Section 8: Hypercinemas

The parallel developments of my own video practice and the industrial trends in video technology are marked by a march towards more; higher bit rates, larger sensors, better color space, higher resolution. My experience has been that the changes in technology indeed facilitate the production of images that look and feel more capable of preserving the sense of what a moment looked and felt like. While the details of the hardware have evolved, the basic forms and functions have remained unchanged; even the change from analog to digital video was one of degree. In this section I offer some concluding thoughts about the current state of video, the near future of my own work, and suggest that the current opportunities present in a dramatically shifting landscape of technology and art practice demand the critical participation of media scholars.

I’ve mostly ever used one camera at a time. Sometimes two. One time I can remember using three. In those cases it was because I was interested in the cameras themselves as part of the experiential space of my living moment. In this section I step into the world of hypercinemas with a depiction of the labor involved in simply charging the batteries of a 12-camera stereoscopic spherical video rig.

I encountered the term ‘hypercinema’ in a 2012 Variety article about fx legend Donald Trumbull. Trumbull uses the term to describe a specific set of cinema technologies characterized by high frame rates, stereoscopy and a huge jump in projected brightness:

No one in the industry has seen a 3D movie at 30 foot Lamberts at 120 frames per second. What happens when you get into this hyper-real realm of a movie, that seems to be a window onto reality, is that the entire cinematic language begins to change. [It’s] an experience of tremendous participation in an alternate world, which I think people will crave and are ready to pay for. (Trumbull quoted in Cohen, 2012).

Trumbull’s speculation aside, for now, I find hypercinemas to be an apt way of describing a whole set of trends in the realm of video practice. Though Trumbull’s vision is aimed squarely at the top of the industrial image making complex, at the blockbuster and cineplex, I see hypercinemas emerging and converging from all sorts of directions, hence the pluralization of his term; it is a trend that cannot and should not be contained in a monolithic sense of cinema at all.

I see it as a trend motivated as much by a crowd-sourced, DIY, amature-enthusiast set of innovations, market pressures and new corporate participants. RED and GoPro broke the traditional grip of the few big camera manufacturers and made way for Black Magic and AJA. Crowdfunding and 3D printing have facilitated new pathways for the development and introduction of camera accessories and stabilization devices; sliders, table-top dollies and gimbals paired with tiny lightweight high resolution cameras allow for new kinds of visual movement making accessible to new kinds of practitioners. At the same time Chinese companies like DJI have built new brands in spaces such as aerial cinematography with their rapid development and the ease with which they can reach consumers who are ready to try new things. Every generation of smartphone helps define the popular language of video making.

Hypercinema is anything that breaks out of the traditional frame rates 24/30i/60i and aspect ratios 1.33/1.78/1.85/2.4 or that sets a camera moving in a way it never moved before. It is the groundswell move towards a new generation’s virtual reality. VR video called 360 video called spherical video. Even the names are open for input right now. But what they can do and what they will be used for is a molten flowing form in danger of diversion and solidification along channels that feed the deep and preexisting wells of media culture and commerce. Maybe the moment is new and ripe, or maybe it is just another step towards the original myth of Bazin’s total cinema.

For the past two semesters at USC I have taught a course called Hypercinemas Studio where students test the boundaries and affordances of ultra high definition, spherical, aerial and giant screen video. Their experiments are messy, personal, surprising, beautiful, successful or not. We don’t start by asking how we can make the new tools fit our old ways, we start by seeing what’s in front of us, seeing where the cracks are, seeing what we can make out of it and then trying again.

In 2016, Ang Lee’s film Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk was the first film to be released in a form that fits with Trumbull’s definition of hypercinema. Only two theaters in the country played it as it was shot and meant to be seen in stereoscopic 4K 120fps video. I saw it at the Arclight Cineramadome in Hollywood on a Sunday morning. Visually, the technology delivered on the hype. It was absolutely unlike anything I had ever seen and at moments it really did feel like looking through a window onto a living world. It is hard to describe the precise quality of presence, resolution, depth and motion that the format conveyed, but the results of the experience were obvious to be as a viewer; they completely broke the illusion of the spectacle. From the very first shots of the film I became keenly aware of every cut and camera setup. Rather than experiencing the flow of dialog as human conversation, I was fixated on decisions the filmmaker’s had made about where to place the camera; ‘why pan back and forth between the actors here, why not let it play in a 2-shot or wider?’

The jarring experience extended to the performers, the script, the scenic direction. For the first 20-minutes or so I wasn’t sure if I would be able to connect to the experience as a work of fictional narrative at all. But then the themes of the film became clearer and I was able to experience and read it as a self-aware commentary. Billy Lynn is a film about turning death into spectacle; about looking for heroes in flawed young men as a way of obscuring the horrors of war and the culpability that extends along the all pervading rays of late capitalism’s pulsing glow. The characters in Billy Lynn literally have conversations about how a movie version of their experience would never be able to depict the truth. Billy Lynn uses hypercinema to own its own lies in a way that disallows any softening through cinematic distance; it confronts you with horror and ugliness in a way you’ve never seen before and still forces you to understand that the illusion is still only a shadow of the true horror it reflects.

The tools and practices of image making, along with the sensitivities, values and realities of day to day life all change together. My own experiments with video making draw me into the languages of hypercinemas; where other early adopters see a chance to make a more immersive image of a whole real world, I see opportunities to mashup time and space and make new kinds of spatial arguments about how we live and what we see and where our human potentials and values are blocked and distorted through the conventional power systems we accept. Video persists and renews its character with each new generation of tools. Each new generation of citizens finds its own way to tell its stories. How do we make space for those stories to thrive? How do we protect the freedom of vision that can lift us all and avoid simply reinscribing the values of our war machines onto the bodies of the future? We are each born already into a system that has compromised us; our own material well being woven into a history and a now where human suffering and environmental destruction still slide off the balances of business as though they count for nothing. If we cannot sometimes see past the world we live in to the world we want to live in, we risk the mire and paralysis of despair.

Along with Jenkins and Shresthova I have set my focus on the idea of civic imagination as both a conceptual framework and a nascent set of creative practices that can help facilitate new opportunities for dialog and group action. At a time when the basic foundations on which popular discourse are contested I am eager to explore an approach to creative, community-based collaboration that can start from a place of shared human values, harness wide open imagination as a way of envisioning what a better future might look like, and then looking for opportunities in the world today to start taking action towards making that future a reality. Video practice will continue to evolve and adapt alongside these efforts and will continue to be an important tool for self reflection, community collaboration, preservation of memory and dissemination of vision. Innovations in video technologies will filter up and down the strata of lay and professional contexts settling towards the values and conventions of whichever legacy or novel generic tropes generate the most revenue for distributors and advertisers, reinforcing the voices of privilege and excluding subsequent generations of potential justice fighters and world savers. With the same critical clarity with which we endeavor to see ourselves and the world we must ever interrogate the capacities and motives embedded in the tools themselves with which that vision is entwined. Looking, listening, moving and knowing are never isolated and fixed but are relearned, renegotiated and renewed with each of us with every day, with every lens, in every camera.