From "The Loop" on Facebook: What the new generation can't stand is the screen being turned off
Hitchcock shot "The Noose" in a room. The corpse was hidden in a trunk, in the center of the action, it dominated attention, organized the suspense. The film had density and excellent rhythm, without resorting to speed, changes of location and hypocritical exaggerations.
With a closed, tight structure, dramatic material was produced from a perfect script. In “The Loop” everything was restrained and compact. In today’s terms of the vast iconography of social media and cyber-virtuality, Hitchcock’s film (and many others) seems dramaturgically inactive. How can my daughter’s generation and Facebook education withstand the low and almost “poor” spectacular development? How can the precision that mature post-war cinema had gained, the solid (although somewhat pretentious in Hitchcock’s case) character building, the well-designed lighting work in today’s conditions? When you're dealing not with viewers but with users of an expanding cartography, with infinite, unknown contacts, requests, connections within an immense digital lycophilia and clandestine reading, can you be frugal? Subtract instead of inflate?
And yet, with extreme filmic austerity, Steven Knight has today shot a highly daring work, a still road movie. "At the Wrong Time". The whole thing takes place inside a car, developed with close-ups on the face of the protagonist, Tom Hardy, and on a bluetooth screen. Gradually, with a sequence of phone calls (the other characters in the work are the names on the device, while the characters are developed in the sparse dialogues), the director opens the terms of a dark middle-class contract (marriage, fraud, within a rigid field of hyper-professionalism).
The work cracks the solid family and professional structure (the protagonist is a superstructure engineer) and precipitates the hero, his family identity and the professional system, into a relentless criminal funnel. How can an extreme iconographic austerity, first of all, describe an extreme situation and then how is it possible to find an audience, ready and willing to shoulder the responsibility of the austere, the "black", the unimaginative, the non-descriptive premise and a plot so cerebral?
Do the two forms of iconography, the filmic densification of historically different examples (Hitchcock and Knight) and Facebook “plurality”, constitute a common semantic framework? A perceptual education has been formed and a cultural field has been composed, which can naturally contain the narrative extremes. The cinematic screen (whether full and adventurous or “empty” and low-key), in full alignment with the suffocating, simplistic and flowing of Facebook. And rather, the latter prepares and tames the former.
The constant scrolling through Facebook pages, the anxieties about posting, the satisfied confirmations from likes and requests, produce a new ocular virginity. As if the user is cleansed of passions and can open up more confidently, more innocently, more unabashedly to the filmic complexity. The hyper-iconicity of the media redesigns the image, ultimately producing a techno-narrative. In other words, the medium itself is reproduced as a value system, as a structure underlying every performance, every narrative. Something like a post-chronological axiom of modernity, where form is structure. The rhythm, the structural categories, the semantic territories of social media, educate in a cinematography that can broadly accept the most unexpected types of experimental or deviant cinema.
The mechanics of the media, ultimately, establish all cinematography. This perceptual ethos seems to keep alive both the examples I use and every filmic construction. It also renews the power of a theme and a cinematic form – such as that suggested by “At the Wrong Time”.
My daughter very easily, between acquaintances from the other hemisphere and endless "Facebook chats", accepts the Spanish "Black Bread", the British "Selfish Giant", the Belgian "The Boy with the Bicycle", the steep Greek "Little Fish" by Economides, etc. A pan-cinematic situation seems to be emerging from the vast pop art condition of the media and within it High Cinema is also legitimized.
What my daughter and her generation cannot stand is the blank screen. The insatiable hunger for the illuminated frame constitutes the circumstances of no longer fiction but mythification. And this is evolving from a cultural into a political problem.
