The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

to offer the viewer the opportunity to observe events as they unfold and experience time passing, a very different cinematic experience from the fast editing and dialogue- and action-driven viewing characteristic of mainstream North American cinema. Developments in digital technology have heightened the contrast between fast, fragmented cinematic worlds augmented by special effects — though these worlds are paradoxically ever more ‘realistic’ — and more contemplative cinemas which aim to crystallise moments of everyday experience in real time. Digital technology has transformed filmmaking at both ends of the production spectrum. While digital special effects now permeate genre cinema to the point where the distinction between live action and artifice is fluid, accessible digital equipment has also changed the nature of small-budget filmmaking. Many filmmakers and critics have discussed the specific qualities and possibilities of small-scale digital film production. Cinema that aims to be close to life — filmed in real locations without professional actors, following the rhythms of the everyday — has greatly benefited from the development of easy-to-use and affordable digital cameras and editing systems, as well as from the advent of DVD and online distribution. Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami underlines the technical freedoms of digital production with a small crew and an unobtrusive digital camera. In his film 10 on Ten 2004, Kiarostami comments in the second of the ten numbered sequences, entitled ‘2: The camera’: The video camera gives both the director and viewer the possibility of discovery. In this way, the camera eliminates the artifice so implanted in the industry. It gives you the possibility of expanding the dimensions of cinema and getting rid of clichés, traditions, imposed forms and pretentious aesthetics . . . Now we can consider that filmmaking is not that different from writing a book, making a sculpture or painting a picture. You no longer really need investment and investors to make a film nor do you need all sorts of skills. All of the necessary skills are self-contained in this small camera. This camera allows artists to work alone again . . . With its impact on cinema, this new phenomenon will bring about structural and fundamental changes in the concept of film, cinema, directing, cinematography, editing, acting and so on. The digital camera is a very firm and valid invitation to return the auteur to the scene. Kiarostami does not equate digital means with any privileged access to reality, but rather underlines its potential to enable experimentation and individual expression. Award-winning, independent filmmaker Lav Diaz, whose often extremely long digital features are rooted in Filipino history and politics, underlines how digital equipment has ensured broad access to the means of cinema production, as well as freedom from financial control: The relatively cheap digital video has started a cinema revolution in all of Southeast Asia. Not only in the Philippines, but in the whole region, a new independent cinema is emerging that works predominantly with digital video. Countries like Malaysia that never had an independent cinema are all of a sudden producing all these unusual films that are increasingly successful in international festivals. Digital is liberation theology. 8 Diaz links digital technology to the pursuit of radical economic and social equality. It has certainly enabled many directors who would not otherwise have had the opportunity, to make films and to experiment stylistically, to respond to social issues as they arise, and to find audiences for their films. Innovative forms of observational cinema have emerged from the conjunction of digital means and ‘slow’ style, notably in varying genres of documentary fiction and fictionalised documentary. Today, documentary is increasingly experienced as a mode to be combined with others. Memories, testimonial, narrative, character and observation are mobilised equally in documentary and feature films, making the two increasingly difficult to clearly distinguish or define. Feature film directors use real locations and individuals; events and daily interactions may closely resemble those filmed, and some actors may play themselves, as in Asli Özge’s Men on the Bridge 2009, a film constructed around the lives of a rose seller, a taxi driver and a police officer who work on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mysterious Object at Noon 2000 was influential in this blurring of boundaries. A road movie with an improvised narrative that the director compares to the surrealists’ ‘exquisite corpse’ drawings, 9 the film travels through northern Thailand via a series of encounters in which willing participants are asked to add to an ongoing narrative. Weerasethakul has said about his process: ‘I try to mimic the pattern of memory and of thinking and the randomness of life’. 10 Just as the partition between fiction and documentary has collapsed, so has the historical opposition between realism and spectacle or artifice. This contrast has been drawn since the early days of cinema, usually with reference to the Lumière brothers’ aim to record reality and George Méliès’s pursuit of spectacle through animation or special effects. In mainstream North American cinema, the expanding application of 56