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The Birth of Primary Cinema from the Spirit of Sound - Feature Article by Frank Rothkamm | ||||||||||
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 It is about eleven o'clock in the morning in my studio in Los Angeles. I look out the window and stare at the Hollywood sign in the distance. The phone almost never rings. If it does, I pick up and nobody is on the line. After a while my mind drifts and a single thought forms in my head like a mantra: As the rate of information is increasing, so is its comprehensibility decreasing. I realize that this is especially true for motion pictures, arguably the first digital art form because they're made of single images floating by at the rate of twenty four frames per second. At this rate however, the perception is one of continuous motion. Because of the high rate of images per second, or, of information given per second, the brain (or let me use a Kantian term: the understanding) can no longer understand or process the single image. The development of the modern cinema in Hollywood has only increased the misunderstanding of the single image by constantly increasing the rate of events per second. When I turn on the TV, a SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon is interrupted by a commercial. The longer the show continues, the more often the commercials are shown. The scenes in these commercials are cut so fast and there are so many images per second that I have no idea of what I'm actually watching and thus, no idea what it is that I'm supposed to buy. I do not try to understand anything anymore, I just sit here and let the events pass by. My eyes drift back to the Hollywood sign: Motion pictures are based on an illusion. Motion pictures are based on an illusion that results from the impossibility to understand a single image. Furthermore, the rate, or the amount, of this illusion is increasing. More and more events occur per minute and the amount of information on the screen is increasing proportionally to the resolution of picture and sound. Everything goes up: The average number of differently coloured pixels, the amount of things on the screen, the number of audible frequencies, and the amount of sound events. This happens not only in technological terms but also in terms of content, of information density. Hollywood's motion pictures are on the verge of becoming black holes: Everything gets sucked into them, but nothing gets out. Everything starts to pass us by but we understand nothing. I fly back to New York. Later, I take an overnight flight to Copenhagen. It starts fine, food is served early and there is wine and cognac. I close my eyes and try to sleep, but after an hour I give up. So, I stare out the window and watch the morning sun over the clouds. Suddenly I don't feel well, panic sets in, and I see the sky falling just before I black out. When I finally return to consciousness, I see a single image: Danish flight attendants are leaning over me. More significantly, sound slowly fades back in, people are talking to me. I try to understand what is going on. This takes me a very long time, the sound is floating by me and I relate what I see to that what I hear. I cling to the soundtrack. For the rest of the flight, I'm in the rear of the aircraft attached to an oxygen mask. All I can do is breath and keep reality from falling away: The illusion of Hollywood's cinema must be turned right side up again. Instead of increasing the images per second, time must be imploded. There will be only a few images that change in galactic time spans. The changes will be almost imperceptible. A cinema that reaches for the outer limits of perception will destroy the dominant illusion of reality. Only if a single image is confronted over the course of many minutes, the brain, the understanding, perception itself will create changes. In the simplest form, it will look at a different part of the minutely changing motion picture. So a mental process is set in motion in the observer, the opening of the psycho-cybernetic dimension: In an attempt to find meaning the auditory perception is heightened to compensate for the lack of visual clues. Sound is primary. I continue to breathe through the oxygen mask, sitting motionless. Ages ago in the darkness of night, humans living in caves were forced to comprehend visual information out of the sound environment. In this way, a dangerous animal could be discovered. This is a basic survival instinct. So, man's Primary Cinema is looking at a very slow moving image in the dark with little visual information while intently listening to sound. Arguably, this is the original immersive surround sound experience and therefore the essence of Primary Cinema is sound. If there was a synthesized soundtrack in which changes happen at an almost imperceptible pace, memory becomes involved. What we perceive as the present tense is really only a twenty second window of short term memory, consisting of three to nine elements. Any longer or more detailed and the understanding begins to exercise its long term memory. Any sound perceived is now compared to the sound remembered. So there is a fine line between the static and the changing: a perceptual divide between memory recall and apprehension. In Primary Cinema one cannot be certain if the perceived sensation is a pattern, a repetition, something static or is something that changes constantly. This is something like Tarkovsky's ZONE, the outer LIMIT of perception, the REGION between signal and noise, between the periodic and a-periodic, between the random and the pattern, between chaos and order. I come back to New York to a minimally furnished studio. I have no TV here. The apartment has been on the market for nine months now, sitting empty. Nobody has made an offer. The stock market begins to collapse. I now put theory into praxis and begin to photograph at night in the streets of Jackson Heights. Everything is shot from the perspective of someone whose head is on the ground, the camera only a few inches above the streets of the city. I shoot the images as I would record a sound. Like a stranger in a foreign land, I'm the only person photographing the vernacular. Towards the intra-image narrative. Primary Cinema remains cinema, it is not painting or staged photography. It is comprehended as a sequence of images with sound which ultimately constructs its meaning. It de-emphasizes change and reduces bright-ness and distributes events on a galactic scale, but despite its apparent emptiness it remains true cinema as the marriage of projected images and sound in space and time. The temporal dimension, the inclusion of everything experiential in space and time provides for the cinematic effect, as everything outside of space and time is unknowable (and remains only an idea or concept). However, like in calculus, infinity is broken down into a series of comprehensible steps. Each step is a scene and ultimately all scenes will make the movie. It is about seven o'clock in the evening on October 3rd, 2008. I'm at Harvestworks in New York and I'm about to start the first test screening of Primary Cinema. The seats are half-filled and the lights go out when I hear somebody ask a question: "What's the title of your film?" I'm caught off-guard. I have no title, but give an answer: "The film does not have a title, but it has a number." In the end, Primary Cinema happens mostly in the perception, understanding, and imagination of the observer because the idea of suspended animation implies time. There can only be a suspension if a primary motion exists. This is Aristotle's prime mover. This is the single image. References: The title of this article: Friedrich Nietzsche The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872) The first line of this article: Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep (1939) History of: Hollywood sign The Understanding: Immanuel Kant Critique of Pure Reason (1781) http://philosophy.ucdavis.edu/mattey/kant/UNDERST.HTM SpongeBob SquarePants: Stephen Hillenburg The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004) Psycho-cybernetic Dimension: Maxwell Maltz Psycho-Cybernetics (1960) Synthesized soundtrack: Frank Rothkamm Iformm (1987-2008) http://iformm.com/content.cfm?dir=CSOUND.DIR&file=RND.GEN The ZONE: Andrei Tarkovsky Stalker (1979) Jackson Heights: New York City neighborhood of Jackson Heights Calculus: Infinitesimal calculus Harvestworks: Harvestworks on October 3rd, 2008: Prime or unmoved mover: Aristotle Metaphysics (350 B.C.E) "The Birth of Primary Cinema from the Spirit of Sound" was composed by Frank Rothkamm. (http://rothkamm.com) in New York and Los Angeles in 2008. The first embodiment of "primary cinema" is a yet untitled and partly finished pixel accurate High Definition 1080-60i (1920 x 1080) Digital Movie, with 24bit/48kHz 5.1 surround sound audio with the center ignored, in essence Quadrophony with equal power to all loudspeakers. Executive Producer: Nina Schneider. For more information (http://fluxrecords.com) Screening request contact: info@fluxrecords.com Review by Frank Rothkamm
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