| VJ Theory: ART Date published: 27/11/08 |
Max with a KeitaiMax Schleser |
This article will outline the influences, which shaped the editing and montage process of the experimental feature film Max With a Keitai. The city film was shot entirely on a mobile phone in Japan in 2006 and is now being distributed for cinematic and mobile media release. The project illustrates a case for considering approaches within moving-image production, which make use of colour and movement as the driving parameters for a mobile documentary film. A visual flow is constructed within the film. Max With a Keitai is based upon a visual rhythm integral to the sequences of mobile video and the quality of 3gp video. The movement within the frame was used as an initial parameter to edit the 180 hours of filmed material in almost four month on location. Lev Manovich argues in The language of New Media (2002), that Dziga Vertov can be thought of as one of the major database filmmakers of the twentieth century. The mobile phone filmmaker Max Schleser is extending this argument and comes to the conclusion that Vertov’s creative practices can be described as a pioneering conceptualisation of VJ techniques. Using contemporary VJ software applications such as Grid Pro, Resolume or Motion Dive Tokyo, one can edit and create montage effects live on the fly. VJ performances are based upon a live montage of video database fragments. In a way analogous to the methods of Vertov where he filmed fragments of Soviet city life, the mobile phone user accumulates a personal video database of mobile fragments. Max With a Keitai was recorded with the caméra-stylo (Astruc 1948). During the production process of Max With a Keitai, the video-blog functioned as a video database. In the first instance the mobile phone videos were indexed daily according to their time and date on location. Within the database, the assembled files are placed into different categories based upon their photographic and abstract representation. In the second instance the mobile video fragments were evaluated and edited to short clips and uploaded to the vblog. As I was working with the mobile phone for the first time, I evaluated the mobile film work at the end of each day. Within this process the video clips were copied and saved in two other databases. I developed a taxonomy based on thematic tags such as (transport, tradition or Tokyo) and one according to the visual characteristics of the medium, i.e. dominant colour in the frame (such as green and orange) or movement on a horizontal and vertical plane. The structure of Max With a Keitai itselftook shape during the editing process. I started to insert the videos in the non-linear desktop editing program’s timeline in a similar way as the videos had been featured on the mobile-mentary vblog (www.mobile-mentary.co.uk). The database, which includes the moving images tagged according their parameters, provides a basis upon which to create the visual flow according to the images visual rhythm. In the final stages of editing the video files are then linked according to this visual rhythm, which is reminiscent of the kinkos’ interval filmmaking method. “The School of kino-eye calls for construction of the film-objects upon ‘intervals’, that is upon the movement between shots, upon the visual correlation of shots with one another, upon transitions from one visual stimulus to another. Also one can mention here Hans Richter’s approach to producing unscripted work on location, which provides another reference point for working with mobile phone video texts. The 1920s avant-garde filmmakers foreshadowed the practice of editing clips on the fly. “Along with Walter Ruttmann and Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger must be recognized as one of the first film pioneers who worked to combine movie and sound tracks. His abstract "Absolut Film" is considered the precursor to audio-visual experimentations, such as Vjing. Forms such as the 60s (liquid) light shows, the expanded cinema, the formal movie, multi-media performances, and many others have made the new, hot, and hip art of Vjing/live cinema possible.” (http://www.soundframe.at/sf_info_e.html) VJ performances are based upon a live montage of video database fragments. In a way analogous to the methods of Vertov documentary filmmaking approach collecting fragments of everyday life. The non-fiction genre provides a creative approach to explore montage and moving-image media according to the parameters of the medium. “… repeatedly what I wanted to say when I made Ghosts Before Breakfast. He could hardly believe that the content, the story – rebellion of objects against daily routine – developed, so to speak, as the by-product of rhythmical conception and by improvisation. The painter had directed the writer, not the other way around.” VJ performance, live editing audio-visual texts in various environments ranging from clubs to galleries, creates a visual rhythm through improvisation. Mark America defines the VJ as a “provocateur who knowingly intervenes in the mainstream art, club, and cinema culture and opens up new possibilities for hybridized art and entertainment events.” (Amerika 2007, p. 56) Writing in VJ: Audio-visual Art and VJ Culture, Bram Crevits traces the term VJ back to its origin, which was first used in the New York club Peppermint Lounge (Crevits in Faulkner 2006, p.14), while simultaneously pointing to the influences from video art and expanded cinema. Elliot Earls situates the current VJ culture as still being off the cultural radar. (Earls in Faulkner 2006, p.14) Recent publications (Faulkner 2006 or One Dot Zero 2006 and 2007) reveal the diverse practices, approaches and backgrounds, which the practioners bring to this field. It is beyond the scope of this present research to map out the field of contemporary audio-visual art practice entirely, but its links to avant-garde practice of the 1920s filmmakers and its application in the editing process of Max With a Keitai are omnipresent. Another common determiner is the form of non-linearity. The experience of a VJ performance, installation or exhibition can be compared to the general unfamiliarity and newness of an emerging art-form found in descriptions of early cinema screenings. In the Struggle for Film, Hans Richter outlines a viewing account of a projectionist who emigrated to Jerusalem in 1923. “One day by mistake the last real was first. Surprisingly there was no complaints. Even the “regulars” failed to stir. This intrigued the cinema owner. He wanted to find out if anyone objected, and if not why, so he ran all the reels in any order. No one seemed to mind. “Why ?”, he wondered in some amazement, and never grasped the plot, even when the film was shown in the right order. It was clear that they only went to the cinema because there one could see people walking, horses galloping, dogs running.” In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan provides a similar account of first time non-western audiences who were not sufficiently visually literate to decode narrative, due to their cultural backgrounds, which are mainly oral traditions. “Our own talkies were a further completion of the visual package as a mere consumer commodity. For with silent film we automatically provide sound for ourselves by way of ‘closure’ or completion. And when it is filled in for us there is very little participation in the work of the image.” (McLuhan 1964, p. 287) McLuhan’s argument can be backed up through a more recent analysis by Stephen Barber as presented in Projected Cities. “…the arrival of synchroniszed-sound cinema implied the destitution of that evocatory power of the film image as all of the great European experimental film-makers of the period foresaw: vocal sound would trivialize cinema into dramatic narrative forms and open it up to forced global appropriation by Hollywood.” (Barber 2002, p.31) Hollywood as a commercial business aims towards selling as many productions as possible. The linear narrative produced on the assembly line in the studios is packaged for the spectacle of cinema. The mobile phone with its low res capabilities operates in an alternative space. The narrative can contradict the visual development of a story and is therefore secondary in mobile-mentaries. “Narrative, then, is not an essential quality of film, but only a potential and secondary quality arising from the production of time in the differentiation within and between frames. To misunderstand this leads to a more serious mistake, that of endowing the discrete machinery of cinema with the illusory attributes of continuous flow. … The cinematic event tends towards incompleteness. Its subject is constituted in the ephemeral movement from frame to frame, mobile and unfixed.” (Cubitt 2004, p.40) The fragments of narrative, which are introduced in Max With a Keitai, function like a short text message. These SMS and the new development of a Keitai aesthetic (as outlined in the next chapter) are based upon a practice specific to mobile devices. In Narrated Theory: Multiple Projection and Multiple Narration (Past and Future), Peter Weibel writes about “reversible rhizomatic narration” in 2002, two years after the introduction of the first mobile phone camera in Japan. “In the future era of calm technology and ubiquitous computing one person is going to carry and use a lot of microcomputers… anybody is going to be able to see any movie in any place at any time: x persons see x films in x places at x times. Anybody, anywhere, any time is the formula for the digital image technology of the future.” The experience of viewing the micro-movies in the cityscape has like “the rhizome, has no beginning nor end, but always a middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p.27) from which the micro-movies can be accessed. The documented environment of Tokyo’s cityscape reflects the same rhiziomatic structure. “Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the point into a line! Be quick, even when standing still!” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p.27) or ‘Hayaku’ (=’be quick’) as the Japanese would say. The experimental documentary Max with a Keitai is exploring Japanese metropolitan centres through the lens of a mobile phone and captures a new emerging mobile phone video aesthetic, which surfaced and characterises the years 2005-2008. The city film captures the everyday life of the mobile phone filmmaker Max during the mobile-mentary (mobile documentary) production and the Japanese megapolis in the Taiheiy? Belt. The cityscapes are depicted as a hybrid of tradition and progressive technoculture. Max With a Keitai provides an alternative reading of the technologically most advanced centre to that of the films produced by Wim Wenders and Chris Marker (Tokyo GA 1985 and Sans Soleil 1983) in the 80s political and cultural landscape. Through a critical lens Max Schleser records the failures of the technoculture, such as the derelict shopping mal in Den-Den town (= Electric city). This sequence can be seen as a requiem of consumer culture, a shopping-centre equipped with a rollercoaster, but no customers and abandoned shops is an epitome for the economic recession that hit Japan in the 1990s. These new images of Japan, which stand in contrast to the futuristic progressive images of Sans Soleil (1983) or Tokyo GA (1985) have a very current connotation referencing the global economic recession. The affect of the Japanese economic recession in the 90s can be contextualised through the work of the photographer Toru Kurihara. Note of Ruins – Dilapidated spaces show nostalgia illustrates the ruins of urban consumer culture projects in Japan. The haikyo phenomenon [1] provides a largely unknown picture of the postmodern megalopolis revealing its economic downside in juxtaposition to the most advanced technoculture. Naturally Max With a Keitai shares some ideas with the 80s city films, which have influenced the project in specific parts of the production process. Sans Soleil can be seen as a direct inspiration to produce a city film in Japan, while Tokyo GA became more influential in the editing process. Here one can point at the train sequence used in Max With a Keitai that reflects Marker’s and Wender’s impression of Tokyo. In Max With a Keitai trains are a visual representation for data traffic in the network of the megapolis. The mobile phone as a ready-made consumer product, a low res format, was used to produce the feature film for the silver screen, which can also be presented as a live remix (see FILMOBILE exhibition, www.filmobile.net). The pixel, a new aesthetic and construct is driving the film’s plot and/or the VJ performance. Its exposure to the most expressive state is depicted in the A-Dome scene. This sequence is a symbolic statement, which emphasises the status of the pixilation on the discursive layer. Hiroshima marks the destruction of the traditional Japanese life and simultaneously introduced a new epoch of consumer culture. The significance of this reference is manifested through the atom test conducted in North Korea during the time of production [2]. The fragmentation of the digital pixel is suggesting the atomic implosion, which is characteristic for the Keitai aesthetic when blowing up mobile phone video footage to cinematic dimensions. Furthermore the mobile phone as a tool for cinematic communication has pushed the representation of the digital city to the next layer. Max With a Keitai has logged and captured the impact of mobile technologies in an abstract form and portrayed the ‘Global City’ Tokyo and other Japanese metropolitan centres through the lens of a mobile phone. “The erosion of the film image’s status coincided with the rise of its digital cityscapes, transmitted pre-eminently from the façades of the city itself, via the immense image-screens of its department stores and corporate advertising zones, and also from the minuscule, hand-held digital screens which contribute to the obsolescence of the city’s cinema screens; those digital screens are maintained in intimate proximity to the endangered urban body in transit.” (Barber 2002, p.153) The city screen nexus is captured with the mobile phone and has provided an update for the city film genre. Historically the city films have been concerned with the exploration, expression and examination of a cinematic forms and technologies. Max With a Keitai expands the city film genre into the mobile realm. The idea to produce non-scripted films as formulated by René Clair in La Tour (Clair, France,1928), the candid camera techniques applied in Berlin Symphony of a City (Ruttmann, Germany, 1929) and the experimentation with unconventional camera practices and techniques are a relevant approach to work with mobile media. Writing in The films of René Clair, R.C. Dale refers to Claire who said “we really just went out and shot a lot of footage, and I didn’t know what was going to happen to it until I started to put it together in the cutting room, where I assembled it largely by trial and error.” (Dale 1987, p.112) Furthermore Dole says Clair had dreamed the film would be free of any restrictions and restrains imposed by narrative fiction.” (Dale 1987, p.112). “However portable devices, such as the iPhone, are used ubiquitously, which is different from cinema … It is therefore inevitable that we study new methods of impact and discover new ways relating it to video.” (Andreas Treske 2008 [online]) The mobile-mentary Max With a Keitai and the mobile-mentary micro-movies project are edited according to the specific viewing experiences. The mobile-mentary can function as a cinematic project, challenging the cinematic qualities itself and simultaneously as a mobile media project. The new mobile experience results from the viewing of micro-movies in the streets, which are distributed via a Bluetooth hubs and edited for a viewing experience in the city outside a cinematic environment. By means of viewing a city-film outside the cinema in an urban environment a new experience is crafted. The translation between the silver – and mobile screen functions via montage; “the combination of two elements, resulting in the production of a specific effect that could not be produced by either of the two elements.” (Aumont 1992, p.48) The micro-movies are sent at intervals at different times of the day. The micro-movies create an experience, which merges the location of the viewing (ie in this case London’s cityscape) with the filmic representation of a place on the other side of the world. The user experience is taking the potential viewing time into consideration. The 23 micro-movies are constructed in a non-sequential fashion and can be viewed in any order to establish an understanding of the whole project. The mobile AV productions function as a unique experience fusing the phenomenal everyday environment with the on screen pro-filmic audio-visual work. Most likely the mobile micro-movies will be viewed in situations where no other screen media is available. Consequentially the user might not solely focus on the micro-movies as one is viewing the content while being on the move. “Tokyo multiplied modernity all over the country within a surprisingly short period of time….Modernisation is Tokyo. Writing in Where the streets have no names: The Japanese City and its Future, he argues that the city consequently is everywhere and nowhere. In Center-City, Empty Centre, Barthes argues that the West has constructed all cities as concentric for historical, economical, religious and military purposes. Tokyo possesses a centre, but “this centre is empty. The entire city turns around a site both forbidden and indifferent, a residence concealed beneath foliage, protected by moats, inhabited by an emperor who is never seen, which is to say literally, by no one knows who.” (Barthes 1983, p.30) Japanese cities, as exemplified through Tokyo, are conceptually structured like a network. This relationship between media- and city- scapes is also implemented in the definition of micro-movies. The term ‘micro-movie’ was coined in the 1980s in Nicholas Negroponte’s Architecture Machine Group at MIT and expanded in 1993 by Glorianna Davenport (Director of the Interactive Cinema Group at MIT Media Lab) in the context of interactive video databases – which were introduced in 1997 at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. (Wolf 2005 [online]) In Orchestrating Digital Micromovies, Davenport describes a micromovie as a short piece of video with descriptive information attached to it (Davenport in Wolf 2005 [online]). “It has often been pointed out that the mute cinema, whose expressive techniques are installed with a certain coefficient of non-reality (no sound / no colour) in some ways favoured a considerable lack of realism in its narration and representation.” (Aumont 1992, p.33) On a mobile device each location can alter the viewing experience and linearity does not provide any flexibility to take this into account. “Linearity and chronology, as classical parameters of narration, fall victim to a multiple perspective projected onto multiple screens. Asynchronous, non-linear, non-projected onto multiple screens is the goal. These narrative procedures comprising a ‘multiform plot’ have been developed with reference to and oriented toward such rhizomatic communication structures as hypertext, ‘associational indexing’ (Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, 1945), text-based ‘multi-user dungeons’ (MUDs) and other digital techniques of literary narration.” (Weibel 2002 p.50) The everyday surroundings shift to the foreground and can alter the viewing experience. The mobile phone enables us to view images in any location, which traditionally used to be connected to the fixed point of the cinema theatre, home or desktop space. The Situationist notion of psychogeography references the significance of location. The Lettristes and after that the Situationist used dérive to formulate the idea of psychogeography. Writing in the book, which bears the name of this concept, Merlin Coverley illustrates psychogeography, as a combination of literary movement, political strategy, a series of new ideas and a set of avant-garde approaches, which “is resisting definition through a shifting series of interwoven themes and constantly being reshaped by its practioners.” (Coverley, 2006, p. 11) Writing in Rethinking the city – Formulary for a new urbanism, Simon Sandler illustrates psychogeography as “playful, cheap and populist, an artistic activity carried out in the everyday space of the street rather than in the conventional art spaces of the gallery or theatre.” In the Situationist international – A user’s guide, Ford says the Situationist city “had to be reinvented on a personal level, to be reconfigured along the lines of a new nomadic lifestyle. Historical precedents include Baudelaire’s description of the flâneur.“ (Ford 2005, p.34) The production of two city films in Japan by the end of the 1920s was foreshadowed by Berhard Kellermann’s 1912 publication Ein Spaziergang in Japan (= A drift in Japan). Writing in Benjamin’s Flâneur in Japan: Urban Modernity and Conceptual Relocation, Rolf Goebel illustrates Kellermann’s work as “The flâneur seeks to decipher the ‘Winke and Weisungen’ (= hints and directions) that buildings and streets, through ‘sprachlos, geistlos’ (= voiceless and spiritless) themselves, offer to someone obsessed with the hidden significance of wayward, half-forgotten details of the cityscape.” (Goebel 1998, p.380) Max With a Keitai depicts these half-forgotten details, which were encountered through drifting and exploration of the city by unconventional means. Dérive functions here as the process of exploring a location or cityscape. Moreover Tokyo requires a flâneur-like approach to exploring the city as there are no house numbers and only a few main streets have names in Tokyo. “You must orient yourself in it not by book, by address, but by walking, by sight, by habit, by experience; here every discovery is intense and fragile, it can be repeated or recovered only by memory of the trace it has left in you: to visit a place for the first time is thereby to begin to write it: the address not being written, it must establish its own writing (Barthes 1983, p. 36). Also Christopher Gray points to the influence of communication media within the conceptualisation of psychogeography in “Everyone will live in his Cathedral”: “psychogeography was a study and correlation of the material obtained from drifting…During the same period (1958-1964) they (the situationists) were also toying with new forms of communication and deconditioning within the city.” (Ivain in Gray, p.4) Moreover he refers to Chtcheglov (Gilles Ivan), whose “central theme was that the city was itself the total work of art…to play with time and space” (Ivain in Gray, p.4) So how can a mobile phone viewing experience be conceptualised through this ‘play’ with time and space? By means of extending the idea of montage into a hybrid technique, micro-movies can be linked to any location. New media artists, practioners and theorists have utilised the montage technique ever since its first defining experiments by Kuleshov in the early 1920s. By means of using a split screen it is possible to extract micro-movies from the feature length project. A fruitful conceptualisation was introduced by the filmmaker Hans Richter at the beginning of the 1920s. Hans Richter published in the De Stijl magazine the article Film: “The existing challenge is defined through the tension, which in detail produces the light’s space, becomes the basis for the construction in the assembling of the whole, so in consequence not only a sum of space constructions is developed but a new quality.” A mobile media montage creates a new quality of its own, a hybridity between city and cinematic space. As outlined in the previous section of this chapter a connection between the micro-movies and Tokyo is decipherable. Writing in EACH ONE A HERO-The Philosophy of Symbiosis, Kisho Kurokawa outlines “A Master Plan for Redeveloping the Nation: The Symbiosis of Redevelopment and Restoration”. His work is constructed in order to preserve the “Jumble of Tokyo's Rhizome”. “The mazelike, jumbled chaos of Tokyo is a natural rhizome that possesses the potential for becoming a city of night, a Postmodern city of symbiosis. Tokyo today seems chaotic, without order... But as I have said before, we are living in a new age, with a new value system and sensibility that transcends Modernism. Anyone would prefer to walk the back streets of Shinjuku, Shibuya, or Harajuku over the broad avenues of Kasumigaseki, lined with the same square Modern boxes. While there's nothing wrong with broad boulevards and high-rise buildings, we also want cluttered mazelike districts to explore.” (Kurokawa 1997, p.232) These lines lead us back to this concept of nomadic exploration, flânerie [or now-a-days the Phoneur (Luke in 2005, p. 186)] and the Situationist practice, which contextualise the experience of viewing mobile-mentary micro-movies. “Open a book, enter a movie theatre or dial up a track on your iPod and your attention is constantly shifted to another place time or time. The dense embedding of these discrete media spaces in the urban fabric yields a city that, like a film with jump cuts and flashbacks is experienced and understood as a sequence of spatial and temporally discontinuous scenes, some of them expressions of the current, local reality and other ephemeral media constructions.” Sandler describes the Situationst City as a constant play of contrast, between confined and open spaces, darkness and illumination, circulation and isolation. (Sandler 1998, p.72) Within the Situationist techniques of drifting and psychogeography, which originate from the lettrists (Ivan Chtcheglov aka Gilles Ivain 1953 Formula for a New City), junctions with the exploration of the city were termed “Plaques tournantes” (Sandler 1998, p.88) “The term punned on so many meanings that it is not possible to translate it straightforwardly. A plaque tournante can be the centre of something; it can be a railway turntable; or it can be a place of exchange.” (Sandler 1998, p.88) Sandler describes Paris as a “plaque tournante of culture” and Marseilles one of trafficking. (Sandler 1998, p.88). Without question Tokyo is the capital, plaque tournante, of hybrid culture, Eastern and Western, modern/post-modern/hyper-modern and traditional, Tokyo is the society of the spectacle (Fashion, culture, commerce, screens in public places, galleries in department stores, zoos in high rise skyscrapers, etc…). “A circus, a show, an exhibition, a one-way transmission of experience. It was a form of ‘communication’ to which one side, the audience, can never reply; a culture based on the …consumer capitalism was to be simply the society of the spectacle.” (Gray 1998, p.6) Tokyo reflects exactly this notion of exchange or an in-between state, sometimes chaotic, but nevertheless structured in the hustle and bustle. Trains leaving the stations at the moment the precise moment the second indicator on the digital clock jumps to zero and entertainment, a red-light district, traditional shrines all next to postmodern architecture in one ward. Parallel phenomenons are found in all 23 wards. Max With a Keitai captures these expressions through rhizomatic lines, which are crafted in the editing process as a visual flow. This visual flow is based upon the colour and movement of the mobile video clips. Moreover Max With a Keitai visually references the idea of drifting by means of navigating through the film via Tokyo’s subway map. “Make maps, not photographs or drawings” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p.27). The film’s non-linear approach is based upon a network structure, which can be graphically illustrated through the subway maps. In addition the idea of a Keitai culture is represented through the superimposed images of the Kenka matsuri [5] (fighting and thunder drum) festival. The festival, which is taking place in the town of Shirahama, Himeji city, is an expression of the concept of mobility. During the festival portable shrines are carried by the man of the local villages. Next to the parades in which the shrines are carried up a hill, the festival also includes fighting rituals in which the different village groups try to topple the shrines. Conceptually the dynamic of the Keitai culture is enunciated through the idea of moving portable shrines around different locations, rather than going to the locations. The portable shrines, the mikoshi, yasa and yatai create an experience in the city rather than in a confined area of a temple. The mobile-mentary micro-movie project has been influenced by these observations during the production of Max With a Keitai. Why would I create AV productions on a mobile phone for the silver screen? The mobile-mentary project is an experiment in cinematic communication. The practice-led research examines the impact of mobile phones on the transforming mediascape, focusing on the convergence of communication technologies with lens-based media. In order to explore how mobile documentaries (mobile-mentaries) contribute to and extend the definition of documentary theory and practice I set out to work in the original parameters of the cinematic medium/format. Documentary originated as media format on the cinematic screen. Max with a Keitai is produced on a mobile phone (Keitai) as a single screen cinematic work. The main objective was to discover if it is possible to produce work with a mobile phone for the big screen. Three years ago mobile phones had limited storage capacities (512 mb microSD cards), recorded in 12 frames per second on two megapixel cameras and worked with the first generation of the 3gp compression format, which could not be transferred directly into non-linear editing suits. Technically it seemed almost impossible to film a feature project on a mobile phone. “The basic cinematic rhythms, achieved through editing, coordinate with the equally basic movements of subject motion and frame motion. The effectiveness of any given shot may depend not only on motion within and motion of the frame, but the motion evoked by juxtaposition. Thus, seven fundamental rhythms are responsible for cinema being the art of creating movement. The use of motion in every shot are based on two- at least subject motion and one of the editing types – or more possible rhythms.” (Gessner 2003, p. 167) Robert Gessner writes in The seven faces of time: An Aesthetic for Cinema that once cinema’s uniqueness is more fully understood, we shall have an aesthetic key capable of unlocking new windows. (Gessner 2003, p. 167) The cinematic uniqueness is defined through a filmic quality, which can be underscored through producing a visual rhythm. Working with mobile phone video one can thus create a visual rhythm according to the screens’ parameters for 174x144 or 576x420. With the aim producing an experimental documentary on a mobile phone Japan was chosen, as it is the country with the longest history of mobile devices in this new media. Jphone introduced the first mobile phone with a video camera, the SHARP SH-04, in Japan in 2000. Seven years later in 2007 a Digital Video [6] issue lists a Finnish mobile phone as a video-camera under £500. This mobile phone company is now the worlds largest camera manufacturer and there are now more camera phones in circulation than digital video and stills cameras combined [7]. Last year the N95 was released and introduced a new standard for mobile filmmaking. The mobile device has got 5 Megapixel Carl Zeiss Optics camera, which has the capacity to record images in native video desktop format (VGA 640x480). In the feature Max With a Keitai, I made a distinct choice in using a 2005 mobile phone recording in a low-res resolution (3gp / 176 x 208 pixels). Simultaneously the feature film is illustrating the potential of advanced mobile phone camera technology by means of using a progressive Japanese camera phone in the production. The Foma N902is already had the capacities to record in mpeg4 compression and native video format in 2006. “The quality of their lenses is inferior to that of analogue and digital cameras, as they are made from plastic rather than glass. So far resolution has been relatively poor, compared to the standard quickly established by digital cameras. Other early problems included limited storage capability, relatively short battery life, and lack of control over exposure, focus, and lense size, compared to fuller-featured digital and analogue cameras.” There were a number of problems ranging from the non-existence of any technical support or instructions to incompatible file formats, landscape and portrait formats of mobile phones. The implementation of two mobile devices, a traditional European and an advanced Japanese model allows reflecting upon the advancement of mobile video technology within the project and the timeframe of production. Max With a Keitai can document the technological advancement in camera phone filmmaking juxtaposing the technical quality of a Japanese mobile phone and a European model. The latter camera phone captures the images with a digital two megapixel camera, which pixelates extensively when blown up to the native video format. The video is filmed in the native 3gp format (176x144) QCIF with 12 frames per second. The advanced Japanese mobile phone incorporated the mpeg 4 codes, which allows working with mobile phone video files in the digital standard size QVGA 320 x 240. As the name indicates this is a quarter of native video format VGA (640x480) and therefore video does not pixelate when imported in a standard DV environment. In addition the keitai video camera records with twice as many frames and stereo sound that can be matched with consumer DV camera quality. Max With a Keitai is a digital record of a vblog (www.mobile-mentary.co.uk). The video-blog was produced at the end of 2006 during the production on location in Japan. The experimental city film Max With a Keitai was edited on location and screened for the first time in Japan at the Design Fiesta in Tokyo (http://www.designfesta.com) in December 2006. The screening of the film to a Japanese audience became part of the project and is a direct reference to the Man With a Movie Camera (Vertov 1929 Soviet Union). In a similar way as Vertov (or Wenders Tokyo GA) describes his filmic project as the diary of a cameraman, the mobile-mentary feature project draws upon the mobile-mentary vblog in the form of a visual (almost) real-time sketchbook. Simultaneously comments from the vblog commentators have been included in the city films as inter titles. The web 2.0 impulse is therefore implemented in Max With a Keitai and allows other people beyond the filmmaker Max to give a ‘voice’ in the film. Max With a Keitai bridges the filmic and online formats and environments through the simulation of sms-inter-titles appearing on screen. In addition the vblog functioned as a production diary and travel log. One can notice a conceptual similarity between documentary and (video) blogs at this level. The word ‘documentary’ itself derives from the French, who used the term to describe travelogues by the term documentaire. (Grierson in MacCann 1966, p.207) The mobile-mentary vblog functions in a similar fashion, while creating a visual database as resource for the feature project. The Vblogs or moblogs can be seen as an extension of the documentary format on the websphere. “A weblog is a record of travels on the Web, so a mobile phone log (moblog) should be a record of travels in the world. …As we chatter and text away, our phones could record and share the parts we choose: a walking, talking, seeing record of our time around town, corrected and augmented by other mobloggers.” (Hall in Goggin 2006, p.143) Another factor that needs to be mentioned when dealing with mobile media is the notions of the immediacy and intimacy of the mobile device. “Rather than being a somewhat distinct, or even formal part of the recording, documentation, and remembering of an event or ritual, the camera phone often has become part of the event itself. Camera phones are perceived to offer a sense of immediacy, lessening the time elapsed between the time when the photo was taken and the time it is reviewed.” (Goggin 2006, p.149) Goggin quotes Wilhelm’s phrase of the ‘power of now’ in Mobile convergences. With immediacy, real time simulation and liveness take the position of indexicality. Rather than re-evaluating the capacity of film to capture actuality, Max With a Keitai and the mobile-mentary micro-movie project focus on the formation of a new mobile experience. As a documentary filmmaker one would normally place the camera in a safe position and then use the tele-focus lens to film a scene at a distance from where the action occurs. The mobile phone does not have these capacities and requires the filmmaker to be involved in the action. This directness is transmitted on screen. The images captured on mobile devices are so close that one could touch them. The notion of immediacy, which is often linked to mobile productions, is explored in the city film through the perspective of the filmmaker. Max reminds the audience showing his projection using the camera-phone in mirrors. Max breaks the 180° rule and thus establishes a link to the audience. Through the immediacy of the medium one can identify with the role of the filmmaker. The obstructions of low-res camera technology can be used in a creative way, which is reminiscent of filmmakers using Super 8 or Pixelvision. The abstract pixel is treated as a driving parameter in the construction of the story, which is revealed through the movement and visual flow of the mobile images. In addition the status of a filmmaker shifts into an invisible phenomenon. As mobile phones are ubiquitous one has the possibility to film without attracting much attention. Max With a Keitai does not claim to work as a fly on the wall, but rather provides a intimate perspective of a subjective view of the world. Max with a Keitai films some scenes using a pocket to hide the camera, while drifting through the cityscapes. Also the phone was attached to bicycles and trains, which references the city films travelling shots. The spirit of the Kinkos is present in the mobile-mentaries as we hold the possibilities for filmmaking in our hands on a daily base. The means of production have been made accessible as the Motorola advertisement slogan reveals: We’re all filmmakers now. The industry is trying to market the mobile device as professional camera equipment (which can be exemplified through the Samsung advertisement, which uses professional set lights.) The mobile-mentary research positions the mobile media practice in a rather alternative space. At this point one can also mention the economical factor for mobile-mentaries. The budget for producing a mobile-mentary is located in the region of Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette, 2003, USA) rather than a blockbuster film project. The recording device, the mobile phone was ‘bought’ for free with a mobile phone contract. “On the one hand, new media technologies have lowered production and distribution costs, expanded the range of available delivery channels, and enable consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways. At the same time, there has been an alarming concentration of the ownership of mainstream commercial media, with a small handful of multinational media conglomerates dominating all sectors of the entertainment industry. No one seems capable of describing both sets of changes at the same time, let alone show how they impact each other. Some fear that media is out of control, others a world where gatekeepers have unprecedented power. Again, the truth lies somewhere in between” (Jenkins 2006, p. 18) Without entering the field of cyborg theory one can now point to the extraordinarily fast developments in the field of augmented and alternative reality games. Jenkins quotes Jane McGonigal in Convergence Culture describing alternate reality games as “an interactive drama played out online and in the real-word spaces, taking place over several weeks or month, in which dozens, hundreds, thousands of players come together online, form collaborative social networks, and work together to solve a mystery or problem that would be absolutely impossible to solve alone.” (McGonigal in Jenkins 2006, p. 280) AR (augmented reality) or toolkits like HP’s mscape technolgy [9] have the potential to bridge the two distinct domains: the cinema industry and the games industry. The mobile-mentary micro-movies project works on a similar layer as unique experiences are created by means of watching micro-movies in the city. Different sections from the feature film are extracted as micro movies via Bluetooth and/or the Internet. As the micro-movies can be viewed in any location, they create new experiences, which can be described as a hybrid of the city and filmic space. “Convergence involes both a change in the way media is produced and a change in the way media is consumed” (Jenkins 2006, p. 16) The mobile device is broadening the field in which mobile media artefacts and video footage can be screened. Thus the mobile-mentary project can be viewed as a cinematic single screen project, as a vblog online, as a micro-movie in the city, in a gallery exhibition and/or as a VJ performance. The mobile-mentary micro-movie project explores the fusion of city and mediascpe. Tokyo, as one of the highest populated urban areas and cosmopolitan centres, presents itself through a futuristic endless cityscape. Tokyo Ga mirrors Max’s ginji (foreigner) impressions and perspective of Japanese fast pace everyday life. “The first impressions present a city and a population in constant movement: sounds from video arcades, pachinko halls, and televisions, augumented by the ever-present, discordant soundtrack, the constant rush of traffic, of trains and of people in the Metro system that create a flood of images, and an inescapable cacophony of audio impressions that blend into a monstrous chaos.” (Graf 2002, p.106) In one weblog entry entitled Hayaku (=’be quick’) the impression of the city is symbolically compared to a computer microprocessor. “The city is criss-crossed by trains, cars and pedestrian bridges. The illuminated billboards flash like microprocessors directing the traffic of the town. The post-modern impression of a city is fueled through the Japanese mentality. Office ward workers, couriers, businesswomen, and lots of other passers-by seem to be in a constant hurry. At the street junction in Shibuya a video billboard uses live-video input. …” (Thursday, September 28th, 2006 www.mobile-mentary.co.uk) As a ginji it is a difficult endeavour to break into traditional Japanese circles, but through the non-conventional means exploring the city seemingly hidden traditional spaces have been revealed and captured through the lens of a mobile phone. The futuristic appearance, as framed by Chris Marker and Wim Wenders is extended through the vision of the mobile phone, which captures the contemporary digital city. Max With a Keitai pushes the pixel aesthetic to its limits and beyond any formats fund in mainstream media (, as one can clearly notice in the Hiroshima section of Max With a Keitai.) The limited camera technology depicts the city as a digital and pixelated image. Max With a Kaitai is a film about Japanese cities and thus reflects the structures of the city both formally and aesthetically. Tokyo is a bricolage of tradition, hypermodern, derelict and new emerging consumer temples: a vast hybridity. ----------------------------------------------- References [1] Japanese photographers use the word as a label for deserted modern buildings, most of which were built in the postwar era. (Miller 2007, http://metropolis.co.jp/tokyo/711/feature.asp) [2] Outcry at N Korea 'nuclear test' http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6033457.stm [3] The mobile-mentary research project is an experiment in cinematic communication. This neologism was created (or rather I should say I created this neologism) to emphasize the convergence of mobile technologies and documentary practice to the formation of a new mobile media experience. [4] Chiyoda, Chuo and Minato in the east and Shinjuku, Shibuya and Toshima in the west. [5] The Kenka matsuri festival is the subject of an ethnographic documentary Japanese Fighting Festivals (1984) by Keiko Ikeda. “The festival focus of the social and liturgical year, channels the energies of thousands into a series of ritually-structured brawls that are the symbolic core of the villages and their identity, confirming their existence, and renewing their heritage for the future” (Bestor 1986, p.778) [6] September 2007 issue [7] “Nokia said it was the world's largest camera maker last year, selling about 140 million camera phones” (PC PRO 2007 http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/101404/ces-2007-nokia-chases-the-thin-market-with-new-phones.html) [8]The pre-production experiments are show-cased online (www.mobile-mentary.co.uk) and have been screened at various film festivals (such as the Super Shorts film-festival July 2006 and The Smalls, mobile phone filmmaking showcase, September 2006) [9] (www.mscape.com / www.createascape.org.uk) ----------------------------------------------- Mobile moving image work The mobile-mentary vblog (Schleser 2007 UK/Japan) FILMOBILE conference, exhibition and cinema screening April/May 08. The mobile-mentary micro-movie project (Schleser 2008 UK/Japan 3gp) Max With a Keitai (Schleser 2008 UK/Japan 3gp and mpeg 4) ----------------------------------------------- Filmography Berlin Symphony of a City (Ruttmann, Germany, 1929) Chelovek s kino-apparatom (Vertov, Dziga, 1929, Soviet Union) Japanese Fighting Festivals (Keiko Ikeda, 1984, Japan) La Tour (Clair, France,1928) Max With a Keitai (Max Schleser 2008, Japan/UK) Nausea (Matthew Noel-Tod, 2005, UK) SMS Sugar Man (Aryan Kaganof,2008, South Africa) Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette, 2003, USA) Tokyo GA (Wim Wenders, 1985, Germany) Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953, Japan) Why didn’t anybody tell me it would become this bad in Afghanistan (Cyrus Frisch, 2007, Holland) ----------------------------------------------- BIBLIOGRAPHY Amerika, M. (2007) Meta/Data A Digital Poetics. Cambridge: MIT Press. Astruc, A. (1948) In Graham, P. (1968) The New Wave. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Aumont, J. (1992) Aesthetics of film. 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