Of all the many weirdnesses of the age of lockdown, video-conferencing must be one of the weirdest. This is the first time many of us have used Zoom, FaceTime, Google Hangouts and Houseparty. And, invaluable as they are, few would disagree that they are a strange way to communicate. From the stilted family group chat to the strained business meeting, it all feels messy and unnatural. Video-conferencing is nothing like real-life conversation, nor is it like cinema or TV, even though it is essentially watching people on a screen.
However, for a certain strain of film-makers and artists, the unblinking, unmoving gaze of the webcam is familiar territory. Could the art end of cinema help ease our pain and anxiety? Could we improve our new social rituals by rethinking them as experiments in avant garde film?
First, it is worth pinpointing the ways in which cinema is different from real life. “The image you get in front of you could be very similar to the real world, but the way you process it is very different,” says Dr Tim Smith, an experimental psychologist at Birkbeck, University of London. Smith’s research involves tracking the eye movements of movie-watchers. Basically, he says, we spend 80% of a film looking at faces. Just as in real life, we fix on the eyes, the mouth and the nose.
But there is one key difference, he says: “When a face looks back at us in the real world, that means something very deep: we have to choose how to respond – because they can see us. So we manifest a facial expression, or talk back, or look away. Cinema takes away that other person seeing you. That gives us some freedom: we can look, think and engage with the content of the film.”
Video-conferencing falls somewhere between the two. You are watching people on screen, but they are watching you back. There are added weirdnesses: as well as seeing whomever you are talking to, you are also watching – and broadcasting – yourself. And it is not just your face, but everything around you. Essentially, you are composing your own scene, be that a casually messy kitchen or a studiously arranged study with all the serious-looking books visible and all the Batman comics and Jilly Cooper novels stashed safely out of shot.
So video-conferencing is like acting in a movie, except you are also directing and production designing, not to mention being in charge of lighting, hair, makeup and more. No wonder it feels so weird and looks so ropey. We are all auteurs now. And we are out of our depths.
A video chat is effectively a movie consisting of one unbroken, usually static, take, while at the cinema we have been trained to expect the opposite. Modern movies never sit still. The language has become complex, relying on camera movement and editing. It is a language that developed almost instantly. The very first movies, shown by the Lumière brothers in 1895, were single takes shot from a fixed camera. Within a year, though, the Lumières were placing their cumbersome camera on a boat or a train, thus creating the tracking shot. Given the limited length of a reel, pioneers soon began sticking lengths of film together to create longer works – and editing was invented.
The vocabulary snowballed: closeups, pans, tilts, dolly shots, zooms. Cameras got smaller, smoother, more mobile. Each new trick gave film-makers new options. Now, thanks to CGI and “virtual” cinematography, anything is possible. Cameras, freed from human operators, can swoop and fly in space. These days, we are often processing images that last only a quarter of a second.
Virtuosity in cinema is often measured in terms of movement and editing. How did Orson Welles create that tracking shot in Touch of Evil? How did David Fincher get the camera to travel through the handle of that coffee pot in Panic Room? How did Sam Mendes make 1917 look like one continuous shot?
However, there are film-makers who have made a point of not moving the camera, of not editing the action. Instead, they work in long, static takes. Andy Warhol, for one, would have revelled in our present Zoom anxieties. Ignoring the Hollywood rules, his seminal early 60s films consist of inexorable takes from a fixed camera: a man slumbering in Sleep (five hours 20 minutes); the Empire State Building from dusk till dawn in Empire (eight hours).
His celebrated Screen Tests, however, may be more relevant to the video-conferencing age. These were short films made of visitors to his celebrated Factory studio. As if posing for a still portrait, celebrities, artists and hangers-on were simply seated in front of a camera for the duration of a reel (three and a half minutes). The results are often revealing. Edie Sedgwick tries not to blink; Dennis Hopper smoulders moodily; Lou Reed wears shades and coolly swigs a Coke.
Subsequent film-makers have taken a similar approach in very different places. For US auteurs Jim Jarmusch and Kevin Smith, there was a certain coolness in just setting up the camera and letting stuff happen in front of it. Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami ran with the idea of the “directorless” camera, most notably in 2002’s Ten. He simply fixed two cameras to the dashboard of a car: one trained on the driver (the actor Mania Akbari), the other on her various passengers (her son, her sister, a sex worker) as she cruised around Tehran.
For viewers, the long, still, painterly approach invites a different way of watching. Instead of being led by movement, editing, directorial winks and nudges, we are encouraged to view the images in our own way. In his 1975 book Transcendental Style in Film, the director Paul Schrader argued that this “contemplative” approach can achieve an almost spiritual dimension. “Most films lean into the viewer desperate for attention. They grab us by the lapels. Contemplative films, on the other hand, lean away. They challenge the viewer to lean forward.”
Such films, Schrader argued, are closer to meditation, “striving towards the ineffable and the invisible”. Schrader traced the tradition back to Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman and such postwar Italian neo-realists as Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica, who took time between dramatic moments to simply observe people going about their everyday business.
This approach is echoed in Chantal Akerman’s pioneering 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. As the street address that forms its title suggests, the film observes the frequently mundane life of a Paris housewife (and part-time sex worker) in almost real time, through long, locked-off takes. Akerman influenced Joanna Hogg, whose dissections of everyday British middle-class dysfunction, from Unrelated to Archipelago, contain barely a camera movement. The tradition extends into overtly spiritual films such as Paweł Pawlikowski’s Oscar-winning Ida (centred on a Polish nun), or the work of “slow cinema” auteurs Lav Diaz, Bela Tarr, Ben Rivers and Pedro Costa.
If video-conferencing needs a patron saint, though, it is surely Yasujiro Ozu, the purveyor of such restrained, achingly humane studies of postwar family life as Tokyo Story, Late Spring and Floating Weeds. Ozu barely ever moved the camera. He usually placed it low down, a few feet off the ground. It became known as the “tatami shot”: corresponding to the eye level of someone sitting on a tatami mat in a traditional Japanese home, although Ozu used a similar low angle for exterior shots.
“It is the attitude for watching, for listening, even for learning,” wrote the cinema historian Donald Ritchie. “Some have consequently compared this position with that of the haiku poet, the tea master, even the priest. This vantage point puts the world at a distance and leaves the spectator uninvolved, a recorder of impressions which he may register, but which do not necessarily involve him.”
Can we achieve the same Buddhist detachment in our Zoom exchanges? Going the full Ozu – sitting on the floor with your laptop on a stool – might be a little excessive if you are just going through figures with the sales team. But if we are going to be video-conferencing a lot, we may as well try to make an artform of it and learn a few tricks from the masters. We have certainly got time.
