User:Aitantv/Metahaven (2018) Digital Tarkovsky

Part 1: Cinema of the Interface

• “For all the complaints that we could make against the average digital device for the time that it is stealing from us, we should perhaps instead investigate the kind of experience that we have whilst staring at — and interacting with — these tiny screens and the digital platforms inside and behind them. Since the experience we intend to describe contains the elements of image, sound, motion, interaction, and duration, we are considering it a cinematic experience.”
• “Media theorist Charles Soukup contends that “the temporal and spatial dimensions of everyday life are complexly interconnected with digital screens. Time and space are fragmented and displaced as individuals are decreasingly ‘grounded’ or tethered to a kind of physical shared reality.”
• “We are engaging with digital devices and screens in a way that approaches, but has not yet reached, the stage of full immersion. In other words, the proto-cinematic narrative form that unites all of these screen experiences is not yet seamless and complete; a digital patchwork that blends in and out of reality and, at the time of writing, ends up totaling every day at the length of a slow Russian movie.”
• “One of the most central qualities of Tarkovsky’s films is how they make us feel the flow of time — even if such a flow is more of a human experience than an accurate scientific observation. Put differently, Tarkovsky forces us to experience the fact that things take time.”
• “We are daydreaming, speculating, and waiting differently. Messages, push notifications, and social media prompts become a new measure of our time. Our addiction to the mobile device’s platform services then enmeshes us in time intervals that run between our cravings for updates, shorter or longer latency periods when no updates happen, the moments of actual updates, and the velocities of all other events in our lives and environments.”
• Media theorist Charles Soukup contends that “the temporal and spatial dimensions of everyday life are complexly interconnected with digital screens. Platforms direct narrative arches and cliffhangers, shaping themselves around a user’s needs and attention. All of this is crucially dependent on the user reciprocating. The platform experience becomes increasingly lengthier, while more user data feeds back into the platform.”
• “Cinema does not normally resolve the problem of the broken cup by running the footage backwards. Instead, its drama is the unfolding of entropy itself. As in life, irreversibility is the driving force of the narrative. Cinema finds one of its sources of drama in entropy, and a certain amount of realism or life-likeness plays a role here too.”
• “For Stiegler, cinema creates a sort of temporary pocket inside a larger timescale, in which cinematic consciousness becomes active. While watching a film, “the time of our consciousness will be totally passive within the thrall of those ‘moving’ images that are linked together by noises, sounds, words, voices. [M]inutes of our life will have passed by outside our ‘real’ life, but within a life or the lives of people and events, [29] real or fictive, to which we will have conjoined our time, adopting their events as though they were happening to us as they happened to them.”
• “Prior events accumulate into an experiential “current note,” a Now that functions not just as a momentary state of being but as a hyper-dense neutron star comprised of many previous Nows. The consecutive passing of each image thus becomes compressed into each future Now.”
• “In spite of film having already ostentatiously won the competition for biggest screen, it still deems it necessary to set rules to avoid distraction from other durational devices; film’s claims on space have to be aggressively defended because it has lost its monopoly on time. More precisely, cinema has lost its monopoly over the dominating inner-time that the screen acts as a conduit for.”
• “In post-war France, the historian Fernand Braudel introduced an equivalent of the cinematic long take: the longue durée. It was nothing short of a paradigm shift in what it meant to write history, and how this was supposed to happen. Braudel viewed history as a dialectic between slow, almost imperceptible change, and the present as it would be experienced at any given moment.”
• “For nothing is more important, nothing comes closer to the crux of social reality than this living, intimate, infinitely repeated opposition between the instant of time and that time which flows only slowly.”
• “Braudel’s long-term historical pattern recognition disjoints the moving playhead from the in- and out-points of the take. Unsurprisingly, a field for which Braudel’s work holds a special significance is that of climatology. The massive, irreversible, planetary-scale climate change that is associated with the feedback loops which human industrial and economic activity has triggered onto the planet can politically uniquely be assessed as a longue durée.”
• “On November 7, 2012, Donald Trump tweeted: “It’s freezing and snowing in New York — we need global warming!” [41] The future president of the United States demonstrated, in grotesquely inflated form, what beguiles “humans with their own innate sense of hereness and nowness, elevating it to the norm for the universe and everything and everyone else. Why should cinema keep catering to this erratic human trait, the fallacy of the Now?”
• “Geoff Dyer complains that “we move further and further away from Tarkovsky time towards moron-time in which nothing can last — and no one can concentrate on anything — for longer than about two seconds.” [6] Will Self, in a talk spearheaded by a still from Solaris, decries the dramatic shortening of the average shot length in films over the course of the last century. For this reason, Self claims he no longer watches films, but only film stills. [7] Time, says Dyer, is no longer experienced as an art form but simply as a hindrance to enjoyment.”