Macrovision 4 - like Samara, Macrovision lives in a deep well.

 

The area where the disruptive Macrovision signal is concealed, the Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI), is a place of absolute darkness. Once a CRT's scanning beam has completed a field and arrived the bottom of the screen it is this interval that, when recognised by the tubes circuitry, causes the beam to trip back up to the upper left hand corner to begin it's descent again.

Viewed as a waveform on an oscilloscope the VBI appears deeper than the surrounding signal as if a trough - or deep dark well. If you had ever wondered when watching a horror movie on videotape, why a black night sky or the corners of a creepy cellar, appear not as black as they ought to be but rather something reminiscent of slightly fuzzy eigengrau, it might be because high levels of contrast were hard to obtain with analogue video media because absolute video black was  hard to achieve within a fluctuating scanline. Perhaps because of this, within the limited agency of analogue video signal's interaction with the hardware, this position of total video black was a domain reserved for the VBI's band of hidden lines.

'she lives in a dark place now'

The 'old dark well' is employed in The Ring as a murder site that conveniently doubles as a location to conceal the body. Chosen for it's obscurity and isolation it is from this location the film's murdered antagonist rises, in a number of ways, to seek revenge in the sun lit world above. 

It is in the depths of the VBI, a place that can be viewed as a sort of video dead time, a negative space, a place of absence, that Macrovision resides - though too it is given to randomly rising up into the light.

Viewed on an oscilloscope the VBI looks like this:

With Macrovision present and ascending:

 

These unseen areas, beyond image and signal, explored and imagined in The Ring and utilised by the inventors of Macrovision are in themselves already a location of anxiety in that they are experienced as hidden from view. Such spaces are mirrored in the material as sites deemed off limits, undesirable, abject, yet at some level always present. Elements of architectural unconscious that exists within every structure. As an annexe within a media, an adjunct storage resource - like a space created by a false bottom in a chest, you won't know it's there until you find it. 

The VBI was utilised as a location for other content such as teletext, closed captioning and a variety of other data and test signals – even something called a Ghost-Canceling Reference (maybe that's what Rachel was searching for, at the screen's edge?). If you ever sat on the remote while replaying an old off-air video recording and inadvertently activated Teletext you have seen that the text, though often corrupted, has also been preserved within the VBI of the recorded video signal.

One of the key vehicles for unease in The Ring is the idea that a VHS tape contains something other than it's visible recording. It is never clearly asserted how Samara's curse is transferred from the recording on the magnetically sensitive tape to the receiver. It occurs during viewing the tape and it's bizarre imagery, so is the curse an effect of the images on the viewer, a sort of Lovecraftian horror that once seen madness and terror ensue? Does the curse exist as a sort of demonic incantation as in The Evil Dead (1981) or the spoken word summoning ritual in Candyman (1992)? Or is the curse a sub-signal as in Videodrome (1983)? Something that exists beneath the visible imagery (whose only real task is to keep you viewing as closely as possible and perhaps emotionally priming the viewer for the absorption of additional para-media) This additional concealed media takes the form of brain altering signal in Videodrome, In the case of The Ring it would be a curse from beyond the grave. Both imagined media would require a depository location. Locations exploited by anti-copy technologies and others might provide such space.

When Rachel and Noah examine the tape by attempting to physically manipulate the video head drum, the video apparatus is visually employed as a site in which the search for clues continues. When Rachel visits a VT archive facility to search even deeper into the recording – even further towards the 'edge of the tape' and the image this interrogation continues.

In both instances the sound effects chosen for the apparatuses reaction to this forced scanning, as the mechanics and electronics reflect the anxiety of the search for the hidden material, include a high pitched whirring as the tracking desperately strives to remain locked onto the tapes signal and to maintain playback.

Some later VCRs with more dynamic, digital tracking circuitry will become so confused by a Macrovision tape that the automatic tracking will emit very similar sounds as they attempt to cope with a signal that has been designed just to throw the AGC and tracking into disarray.¹

In the latter intervention, a VT lab technician guides Rachel to an older machine that she suggests may help her in her quest.

“The big box here's a warhorse – totally analog, she'll read to the very edge of your tape. (just don't force her or she'll get pissy with you)" 

The machine, only visible for a moment, does indeed has the look of a far earlier vintage than the early 2000s. The suggestion that an older iteration of a media technology offers greater control, more agency over the apparatus would fit in with Retrotechnophobia's focus on The Ring's response to the perceived threat of the 'Analog Hole'. The fact that media can be accessed, copied or in the case of The Ring, viewed in entirety without limitations with on older equipment, reveals that the developers and producers of media hardware are not always steered by the desire to provide the user as much control as possible.²

As stated by Brian Winston, 'The apparatus is not neutral'³

In fact some of the older VCRs were not supplied with onboard AGC circuitry and as such were seemingly 'immune' to Macrovision. Like the 'Big Box', the more 'analogue' the equipment was, and early VCRs were packed full of multiple boards populated with discreet analogue components that would be replaced with chips and Ics on later variants, the more control over certain specific functions were occasionally available to the user. Not that this agency was ever declared by the manufacturers let alone the tape distributors. These quirks were shared between users, becoming the site of myth, misunderstanding and distortion.

(1) see Macrovision: The Copy Protection in VHS by Technology Connections at 8m 22s for a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VqsU1VK3mU

(2) Retrotechnophobia: Putting an End to Analog Abjection with The Ring, published in Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens, 2013, Caetlin Benson-Allott, University of California Press. p114

(2) Technologies of seeing : photography, cinematography and television, Brian Winston, British Film Institute, 1996. p41

 

Macrovision 3 - something is hidden at the screens edge.

The limits of the TV frame become of interest to Rachael, the protagonist in The Ring (2002). While watching ex-boyfriend Noah physically intervene with a VCRs mechanism she begins to suspect there is more to see beyond the screens edge than meets the eye. In a later attempt, upping the assault on the tapes reluctance to give up it's secrets, Rachael uses a more advanced machine to pan across and beyond what is visible to the very edge of the recording.

Both attempts result in a type of overload and failure of the playback media, employing a common cinematic visual trope suggesting the very limits the device or medium have been reached. The build up to the climax of the first attempt, a sort of generic 'she cannae take any more captain' moment is visually represented by the, technically erroneous, manipulation of the tape's transit across the drum head attempted by Noah (which could surely work only in an imagined AV studio. Physically manipulating a video drum head is very unlikely to reveal any surplus image - just a loss of picture) and crescendoed by with the receipt of an electric shock. In the second instance at the higher spec facility, an analogue VU meter, itself a somewhat retro but oft used device, displays overload to the point of failure. 

These markers define the crossing into another space, both for our protagonists journey along a dangerous and uncharted road and more specifically into an area less visited – the fringes and back rooms of the videocassette and VCR technology.

What Rachael finds there is a clue, a pointer towards locating the origin of the tape. Did Samara want to leave a trail that might lead a certain kind of viewer to her location? Had she merely figured out how to squeeze an ultra-widescreen image onto regular tape? We never find out. Instead the discovery adds to the already considerable enigma of the tape, displays Rachael's resourcefulness as an investigator and moves the story on to the next beat. 

 

Caetlin Benson-Allott describes this space discovered beyond the frame in Lacanian terms via Zisek to suggest a sense of paranoia. This revealed position within an image is where the viewer herself is being viewed from by the Other. 'you can never see me from the point from which I gaze at you' ¹

This might might be a fair description the Macrovision experience, the sensation of realising your VCR knows what you have been up to. Punishing you immediately with a weird, spoilt copy and suggesting that you may be in big trouble for breaking the rules. For just as the gaze hides at the side of the screen, so does Macrovision. The Macrovision signal is hidden out of view at the very top of the screen in roughly 45 unused lines. As stated in the 1985 Patent 'Since most television sets are overscanned by 5% to 10%, these pulses would still be invisible.' ² Though normally out of view the signal can be seen as a row of bright undulating bars within black when the image is pulled down on a television or a monitor with manual Vertical Hold adjustment.

Lost Highway's mystery Man, no stranger to dupes, evokes the technological uncanny by occupying two spaces at once. Here he shares the vertically adjusted screen with a Macrovision signal. Lost Highway (1997)

It can also be seen when, during an attempted recording of a protected tape, the image folds, flags and flickers downwards, momentarily revealing the signals presence. Like Samara's recording, the Macrovision signal was not assigned to tape with conventional means. It would be inserted during commercial duplication by sealed electronic units leased from the anti-copy service provider.

Portions of Samaras images and Macrovision exist in areas of a videocassette recording usually hidden from view. (Macrovision can be quite easily located and even analysed on an Oscilloscope, though it appears reluctant to give up all it's secrets³ and most internet based analysis involve some degree of interpretation and assumption. Samara used 'projected thermography' to place her montage on the tape – how and where she located or embedded her curse is never established)

André Bazin stated 'there are no wings to the screen'⁴ and yet it seems within a videorecording there are. Bazin also attributed the painted canvas with centripetal force drawing the world inwards in direct contrast to the cinematic screen which asserted a centrifugal force, casting the 'cinematographic image into infinity'⁵ Perhaps he didn't watch much television because CRT technology always biased what needed to be seen inwards creating a safe area where inconsistencies in CRT performance would not result in a loss of information or image in the non visible overscan regions. In the transference of cinema to homevideo this was exacerbated by the pan and scan telecine process. This biasing inwards suggests but does not reveal an other, a zone beyond what is visible.

'VHS always contained (made visual reference to) more than could meet the eye.' ⁶

 
The sense that something is present, perhaps watching us from a position just out of sight, seems a much valued trope within horror movies, anti-copy systems and horror movies that appear to share the objectives of such systems.

(1) Retrotechnophobia: Putting an End to Analog Abjection with The Ring, published in Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens, 2013, Caetlin Benson-Allott, University of California Press p119

(2)  Method and apparatus for processing a video signal so as to prohibit the making of acceptable video tape recordings thereof  Apr 17, 1985 - https://patents.justia.com/patent/4631603

(3)  The technical specifications of Macrovision anti-copy system were naturally confidential. Online analysis of the signal, such as in the link provided, get very close to a full understanding but there are usually certain artifacts or functions that seem to evade the inquirer.    https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/170667-What-Macrovision-looks-lik

 (4)What is Cinema, Theatre and Cinema part 2, 1967, André Bazin, p105. 

(5) ibid. Painting and Cinema, p166.

(6)Ibid. Retrotechnophobia: Putting an End to Analog Abjection with The Ring, Caetlin Benson-Allott, p120

 

Macrovision 2 - the strangest sensation of being watched...

Like the tape in The Ring, Macrovision knows whether you are watching or copying a videocassette.

If the horror genre, it's familiar tropes and their ability to evoke anxiety, can convey an anti-piracy message from within the medium perceived to be at risk of illicit duplication – as in the FACT Public information short and, more pertinently, as per Retrotechnophobia, in The Ring (2002) -  couldn't the medium contain a anti-piracy technology that included and demonstrated some of the same tropes? How uncanny and capable of evoking anxiety can video technology be – when things start to go wrong?

In The Ring, the protagonist, Rachel figures out the cursed tape offers different outcomes for those who copy it from those it merely watch it – effectively, it knows which you are doing - and so did a system called Macrovision.

Macrovision was an anti-copy technology developed in the 1980s during the home video boom. A rented or purchased pre-recorded tape with Macrovision installed could be watched on a television or monitor without issue but any attempts to copy the recording on a second VCR would be 'rendered unacceptable' ¹

As a device installed by video distributors, Macrovision naturally wants you to watch the tape but doesn't want you to copy it. Macrovision expects that the viewer will ignore the FBI or similar warning at the start of the tape because no matter how threatening, it was believed to have no further agency or knowledge of whether it's warning was being observed within the privacy of the video users home.

Macrovision enters said home concealed within the tapes interstitial spaces where it sits in wait until activated by a deviance from guidelines. It may be watched a dozen times without incident or error but any attempt to copy it will reveal the presence of the signal.

VCRs contain Automatic Gain Control circuits (AGC) that monitor an incoming external video signal and adjust aspects of it to a suitable, stable level for recording. Macrovision contains pseudo pulses ² that sweep across a range of amplitudes that confuse the VCRs AGC forcing it to attempt correction and to struggle to maintain a commensurate recording level. This results in distorted images, undulating brightness and colour, flickering, and image tearing.³

In effect, the Macrovision signal tricks the VCR's AGC into reacting as if the incoming video was wildly unstable thus causing a circuit originally intended to maintain a stable recording, into creating an chaotic, unstable one. A television or monitor has no such circuitry and the Macrovision signal is ignored, the protected recording is displayed without distortion.

As stand alone, non interactive playback media, VHS tapes were never considered to be aware of what we were doing with them. The unease generated by discovering a mysterious agent within a inanimate object may evoke the shades of the eerie as described by Mark Fisher. Something is present that should not be there.⁴

This is the first stage of a tape copiers encounter with a tape containing Macrovision.

Unlike contemporary platform based technologies, Home video (read for our purposes VHS) quickly peaked in it's ability to diversify, emerge, and 'wow' the user with new innovations located within the pre-existing medium.

VideoPlus, 4 heads, 6 heads, stereo sound, for many these developments may have appeared more gimmicks and the stuff of salesman's patter than any generational evolution or development. There were some improvements and additions but there was certainly no Moore's law for VHS.

The tapes played and recorded more or less the same. For twenty years the capabilities of the format barely changed and the greatest development would appear to have been the race to lower the price per unit – perhaps further degrading ownership status, removing the glamour of the luxury item and upon achieving market saturation and ubiquity, consigning it to the ranks most mundane of household consumer items.

Home Video's potential to amaze wore off quickly as it was soon taken for granted, perceived to be an inferior conduit to other media, cinema, television, etc. Video's ability to inspire or drive utopian strategies and rhetoric, just as the internet would in the 90s, peaked early in video utopianist spaces such as Radical Software ⁵ and by the time consumers were watching sell-through copies of Videodrome or The Ring, the medium's chances of asserting real change had often appear to have become all but forgotten.

Perhaps for this reason, suddenly discovering that a tape knows what you are doing with it must have provoked a frisson of anxiety. Having mysteriously transgressed from inanimate container to intelligent observer how would the copier have known where the tapes knew found agency would end? Not only does Macrovision, like Caetlin Benson Allott's description of the character Noah's frustration with the tape's timecode, 'reduce the viewer's agency within the video apparatus' ⁶ it, on it's production of an abnormal copy, informs us, we are moving towards the previously unknown, that 'something has not worked out' ⁷

As a medium on which to view movies, videotape may have lacked in resolution but it performed very well in terms of privacy and isolation within systems of distribution. The material had to be acquired - rented, purchased or traded but once obtained it could be viewed, usually in the comfort of the home with anonymity pretty much guaranteed. Before even considering ISP logs or malicious internet trackers, we could contrast the fact that all our Youtube and Netflix user interfaces regularly remind us that they know exactly what we watched and when. With this in mind, one could argue that never before or since has viewing audio visual material, in certain regards, been as discreet as it was with VHS. ⁸

Although a tape copier might not immediately know it, Macrovision's capabilities were limited, and stopped far short of, for example, reporting back to Warner Home Video that Blade Runner was being duped, including such information as where and by whom (we'd have to wait for the digital revolution for that)

But what it could do, as well as achieving it's primary objective of ensuring that any illicit copy of a Macrovision protected tape was rendered unacceptable by generating unacceptable pictures, was to elicit, just as Samara's tape did initially for Rachael, confusion and unease and demand the question – where the hell is this coming from and how can it know what I am doing?

(1) Method and apparatus for processing a video signal so as to prohibit the making of acceptable video tape recordings thereof
Apr 17, 1985 - https://patents.justia.com/patent/4631603
(2) ibid.
(3) a video error that sees the top of image appear to distort and fold downwards
(4) Mark Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie (Repeater, 2017)
(5) Radical Software was a magazine concerned with the work and aspirations of videos first experimenters, artists and activists. https://www.radicalsoftware.org/e/index.html

(6) Retrotechnophobia: Putting an End to Analog Abjection with The Ring, published in Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens, 2013, Caetlin Benson-Allott, University of California Press p116
(7)    ibid p125
(8) clearly watching the flow of analogue television would be hard to beat here – for much of the VCR era, in the UK and Europe anyway, television channels were very limited (just four in the UK until the late nineties) and so when one viewed TV the was always a least one in four chance of guessing what was being watched.

Macrovision 1 - the contents of this videocassette.

At the beginning of my VHS copy of The Ring (2002, dir. Gore Verbinski), after a standard copyright notice, a DreamWorks logo and trailers, there is an informational short sponsored by FACT, the Federation Against Copyright Theft. It explains the dangers of video piracy.

As a slightly edgy and streetwise sounding voice over warns “the pirates are out to get you, don't let them brand you with their mark“ a demonic blacksmith with glowing eyes and enveloped in flames, heats a branding iron bearing an X before holding it up to camera. 

 

The voice goes on to tell us video piracy funds organised crime, terrorism and that it will destroy 'our development and your enjoyment'. As the iron's brand is plunged into water it's X transforms into the copyright © and our voiceover gives way to a more measured and well spoken voice that advises how one should go about handing over any suspected pirates to the authorities.

Described on a Public Information Film fansite as “perhaps one of the darkest and scariest anti-piracy PIFs ever made“¹

it represents a coming together of the horror genre, anti-piracy and the videocassette; a cocktail that seeks to utilise horror tropes, on the home territory to scare viewers into resisting the temptation of dabbling in the dark arts of video piracy.

Elements that, according to Caetlin Benson-Allott's, Retrotechnophobia: Putting an End to Analog Abjection with The Ring ² are also to be found in the tape's main feature.

The © brand now a sigil charged with another kind of authority and message. i.e. The movie you are about to see is a work of fiction, for your entertainment – but make copies of it and you will know the full might of the law and perhaps even the horrors of financial ruin or incarceration.

The ©, is finally displayed embedded, for increased emphasis and veracity, within the word FA©T. It seems the mantra – it's only a movie, only a movie... – does not entirely apply here and we are left with a question. Was a movie on videocassette, the cassette itself or the machine on which it was played capable of scaring audiences into regulating their video practices to fall into line with the desires of nervous holders of video copyright?

Anyone who has ever watched a horror movie in the slasher sub-genre, as exemplified by Friday the 13th (1980,dir. Sean Cunningham) or Halloween (1978, dir.John Carpenter) and very much imitated thereafter will know that tropes that exploit target audience anxieties and guilty pleasures, imagined or otherwise were part of that particular genre's language .

Whether sneaking out to smoke dope or having sex with a smuggled in friend whilst on babysitting duties, these minor transgressions were often met with the harshest and most immediate penalties.

Whether these repetitive acts of screen violence are understood to function as an ideological thrust from the film makers or merely evidence of a marketing feedback loop or assumption of their audience's desires and fears or a falling back on what has proven turn a reliable profit for the film's producers -- the notion that the horror genre, contains and makes use of 'cautionary tale' tactics and tropes is not a new one. 

With this in mind, Caetlin Benson-Allott's proposition in her 2013 essay Retrotechnophobia: Putting an End to Analog Abjection with The Ring, that the US remake The Ring (2002) hosts, a specific warning against transgressive behavior can said to adhere to a convention, long established within the horror genre. Benson-Allott's reading of the The Ring is akin to Samara's tape within it, in that it contains, hidden somewhere out of ordinary view, a threat of retribution lest the viewer do as they are told.

Benson-Allott's proposals can also be viewed as a very clever, playful meta-textual proposition, whereby a narrative concerned with the distribution of urban myth seeks to generate it's own.

Retrotechnophobia operates in sort of experimental hyperstitional sandbox, presenting it's ideas in the region of, too strange to be true yet too clearly evidenced to be easily dismissed as false, that provides fertile substrate for myth and associative thinking. It is also a learned and impeccably researched text that explores an area previously widely ignored. While focusing on the point of death of VHS, the horror of it's rejection en masse (just for the sake of a few more pixels, saved shelf space and a directors commentary) the text helps illuminate the fact that in certain respects the VCR was always abject. A miraculous medium yet one that, despite widespread diffusion, was rarely recognised on it's own terms. A bitterly poor substitute for the cinema, a mere add-on to television with 'Made for Home Video' or 'Straight-to-Video' considered hallmarks of cheap, inept attempts to ape dominant media ³.

The areas where Home Video and the VCR asserted themselves and found a niche also suggested abjection and deviancy; Pornography, extreme horror and of course illegal copy making ⁴.

Not only was the VCR undervalued it was largely misunderstood, resulting in a black slab of technology sat in almost every home, simultaneously as mundane as it was impossible to truly understand.

We lived with VCRs for twenty five years without ever really finding out how they worked.

I'll write more about this in the future but Benson-Allott is absolutely right to describe the videocassette as a “small casket whose inner cavity... cannot be opened”  unless first hidden within the recesses of the VCR, itself a black box extraordinaire – arguably the most highly sealed to enter into home/consumer use up to that point and maybe even since. 

Why wouldn't they make ideal hiding places?

Benson-Allot isn't the only writer to consider hidden content or intention in The Ring. In the introduction to Cinema in the Digital Age, (2009, Walllowerpress) a series of essays on cinema's transition from analogue to digital that frequently turns to The Ring, Nicholas Rhombes also considers it a space for concealment when he cites it as 'A genre film hiding an Avant-Garde video inside it'. He locates within The Ring 'strange correspondences between film images, a sort of secret history' and suggests digital technology has 'stripped away a layer, and exposed uncanny associations'.

Retrotechnophobia seems to epitomise a treatment of the moving image media suggested by Rhombes when he states, 'terms like 'intention' and 'genre' need to be reinvented, for what links films together is not simply their plots, their styles, their directors, but something less coherent'.  Benson-Allott would seem to agree when talking of 'new video studies' and the reading she applies to The Ring feels as though it exists not merely as subtext but as something not unlike the active elements within Samara's curse tape. 

In the digital age we've grown accustomed to the idea that there is always a little more than we can see within our media content. From the serendipity of the Easter Egg, to the hidden sector, the tracker, the Trojan and the large portions of data and media within the files themselves that seem to sit dormant, unused, often apparently empty.

Lines of code such as 'Multiline comments' that are hidden from view, within the inner confines of a file - not visible to a user or viewer and hidden from the platform or operating system under which the code is running.

There are such spaces and artifacts to be found within analogue media but they are not as simple to create, conceal or manage. They have been less discussed or understood and are perhaps, therefore, arguably always less expected.   When reading it's complex electronic signal, the VCR's specialised electromechanical processes are so contingent on precise variants such as timing, pressure and sensitivity that it is highly vulnerable to interference, error and loss. For this reason, barely any intervention be it hobbyist, hacker, artist was made at the actual 'read' end of the VCR apparatus. Video processing, manipulation and effects generation that began with early video artists before swiftly being further developed in industrial, creative and later home user contexts deals exclusively with the video signal as it leaves the playback device rather than as it is captured within it. For these reasons the home VCR lived and died as a black box technology.

The functioning of a black box can be described or observed as extrapolation even when the inner workings are obscured.  A simple block diagram could be used to explain the functional relationship between a videocassette and a VCR without ever having to remove a screw but, at most levels of proficiency exploring and explaining such spaces, using blind cause and effect descriptions creates potential for certain factors and interstices to be overlooked.  

Every blackbox will contain areas unknowable from the outside. Given the complexity and integrity of the VCR and Videocassette it should come as no surprise that they possess such spaces too.

Within the narrative of The Ring, Samara's tape utilises such a space. Locating room for an occult function in a device that already exhibited high levels of the unknown.

Caeltin Benson- Allott's exploration of The Ring  as horror laced with anti-piracy propaganda led me to consider another anti-copy apparatus that would seem to uncannily display and evoke similar tropes and features. Like Samara's curse it is hidden within the medium, burnt in using non conventional means to a location deep within the sealed container.

1. https://pif.fandom.com/wiki/Federation_Against_Copyright_Theft_-_The_Pirates_Are_Out_To_Get_You  --  watch the video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLBY4qzUMNw

2. Retrotechnophobia: Putting an End to Analog Abjection with The Ring, published in Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens, 2013, Caetlin Benson-Allott, University of California Press

3. Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium, 2014, Michael Z. Newman, Columbia University Press.

4. A key reference here is clearly, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright, 2009, Lucas Hilderbrand, Duke University Press but also Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horror-Avant-garde, 2000, Joan Hawkins, University of Minnesota Press and Electric Blues: The Rise and Fall of Britain's First Pre-recorded Videocassette Distributors, 2016, Julian Upton, Edinburgh University Press are also all great.

On the 66th Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen.

transcribed and expanded first impressions captured on voice recorder, 2014: I find Oberhausen to be a pleasant town of appealing proportions. The architecture is oddly varied except in its height that rarely seems to exceed four stories. Much rebuilt after the devastating bombing raids of the second world war, it's as if the structures mistrust the sky and huddle down together, close to the ground, trying to present hard targets. The style of certain wide yet un-assuming avenues furnished with rows of terraced townhouses reminds me of the Quai au Foin in Brussels or other towns with Flemish influence, the kind of terrain where a dreamy city roamer must always keep one eye on the pavement lest he wander into some unnoticed historic canal. The local residents go about their business and appear to be tucked up in bed by eleven o'clock. Once a year the film festival arrives...

 

This year it didn't. Or it didn't while at the same time it did, last month May 13th - 19th. So much dialogue surrounding the type of moving image celebrated and explored at Oberhausen Short Film Festivals has, of recent years, concerned itself with uncertainty and vulnerabilities of the medium itself. Is cinema dead? Does the digital image provide an adequate replacement for the film strip? What chance do artist labs and co-operatives, independent screens and facilities have when even industrial chains are potentially being driven out of business by apparently global overcooking of property prices? (1)

The forces that define ontologies shift. Pressures create imprints, mold and shape. There was a time when independent film makers faced impossible costs for equipment and material. Then having strived for a means to produce, they were met with the terrible reality that barely anyone would be able to witness it. The systems of distribution allowed little to no space for independent, experimental or underground work and short work has always struggled to find audiences. Cheap, high quality digital equipment solved the first of these problems. The accessibility of high bandwidth cyberspace put an end to the second.

More recently constraints on physical spaces in which to make and present work have increased year on year with little hope of abating. For a society invested in the virtual, material space is commanding an outrageous premium.

Which is why events like Oberhausen continue to be important to the world of short film and video. But if cinema can survive the (near) death of film, the transition into the less material domains of the digital – how would the ontology of an specific material durational event such as a long standing film festival fare online?

With over 2500 passes sold and 1000 trade visitors I guess the simplest answer would be – pretty well.

The selection of films lined up at Oberhausen this year often seemed to address the lack of physical stimuli ; large darkened audatoria, drinks and chats with makers, viewers and critics on the pedestrianised thoroughfare outside Kino Lichtburg, glasses of cold Bitburger -- with work that provoked a sense of the haptic, the sensations of the flesh, the indexicality so privileged by exponents of analogue.

The immersive pleasure of the cinema auditorium may have been absent whilst watching a video such as Bog Body (2019, 16m, Joonas Hyvönen) on a laptop sat on a messy desk during lockdown but there were invitations to be immersed elsewhere – in a very wet (digital) peat bog for instance. This place we discover, like film, video and digital, is a storage space for memory. To slip into this quagmire, like the crooning protagonist, is to become deathly, spectral, like the sonar image of a shipwreck too deep to be experienced as anything other than a ghost. The objects within the bog have become merely images, recordings. And yet the trade off here is a potentially fair one, as with any film subject, to enter the bog offers a possibility of immortality. As storage media go, peat preserves very well and resident Tardigrades have excellent memories (and not just for bad jokes).

                                                       Bog Body, Joonas Hyvönen, courtesy of AV-arkki

Storage media and sensory mash up are also central in Patent Nr: 314805 (2020, 2m, Mika Taanila) Here a very early attempt to record sound onto film, rediscovered in the Finnish Film Archives, boldly dominates the screen, bringing with it synesthesia and a reminder that film has been, at every step not just recorder as in live action filming, or means of synthesis as in animation but an analytic tool as in the chronophotography of Marey, Muybridge and many successors who have used the power of film to visualise that previously invisible.

                                                  Patentti Nr. 314805, Mika Taanila, courtesy of Kurzfilmtage

The process created by in 1914 by Eric Tigerstedt, the 'Edison of Finland' no less, captured sound as stark, vivid monochrome images with an enigmatic device he called the Photomagnetophone. During an post screening Zoom interview, Taanila was asked several times how the images were created and, it seems, he either doesn't know or prefers the mystery of the process to remain undivulged. Either way the fluttering stripes of sound that run vertically down the screen are spellbinding to watch and remarkably similar to the optical sound systems that would become industry standards some years later. The undulating recordings are also reminiscent of a sine wave displayed on an oscilloscope – an image that would become a cross genre cinematic trope to denote the white heat of science and visualisations of the futuristic and the unknown. They must surely have looked that way in 1914.

Tigerstedt's comparison to Edison reinforces the oft stated fact that the American was as inspired a businessman as inventor. The Phonomagnetophone, like many other innovations by the prophetic Tigerstedt went unrewarded and it seems he died in 1925 having received little recognition for his work.

A highlight of the festival for me was Susannah Gent's Psychotel (2020, 60m) that explores the uncanny, though montages of rich image and spoken text, evocations of horror film and folk tale. Gent, a taxidermist, understands that, like a photograph as described by Barthes – the stuffed cadaver and the representational moving image function both a transgression of death and memento mori – a reminder of it's inescapability.

                                        Psychotel, copyright Susannah Gent, 2020

The corridors of the Psyhotel are those Kubrick chased Steadicam operators along – a flying eye perspective rushing towards a date with unknown. We observe it's rooms as if through a peepholes carved in the wall. The otherliness of the hotel room exists partly in the fluidity of it's possession. What is 'my room' was recently someone else's. And yet, as witnessed in Norman Bate's post homicidal tidy up, all trace of previous occupant's presence has been erased. That's part of the service, delivered by unseen and unknown hands.

Like their bodily counterparts, the living, spectres require a space. Most fictional texts that concern themselves with haunting embed the ghosts and their back stories around a physical location or space. The house built on an ancient burial ground, the Gothic castle, the suburban home tormented by previous tenants who had met bitterly violent ends. The hotel room is more of a palimpsest, with any personal, durational or emotional investment or charge created during occupation being thoroughly erased before the next tenant takes residency may seem unlikely space for a haunting on these terms. The hotel room resists the imposition of the type of histories that the supernatural appear to demand and yet, uncannily, the spooky hotel finds itself charged with a extra burst of eeriness. Certain revenants  ignore check out time and as for observing the 'do not disturb' signs, well...

Mark Fisher, describes the eerie a sense of 'something where there should be nothing, or there is nothing where there should be something.' (2) The hotel with it's long empty corridors, and quasi private spaces, that lack evidence of personal occupation clearly meet the latter of these definitions and when there is suggestion that some presence, psychic or supernatural exists within this neutral, generic place the former is evoked.

As illuminated by Laura Mulvay, (3) Freud saw the uncanny as a troubling reconnection with repressed figments of a shared or personal past. To experience the uncanny was to re-encounter traces of fears previously believed to have been overcome. For Ernst Jentsch, the uncanny was as much about that which made strange in the presentation of elements that provoke a sense of 'intellectual uncertainty', that which operates in ways that we cannot fathom – a technological uncanny. (4)

Gent's film exemplifies both definitions excellently and the sense of unearthing of anxieties and tropes from a repressed past, their manifestation in abjection and unease are balanced against masterful conception, direction and visuality that impress with as vivid sense of the contemporary.

As to the uncanniness of the festival that was not there and it's the doppelgänger Oberhausen's 66^th Internationale Kurzfilmtage, 2020... it would appear to follow Jentsch rather than Freud. It is a celebration of cinematic vision, voice and spectacle that astounds with the novel and the cutting edge. A showcase for another year's inspiration and hard work from around the globe. As for Freud's definition of the uncanny, it simply does not function as a repression or revenant when, even during the Covid lockdown of 2020, it never really went away.

1. I'm referring to the closure of the Multiscreen Sony Cinestar at Potsdamerplatz, Berlin which was apparently shut due to rising rent costs. The excellent repertory and experimental screens at the close by Arsenal happily continue.
2. Mark Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie (Repeater, 2017)
3. Laura Mulvay, Death 24x a Second (Reaktion Books, 2006)
4. Ernst Jentsch, On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906), Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1919)