After seeing the Dogme film The Celebration, Dana Dorrity explored what makes digital video a cool medium and its unique qualities for storytelling.
In 1999, when I was in my first year of the AFI Conservatory Screenwriting program, I saw a screening of The Celebration (Festen), the first Dogme Collective film by Thomas Vinterberg, at the Laemmle Sunset Theatre.
I had been a video producer in New York, shooting infomercials and video news releases, but I was insecure about my lack of knowledge of film. As I watched the pixilated image, which looked like a moving impressionist painting, I knew that video, digital video, could be used to tell meaningful, and beautiful, big screen stories. But it would only be successful if filmmakers chose the right kinds of stories for this new cooler medium.
The Celebration was the story of a family reunion in an opulent country inn. The father’s birthday dinner party eventually becomes a battlefield, when his son launches an attack accusing his father of causing his twin sister’s suicide. The intensity of the story, which was shot the use of video which looks like a home movie. Video is inevitably associated with truth, because until now most video images – the news, home movies, security cameras – capture events that are actually happening. The viewer, watching this film, feels like they are a witness to this devastating family battle.
In the book, Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan asserts that video is a cooler medium than film. The Celebration, which was shot on a European standard PAL DV camera with 750 lines of definition, is significantly lower resolution than film which is “well-filled with data.” A single frame of 35 millimeter film can be converted to a digital file of up to ten million pixels. Film is a hot, high definition medium which transports the viewer into the story through the sense of sight.
Digital Video yields less visual information. Our minds are forced to fill in the gaps between the pixels. Like a kid who wakes up from a nightmare and has to walk down a dark hallway, digital video creates a sense of danger even in the most familiar or mundane setting. The absence of visual information triggers a sense of the ominous. The DV movie viewer is wary of what could emerge from the shadows or what’s outside the video frame.
This cooler medium was used effectively in The Blair Witch Project, written and directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. It was the first DV film to be released nationally, and it was tremendously successful because many young viewers couldn’t help but believe that the story was true. Initially, this was interpreted as a marketing ploy, but even as an educated viewer, I couldn’t help but look up Blair, Maryland on the map and surf the internet trying to learn more about the witch.
The Blair Witch Project also used the medium by not revealing the Witch. Since the strength of digital video comes from what’s not there, the most terrifying images are absent from this story. If film paints a world that we enter through our eyes, digital video brings us in through a feeling of paranoia, like the characters on screen, we wonder, “What’s behind me?”
These digital filmmaking techniques worked for director Miguel Arteta in Chuck & Buck. In this DV film, written by Mike White, an LA record producer is stalked by his lollypop-licking childhood friend. Buck is the most benign character, but the graininess of the DV medium increases the viewer’s sense of danger, and we sympathize with Chuck, who is now called Charlie, and who wonders why Buck has re-entered his life.
Each of these storylines circles around something unseen by the viewer. Both The Celebration and Chuck & Buck tell stories about the past, something that is gone forever and often inaccurately recalled by memory. Similarly Tape, Richard Linklater’s first digital film is about two friends who meet up after ten years. One accuses the other of a past offense and blackmails him with a tape. Throughout the film, it is never clear to either of the characters or the viewer what happened in the past, and the tape is never played. In The Celebration, the ghost of the twin sister who has committed suicide is established throughout the film in point-of-view shots, but she is never fully revealed. In the climax sequence when the characters are on a drunken, dancing rampage through the house, the main character senses her presence, and we see an image of a girl, but this could just be his memory of her. The Blair Witch accurately depicts on video the thing which scares us most, the unknown. Through the use of flashbacks, movies often make the past seem recoverable. DV reflects reality and lets the past seep into the dark, digitized absence of this cool medium.
Dana Dorrity is an assistant professor of Communications and Media Arts at Dutchess Community College. She has an MFA in screenwriting from the American Film Institute and teaches media writing, screenwriting and video production classes.
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