14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

Towards an Archive for Visual Concepts 279
same amount of time as an editing assistant. The individual unions still possessed
a degree of autonomy in those days and a certain code of behaviour was
still in effect, which was transmitted within those professions. I do not intend
to judge that situation, but merely to point out that the situation has changed a
great deal since then. No one is an apprentice for seven years anymore; after
seven years, one is either the director of Viva 3 [trans.: a German TV station
broadcasting music videos] or unemployed again. The majority of texts on the
language of film were written at a time when the film profession still offered
the appearance of being a craft. The de-skilling of the profession came about
through the technical revolution. With video, the camera assistant became obsolete,
and with him disappeared an institution with hierarchical significance,
like a private assigned to serve his officer. The time given for production has
been dramatically reduced. One is not able to shoot a narrative film very much
faster than one did before – in Hollywood in the 1950s, a 70-minute B-movie
was made in a week. However, the tools of post-production, video and the
computer have been responsible for a major acceleration in tempo. In 1970, one
would be allotted four weeks to edit a 45-minute film at the WDR, say, on
Heinrich Böll or on the desperate living conditions in the suburbs. Today one
is allotted perhaps nine days to edit and add post-production sound to a Tatort
episode [trans.: a popular weekly crime show on German television] on an
AVID. The technical revolution has also seen the rise of particular effects that
are made possible by those devices, indeed they are part of the programmes of
these machines, as Vilém Flusser would say. Flusser emphasises the manner in
which any individual photograph or filmic expression is a product of programming.
I use the word ‘programming’ in a somewhat less essential fashion.
Even in the days when film reigned, technical advancement always had
stylistic implications: one only needed to consider portable cameras, the
blimped camera, the zoom lens. But today there are technical advances nearly
every year, which produce, in turn, stylistic proclivities. People no longer learn
from a textbook but rather from a manual – by way of its explicit and implicit
advice. What takes place there has long ceased entering into book form.
One can easily imagine that a great deal is possible in such a situation, when
a filmmaker theorises or when one’s filmmaking praxis is transformed into
writing about film. Written language, which, according to Flusser, is fundamentally
critical, only minimally reveals an orientation towards praxis in the
case of film language. I do not mean to say that one should begin to search for
theories, which would allow a more systematic approach to film production,
as is the case in the analysis of the production of other material goods. Cameraman
Axel Block told me a few years ago how the directors who shoot a Tatort
episode, watch a tape of a Hawks film the night before, in order to draw something
from it for their own shoot. One could make fun of this practice, as I actu-