From: Roger Beebe (email suppressed)
Date: Thu Jan 21 2010 - 17:20:37 PST
This seems like an important correction. In essence, then, NEITHER is the "democratic medium"--it's really about one's approach to these media. It'd be easy enough to dumpster an old VHS cam-porter & a few VCRs & edit that way for just about $0. As Dave points out in his post, within either medium there's such a wide range of approaches that it almost doesn't make sense to talk about them all together. If my knee-jerk impulse was to talk about the potential cheapness of film versus a certain kind of videomaking, I suspect that impulse was overdetermined by the endless hours I've spent in classrooms arguing with boys with baseball hats against a certain kind of videomaking that fetishizes the newest & shiniest gear, the latest plug-ins for the newest version of Final Cut Pro, etc.
Taking back a few of my 4 cents,
Roger
On Jan 21, 2010, at 2:34 PM, Nicholas O'Brien wrote:
> I'd have to slightly contend w/ Roger on the "cheap" issue of video. Although computers themselves are not necessarily cheap, lots of progress has been made towards making free/open-source video editing software (http://www.openshotvideo.com/ + http://vlmc.org/).
>
> Contrasting super8 cameras/projectors to hi-end HD cameras isn't a fair comparison . You can get a flip video camera (I think the closest equivalent to a brownie), for around $50 on ebay or craigslist, and they have a built-in simple editor/uploader to allow for sharing and easy distribution. Also pointing to the pixel vision cameras (infamously used by Sadie Benning, of course), can show how "cheap" video can be incredibly moving (even if Sadie potentially could have afforded a "better" camera).
>
> Maybe I'm just being nit-picky, but I would say video can be cheap, and that choosing to go to video from film can have similar formal motivations relevant to this thread.
>
> On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 1:08 PM, Jonathan Walley <email suppressed> wrote:
> Roger,
>
> Thank you - your "2 cents" are adding up (just like the cost of film/video making!). I think this is a really important point, one that my students would be well to absorb, as well as those authors of ecstatic paens to the digital revolution (lots of academics, unfortunately, as well as journalists in the mainstream press). Again, even if it's not true, there is this perception that video is cheaper and, flowing from that, more accessible, democratic, populist, etc. [It amazes me how many people assume that every single person in America could join the digital revolution on the grounds that "all you need is a cheap video camera and a computer." As if everyone can afford even the most basic home-use hard and software. Whenever I hear that - and I do, from students and colleagues alike - I invite the person who says it to my neighborhood].
>
> My reference to economics was partly in response to the posts about James Benning that came up earlier, which indicated that Benning felt he could no longer continue as a filmmaker because of cost. As your post suggests, it probably depends a lot on the scale of production and what kind of work you want to do. It's true that filmmaking can be very cheap, but only if you want to make certain kinds of films - that is, only if you're willing to accept certain constraints above and beyond those "built into" your medium. Unfortunately, the overriding assumptions in our culture about what films "should" look like means that the people who embrace these constraints and say, like Sidney Peterson did, "resources limited, content almost unlimited," are in the minority.
>
> Of course, there are video makers out there working in equally cheap and subversive ways - again, my personal feelings about film "vs." video aside, none of this is necessarily meant to make a whipping boy out of video.
>
> Jonathan
>
>
> Asst. Professor of Cinema
> Denison University
> email suppressed
>
>
>
> On Jan 21, 2010, at 1:11 PM, Roger Beebe wrote:
>
> Jonathan,
>
> This has been a really interesting thread to follow, and I've loved both the anecdotes that have popped up in response as well as the more theoretical musings on this topic. However, I do want to trouble (again) one of your assertions below, about the economics of filmmaking. There seems to be some idea that making video is "cheap," and I want to suggest that that's a total illusion. For the price of even a consumer-level HD video camera, I could make several years' worth of short 16mm films. With video technology constantly evolving, you're forced to upgrade (camera, editing software, computer) every few years, thus requiring expense after expense; with film on the other hand, I'm still shooting on cameras that were made 30, 40, or 50 years ago. Plus, since everyone's decided that film is basically worthless, you can pick up 16mm, super 8, and regular 8mm gear for a song. I've got a fleet of 16mm projectors that I've purchased for $5 or $10 each; I shot a film on a ca!
> mera that I got for $4 at a flea market. Sure, once the film starts running through the camera, you'll start spending real money, but with the tremendous startup costs for making work in video (costs that recur regularly), it'd take a lot of shooting before the price of 8mm or 16mm filmmaking began to approach that or working on video. Of course, there are ways to make your experimental celluloid works really expensive (like having someone else conform your negative, for ex.), but one certainly can avoid many of those costs.
>
> 2 (more) cents,
> Roger
>
> On Jan 21, 2010, at 12:23 PM, Jonathan Walley wrote:
>
> Hopefully I cleared this up in my last post - that I was looking for examples in which filmmakers emphasize the constraints of their medium in ways that could be either positive OR negative, but that in most cases the constraints or limitations are characterized by said filmmakers as essential for their art and thus valuable. The one major exception, so far, seems to be economics - the expense of working with film, as in the case of James Benning, is a difficulty that is harder to "embrace."
>
>
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
>
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
>
>
>
> --
> Nicholas O'Brien
> doubleunderscore.net
> __________________________________________________________________ For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
>
>
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.