I'm interested in discussing for the next twenty minutes the effect of video when it's used and projected in different contexts. Specifically looking at the use and effect of video in film, asking how the quotidian or everyday qualities of video can be worked, transformed, or recontextualised to suggest something other than the tropes of surveillance, voyeurism and alienation. How can the video image work with, or counter, the myths of and qualities of cinema? What happens if the delineation between the properties of film and the video image is denied? What happens when someone attempts to put them together, to make the impossible, the imperfect marriage?

Film and video are marked by their physical properties, by their ability to represent reality, but video has associations which are considered to be everyday, or domestic, as something people can make themselves, and not imbued with the same mystification that exists around film, consequently it's easier to be suspicious of a video image, to wonder what is it's value, in a dramatic context.1 Most of us have experienced the effects of video as an archival instrument, documenting weddings and other family affairs, doubling the pleasure by allowing the acts of watching and taking part to be interchangeable. But in film, installation and diary form, video can also act as present memory, as parallel commentary, sometimes offering intimate documentation, performing as commentator or missing character in everyday life and communication. The implications, needless to say are many and the variations as widespread as the camcorders global market, but a couple of examples from a filmmaker whose work has formally and critically addressed the place of video in contemporary representation might illustrate what I mean (although I acknowledge he may present an atypical illustration but there are other examples like Michael Almereyda's shimmering PixelVision feature Another Girl Another Planet which could also make my point.)

Atom Egoyan (the Canadian/Armenian filmmaker who was recently awarded the Grand Prix of the Jury at Cannes forThe Sweet Here After, which ironically for my purposes is his most cinematic film to date, the most commercially successful, with least amount of video) started out in theatre, untrained in film he experimented with the practices and the conventions of the medium, progressively incorporating them into the structure and content of his films, using cinema as a space to challenge the confining notions which have been used to delineate the properties and functions of the film and the video image. Rather than something to improve or overcome he uses the quotidian or everyday qualities of video and it's role in modern life. If it's rough and ready, cheap and informal, so be it, but it's meaning and value in everyday life adds up to something more than this dismissive description.

According to Egoyan both film & video invite immediate participation, imprinting on the consciousness immediately & effortlessly but the film image, rich in metaphor and the ability to work in and against itself, is consistently mystified and considered outside of everyday experience. It's much easier to create a myth around a human face when it's projected on a film screen than on a video screen. For the video image to transport us to another realm it must be contextualised in a much more specific way. To take a video image and place it on a film screen creates a very elusive rapport because you have to identify the properties of both mediums and understand why the video image is being presented in the territory of the film image.

I'm particularly interested in the way Egoyan does not privilege film as the exemplary subject position or the most emblematic moment in film but incorporates and interweaves the images and techniques of the video image, like a pathology, obsessively returning to points of memory and the condition of loss. By pausing, rewinding, repeating, and channel searching Egoyan echoes with video technique the sad forecast that desire is a process, always encircled, never attained.2 In films recognised for their complex formal organisation (or sterility if you're not a fan) Egoyan allows the projected, or transposed, video image to emerge as frail, delicate and precious; sustaining an overall effort of emotional saturation, allowing revelations and secrets to emerge in the most unstraight forward way. This of course is an unexpected result if you subscribe to a limited interpretation of video where the tropes (strengths and weaknesses) are well worn - accessible, affordable, archival, actuality, family friendly, amateur easy, ready made grunge or spooky effect - where the potential of video is rail roaded into concentrating on the perverse necessity of surveillance camera voyeurism, or "the wobbly effects of 2nd assistant director attempting 1st person confessional."3

Egoyan as filmmaker accepts the simple fact of the video image in daily life and systematically treats nearly all of it's familial and commercial variants within his films; using everything from TV talk shows & family therapy sessions to personal camcorders and amatuer pornography. By denying the fixed notion of the delineation between the properties of the film image and the video image he overlooks, or works, the myth which implies only film carries the imprint of the real -the filmed object- in it's form. [In film, light becomes chemistry (particles of silver suspended in emulsion), in video, it becomes an electronic signal, an analog of the recorded object rather than a direct impression of it. And where the absence of film is comforting darkness, the absence of video is the erratic snowstorm known as noise or static. Digital imagery is more removed again, consisting of just zeros and ones in complex arrangements with no origin in external actuality to make or keep a faithful likeness.) This attitude invokes over and over again the ontological argument that maths isn't music. Maybe not, but Atom Egoyan regularly makes the video image (analog or digital) resonate with an emotional intensity that is very close to poetry!

It's also worth noting that placing video on the big screen hasn't been a one way relationship, nor has it been confined to art house productions. Following the rapid assimilation of the VCR and camcorder into daily life, that is since the 60's and 70's, mainstream cinema has been quick to make room for video in it's visual vocabulary and technical procedures. Video surveillance, secondary characters with camcorders, cut-a-ways to camera view-finder POV's, fuzzy or eerie effects, have become a recurring reflexive plot accessory cum stylistic device in many recent productions. I guess the primary text is still Videodrome, and sex, lies and videotape the film that alerted Hollywood to the possibilities of this new fangled thing called video - picking up the unfulfilled promise of Super 8 - and allowing what some call the second coming of home movies.4 From Lost Highway and The End of Violence, toSlacker, Sliver and Down and Out in Beverley Hills, video has appeared in many guises but overall film, especially Hollywood, displays a propensity to demonise video, as it did initially with television. In the period when the Box challenged the box office, television was regularly portrayed as insidiously mind numbing, the banal refuge of the lonely or a message from outer space but more sinister overtones are ascribed to video, primarily through bleak association with stalking, voyeurs, terrorism and kidnappers. From Rodney King to Jamie Bolger everyday evil deeds, random and deliberate, register on the electric panopticon made available by private video and public monitoring surveillance systems to be recycled as evidence or tabloid event.

Significantly the domestification of the VCR has also been instrumental in the demystification of the process of image construction, annexing control, and interrupting for replay and review the once seamless flow of the movies; encouraging through an escalation of edits per minute ever more attenuated and frenetic constructions of spectacle, not to mention substantially extended distribution, increased revenue and audience that come with video hire & purchase. But somehow despite the money film doesn't forgive video it's origins, as technology and ideology video is treated like a poor relation, as bad sister, as the autistic child of TV. Despite the significant incursions of video assist, the cost cutting revolution of digital editing, and refinements made to the processes of telecine, video is still trashed. Resolution, depth of field, colour saturation, grading, aspect ratio & scale, are regularly, implicitly, judged to be inferior in video. Stripe lines and strobing (the on screen and camera motion blur) are considered (or used) as a troubling and unfortunate effect of the transfer from video's 30 frames per second to the soothing 24 frames per second. Video's unyielding electronic glare, apparently promotes a subliminal optical tension, never managing to efface the visible banded pictorial surface of the TV screen, it's fixed pixel grid failing to achieve the luxurious and detailed visual field of unfixed fine grain of 35mm....

.... this ongoing opposition reminds me of the superstition - or belief, or scientific truth supported by experiment - cited by Chilean film maker Raoul Ruiz - which says that cinema is the art of stimulating a part of the mind that normally functions during sleep, bombarding it static images juxtaposed so as to create the illusion of movement. Video on the other hand, in which the image is liquid, is said to stimulate another part of the brain which functions only while the body is awake....5

.... but video as a technology can't always be examined merely as a deterring set of contrasts, or as the editors of an issue of Art Journal dedicated to video so succinctly put it, "it needs to be recognised that video as a technology and complex aesthetic discourse has played a key role in facilitating and critiquing the circulation of media images and ideas between the worlds of art, popular entertainment, and the ideology of consumer culture. The defining tropes of the art and film worlds which rely upon a modernist aesthetic and ideal, need to be expanded to accommodate new media and practices that should not be made to conform to a previous model but rather challenge and transform it." 6

As installation and as sculpture, video has extended the space of performance, implicating the viewer in the sphere and activity of the artist. Similarly, Egoyan incorporates video as an actor or missing person, employing it in the family romance, layering it within the narrative process, to expose the fictions of filmic systems, the construct of memory, and the way we manipulate our own state of consciousness in order to serve, or enhance, or distort our relations with one another. With video, people have an instrument to document and archive their own history, and there is nothing casual about accessing that memory or the way that experience is evoked. For Egoyan there is something very self conscious and quite determined about the way people manipulate or use their own experience to get what they want.

In Calendar (a 1993 low budget production shot on 8mm video & 16mm film) an emotionally paralysed photographer uses, or cues, attractive dinner dates to play out a foreign language phone ritual, needed to help him unravel the reasons why his wife left him for an interpreter while they travelled on a shoot to their homeland. The Canadian Armenian photographer (played by Egoyan) and his Armenian born wife (Arsinee Khanjian) scout locations - 12 churches needed for 12 months - and in the process fall into the gap leavened by the clash of North American affluence with a culture deeply scarred by a history of war and deprivation. Because the photographer can speak no Armenian, and the driver no English, his wife serves as translator to both. The photographer is more comfortable with his technology than with his partner or guide. He likes to point, to direct, but refuses to touch. When asked to go for a walk, the photographer declines. He wants to, can't help but, remain apart. What he really wants, he explains later in a letter to his wife (yet another form of indirect comm-unication) "is to go on watching the two of you leave me and disappear into the landscape that I am about to photograph". 7 Somewhere between the camera, the video, and a bilingual dictionary he loses her. When he looked through the view finder he didn't see. When they talked he didn't hear. (VIDEO CLIP)

In Calendar we witness - or detect - in the interplay between video and film, image and sound, the gradual transferral of the wife's affection from her past relationship with the photographer to the future relationship with the driver. By choosing the driver she is choosing her roots, which the photographer overlooks. If Calendar is concerned with time, it's also concerned with space. We hear his wife, through the answering machine, wanting to explain what has happened to them. She describes the moment when he lost her as an extended tracking shot is repeated, rewound and run backwards several times; the "moment" becoming unendurable. "He grasped my hand," she explains through the crackle of the answering machine "while you grasped your camera. Did you know? Were you there? Are you there?" 8 Playing with the selective processes of memory, image and sound, Egoyan reorders and replays the confusion in the mind of the photographer, moving backward and forward, across film and tape, to unravel different perspectives on loss, to scan different points of seduction.

The contradictions involved in making images of other human beings is invoked by Egoyan providing another "character" behind the lens. In all of his fims there is usually an important central character who is missing, who is not in the drama but is somehow central to it. The embodiment or spirit of that missing person is frequently the video camera. Characters look at the camera with the same fear and anticipation with which they would regard the very person they're looking for or avoiding. "It's a very self conscious device, where the spirit of someone removed yet intrinsic to the happiness of others is watching the scene. Egoyan's films also suggest that the contemplation of a character, the identity we are looking for, and the means by which you are regarding them, might hold the secrets of the very thing that they feel is lacking in their lives." 9

Again and again they look hard at the past, or present, as if trying to possess, or repossess it. Hedging on the dilemma do we see ourselves as participants or do we see it from our point of view.

In Egoyan's Family Viewing (1987) a young man apprehends something like the primal scene when he finds his authoritarian father has erased an archive of old video images. Amateur pornography featuring Dad's sexual romps with his mistress, obliterate the son's cherished images of a childhood spent with his now absent mother and grandmother. In Family Viewing there is an unsettling ambiguity about the role of technology. It's a means by which the father attempts to control the family but it's also the way the boy recovers his past. "The film takes as it's central theme the desire to make connections - away from "false" images toward "true" images, away from pornography toward affection, away from the father toward the mother, from Angloceltic culture to an Armenian world, a large part of which has been lost."10 A section of videotape is played over and over again; a fragment from when the mother and grandmother were still part of the home and the boy just a child. It's an extraordinarily poignant sequence, choreographed to enmesh the family in a pre-lapsarian scene. The father, at the left of the scene, watches his family in the garden through a window, separated by glass and language. The father gives instructions to his son through the window by miming the gestures which he wants the child to imitate. Outside in the garden, the mother and grandmother talk to the boy in Armenian. Either side of this video piece (watching on film) are the aged grandmother (recently rescued from an old folks home) and the now grown boy. (VIDEO CLIP) There are so many screens and filters at work here, barriers and conduits to intimacy, and this scene is allowed to haunt the film like a discarded memory of familial affection and inevitable loss. The broken texture of the video image perfectly imperfectly conveying the intangibility of repossessing memory.

In these films Egoyan plays with more than home video, as I've said, he includes and redirects the everyday, using TV talk shows, the facilities of TV studios and sound, family therapy sessions, teleconferencing, amatuer pornography and any other effort to obtain a speaking part. He effectively demonstrates that technology allows us to reformat our history, to serve an emotional imperative. The polyphonic structure and technique of Egoyan's films acknowledging our desire to control our self image, to write our own stories, to create parts for ourselves, and have secret lives. And as most of us don't make it to the big screen, Egoyan imbues video with a weightless transluscence, self effacing simplicity and confusion that sometimes evokes the evanescence and instability of emotional ebb and flow.

If I've deified Egoyan, to illustrate the incorporation of video into film, it's because he explores the everyday misunderstandings (banal & profound) engendered by the technologies of separation, by the system of signs which proliferate communication but do not necessarily enhance it. In his films misunderstanding is not necessarily eased or expedited by the excess of signs or proliferation of media which surround us, instead we are offered new possibilities for disenfranchisement. He incorporates communication as subject & technique, negotiated by forms and rituals (formal, social, linguistic & technological) which actually inhibit us. Registering the increasing simulation of emotion still predicated on desire, there is listening but no comm-unication, there is projection, consuming, mistrust. Somehow Egoyan makes the camera - video &/or movie - feel this, not through what you see but how you look, by affective intensities. The camera becomes subjective. The camera is part of the transfer of emotion. The experience of time and memory become antidotes to the image of the objectified body modelled on other images, coded and reified by commercial machines that defer contact, that say look, but don't touch. In Egoyan's films seeing always accentuates the desire to touch, which you've got to admit is something more than the cool blue of surveillance!

Bibliography:

Art & Design, Profile No 49, Ar t & Design, (Ed) Nicola Kearton
Carole Desbarats (Ed) Atom Egoyan, DisVoir, France, 1993
Chris Drake, "Distant Lives", Frieze, Issue 20, Jan/Feb, 1995, pp 47- 49
Richard Falcon, "V for Video", Sight and Sound, Vol 8, Issue 3, Mar, 1998, pp 24-26
Jean-Pierre Geuens, "Through the Looking Glasses; From the Camera Obscura to the VIdeo Assist", Film Quarterly, Vol 49, No 3, Spring, 1996, pp16-26
John G. Hanhardt & Maria Christina Villasenor (Eds), "Video/Media Culture of the Late Twentieth Century", Art Journal, Vol 54, No 4, Winter, 1995
Peter Harcourt, "Imaginary Images; An Examination of Atom Egoyan's Films", Film Quarterly, Vol 48, No 3, Spring, 1995, pp 2-14
Richard Porton, "Family Romances: An Interview with Atom Egoyan", Cineaste, Vol XXIII, No 2, 1997, pp8-15 Raul Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema , DisVoir, France, 1995
Gavin Smith,"Straight to Film", Film Comment, Vol 33, No 4, July/Aug, 1997, pp 54-55 Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture, MIT, Massachusetts, 1992

Filmography:
Calendar, 1993, Atom Egoyan, Director, Screenplay & Editor; Production: Ego Film Arts, in association with ZDF German Televison & The Armenian National Cinematheque
Family Viewing, 1987, Atom Egoyan, Director & Screenplay; Production: Ego Film Arts, in assocaition with Ontario Film Development Corporation, the Canada Council & the Ontario Arts Council

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Courtesy of CCP and
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