City of Brass: The Art of Masking Reality in Digital Film

Abstract

The author's interest in film lies in its ability to expand consciousness and perception in ways unique to the medium. His films challenge the language of filmmaking, be it montage, color, sound, lighting, mise-en-scène or acting. The author employs a wide palette of film vocabulary to mask reality and filter it through a personal vision. With the introduction of computers, new ways of seeing the world through film, and thus of acting in the world, may be accomplished.

The Process

In my digital film City of Brass I have attempted to explore the use of computers to expand film language, not merely by recording with digital cameras, but more importantly by juxtaposing optical and computer environments within the overall film vocabulary to gain new insights into the nature of seeing and knowing.

Although the interplay of optical and digital landscapes has been used in many recent films, what is disappointing is that this process has been used to enhance photographic realism. Indeed, such an approach clarifies nothing. All in all, little is done on the aesthetic plane to expand the language of cinema as an art form through the use of computation and consequently to pave the way for new ways of perception, as sound and color did in the 1930s, for example.

In City of Brass the interplay of the optical and digital landscapes facilitates the transition from photographic realism to aesthetic impressionism and creates a tension between psychological realism and symbolism. The viewer is confronted with an enigmatic film image, which simultaneously engages both the conscious and the unconscious state of mind. The former encounters the real environment of the optical world, while the latter is engrossed in the symbolic imagery generated by the computer. The viewer's perception thus encounters a double reality, that of the familiar and that of the symbolic. The ensuing multi-layered digital film image becomes a hieroglyphic sign, having a hidden meaning, symbolical and emblematic. This new genre of filmic image, however, does not and cannot become part of the vocabulary of film language if other filmic elements are not profusely intermingled within its formal architecture, allowing form and meaning to become one [1].

Of course, there is nothing new in what I am doing. The great masters of cinema have all created worlds in which both concreteness and fantasy existed side by side. What is problematic today is that there is a strong move to politicize and subsequently standardize concreteness and suppress fantasy. The commercial markets, as well as the ideologues of academia, galleries and museums are responsible for this crisis.

The Art of Masking Reality

"Masking" refers to obscuring or covering up the true state, identity or character of a thing, but also to altering its appearance and misleading by presenting a different apparent identity. "Reality" refers to the totality of real things and events. Therefore, it is not artificial or illusory, but genuine, being precisely what the thing itself implies. It is the opposite of masking, in which existence is inferred from indirect evidence.

Fig. 1.

"The Witch," still from the digital film City of Brass, 2002. An optical and digital image.

© Muqarnas Cinema

Fig. 2.

"Alma and Antoine," still from City of Brass: 2002. Dramatic tension.

© Muqarnas Cinema

In the juxtaposition of these two opposite states of being in the art of film, something magical happened in 1895. On one hand, it is cinema's ability to represent reality "as it is" (in the words of the Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov) that gave it its initial magic. On the other hand, it was the masking of this reality that gave film a language and transformed it into an art form. Be it Méliès's in-camera dissolves, Murnau's miniature sets and chiaroscuro, Gance's multiple-screen composition, Dreyer's space and expressive camera, Welles's deep space and dynamic editing, Ford's mythic landscapes, McLaren's animated movements, Rossellini's neorealism, Bokanowski's and Frampton's...