Dancers in the Dark

(on digital filmmaking)

Keynote to an audience of film students
at "Nibblefest",
Columbia University, NY,
on February 24, 2001

I'm not quite sure, who I'm addressing,
what you're all doing
and what your interests are, here, today.
I just know that some of you, maybe most of you, are film students.
Well, just to make sure you know where I'm coming from:
I'm a filmmaker,
and I will talk to you as such.

Here's a theory for you.
The future of cinema lies no longer in its past.
Or let me say it the other way around:
The movies that we know so far
will not help us much
to make the quantum leap
into the digital age of filmmaking.

I know a lot of my colleagues would say now, in answer to that:
"We've learned everything we know about the cinema from its past.
It's dear to us!
We're good at what we do,
and we owe it to the past.
Why wouldn't that knowledge carry us (and our cinema) into the future?"

Well, I don't think it will, because:
The future of the cinema is just about to get invented.
I love and cherish its analogue history,
but I have lost all confidence whatsoever in nostalgia.
Nostalgia isn't getting us, you and me, anywhere.

The digital revolution
of which we are witnessing but the first phase for the last few years,
with its beginning a decade ago,
at least in the field of filmmaking,
that digital revolution is not that much based on evolution
as some might like to believe.
I have the impression it's rather reconstructing Cinema from scratch.

When sound came up, some seventy or so years ago,
a lot of rules changed, some stayed the same.
Films looked less elaborate for a while, that's for sure,
and the elegant language of the silent era was reduced and crippled at first.
But not for that long:
Film incorporated the new technology of sound pretty fast,
recovered and grew and became more complex than ever.

The "new technologies" however are not just an extension of film,
even if they introduced themselves as such at first.
They don't just add a dimension, like sound did.
They will not be incorporated,
they are rather taking over.
They are about to replace "film".
I am not just referring to the material, to celluloid.
I am referring to everything we know about our craft,
our art, our industry.
The entire landscape of film is about to be shaken up completely.
I repeat: Its past will no longer be its future…

Yet, I suppose we will all continue to do what we do,
or in your case what you aspire to become:
We will be directors, producers, writers, actors, cameramen,
set designers, composers…
There will be an increased need for editors,
there will be professions for which we don't have the names yet.
There will even be a continued need for agents and lawyers, unfortunately.
You will all continue to work in that large field of storytelling,
in the realm of the audiovisual world.

Our common profession might even continue to be called "Filmmaking".
But it won't be based on what we know now
and what we've learned from the past.

I don't necessarily pretend to know more than you.
I have worked a bit inside that new digital world,
I have learned how to use some of the new tools, just a bit,
I have made some music videos and commercials,
I have shot on virtual sets,
I have worked in High-Definition,
for the first time in 1990,
and lately on Sony's 24p camera,
I have shot 2 entire feature-length films digitally,
done some special effect work,
sat on machines like the Fire, the Flame, or the Inferno,
(their names all sound as if Dante had invented them)
I worked on the Henry, the C-Reality…
just enough to understand that I have only opened a door
and peaked into a new landscape.

I feel like the guy in that famous drawing from the middle ages
who breaks through the skin that is wrapped around the Earth's atmosphere
and sees the planets and the stars out there, in amazement.
I feel like I want to turn around as well and tell everybody
that the Earth is not flat,
that Cinema is not flat,
and that we all don't have an idea yet what's out there.
It's in those dimensions,
that I see the impact of the so-called new technologies:

Even Lars von Trier with his remarkably big step into this future
(talking about "Dancer in the Dark")
even Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Roland Emmerich or Luc Besson,
and with them other directors
who have faced and embraced the new technologies
we don't know all that much about the vast open territory in front of us.

Right now filmmaking seems to me like at the age
when the first scientists imagined nuclear energy
and then eventually managed to split matter for the first time.
Little did they know.
It's like that now:
We have just learned how each image and each sound
can be split up down to its atoms
and put back together.
But we are still handling those images with the same narrative structures,
the same dramaturgy, the same storytelling recipes,
the same storyboards and editing techniques
like Griffith, Chaplin or Abel Gance.
Basically.

We can feed film into computers so that it becomes immaterial information,
of which every bit, every single atom, can be worked at,
manipulated, changed and replaced.
Then we can output the result back to film,
as if nothing ever happened.
But we have not changed all the story-telling tools around.
We're still toying around with a new nuclear technology of images
without a clue, really, where it is taking us.

Technology never does anything that you don't make it do.
Nothing else produces poetry, beauty, truth, drama, tension, feelings,
than the human mind and the human heart.
Digital technology can't do that.
It can't do anything on its own.
Technology is not entertaining us, not teaching us, not moving us.
In the future of cinema
we/you still have to do that.

There is a word that has become very popular lately
that I hate passionately.
I get angry, when I hear it,
because it makes such a stupid, mindless, sad statement.
That word is: "Content".
It comes out of that insecure time of transition
in which we're in,
where technology rules.
We can do so much, all of a sudden,
that these new technologies of transmission
(which they basically are…)
are encouraged to pretend that they ARE the essential thing themselves,
so that what they transport,
looks like it was only of secondary nature,
only "Content".
Can you feel how condescending that word is?

I am looking forward to the future
where technology will be so boring again
that the only exciting thing will be, once more,
what you say with it, what you express with it.

I am not talking against the new technologies here.
On the very contrary:
I rather suggest to accept it as given
that they are here to stay and to change the cinema.
But I would like to encourage you
to imagine how to overcome that situation of unbalance
between technology and "content".

If the biggest advertising factor for a film today are his special effects,
meaning the mere technology used to tell its story,
and if the story and the characters play second fiddle to these effects,
then we are in the process of giving up our craft to our tools.
Our craft is storytelling,
not handling digital machines.
Let's not mix up motion with emotion.

There is really only one attitude towards our new nuclear technology
which is: To master it.
We have to learn how to use it, competently,
because right now it is in effect starting to use us.

Right now it might seem to many,
especially in my generation,
as if all that digital technology was invented mainly to blow things up
and to create new and cheaper ways to depict destruction,
all sorts of horror and brutality.
That's a huge misunderstanding,
but provoked by the history of digital effects,
who in fact were first used only in commercials
and then in big action movies,
very often for gory effects.

But it would be so very nearsighted
and a fatal mistake
to constrain digital technology to that first application,
to their first clumsy appearance.
It is up to us
to put the new digital technologies into the service of all sorts of storytelling
and push them into realms that nobody has opened up yet.
They are capable of everything, not just violence.
They are willing to be instruments of poetry as well,
of tenderness, of lightness, of irony.

Only this technology will help us, will help YOU,
to adequately grasp the reality of the 21st century.
We can't make new expeditions into the human mind and the human heart
with the hardware of the 19th century.

In a few years, there will be data beamers
standing next to the good old movie projectors,
and in another few years, those projectors will be gone.
Along all the new films that will be shot,
the entire history of cinema will be available in any theatre
via servers, optical cables, satellites, broadband or whatever system.

The cinema of the past will continue to exist in the future medium,
the cinema of the future still wants to know how to fill that digital medium.
We already catch glimpses of it, here and there,
glimpses of an incredible richness of expression.
And that is why my anticipation of it is optimistic.

To sum it up:
The power, the poetry and the imagination
are only in the hands of people
who master their craft and their tools.
There is an abundance of new tools just shaping up in front of our eyes.
A lot of people will use them recklessly and mindlessly.
You can count on that.
So we shouldn't just leave them in their hands.
It is up to you to expand our craft and our art and our knowledge
so you stay in control of the industry
that we still might call "Cinema" in the future.

I envy you for that big formidable task.
You will have the vocabulary and the grammar at hand
to reinvent storytelling.
This time of transition will eventually end.
Make sure that in the new era afterwards
the endless possibilities
will be filled with all aspects of the human condition,
not just "content".

Technology will help you,
but it won't do anything on its own.
You have to force it to start swinging,
hopefully even dancing.
Otherwise we'll all end up as dancers in the dark.

Wim signs a poster of 'Until the End of the World' at Nibblebox.com.

back to March 2001 News Reel