|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
More on Pursuits & Retreats from The Atlantic Monthly. Contents | November 2006 |
Pursuits & Retreats
Content
Thank You, YouTubeDIY video is making merely professional television seem stodgy, slow, and hopelessly last century..... hen Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were bringing I Love Lucy to the airwaves in 1951, videotape didn’t exist yet. The only way to create a permanent record of a televised moment was to use a technique called kinescoping, in which a movie camera recorded off a television monitor. Since the country had yet to be linked for live broadcast, viewers in the western half of the country generally had to make do with kinescoped copies of the live productions coming out of New York. Lucy and Desi wanted to make their show in Los Angeles, where they lived, but corporate sponsors insisted that New York audiences—then the country’s largest advertising market—see higher-quality productions than kinescoping offered. The solution: have three movie cameras simultaneously record the performance on a stage in front of a studio audience, with a director stitching together the feeds into a cohesive whole. So was born the three-camera sitcom, television’s most dominant and enduring format.
The lonelygirl15 series, shot on a $150 Web camera, shows that digital video can be made by anyone, go anywhere, and pose as anything. And, clearly, audiences have made a new compact with creators: traditional notions of quality, they are signaling, no longer matter (the out-of-focus, off-kilter MySpace cell-phone snap being the portrait painting of the mid-aughts). In fact, this grittiness, lack of polish, and occasionally shocking intimacy constitute a new aesthetic of realness, much as the scratchiness, feedback, and ostentatious amateurishness of the Sex Pistols made everything else seem like mere affectation. Fear not, revanchists: Do-It- Yourself video will ultimately not mean the end of classic filmic values, just as the Pistols—and Public Enemy and N.W.A and Nirvana after them—did not kill off bad heavy metal, overproduced bling-crazed hip-hop, and unctuous, keening pop rock. Drama, both on television and in film, appears better suited to survive the onslaught than comedy, mostly because narrative seems to be an eternal value. And it’s even been argued that current dramas like 24, Lost, and Prison Break (and pretty much everything on HBO) are so good because of the challenge from digital media: they are faster, more complex, and smarter than the shows we grew up on. DIY video is, in fact, not an overnight phenomenon. One could draw a line from lonelygirl15 as far back as Grey Gardens, the brutally deadpan 1975 Maysles brothers documentary about the batty housebound “Big Edie” Beale and her daughter, the unwittingly fabulous “Little Edie” (aunt and first cousin, respectively, of Jackie O). But it’s indisputable that the advent of low-cost digital video, and its almost-no-cost distribution, make this more than a passing moment. The breakthrough expression of punk video was most likely The Blair Witch Project, a pseudo-documentary horror movie that became the hipster smash of 1999. The conceit was that three student filmmakers disappear somewhere in the Maryland woods while making a documentary, never to be seen again. All we have left is the very tape you’re watching, a coup-de-théâtre that at the time had some of the frisson of a snuff film: the tape just runs out. Once seen all the way through, the story is a bit of a nothingburger, but the whipsaw camera movements, lack of conventional dramatic beats, and off-kilter angles hit emotional notes that mainstream moviemaking couldn’t touch. (Sharing this production approach—but little else—MTV’s Jackass became the DIY- television breakthrough of 2000.)
Michael Hirschorn is the executive vice president of original programming and production at VH1. He will be writing the Content column in each issue of The Atlantic. Copyright © 2006 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; November 2006; Thank You, YouTube; Volume 298, No. 4 |
||||||
Home |
Current Issue |
Back Issues |
Forum |
Site Guide |
Feedback |
Subscribe |
Search
|
|||||||
|