Future Tense Science Fiction

The March 3rd edition of ABC Radio national’s superb Future Tense program focused on Science Fiction and SciFi Cinema. I did a long and wide ranging interview with host Antony Funnell which covered such topics as Why Australia doesn’t make SciFi films (and why perhaps it should and could), the relationship between SciFi and visual Effects and the potential new eave of SciFi that we may be about to head into.

From the Interview:

Mike Jones: Australia makes so few science fiction films. Its history of cinema is rich and varied but we’ve made so few science fiction films, and yet we would seem to be a nation well-groomed to make science fiction film. We have good science, you know world-leading science in this country, we are naturally a frontier which is so much a part of the science fiction canon, so it’s a bit of a mystery why we don’t. And yet science fiction films continuously perform very well at the Australian box office, international science fiction films are enormously popular amongst Australian audiences. So there’s this strange gap between the popularity of the genre as a film genre, and young film makers who are interested in it and yet not actually making a lot of sci-fi at the other end.

Antony Funnell: Is it because there is a bit of a perception that science-fiction, you know it involves big budgets, that a lot of the most popular science-fiction has certainly been extravagant in that way. Is there a sense that in Australia we tend to do low budget films or low budget television.

Mike Jones: I think it’s absolutely part of the equation, particularly with regard to Australian film makers, is a belief that there’s a synonymous relationship between bit budget and science fiction. And it’s not only not true historically, as in the past that hasn’t been the case. It’s certainly not true now in a very contemporary sense. We’re seeing some of the most dynamic science-fiction films we’ve seen in a decade at least, when we look at films like Moon out of the UK, or District 9 out of South Africa last year. They were enormously popular at the box office, played to very mainstream audiences, and yet by comparison to the sort of Armageddons or the monster films of the ’90s and then the early part of the 2000s, these films were very modest in budget and they really did play to where science fiction is most at home, which is ideas. If the idea is compelling, the budget only has to support the idea. It doesn’t have to support the spectacle, and that’s something we really try and work through in the course when I teach science fiction is How do we get an idea that instils those feeling states of fear and awe that are so much a part of science fiction? If the idea can do that, the spectacle can be released to lower budgets.

Antony Funnell: So from what you’ve said there, I take it we are in a bit of a resurgence of science fiction, are we?

Mike Jones: Yes, well science fiction goes through phases, and genres themselves, film genres, literary genres are invariably flexible and evolvable. But what was saw through the ’80s and the ’90s was a shift in science fiction away from the high concept philosophical question at the heart of the science fiction story and more towards the monster or the disaster film, which in many ways are sub genres of science fiction. And what we’ve seen lately is a steer back to clear ‘what if’ questions at the heart of science fiction. So less away from the monster film which might just use the science as a catalyst, and much more to the science being integral to the idea inherent in a story. And those two films I mentioned earlier Moon andDistrict 9 give us two ends to that spectrum. So with Moon we have what we might call a hard sci-fi, the hard science fiction, where the science they’re dealing with, human cloning, mining helium-3 on the moon, these are very real and tangible scientific pursuits here and now. And the film simply extends them. Whereas we take a film like District 9 and the science is much more an allegory. What if aliens came and they weren’t conquerors, they were desperate refugees? And those two ends give us a very broad range of thinking about science fiction, between that which extends upon a science that’s very new to us, and that which is dealing with the science as an allegory or as a metaphor for something that’s happening here and now.

You can listen to the whole program as a Podcast or read the full Transcript on the ABC Future Tense Website.

Anti-intellectualism to the left, self-absorption to the right.

I am torn…  

On one hand I absolutely believe that there is No such thing as knowing too much. That ideas matter and that all knowledge has value. Moreover, that knowledge and Learning should not be wholly bound by pragmatism - that if knowledge is chained to getting a job or commercial application, then our society as a whole is diminished. Knowledge for knowledge sake is the noble ideal that very often leads to the most profound but unforeseen benefits. At a simpler level I rather angrily reject the anti-intellectualism that plagues Australian society.

And yet…

I am in despair by what I consistently endure sitting in the audience of the numerous academic conferences I attend and present at.

We may call my field of interest Screen Studies and thus, by at least my own definition at least, the study of how movies are made and how they work, what we watch and why we watch it? I study screen production in order to generate Useful knowledge for filmmakers and Empower more articulate audiences.

However, when I go to Screen Studies conferences - with other academics, reporting to be Screen Studies scholars - what I hear seems to me to be (by and large) a) NOT Screen studies and b) NOT useful for those who make screen productions or, frankly, those that watch them.

Now, before I go on, don t get me wrong - I am Not suggesting that scholarly academic work on cinema necessarily Has to be about how films work, nor that such scholarship Must be practically useful to filmmakers. But what I am suggesting is that firstly, perhaps we need a new name to separate true Screen Studies - as the study of films and filmmaking - from what is more readily Cultural Studies viewed through a prism of cinema.
And secondly - if I may be permitted some blunt honesty - I just don t give a shit about Screen Studies that isn’t Useful to screen content makers or audiences..

At the risk of sounding like the anti-intellectual I despise, I can t help but see such cinema-derived cultural studies that pretends to be Screen Studies as a kind of self-absorbed navel gazing. If it’s not useful for filmmakers and doesn’t expand comprehension and appreciation for active audiences then I struggle to see the point or purpose.

Now, this may sound verbose but allow me to give this a caveat (and the point of my post); cinema-derived Cultural Studies on one hand and Screen Studies useful to filmmakers and audiences on the other need not be mutually exclusive. Too often there seems to be a separation between studying Cinema as a prism to understand societal and cultural issues and studying cinema to understand how filmmakers can engage cultural and social precepts. But if we accept that art itself is a reflection of societal and cultural values then why - or moreover how - can these perspectives been read or viewed as separate?

To add a touch of trademark audacity I would suggest that cinema-derived Cultural Studies research that isn t useful to filmmakers is just Lazy. If Cultural Studies scholars looking at cinema would put aside their self indulgence for just a moment they may see that the effort to connect their navel-gazing to tangible ideas for filmmakers and film audiences, is no great effort at all.

To prove the point I can take examples from a conference I attended late last year - the Australian and New Zealand Film and History conference. Scholar Julian Murphett presented on camera movement (a paper entitled ‘Tracking the modern: camera movement and autonomy’) and drew together a long history of the moving camera to draw a profile of modernist motion perspective in cinema. At the same conference eminent professor Jane Mills gave a paper that explored the idea of Sojourner  Filmmakers - a rich pattern of directors who have gone to a foreign country to make a film that tells a localised story for that place but which is otherwise outside the experience of the director themselves.

What both these papers failed to do - despite their rather astute and carefully observed ideas - was ask the glaringly obvious question; So what does this mean ?

Julian Murphett’s presentation mined a rich vein of moving camera examples but at no time did he make a suggestion about what such an evolving history of motion might mean for cinematographers working today?The only connection he made to future implications of the moving camera was a cynical and decidedly ill-informed view that the virtual camera of digital filmmaking, and in particular computer gaming, was disastrous backward step for cinema. Julian cited only one game to validate his nihilistic point of view, Grand Theft Auto, citing it as a continuous first-person camera that “doesn’t work” . Of course to anyone who has actually played GTA will know that it is NOT a first-person game at all but rather a third-person camera; moreover it is so utterly broken up with pre-edited cut-scenes as to be as far from continuous, and every bit as constructed, as a filmic Eisenstein montage sequence..! GTA is the OPPOSITE of what My Murphett seemed to argue it was.

If he wanted a genuine example for his thesis he should have cited Half Life 2 as the first major FPS without any cutscenes and a single continuous POV shot from start to finish, but I fear that the level of scholarship Mr Murphett clearly extends to traditional cinema he did not see worthy to extend to games. Thus it seems a shame to me that he would feel the need to draw nihilistic conclusions about the worth of the virtual camera in gaming without bothering to actually play games. That aside, for all the valid observations Julian Murphett made he never once approached the notion of what the evolution of the moving camera might actually mean for filmmakers? How will the camera be used in the future? What new states of experience or perspective are possible? What can DoP’s learn from the history of camera movement to inform future techniques? A perfect opportunity to connect observation with tangibility and elevate the research from self-indulgent navel-gazing to something both fascinating and useful seemed to have been squandered.

Similarly in the case Jane Mills - if you re going to make a case for a subset of films and filmmakers as sojourners - a pattern of auteurs who make a film in a foreign country and culture - then should you not take the next obvious step and ask what does this mean for filmmakers and filmmaking? Do such filmmakers make better films because of their non-native and removed position? What does this mean for national cinemas; domestic product for domestic consumption? How are such films received in those countries where they are made as opposed to in the filmmakers homeland? Are the films more or less successful than native works? Should Australian filmmakers be encouraged to become Sojourners? How does (or doesn t) an Australian sensibility hold up in a foreign context? Will films by Australian Sojourners improve or expand domestic Australian screen industries?

jane Mills’ research prompts so many of these great questions directly pertinent to industry and practice and audience, and yet the research itself, as presented, never went anywhere near such questions. Wholly preoccupied with its own navel-gazing and cleverness such questions as so what does this mean seem never to have entered the conversation.

Sadly, as a result, I believe both academia and practice are both diminished by presentations such as these - research that remains pretentious and self-absorbed, all too easily dismissible as irrelevant by both practitioners and audiences alike. Likewise, from the other side, the anti-intellectualism that plagues Australian cinema practice - and which I would argue has held it back in the mire of the lowest common denominator - is deprived of an opportunity to grow beyond its petty shallow banality, to engage with rich ideas.
I’ve ranted on this divide between cinema scholarship and cinema practice before - witness my great frustration with absurdly ill-informed texts such as Cinetech by Stephen Keane which piles fallacy and inaccuracy onto stupidity with every paragraph. (you can read my much justified bashing of this atrocious book here)

And yet it is these two worlds of scholarship and practice that I attempt straddle with my own work everyday. Thus when I see such divides between theory, practice and audiences - entirely unnecessary and unproductive divides - I find myself decidedly frustrated; torn between anti-intellectualism on one side and self-absorbed navel-gazing on the other. Surely there is a middle ground that celebrates ideas and knowledge in the service of making better films and smarter audiences ?

Stereo3D - creative boon or desperate financial ploy?

Can/Will Stereoscopic 3D reinvigorate interest in deep-focus staging and a greater utilization of the spatiality of cinema? And Is Stereoscopic 3D ‘all that and a bag of chips?’ Or is it doomed to die?

These were the questions recently posed on my blog by a reader posed in response to a lengthy discussion on deep-focus vs rack-focus cinema techniques and my perspective of the later being vastly over-used. The reader, Dani, speculated that Stereo3D may prompt a revisiting of less common deep-focus techniques.

My response to that first question would be a fairly resounding yes. I think the very nature of Stereoscopic 3D forces directors and DoP’s to think immediately of Staging and Spatial arrangement first and foremost rather than Framing. The nature of what Stereo3D can do puts onus on arrangement in Space rather than arrangement in Frame. Stereo3D innately demands deep-focus as going ultra shallow with blur is effectively composing in 2-dimensional planes rather than deep spaces. So a DoP shooting Stereo3D with ultrafast primes with wide open apertures is totally defeating the purpose of having Stereo3D in the first place.

Now, as for the second question. It would be too easy for me to say that i generally think Stereo3D is a crock of shit that no one is really interested in and which the mass general public is, at best, ambivalent about. But I’ll avoid such provocation and instead entertain a perspective on WHY parts of the film industry are so gung-ho on 3D….?

Lets face it, Hollywood studios are Terrified.

Movie theatre ticket sales are slumping. It’s getting harder for the studios to convince people to leave their homes to go to the movies. The reason..? Well aside from cultural phenomenon factors I think there two more tangible elements.  Home theatre systems are getting cheaper and better and so the enticement of the ‘big screen’ experience is just not as alluring as once was. When our home TV’s were small, 4:3 with convex glass and limited colour and resolution, there was a great ‘viewing quality’ attractor with going to the cinema - an experience you couldnt get at home. But when you’ve got a 40-50” flat-screen LCD on the wall (let alone a home projector) with a multi channel surround sound system playing from BluRay in HD and a VERY COMFY couch; the movie theatre just doesn’t have the pull it once did. Frankly I for one would generally  rather watch a movie on my home  than the  theatre. I can stop whenever i like for a piss-break. I can rewind if I miss a line of dialogue and I can have my friends over and have a better communal experience.

Then we add on top of this the dreaded DownLoad culture…! Shock Horror!

Legalities aside, the much bigger problem for the studios is that they are trying to convince viewers to conform their watching to When and Where the studios say they can in a culture where the viewer otherwise has complete control over how and when they watch just about anything. 4000 years of human history and warfare has told us that people dont like being told what to do and being dictated to.

There was a shift a decade ago when studios started treating Theatrical Releases at the Movie Theatre as simply a ‘marketing exercise’ to drive DVD sales post theatre run. That trend still stands and indeed some big mainstream films actually draw the money to pay for theatrical release prints directly out of the marketing budget for the film. This alone tells you the brave new world we live in. A world the studios are terrified of…

And this brings us to Stereo3D. Why are the studios pushing Stereo3D so hard? Why are they talking it up? Why are they giving huge financial incentives to hardware and software companies to develop Stereo3d technologies…? Because You HAVE to go to the Movie Theatre to see it. I cant download a Stereo3D version to watch at home. I have to go to the movie theatre and buy a traditional ticket to see Stereo3D.

So the major studios are pushing hard on Stereo3D because it is a way to preserve the traditional hierarchical financial structure of the film industry. In maintains the old-school distribution pyramid that trickles down from Theatrical release, through DVD and onto Broadcast in a strict linear privilege. Rather than change the way they operate they are pushing a technology simply to reinforce the status quo they are most comfortable with.

So… I could argue that Stereo3D is a viewing experience the bulk of the world’s movie goers simply dont give a flying rats arse about. Or I could argue that my experience is, as with many others, that Stereo3D is hard to watch, makes my eyes tired and sore and so will be avoided by many on physiological grounds. But, i wont argue either of these because I dont have to. 

My predication is not that Stereo3D will disappear (quite the contrary, i think it will persist in various forms for some time to come) but that it will fundamentally FAIL to do what the Hollywood studios desire so desperately for it to achieve - Get people back into the movie theatres en-masse again. It will fail this overt objective through a) audience apathy and b) because it is simply a matter of time before technology advances and I can watch Stereo3D movie in my home theatre from a file I illegally downloaded (not that i would ever do that ;) Even 2 years ago i tested a prototype laptop computer that could make a Stereo3D image WITHOUT glasses; you just had to sit dead-square in front of it. It wont be long before that becomes mainstream (if people want it)

Thus I draw the conclusion that it doesn’t matter how good Stereo3D is, or how great it looks, it will Fail to do what the studios desperately want it to do. And when it does, they will give up on it and desperately scurry for soemthign else to plug their sinking boat. And because I think audience desire for Stereo3D will always be fringe and marginal rather than mainstream, development of hardware and software for Stereo3D will subsequently cease or slow once the studios let it go.

As a case in point of the culture of apathy I believe exists around Stereo3D (from those outside of the big studio set at least) I can say that I teach a hundred rabidly enthusiastic, drenched in movies, gung-ho film school  brats who eat breath and sleep cinema technology. Are they milling over the internet reading about Avatar and Stereo3D? Are they endlessly talking about Stereo3D between classes? Are they excitedly musing on how they would use Stereo3D when they should be working on their HDV short films? NOPE..! They just dont care…. They really dont. They talk endlessly of video games, 3D animation, CGI, RED camera, 4k, Steadicams but Stereo3D is just NOT on their mind. Some might argue that this will change once they see Avatar…. But im not so sure. This is the next generation of filmmakers, all in their 20’s, and right now  they just dont care about Stereo3D. And if they dont care do we really think the general public is going to care enough to leave their comfy couches…?

The Belgrade Manifesto - Profound or Indulgent?

At the recent Belgrade film festival an attempt was made to draw a line in the sand for filmmakers; a line that attempted to declare No More to shallow, puerile, pointless cinema and foster a focus on quality engagement with cinema as an artform for the human experience.

The document entitled the Belgrade Manifesto (which can be read here) opens with the declaration:

“There is a crisis in cinema today, a deep malaise, a feeling of artistic exhaustion, of pointlessness. The evolution of cinematic language that is so vital to the continued well-being and relevance of the medium has pretty much come to a standstill. Good films are getting fewer, the informed and knowledgeable audience that is so important for their success has shrunk. The older generation don’t go to the cinema any more because so many films are for young people, and the young people today have little idea of cinema’s capacity for depth, excitement and complexity. The critics, who should be guiding and educating that audience, are mostly inadequate, and the distribution structures no longer work.”

Its hard not to read such a document without seeing comparison to Dogme95, the Manifesto of Chastity in Filmmaking that began in Denmark and stamped its place in cinema history across the world. Dogme95 reads:

DOGME 95 is a rescue action!
In 1960 enough was enough! The movie was dead and called for resurrection. The goal was correct but the means were not! The new wave proved to be a ripple that washed ashore and turned to muck.
Slogans of individualism and freedom created works for a while, but no changes. The wave was up for grabs, like the directors themselves. The wave was never stronger than the men behind it. The anti-bourgeois cinema itself became bourgeois, because the foundations upon which its theories were based was the bourgeois perception of art. The auteur concept was bourgeois romanticism from the very start and thereby … false!
To DOGME 95 cinema is not individual!

“I swear to submit to the following set of rules drawn up and confirmed by DOGME 95:

1.
Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).
2.
The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot).
3.
The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. (The film must not take place where the camera is standing; shooting must take place where the film takes place).
4.
The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera).
5.
Optical work and filters are forbidden.
6.
The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)
7.
Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.)
8.
Genre movies are not acceptable.
9.
The film format must be Academy 35 mm.
10.
The director must not be credited.

Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a “work”, as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.
Thus I make my VOW OF CHASTITY.”


There no doubt that the creators of the Belgrade manifesto would have been looking and hoping for some of the success of Dogme95 but I have my doubts that this act of defiance will make anything more than an ignored ripple in world cinema.

Dogme95, defiant though it was, had a good dose of humour, self-deprecation, dare I say fun about it. You only have to watch any of the wildly successful Dogme films such as Mifune and The Idiots to see the exuberance for cinema pop right out from the screen. Dogme95 in many ways didnt actually take itself that seriously. It was framework and a creative ideology rather than a socio-political one. And its that which I fear fails the Belgrade Manifesto.

No one deplores Hollywood excess more than I; no one finds shallow, mindless, lowest common denominator Hollywood filmmaking more distasteful and infuriating than I do. But its hard not to read the verbose prose of the Belgrade Manifesto as anything more than self-indulgent, pompous bitchin and moanin.

The story is given exaggerated importance; the study of its crude mechanics has become an industry in itself with consultants and experts in every financing agency and production house, part of an ever growing and unproductive bureaucracy whose purpose is to sniff out the trends and fads of the day and to select and develop (and distort) productions in accordance with those predictions.

Whilst Id be first to deplore the industry of self-help, instant success, screenwriting formulas (something I wrote about here on DigitalBasin after presenting at the Los Angeles Screenwriters Conference) the declarations that The story is given exaggerated importance and that Nobody pays attention to form, without which, as our predecessors understood, nothing worthwhile can possibly develop seems to me to be exertion towards Style over Substance, something I would have thought the authors of the Belgrade Manifesto would be seeking to fight against.

I find it hard to read the Belgrade Manifesto and Not picture a whole bunch of filmmakers (no-doubt wearing black and sporting designer eye-ware) who cant find the success they believe they deserve, gathered together and looking to find someone to blame for their un-success. Complaining that theres too much focus on story? and we need more focus on Form? Youve got to be kidding me! That’s exactly the problem with the worst of Hollywood all glitz and no guts; all effects and no engaging narrative.

The Manifesto singles out cinematic language as failing to move forward but I simply do not think this argument can be sustained; evidently the authors dont get out much or view very widely. The range of cinema craft techniques that deliver new language constructs for cinematic meaning has never been more diverse. If you were to watch only banal feature films you could be forgiven for buying into this perspective. But look a little wider than the narrow confines of the multiplex  to the flood great TV drama over the past 8 years, computer gaming, online video, hybrid documentary, interactive forms, music videos, motion graphics, media art  these are not the fringes of cinematic language, this is the mainstream. The virtual camera, multiple layers, blended imagery, 3D environments, motion capture control, motion tracking, low-fi cameras, handheld devices, DV and HDV; the shift in cinema language driven by new technologies has never, ever, been more dynamic. The moving can do things now that it has never been able to do before; the boundaries of cinema language have never been more pushed than they are now  perhaps not in mainstream every day move theatres but Everywhere else. If youve missed it then youre eyes havent been open.

Where Dogme95 was simply about crafting a Point of Difference, a way to make films unlike that which dominated cinematic form, the Belgrade Manifesto seems little more than a public whinge session about how hard it is to be an artist. I feel like shouting  “Shut up and go make a film!”

Its only at the end that the Belgrade Manifesto I think finds any traction of tangible and proactive energy:

“it is now possible, because of the huge reduction in costs, to bypass existing funding channels and make high quality films WITHOUT PERMISSION. In addition, we need to adapt and develop those models of distribution and exhibition that are already being pioneered and begin to identify new sources of minimal funding. It is time to take responsibility for our own future and establish a committed, interactive community that can share ideas and work together to find viable ways to make and show our films and build audiences that will want to see them.”

I do love the line make high quality films without permission  yes indeed! That is what the digital age demands we do. I fear that if the authors of the Belgrade Manifesto put as much energy into making the films they want to see as they did into the writing and publicising of the Manifesto they may have achieved more credibility.

The fact that the Belgrade Manifesto has less than 70 signatures world wide saids perhaps Im not alone in feeling this way.