The Clockwork Penguin

Daniel Binns is a media theorist and filmmaker tinkering with the weird edges of technology, storytelling, and screen culture. He is the author of Material Media-Making in the Digital Age and currently writes about posthuman poetics, glitchy machines, and speculative media worlds.

Tag: cinema

  • Look inside

    mare incognito

    While abroad in January, I was invited to a premiere screening of De Humani Corporis Fabrica, a pretty harrowing slice-of-life documentary set in a French hospital. A bizarre experience for my first couple of days in France, as my middling language skills were tested; but many lovely moments of juxtaposition of sound and vision, particularly with surgeons discussing quotidian, often humorous, matters as we see the confronting effects of their actions on the patient on the table.

    My overriding thought through the whole thing – perhaps as a kind of coping mechanism – was how amazing we are as a species. While there is still so much to learn in every realm of science (will we ever learn everything?), we know so much about ourselves; certainly enough to remedy a host of ills.

    There was also something about watching this post-lockdown, post-anti-vaxxers, and during whatever social suspension of disbelief is trending right now. Something about health workers, be they heart surgeons, nurses, or morticians, just cracking on with their work, looking after everyone because it’s their job. Cracking on in spite of the horrendous rhetoric they’ve had to put up with over the last few years, not to mention even before COVID being treated, on the whole, very poorly.

    The confrontational aspect is the very objective views of internal organs being sliced open or purged, or just scalpels digging into human flesh, or various other procedures of increasing or decreasing discomfort to both patient and viewer. After a while I actually found myself somewhat desensitised, while also thinking about the scientific advancements that led us to this point. There’s also something about seeing a body flayed open that made me think of old anatomical drawings, as a kind of map of the human form, but also as a visual diary of the evolution of how we think about bodies, corporeality, mortality, existence.

    Old maps, too, command a kind of fascination, and a strong connection to anatomical illustrations. The visual style is sometimes similar, but particularly there is an element of the unknown present in both. We seek to fill the unknown with something, anything; in many historical cases that was some kind of ethereal force, be it religious, cosmic, or fantastical.

    We are more willing now, I think, to accept the infinite, the ungraspable. This is sometimes an aspirational quality for academics, to be sure, but there is the increasingly pervasive aspiration of intellectual humility: a willingness to acknowledge one’s limits or boundaries, to hold space in one’s mind for what we do not (or indeed, cannot) know. This film put me, once more, in awe of medical professionals, and of modern science, and very willing to sprinkle a little ‘here be dragons’ over that kind of knowledge.

    What a privilege it is to be able to see films like this; and what privilege to be able to think and write about them. The most any of us can hope for is to wear that privilege as humility when, invariably, we have to enter some kind of healthcare setting at some point in our lives.

  • Back on the (block)chain gang

    My current writing project is around blockchain and the entertainment industries, and mostly involves sorting hype from legitimate ideas. This is one of the first not-super-conceptual academic pieces I’ve written, so it’s interesting to sort through a whole bunch of reportage, blogs, videos, and just get a sense of what the current atmosphere around something is.

    In this case, that ‘something’ is blockchain, crypto, NFTs, and how, in the wake of That Sale, everyone wants one, is selling one, or is just trying to understand one.

    In much of my work — particularly around cinema — the films I’m writing about, or the technology of film itself, has been around long enough for a wide variety of opinions and theories to have circulated and settled. In this case, with web3, it does occasionally feel like it’s happening live.

    If you try to get above the arguments, rage, and gatekeeping (I see you, unnamed social media platform rhyming completely unironically with ‘bitter’), the kinds of questions being asked are legitimately interesting and important. And those contributing to the discussion are a unique mixture of techs/programmers/engineers, artists, philosophers, and media pundits.

    Soon, a favourable peer review pending, I guess I’ll be one of them.

  • Romance and reflection

    There is a mode of writing about film that I really enjoy reading — I’m cautiously calling it romantic-reflexive. Practitioners of this style include Murray Pomerance, Geoff Dyer, Raul Ruiz. It’s a style I enjoy because it feels immediate, almost as if the thought had just occurred to the writer. It’s an informed style, but rather than be peppered with footnotes or citations at every turn, the reader is just aware that they’re being spoken to by someone who’s done a lot of reading.

    It’s a style that permits idiosyncrasies, but one that does not allow laziness. It allows for a nuanced discussion of film, but a discussion that is not hyper-critical. The analysis is not over-wrought, such that the film loses all magic, all its moments. I sense that this is a difficult style to master, but I’ve sketched out a few projects in the coming months that will hopefully allow me to give it a try.

    For now, though, here, on this blog, I’m going to run the style past whatever I’m watching in the next few weeks, months. I’m currently halfway through Paris, Texas, so maybe that’ll be first.

  • Hypnosis

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    Like the boy reaching out in Persona …

    … like Neo, who cannot resist the mirror …

    … cinema is hypnotic, and we are powerless to its mechanisms.

  • Stoker (2013)

    I’ve frequently maintained that the best films stay with you. I don’t mean ‘best’ in terms of quality, necessarily — though that helps — but the best films in terms of those that actually meaningfully contribute to what we call cinema. The best films keep projecting into our temporal lobes long after the credits have rolled; they haunt us, they taunt us, they call to us to watch again, to peel back the layers of their meaning, to look beneath their skin just as they have weaved their way under ours.

    A few years ago I taught a course at the University of Sydney that examined the transition from celluloid to digital. It was a wonderful course, and inspired me in many ways for the studio teaching and research I’m currently undertaking. One of the films we watched was Park Chan-wook’s Night Fishing. What a weird little film. Shot entirely on an iPhone 4, the film combines night-vision, fishing, camping, mythology, ghost stories, grief — it’s a masterful little thing. It was perfect for that course, too, because it reiterated that it doesn’t matter what tool you use to create cinema; cinema can be created with anything.

    I’d been meaning to catch more of Park’s work, particularly Oldboy and the Vengeance trilogy, but they remain on the Shelf of Shame. After seeing a screengrab from Stoker in a talk on Friday though, I was immediately inspired to get the bluray. This film deserves the highest quality, as it is stunningly beautiful. Also, with this kind of movie, you need your blacks to be really black.

    Briefly, and trying not to spoil anything, Stoker is a bottled drama starring Mia Wasikowska as India Stoker, Nicole Kidman as her mother Evelyn, and Matthew Goode as India’s Uncle Charlie. India and Evelyn are recovering from the death of India’s father, Richard, as Uncle Charlie moves back into their lives after a long absence. Long story short, some stuff happens.

    stoke-rabs

    The Hitchcockian overtones and influences are readily apparent — the Uncle Charlie/India relationship is pilfered from Shadow of a Doubt, and the tension that slowly builds throughout the film is reminiscent of [insert name of any Hitchcock film here]. But what’s neat about this film is how that tension is woven in with the beautiful imagery. Further, their are even hints of the mobile image (as in mobile phone) that I remember from Night Fishing. In one scene, India and Charlie are playing a duet on the piano. This is a weird moment for a lot of reasons, but the weirdness is reinforced by this tracking shot, about shin-height, that snakes its way between the furniture right up behind them. The tracking shot recalls The Shining, but the movement isn’t entirely smooth. Much like the visual composition of the rest of the film, this shot is not entirely stable. You wouldn’t say its unstable, but there’s definitely something not right. Take any shot of Uncle Charlie, for example. We’re never given the full picture, something is always in the way. It doesn’t hurt, too, that Goode’s performance oozes Anthony Perkins in Psycho.

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    Stoker is one of those perfect examples of a film where everything congeals into one single vision. Camera, editing, music, performance, narrative all just happen; there’s really no separating them. There is no distinction to be made here between the analogue and the digital (for what it’s worth, it was shot on 35mm). This is a stream of information, a torrent of meaning, that brings the audience wholly into the narrative in an effortless way. This may not be a quality film (it is), but it certainly is one of the best.