1. LOW RESOLUTIONS
In one of Woody Allen’s films 1 the main
character is out of focus. It’s not a technical problem but some sort of disease that has befallen
him:
his image is consistently blurred. Since Allen’s character is an actor, this becomes a major
problem: he
is
unable to find work. His lack of definition turns into a material problem. Focus is identified as a
class position, a position of ease and privilege, while being out of focus lowers one’s value as an
image.
The contemporary hierarchy of images, however, is not only based on sharpness, but also and primarily
on resolution. Just look at any electronics store and this system, described by Harun Farocki in a
notable 2007 interview,2 becomes
immediately apparent. In the
class society of images, cinema takes on the role of a flagship store. In flagship stores high-end
products are marketed in an upscale environment. More affordable derivatives of the same images
circulate as DVDs, on broadcast television or online, as poor images.
Obviously, a high-resolution image looks more brilliant and impressive, more mimetic and magic, more
scary and seductive than a poor one. It is more rich, so to speak. Now, even consumer formats are
increasingly adapting to the tastes of cineastes and esthetes, who insisted on 35 mm film as a
guarantee of pristine visuality. The insistence upon analog film as the sole medium of visual
importance resounded throughout discourses on cinema, almost regardless of their ideological
inflection. It never mattered that these high-end economies of film production were (and still are)
firmly anchored in systems of national culture, capitalist studio production, the cult of mostly
male genius, and the original version, and thus are often conservative in their very structure.
Resolution was fetishized as if its lack amounted to castration of the author. The cult of film
gauge dominated even independent film production. The rich image established its own set of
hierarchies, with new technologies offering more and more possibilities to creatively degrade it.
2. RESURRECTION (AS POOR IMAGES)
But insisting on rich images also had more serious consequences. A speaker at a recent conference on
the film essay refused to show clips from a piece by Humphrey Jennings because no proper film
projection was available. Although there was at the speaker’s disposal a perfectly standard DVD
player and video projector, the audience was left to imagine what those images might have looked
like.
In this case the invisibility of the image was more or less voluntary and based on aesthetic
premises. But it has a much more general equivalent based on the consequences of neoliberal
policies. Twenty or even thirty years ago, the neoliberal restructuring of media production began
slowly obscuring non-commercial imagery, to the point where experimental and essayistic cinema
became almost invisible. As it became prohibitively expensive to keep these works circulating in
cinemas, so were they also deemed too marginal to be broadcast on television. Thus they slowly
disappeared not just from cinemas, but from the public sphere as well. Video essays and experimental
films remained for the most part unseen save for some rare screenings in metropolitan film museums
or film clubs, projected in their original resolution before disappearing again into the darkness of
the archive.
This development was of course connected to the neoliberal radicalization of the concept of culture
as commodity, to the commercialization of cinema, its dispersion into multiplexes, and the
marginalization of independent filmmaking. It was also connected to the restructuring of global
media industries and the establishment of monopolies over the audiovisual in certain countries or
territories. In this way, resistant or non-conformist visual matter disappeared from the surface
into an underground of alternative archives and collections, kept alive only by a network of
committed organizations and individuals, who would circulate bootlegged VHS copies amongst
themselves. Sources for these were extremely rare—tapes moved from hand to hand, depending on word
of mouth, within circles of friends and colleagues. With the possibility to stream video online,
this condition started to dramatically change. An increasing number of rare materials reappeared on
publicly accessible platforms, some of them carefully curated (Ubuweb) and some just a pile of stuff
(YouTube).
At present, there are at least twenty torrents of Chris Marker’s film essays available online. If you
want a retrospective, you can have it. But the economy of poor images is about more than just
downloads: you can keep the files, watch them again, even reedit or improve them if you think it
necessary. And the results circulate. Blurred AVI files of half-forgotten masterpieces are exchanged
on semi-secret P2P platforms. Clandestine cell-phone videos smuggled out of museums are broadcast on
YouTube. DVDs of artists’ viewing copies are bartered.3 Many
works of avant-garde, essayistic, and non-commercial cinema have been resurrected as poor images.
Whether they like it or not.
3. PRIVATIZATION AND PRIVACY
That rare prints of militant, experimental, and classical works of cinema as well as video art
reappear as poor images is significant on another level. Their situation reveals much more than the
content or appearance of the images themselves: it also
reveals the conditions of
their marginalization, the constellation of social forces leading to their online circulation as
poor images.4 Poor images are poor because they are not assigned any value
within the class society of images—their status as illicit or degraded grants them exemption from
its criteria. Their lack of resolution attests to their
appropriation and
displacement.5
Obviously, this condition is not only connected to the neoliberal restructuring of media production
and digital technology; it also has to do with the post-socialist and postcolonial restructuring of
nation states, their cultures, and their archives. While some nation states are dismantled or fall
apart, new cultures and traditions are invented and new histories created. This obviously also
affects film archives—in many cases, a whole heritage of film prints is left without its supporting
framework of national culture. As I once observed
6 in the case
of a film museum in Sarajevo, the national archive can find its next life in the form of a
video-rental store. Pirate copies seep out of such archives through disorganized privatization. On
the other hand, even the British Library sells off its contents online at astronomical prices.
As Kodwo Eshun has noted,7 poor images
circulate partly in the
void left by state-cinema organizations who find it too difficult to operate as a 16/35-mm archive
or to maintain any kind of distribution infrastructure in the contemporary era. From this
perspective, the poor image reveals the decline and degradation of the film essay, or indeed any
experimental and non-commercial cinema, which in many places was made possible because the
production of culture was considered a task of the state. Privatization of media production
gradually grew more important than state controlled/sponsored media production. But, on the other
hand, the rampant privatization of intellectual content, along with online marketing and
commodification, also enable piracy and appropriation; it gives rise to the circulation of poor
images.
4. IMPERFECT CINEMA
The emergence of poor images reminds one of a classic Third Cinema manifesto, For an Imperfect Cinema,8 by Juan García
Espinosa, written in Cuba in the
late 1960s. Espinosa argues for an imperfect cinema because, in his words, “perfect
cinema—technically and artistically masterful—is almost always reactionary cinema.” The imperfect
cinema is one that strives to overcome the divisions of labor within class society. It merges art
with life and science, blurring the distinction between consumer and producer, audience and author.
It insists upon its own imperfection, is popular but not consumerist, committed without becoming
bureaucratic.
In his manifesto, Espinosa also reflects on the promises of new media. He clearly predicts that the
development of video technology will jeopardize the elitist position of traditional filmmakers and
enable some sort of mass film production: an art of the people. Like the economy of poor images,
imperfect cinema diminishes the distinctions between author and audience and merges life and art.
Most of all, its visuality is resolutely compromised: blurred, amateurish, and full of artifacts.
In some way, the economy of poor images corresponds to the description of imperfect cinema, while the
description of perfect cinema represents rather the concept of cinema as a flagship store. But the
real and contemporary imperfect cinema is also much more ambivalent and affective than Espinosa had
anticipated. On the one hand, the economy of poor images, with its immediate possibility of
worldwide distribution and its ethics of remix and appropriation, enables the participation of a
much larger group of producers than ever before. But this does not mean that these opportunities are
only used for progressive ends. Hate speech, spam, and other rubbish make their way through digital
connections as well. Digital communication has also become one of the most contested markets—a zone
that has long been subjected to an ongoing original accumulation and to massive (and, to a certain
extent, successful) attempts at privatization.
The networks in which poor images circulate thus constitute both a platform for a fragile new common
interest and a battleground for commercial and national agendas. They contain experimental and
artistic material, but also incredible amounts of porn and paranoia. While the territory of poor
images allows access to excluded imagery, it is also permeated by the most advanced commodification
techniques. While it enables the users’ active participation in the creation and distribution of
content, it also drafts them into production. Users become the editors, critics, translators, and
(co-)authors of poor images.
Poor images are thus popular images—images that can be made and seen by the many. They express all
the contradictions of the contemporary crowd: its
opportunism, narcissism, desire
for autonomy and creation, its inability to focus or make up its mind, its constant readiness
for transgression and simultaneous submission.9 Altogether, poor images
present a snapshot of the affective condition of the crowd, its neurosis, paranoia, and fear, as
well as its craving for intensity, fun, and distraction. The condition of the images speaks not only
of countless transfers and reformattings, but also of the countless people who cared enough about
them to convert them over and over again, to add subtitles, reedit, or upload them.
In this light, perhaps one has to redefine the value of the image, or, more precisely, to create a
new perspective for it. Apart from resolution and exchange value, one might imagine another form of
value defined by velocity, intensity, and spread. Poor images are poor because they are heavily
compressed and travel quickly. They lose matter and gain speed. But they also express a condition of
dematerialization, shared not only with the legacy of conceptual art but above all with contemporary modes of semiotic
production.10 Capital’s
semiotic turn, as described by Felix
Guattari,11 plays in
favor of the creation and dissemination of compressed and
flexible data packages
that can be integrated into ever-newer combinations and sequences.12
This flattening-out of visual content—the concept-in-becoming of the images—positions them within a
general informational turn, within economies of knowledge that tear images and their captions out of
context into the swirl of permanent capitalist
deterritorialization.13 The history of conceptual art describes this
dematerialization of the art object first as a resistant move against the fetish value of
visibility. Then, however, the dematerialized art object turns out to be perfectly adapted to the
semioticization of capital, and thus to the conceptual
turn of
capitalism.14 In a way, the poor image is subject to a similar tension. On the
one hand, it operates against the fetish value of high resolution. On the other hand, this is
precisely why it also ends up being perfectly integrated into an information capitalism thriving on
compressed attention spans, on impression rather than immersion, on intensity rather than
contemplation, on previews rather than screenings.
5. COMRADE, WHAT IS YOUR VISUAL BOND TODAY?
But, simultaneously, a paradoxical reversal happens. The circulation of poor images creates a
circuit, which fulfills the original ambitions of militant and (some) essayistic and experimental
cinema—to create an alternative economy of images, an imperfect cinema existing inside as well as
beyond and under commercial media streams. In the age of file-sharing, even marginalized content
circulates again and reconnects dispersed worldwide audiences.
The poor image thus constructs anonymous global networks just as it creates a shared history. It
builds alliances as it travels, provokes translation or mistranslation, and creates new publics and
debates. By losing its visual substance it recovers some of its political punch and creates a new
aura around it. This aura is no longer based on the permanence of the “original,” but on the
transience of the copy. It is no longer anchored within a classical public sphere mediated and
supported by the frame of the nation state or corporation, but
floats on the
surface of temporary and dubious data pools. By drifting away from the vaults of cinema,
it is propelled onto new and ephemeral screens stitched together by the desires of dispersed
spectators.
The circulation of poor images thus creates “visual bonds,” as Dziga Vertov once
called them.15 This “visual bond” was, according to Vertov,16 supposed to link the workers of
the world with each
other. He imagined a sort of communist, visual, Adamic language that could not only inform or
entertain, but also organize its viewers. In a sense, his dream has come true, if mostly under the
rule of a global information capitalism whose audiences are linked almost in a physical sense by
mutual excitement, affective attunement, and anxiety.
But there is also the circulation and production of poor images based on cell phone cameras, home
computers, and unconventional forms of distribution. Its optical connections—collective editing,
file sharing, or grassroots distribution circuits—reveal erratic and coincidental links between
producers everywhere, which simultaneously constitute dispersed audiences.
The circulation of poor images feeds into both capitalist media assembly lines and alternative
audiovisual economies. In addition to a lot of confusion and stupefaction, it also possibly creates
disruptive movements of thought and affect. The circulation of poor images thus initiates another
chapter in the historical genealogy of nonconformist information circuits: Vertov’s “visual bonds,”
the internationalist workers pedagogies that Peter Weiss described in The Aesthetics of Resistance,
the circuits of Third Cinema and Tricontinentalism, of non-aligned filmmaking and thinking. The poor
image—ambivalent as its status may be—thus takes its place in the genealogy of carbon-copied
pamphlets, cine-train agit-prop films, underground video magazines and other nonconformist
materials, which aesthetically often used poor materials. Moreover, it reactualizes many of the
historical ideas associated with these circuits, among others Vertov’s idea of the visual bond.
Imagine somebody from the past with a beret asking you, “Comrade, what is your visual bond today?”
You might answer: it is this link to the present.
6. NOW!
The poor image embodies the afterlife of many former masterpieces of cinema and video art. It has been expelled from the sheltered paradise that
cinema seems to have once
been.17 After being kicked out of the protected and often protectionist arena
of national culture, discarded from commercial circulation, these works have become travelers in a
digital no-man’s land, constantly shifting their resolution and format, speed and media, sometimes
even losing names and credits along the way.
Now many of these works are back—as poor images, I admit. One could of course argue that this is not
the real thing, but then—please, anybody—show me this real thing.
The poor image is no longer about the real thing—the originary original. Instead, it is about its own
real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible
temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and
exploitation.
In short: it is about reality.