Screening the digital - Digital Film Festival, New York, New York

Afterimage, March-April, 1998 by Barbara L. Miller

The producers of Contact (1997, by Robert Zemeckis), for example, inserted digitally-altered news footage of Clinton into several scenes. In doing so, they suggest that a global icon such as the President of the United States has become an avatar or, worse still, clip art. As such, he can be inserted into a spectrum of media publications. While for some, this may be an amusing comment on Clinton's shifting persona and political agendas, the world of make-believe now, to a greater degree than in the past, shapes our perception of reality. This development has alarming consequences.

Newscasters often broadcast computer-enhanced footage of catastrophic events. In late August 1997, newscasters zoomed in and cleaned up a portion of the video surveillance tape taken at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. In a bizarre replay reminiscent of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), images of Princess Diana, her lover and chauffeur were endlessly broadcast on every news station around the globe. Viewers could interpret the events that led up to the Princess's death. In doing so, newscasters produced a sense of immediacy and participation; those of us glued to our sets in disbelief could pretend we were participants in the investigation or guests on a find-the-hidden-clue game show. Hence, the broadcasts were only a few steps away from realizing sci-fi fantasies such as The Running Man (1987, by Paul Michael Glaser): in a bizarre twenty-first-century game show, the audience bet on a contestant's ability to survive a rather brutal obstacle course.

It is in this milieu of immediacy and participation that d.film emerges. D.film comes into existence in the very era when the boundaries between reality and fiction, viewing and participation are becoming increasingly unstable. We are at a point where these ideas can, to some extent, be reshaped. It is this notion that d.films such as Vester's Abductees, begin to address, but does not go far enough.

In Abductees, Vester produced a visually stimulating image track. After meticulously going over all the descriptions, I was most taken with this piece; the artist, as the program states, took live video footage, blew it up on a Xerox machine and then repegged and reshot the images. The result proved to be an exciting, grainy, yet dense surface. Each segment became a spatial grid. Rather than exploring aspects of this grid, playing with the boundaries that separate front from back planes and manipulating the distinctions that define "real" and reproduced images, Vester stopped short and wove his intricately layered surfaces into a traditional storyline. Given the inherent non-linear aspects of his working process, it is curious that Vester and so many other d.filmmakers in the festival were so invested in telling a linear story. This is not to say that they should not do so, but it seems that traditional film and analog video are better suited to this type of exploration.

If d.filmmakers are, as Cheever states in the November 1997 issue of Wired, attempting to reconceptualize Hollywood cinema, they need to rethink their strategy. Their low-end experimental shorts too closely resemble Hollywood productions. As a result of their dependence on storylines, d.filmmakers' evocative works looked more like demo reels. If these artists want to produce work for industry that is their choice. If they want to create work for an art audience, they could learn much from video art; video artists of the '70s and '80s understood the critical potential of the technology and demonstrated this knowledge in their work.