took the path of no return in embracing technology to forge ‘cinema spectacle’ (3D, Cinerama, CinemaScope etc.), which not only set the norm for commercial cinema in the decades to come, but also established the milestone for Hollywood’s global supremacy. In Asia, television had the same impact. It helped boost the careers of novice film makers, paved the way for modern Japanese cinema and nurtured the Hong Kong New Wave.
Worth highlighting as well are the artistic influences television has had on the film idiom of the French Nouvelle Vague and on the introduction of everyday settings and characters in cinema (Adieu Philippine by Jacques Rozier, for example). By the mid 70s, video technology enabled Godard's bold experimentation with Numéro deux, anticipating digital editing and digital projection by more than two decades.
If some consider The Blair Witch Project to be the first film that introduced no-budget digital film making, it is useful to re-discover Another Girl, Another Planet - a much better film by Michael Almereyda, who shot this poetic feature with PixelVision, literally a toy and a precursor of the DV cam, in 1992.
The Raven is probably Roger Corman's most accomplished film, with sumptuous decors and his signature comic-horror mix. Seeing the film at a drive-in is not only fun and nostalgic, it is also an inspiring lesson in thinking outside the box. While the Hollywood majors were obsessing over new technologies, the independent outfit AIP was able to identify a whole new audience before the majors did, thanks in particular to Roger Corman’s keen observation and extraordinary marketing sense: he saw that only the parents were sitting in front of the TV, not the kids. This was when AIP set out to produce and release B-movies for teenagers with great success. Vedozero (Andrea Caccia, 2009), the closing film of the programme, proposes a project no less ambitious than challenging auteurism, by conferring the most crucial creative part of film making – image and sound - to a group of amateur high school students armed with 70 mobile phones.
All these films exemplify important tendencies of their times in one way or another. They are also atypical in that they are in some way exceptional.
The present is never isolated, and the future is often reflected in recognizable patterns in the past. Indeed, television revolutionized the consumption of moving images well before the Internet, and video technologies launched the individualization of programming decades ago. 3D, the latest phenomenon – and according to some, ‘the future standard for all visual media’ - has attempted numerous times in the past to conquer the world. Virgil once wrote: ‘Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future.’ The cinema of the 21st century has just been set in motion. Let's be knowledgeable, and wise.