HANDS ARE FULL

The temporary empire of MiniDV

Last week, we were joined — on Muub Tube — by Daniel Neofetou, discussing all things MiniDV. As a kind of postscript, I’ve written the piece you’ll find below; introducing a handful of the films we talked about. This is all going to be followed by a special episode on the early films of Jerzy Skolimowski. I’m on the cusp of moving house. Expect a slightly uneven delivery of newsletters for the next few weeks. Life.

---

No more leaks

— Looking back at 1995, you feel an air of breezy, ill-footed optimism; putting thoughts of Gulf War Syndrome and the imminent levelling of Sarajevo out of mind (they are still there, loitering in the background). The MiniDV arrived into this space — at a time when “reality and fiction were already in the process of collapse”, as Masha Tupitsyn puts it, but not quite — with the promise of unsticking film from the glue-trap of its precious heritage: all that cranking of Bolex (juddering, skipping), the pretty softness of 35mm; things that are prone to explode, burst into flames, degrade, smear, become bloated with leaks of light. The MiniDV — launched by a consortium of technology firms (Sony and Panasonic among them) — heralded a new dawn: one that was portable, high-fidelity, reliable, modern.

— It would be the perfect instrument to capture the world as it turned on a knife’s edge — from MTV to a pair of collapsing towers, and all the “shock and awe” that followed. Welcome to the new millennium, baby. It’s handheld here.

— But the MiniDV was not quite the cam-corder, even if — spiritually — they drank from the same cup. The DV cinema camera was really a professional tool, not a thing for ‘home movies’; expanding the possibilities of filming at night, and without the bulky rigging and equipment that cinema was used to lugging around (you think: like the ‘wagon train’ of a 17th century army — cooks, amputees, wives). Between 1995 and (a loosely defined) 2010, a span of 15 short years, the MiniDV would play no small role in defining the scuzzy audio-visual amphitheater of the new millennium: something that looked a little like MTV, CCTV. Like everyday life.

— I said ‘reliability’, high-fidelity. These things are true, but only so far. The MiniDV draws people with a piece of blunted chalk, outlines seeming imprecise – tones both muted and excessive. With film — by which I mean, celluloid — beauty was in the eye of the camera operator: a soft, buttery richness in which everyone got to look a little like a Titian model (draped, soft, weighty). MiniDV offered a paler shade of reality; one that was more immediately recognizable: pinkish spots, open pores, patchy skin, watery eyes. Life. If I spoke, recently, about the blur paintings of Gerhard Richter, then these MiniDV films evoke the same kind of truthy imprecision: a ‘real’ or source image that has been obstructed, disarticulated, unhooked. Reality through the back-door.

The everywhere lens

— Later — a little later, in 2007 — Google would introduce Google Street View. Here was a mode of image capture that was automated and anti-auratic: a “massive, undiscerning machine for image-making” whose aesthetics were “not concerned with what is photographed and how it is framed”. Image by image, these slices of time — and space — look abundantly familiar to MiniDV film: rough around the edges, imprecise, jumpy. But MiniDV was not — properly – an exercise in abrogation, but of assertion. Light and nimble, the camera could be easily wielded to reflect a more impressionistic point-of-view unavailable to the overdetermined technical apparatus of Film (capital F, your majesty).

— First, there was Festen. Later, Lynch’s Inland Empire. The technology was confidently adopted in Japan, where Miike and Anno both used the equipment to explore the intersection of sex, alienation, and perversion. In fact, most — if not all — MiniDV films seem to concern themselves with varieties of the unsettling: fucked world, fucked image, piercing the jolly, libidinal confidence of MTV. Because it looked like CCTV, because it felt like Film without being Film. It reminds me — kind of, sort of — about Bauman’s ‘flawed consumer’: a subject that is “blemished, defective, faulty, deficient”. Like them, the MiniDV embodies a kind of ‘flawed consumer good’ — equally blemished, visually ‘defective’ (so far as it ‘fails’ to give us the salve of an easy beauty). But it’s a kind of defectiveness you can work with.

— For Joanna Hogg, with her Unrelated, the MiniDV would transform Tuscany into a place that seems always already a memory, where ‘her’ holidaying family — between cigarettes and bottles of chianti — are painted with quavering shades and diffuse edges. Rohmer with a bag of tinnies. Pasolini in plastic sandals and cargo shorts. Here, the DV lends an edge of defamiliarization: making sweat seem sweatier, smoke smokier. Light is just that: whiteness, offering neither heat or sublimity. The romance has been vacuumed away. Everything is a little more on edge, trembling.

— Meanwhile, Anno — in his Love and Pop (1998) — relished the technology’s capabilities for surveillance — cutting regularly and often from angle to angle (now at feet level, now overhead [in the corner of a room], now right in front of the face [pores, tear ducts, pupils]). His camera would lunge between legs and — overlapping with the ‘eye’ — would intrude between two bodies, legs and knees and hands pushing and tugging around the camera. 

— Really, this is a cinema that is both impartial and intimate. You might say: complicit. He smashes these frames together through haunting superimposition. The final 30 of the film is its best; an almost transcendent sense of oddness pooling over everything. But there is also — for Anno — an attempt to surface privacies, secrecies, shame(s); to lift the lid on a world of shady transactions and the existential malaise of young people in Japan. In the making-of documentary — shot, appropriately, on cam-corder — Anno wracks his brains at the writer’s table, fanning himself in the heat. The hardest thing will be to understand the lives of these young girls – a realm that is experientially inaccessible to him. DV offered him a kind of approach.

— Likewise, Miiake — in Visitor Q — blends DV and camcorder footage; flipping between the handheld, frequently POV rushes shot by Kiyoshi — himself a filmmaker producing a documentary about ‘youth culture’ — and the wider frame of the DV itself, both of which overlap, conjoin, disperse. Together, they soak up moments of humiliation and shame — Kiyoshi sleeping with his own daughter (she taunts him for his poor performance); his filming of his own son being accosted by bullies; his watching back footage of his sexual assault by a group of young delinquents. What emerges is an aesthetic of intimate indifference — a kind of soporific lens that can capture everything and mediate nothing (a kind of ‘looking without intervention’). But then, it ends with a — eerily disquieting — moment of real beauty. For once, I won’t give that away.

— Return to Festen. The MiniDV footage is necessary — it lends a jerky, fish-eyed bulbousness and chaos to the unspooling of a family birthday. We feel like a spectator, an interloper; Vinterberg using the mobility of the equipment to pan and cut to the expressions (shocked) of other spectators (honoured guests), to creep up closely to sweating faces, heads and shoulders. But also to relish in the darkness (think: that ghostly haunting-visitation, at night). The DV puts you there, bringing a certain kind of clarity (ur-naturalism) to a profoundly alienating environment. The frenetic pacing of the film suits this mobility, rushing head-long; ducking and weaving. There’s a lot of physicality in the film — backs slapped, bodies dragged, arms akimbo, and the DV really comes into its own by articulating this meatiness, this corporeality. We are slipping too, whipping our necks around; darting this way and that. Mary Bronstein, with her Yeast (2008), achieved a similarity of effect — with the DV used to roll and tumble around the faces of her trilogy of frenetic protagonists. It’s dizzying, disorienting. Harshly tender.

Too much, not enough

— The DV wouldn’t last. Other, newfangled expressions of digital film promised an image that was like proper 35mm celluloid; the same richness, the same depth of colour field; shadows seeming less scrambled, less harrowing. Here, a return to the ‘pristine’ — or punching through it, reaching something egg-smooth and aesthetically uninteresting. 

— The list of films produced on MiniDV runs quite thin, leaving the impression that it was never really a contender; that film was really waiting for something ‘better’; something more consistent and obviously Beautiful (capital B, thank you). In the right hands, however, it could shove through the veil of reality — telling tales after dark, sinister smile, perversions on display. It was a technology for getting things done — for shooting and finding out. At its best, it left us with Inland Empire and Festen — arguably two of the best (and most influential) films of the 90s and 00s. Elsewhere, it can feel like a novelty — a box of tricks that had been set aside by now distracted hands.

— I like DV footage. It feels immediate, even dangerous. It has a flowing that is all but absent with the embarrassed ‘grandeur’ of contemporary art house filmmaking (where whip pans, smash cuts, handheld are all considered to be too frivolous, too imperfect; in effect, amateurish). The mannerism of contempo art house only occasionally flirts with its shaky past (thinking here of Aftersun’s occasional dalliances with handheld camcorder footage). Today, it is used only in the pursuit of ‘authenticity’ — and not as an instrument of re-visioning the cinematic world.

— Mike Figgis got very close to creating the ‘ultimate’ DV film — Timecode (2000). Really it is four films, each corner of the screen — like a MarioKart party — showing a different space within the same 90 minutes. The only ‘single take, quadruple screen’ film, outside of CCTV? Perhaps. It gets really good when these four narratives blatantly interlink, or when two adjacent panels slowly merge together. If the shaky, over-the-shoulder shooting would anticipate the likes of Succession, then these moments of interleaving would find a way to let the sublime in. A strangeness greater and more beautiful than reality; albeit achieved with the blank tools of reality. Lynch would walk in other directions. For Inland Empire, the DV is often wielded like a cinema camera, but its scuzziness and flatness are pushed into strange textural extremes. The edges of the ‘real’ seem to unstick — where pulses of light (the Locomotion dance scene), superimposition, shadow are imbued with a really trembling horror. It drinks reality in and spits it back out. DV was always trying to scratch the sticker off the packet. Lynch made sure there was plenty of glue left.

— Today, you can buy a cinema DV camera on eBay for about the same price as a Playstation — perhaps less. You could probably shoot something very beautiful and strange with it. I wonder how closely the image of the DV was coupled with its era — how much the millennium gave weird, janky life to the images that it captured and threw back out. Looking back now, you realise how comprehensively the imaginary of the 2000s is wrapped around a particular look, a structure of feeling and seeing. We were never so innocent, or so unprepared.

---

If you liked this newsletter then please consider liking, sharing or subscribing. It’s lonely here.