◡◶▿ SOFT02 | Future histories

🔮 Writing cinema history in advance. Infecting future filmmaking machines. Advice from John Waters. Plus: the vertical video format lies down. | Imaginary Software of the Filmmaking Future Week 02

Graeme Cole

Feb 05, 2024

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Hello, hello! Feeling better. Thank you to those who sent well-wishes after last week’s sick day. There will be a little extra something on your grade transcript at the end of the year. 😉.

Okay! Good. On with week two of Imaginary Software of the Filmmaking Future: How to use, confuse, or avoid your new robot crewmate.

You’ll recall that in week one, we covered how:

This program will propose a “soft imaginary science for conceptualising the film arts in (and beyond) this moment of radical retooling.”
Things like ‘tools,’ ‘assistive software,’ ‘formulaic movies,’ and ‘exploiting the corpus of non-consensual artist work’ have been around a long time, so there’s no need to panic about AI.
The most powerful piece of software remains the mind.
A 1930s anecdote from Luis Bunuel told how he used a paper chart to algorithmically predict the ending of any American movie.

In coming weeks, we will cover topics as sensational and improbable as naive robots, radical incompatibility, cyborg crews, and the so-called “uncanny diner.”

But we must first ground ourselves. Ground ourselves in history, or whatever this is right now.

And so, in today’s lesson, we will discuss:

⚙️ The decisions the filmmaker faces after breakfast and after civilisation.

📜 Filmmaking’s stubborn relationship with the past - and how it must be negotiated before conquering the future.

🧪 The unbearable fizziness of being avant-garde.

🗺️ The forking paths from possible filmmaking to probable filmmaking.

Plus! How TikTok is turning back the clock to the golden age of horizontality.

Missed a week? Joined late? Don’t worry about reading these lessons out of order. Each functions independently. They are sent in a sensible sequence but hardly reliant on it.

Please share this lesson with someone you know will appreciate it.

Decide

You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.

Before we embark on the design and use of future film software and hardware, we must ask ourselves what we want from movies in the future. Most urgently, what we want from movies tonight. But also, and in order of distance into the future:

At the weekend,
After the present buzz has passed,
After the current waves have swept on,
Even after the present future has gone,
Through the cyberpunk times, during new apocalypses, killing time in doomed utopias,
After eyes; after ears; after toes.

And, before she embarks on the design and use of future film machines, the filmmaker must ask herself what she wants from filmmaking in the future. Most urgently, what she wants from filmmaking after breakfast, while making clips of snow, shadows wobbling, or dog behaviour. But also:

next month on set, and
next year with new collaborators,
after her life’s present chapter, and
through her world’s cyberpunk, apocalyptic, and doomed utopian phases,
after crews; after places,
etc. to infinity.

She may not have a say in the matter. Her decision may evolve or fade or be broken down by enzymes. But the filmmaker can tread more boldly if she foresees her next step. May trample fresh paths if she approaches the horizon with her chin up.

Next, she must decide how to get from here to that future on which she has so boldly decided.

The art of the past

Filmmaking is not a futurist art. In fact, cinema is pathologically backwards looking. (If you look backwards, you’ll even see a little projectionist mining the light deposits and carting them overhead towards the screen). A Frankenstein of re-animated art forms: theatre, novel, music. Dance.

Films are moving, they fall backwards through time as soon as they start. Unlike architecture, which is animated by the future. By future lives and uses real and imagined and re-imagined. An art of spaces waiting to be occupied, reoccupied, to be propped up, to collapse. Even the ghosts have to respond to unfolding events.

Unlike dance, which, as far as we can tell, is totally about the present moment, or perhaps a short-term future just a fraction of a moment ahead of any slice of the performance.

This is why dance is such a crucial element of the film crew’s daily routine. Let’s hope we don’t lose that!

Filmmaking is not a futurist art. Filmmaking futurists are rare, and even they are driven by a passion for the past. So, the filmmaker must guide her filmmaking carefully into the future. But she must protect her movie with even closer vigilance from cinema history.

Advance/guard

Filmmaking has its innovators. But it evolves through attrition. Falls into new grooves. When filmmaking moves forward, it is a slow act of becoming - for both the filmmaker and a film.

Filmmaking futurists are rare, and even they are driven by a passion for the past. And perhaps frustration with last night’s movie.

And so, it is difficult when:

an old master dies, or
a new rule is announced, or
a new tool eclipses the established apparatus, or
the fog clears on an unwelcome new trope, and you discover it has taken root as a permanent norm.

It is difficult to accept the end of a beautiful tendency that was easy to love. It is just as easy to spot how “everything is getting worse” (your enemy’s new film technique has become the fashionable thing; the frameworks laid out by your heroes have atrophied).

Likewise, there is a thin line between:

John Waters asserting the job of contemporary art is to “wreck what came before,” and that the emerging filmmaker should “[g]o out in the world and fuck it up beautifully,” and
the inventor who wishes to “disrupt” established modes of production and consumption for the kicks, the giggles, the profit, and/or the ego,
the adoption of trending tendencies for their novelty or vanity or self-protection.

To identify that line is to begin to locate - or assert - your place in the avant-garde. Perhaps it begins with “humility” or “generosity”? How will you know that it’s genuine?

Perhaps it will become more common for filmmakers to devise science fiction production practices. And for those practices to become standard, everyday filmmaking science. Become more common, as:

film apparatus becomes lightweight to the point of immateriality
- At least at the filmmaker’s end; it becomes possible to create a movie by the remote control of satellite cameras or generative software in distant silos using just voice or gesture or, before too long, thought.
our memory of history grows shorter,
our future grows shorter and mutates from what it once was.
- Who will get there first? Will they be smug? Lonely? Will they fluff the pillows for the rest?

The concept of “movies of the future,” or “filmmaking of the future” stirs feelings. Stirs feelings before it is gobbled up by busy thought. It activates, by turns, different softwares through the body, that may cause the body to hum. This is a useful reaction and an opportunity to check in with your fingertips. Check in with your teeth!

What do you feel? What is your gut response to the idea that what we call movies, what we use for cinema, might be something else? Panic? Nostalgia? Anticipation? Hunger?

Why do you think that is?

How might that affect the movies of tomorrow’s past that you make in today’s future?

Probable filmmaking

When we consider the future of the making of films, we enter the realm of speculation. Great! That’s what it’s all about. Isn’t it?

To consider future filmmaking, we must extrapolate. Trace futures from today’s patterns or trajectories. Today’s patterns or trajectories of (film) language, thought, creativity, economics, nature, etc. Whatever’s going on.

We make informed predictions. More or less informed according to personal taste.

To be in with a fighting chance of being right, such a prediction must take the realistic and

twist,
extend,
upend, and/or
stunt it

to some degree.

But, however earnest our assumptions, predictions, and inventions, they are science fictions. However non-fictional we expect, hope, or are working to make them be.

And that’s okay! Science fiction is a framework for change (testing the boundaries of possibility). Or for obstinate stasis (in a moving world, you can’t keep things the same by standing still). Whatever you prefer. Whatever you arrive at, having faced up, critically, to your gut reaction to the idea that filmmaking might become something else.

It’s possible the trajectories are misleading! So, we may try a blunter mode of speculation. Make blind pokes at cloaked futures. Imagine a leap across some abyss in future-history. A complete break in time or civilisation.

How might they do this filmmaking thing on the other side? Who might they be doing it with?

The future movie might be something we can’t yet trace:

Created with technology, or
by intelligences (or feelings), or
occupying a form

that is beyond the imaginable today. A cinema that develops out of a deviant protein or a hidden dimension or the ideas of highly-evolved birds.

The filmmaker may prepare her ideas and her craft for tomorrow’s unimaginable film set, as best she can. She may de-school herself of her own cinematic language. De-school herself of grammar, aware that with new tools come a new grammar for living (or perhaps it’s the other way around). But what if future filmmaking doesn’t need her? What if it isn’t healthy?

More likely, the cinema of the distant future is something we could, but won’t, imagine. If a filmmaker came to us from the future and explained it, it might be something:

only the most imaginative of today’s filmmakers could visualise from the description, or
something so simple it would blow our unprepared technologies apart.

Who could have imagined the six-second video or a TV channel on which everyone broadcasts while it slowly eats, excretes, and re-heats itself?

But where ‘possible film’ leans into ‘probable film’ comes down to habit. The grooves or imprints of well-worn ground, the easiest route. The filmmaker cannot know what future filmmaking will be since she does not yet know the conditions in which movies will be made or watched. The human condition. The gravities, coercions, lazinesses, or impulses she will tug this way or that.

“Technology is explicitness,” said Marshall McLuhan. “Invention or creation is implicitness.” In cinema, we are engaged in the concrete. And led by the concrete mixer. Ideas are fine, but machinery clears the path at every turn. The machinery of not just filmmaking, but of the everyday.

The ideas will pass, but the grooves will remain. The challenge to the probable filmmaker is to write her ideas into software: to infect the machinery with her thoughts and send them grooving into the future.

Horizontal long-form content

TikTok has come up with a great new idea: horizontal long-form content!

And it is a not-very-happy irony (at least as far as people’s livelihoods go) that this apparent pivot towards classical cinema has caused ripples of future shock - or perhaps tradition shock - among TikTok’s video makers. Where will it end? Academy ratio? The zoopraxiscope?

“I don’t see how horizontal long-form content would ever survive on the platform, or how the platform would survive an influx of that kind of stuff,” TikTok video maker Noah Jennings told the Washington Post. “When I go on TikTok, I want to be served videos that are quick. I can get my entertainment and brain-rot dosage and move to the next thing.” If only Alvin Toffler were around to read that sentence.

I’ve not got ‘into’ TikTok`. But I did spend some time over Christmas trying to edit a rediscovered copy of UPV’s Something About Sound Design video lecture into a pleasing vertical format for possible publication on the platform. That’s just something I do to aid my digestion!

But perhaps I’ll just serialise it on TikTok in its horizontal form and transform the school into asocial media phenomenon for the landscape age. Anything could happen!

Do you publish on TikTok? And/or have feelings about prostrated video formats? Let me know in the comments. We should probably work this TikTok thing out before it goes the way of the cave painting, only backwards.