[COLUMN] This Year, Filmmakers Want You to Notice the Camera | by Darren Mooney

As has been much-discussed, this is an age of “content.” Film and television are no longer regarded as media, but instead as formless and shapeless “content.”

“As recently as fifteen years ago, the term ‘content’ was heard only when people were discussing the cinema on a serious level, and it was contrasted with and measured against ‘form’,” wrote director Martin Scorsese four years ago in the pages of Harper’s Magazine. “‘Content’ became a business term for all moving images: a David Lean movie, a cat video, a Super Bowl commercial, a superhero sequel, a series episode.”

Some observers might argue that “content” is the great equalizer, that discussions of “form” exist only as a mechanism of imposing a hierarchy on media; to suggest that a feature film is inherently superior to a television episode, or that the superhero sequel is inferior to a short film. In this framing, the notion of “content” is a “disruptor” to the rigid hierarchy of multimedia in much the same way that the big tech companies disrupted Hollywood.

In reality, recognizing the formal constraints of a given medium does not imply that any medium is inherently superior or inferior to another. It simply recognizes that there are intrinsic aspects of a given medium that are unique, and that can be used effectively in constructing a narrative (or a piece of art) within that medium. Assuming that all “content” must be equivalent, regardless of medium, simply means adopting the standards of the lowest common denominator.

This is true in a very literal sense. A lot of film and television produced for streaming, for example, has a very generic and recognizably bland look to it, designed to optimize both production and compression. This style is no longer confined to streaming services. It has begun to spread to theatrical releases. Wicked, for example, has the same weird greyish texture that defines so many of these generic streaming shows and movies.

In mainstream popular entertainment, there has been a push towards homogeneity in both visual and aural storytelling, a sort of flatness designed to erase any distinction between individual works. Tying back to Scorsese’s comments, it is very clear that a lot of modern media is designed in such a way as to de-emphasize form through a process of standardization. These aren’t films or shows, they are just vectors for delivery of content.

This encourages audiences to think about these objects less as constructed pieces of art and more as “gossip about imaginary people.” It ignores the observation made by Roger Ebert that a creative work is “not what it is about, it is how it is about it.” That is to say that form and function are interlinked. A work is more than just a plot delivery mechanism. This understanding has fallen by the wayside in recent decades, perhaps prompted by the rise of the recap as the dominant critical mode.

However, what is interesting is that in the midst of this push towards what might be termed “contentification” and perhaps as a response to it, there has been a renewed emphasis on form within mainstream popular entertainment. There are an increasing number of films and television shows that aren’t trying to conceal the art of their creation, but instead to force the audience to grapple with them as constructed objects.

This is true in a number of ways. Old filmmaking techniques are making a return. There has recently been an explosion in black-and-white filmmaking. Fully half of last year’s Best Picture nominees included extended sequences in black-and-white, to say nothing of potential contenders like Asteroid City or The Color Purple. There have also recently been a number of high-profile “silent” films like Hundreds of Beavers, Azrael or No One Will Save You.

There has also been a renewed emphasis on the mechanics of moviemaking. Film is more than just a medium; it is a tactile object. Christopher Nolan’s use of IMAX has arguably reinvigorated the form, to the point that even Netflix wants to release (certain) films in IMAX cinemas. Much of the hype around The Brutalist derives from the peculiarities of its format: its use of the 1950s technique of VistaVision, the gigantic film canisters, the inclusion of an interval.

There is also a very interesting emphasis on the role of the camera in three recent releases. Ramell Ross’ Nickel Boys is perhaps the most high-profile example, a somewhat surprising Best Picture nominee this year. Nickel Boys is interesting, because the bulk of the movie is told from the most subjective perspective imaginable. The camera places the audience in the literal perspective of its two central characters, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson).

Like Stanley Kubrick before him, Ross came to filmmaking through photography. The first-person framing of Nickel Boys serves an important thematic and narrative purpose within the work. “It’s an ode to looking out of the eyes of those whose eyes have been owned by others, and whose perception has been managed by others,” Ross explains. This approach was Ross’ “first thought” after reading the source material, Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys.

This formal hook exists in conversation with the audience’s relationship to film. It is the most literal expression of what Roger Ebert described as the “empathy machine” aspect of cinema, its power to let an audience member “see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief.” It also draws the audience’s attention to “the gaze”, the debate concerning whose eye through which cinema is constructed.

“The image is an invitation for the viewer to really place themselves in a body that they may or may not recognize,” argues cinematographer Jomo Fray. “For two hours, you truly are walking in the shoes of another person. And that’s at the heart of the promise of cinema.” Actor Brandon Williams explained, “For audience members who are watching all of this happen from the perspective of these two, they can’t separate themselves the way they can with other films.”

To put it simply, this is an approach that could not work in a novel or a stage play. While there have obviously been first-person sequences and even movies before – charmingly, Ross has repeatedly cited Hardcore Henry as an inspiration during awards season – this still feels novel and exciting. It is rare to see a mainstream movie that is this formally ambitious and aggressive. As such, it feels notable that Nickel Boys is one of three films playing with the camera this awards season.

The other big movie to embrace a point-of-view approach to filmmaking – what Fray calls “a sentient image” – is Steven Soderbergh’s Presence, which is effectively a haunted house movie told from the perspective of the ghost. The camera roams through the house, voyeuristically looming over the family, spying on their intimate moments, and trying desperately to communicate with them. As with Nickel Boys, the camera is a character.

Presence is not dealing with the same heavy thematic concerns as Nickel Boys, it is not necessarily interrogating decades of constructed images of the suffering of African American characters on screen. However, it is playing with the audience’s understanding of the cinematic language of horror movies. The idea of putting the audience in the perspective of the “monster” obviously owes a great deal to John Carpenter’s classic opening sequence of Halloween or the most iconic scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, among many others. Presence just sustains that approach.

It seems like Presence was directly prompted by changes in filmmaking. Soderbergh has talked about the challenges of making a film in virtual reality. Soderbergh, talking about virtual reality. “There’s no POV and reverse angle on a character who’s experiencing this is hugely limiting,” he argued three years ago. “That is how we engage with visual stories, is to watch the expressions of the characters so that we can read the emotions of what we’re experiencing.”

Presence feels like a response to that challenge. Indeed, Soderbergh has been quite candid that the film is more about form than about content. “There is no movie without the gimmick,” he confessed. “There's no plan B. There's no other way to do it.” Soderbergh openly admits, “If you shot this conventionally, it’s not interesting. People would go, ‘I don’t know why he made that.’” It is not so much form following function as function being inseparable from form.

Like Nickel Boys, Presence is a project that could only work in this specific form. It cannot be rendered generic. “It’s a real movie idea in the sense that it can’t be a book, it can’t be a play, it’s gotta be a movie,” Soderbergh contends. “It’s a conceit that only works as a movie.” There is no way of flattening this. This is not “content.” This is a movie. It demands to be considered as a movie. It’s an experience that cannot be undermined or ruined by a plot summary.

The same is true of Robert Zemeckis’ Here, the third and easily weakest of the recent examples of a feature film to draw attention to the camera as a physical object. Unlike Nickel Boys and Presence, the camera is not a character. It does not move. Instead, it remains fixed in a single position as the audience shifts backwards and forwards in time. It is a sort of a bastardization of Andrei Tarkovsky’s famous description of filmmaking as “sculpting in time.”

Barring its final moments, Here unfolds from a single fixed perspective, from the dawn of time to the present day. The camera remains locked in a space that will become the corner of a family living room, a window into lives spanning centuries. Here is a weaker film than either Nickel Boys or Presence, because Zemickis is too much of a populist to embrace the truly experimental potential of the format. Still, it is an example of this larger trend, what might be deemed “the new formalism.”

“Nothing is of its own explanation,” states architect László Toth (Adrien Brody) in The Brutalist. “Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?” In a way, this wave of movies designed to emphasize their own form fits in the context of a recent wave of feature films about artists struggling to articulate themselves in a hostile context, whether metaphorically (Joker: Folie á Deux) or literally (A Complete Unknown, The Brutalist).

Many of this year’s movies want to remind audiences that they are constructed works, that they are not abstract and formless content, but the result of conscious and motivated decisions. This makes sense in the larger context of the modern film industry, following a massive labor disruption, the encroachment of artificial intelligence into the creative arts and the increased sense that studios are looking for filmmakers who are “more shooter than auteur.”

This year, there is a concerted effort to remind audiences that films are not just conjured into being – and that the camera doesn’t move itself.