In parallel with its own exponential growth, my fascination with YouTube has galloped into a raging obsession. Whole evenings, theoretically dedicated to writing, have been hijacked by a terrible need to click away from the Microsoft Word document, on to the Internet browser, and from there the lure of YouTube is irresistible.
What's not to be fascinated by? However slick or however rickety, the best of these mini-movies have an unmediated quality, a found-object realness that is completely lacking in anything available in the cinema or on TV. YouTube now has imitators:
Google Video, ifilm.com and putfile.com; for a growing number of people, time spent surfing the Web exceeds the time spent watching TV, so who knows if this way of making and watching movies might not become a huge and serious rival to the mainstream. Many contemporary movie-makers have become fascinated by the lo-fi video aesthetic, and by blank "locked off" camera work with a deadpan surveillance feel, which has risen in parallel to this Internet revolution.
The cinema has something in common with the confessional, video blog aspect of YouTube. The popularity of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez's The Blair Witch Project was inflamed by a vast, grassroots Internet campaign which mischievously suggested that the film's horrors were real. And there's a cousin to this blurring of fact and fiction in YouTube -- confessional blogs which turn out to be faked by ingenious actors. Documentaries like Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man and Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans have YouTube qualities, in that the footage was shot by the participants themselves, but needed a professional cinema practitioner to bring it to light. If the unhappy heroes of these films were making their videos now, they would probably bypass these directors and take them straight to YouTube.
Where straight cinema and YouTube come more closely into parallel is the use of the continuous shot: the persistent, unjudging, almost uncomprehending gaze; an unedited, deep-focus scene in which our attention as audience is not coerced or directed. Some of the most remarkable clips on YouTube are from the Iraq war. Army personnel are increasingly editing their tapes and adding music (have a look at militaryvideos.net).
But in military or civilian life, the true YouTube gems are not the digitally carpentered mini-features. The most gripping material is raw, unedited footage in one continuous take. The legendary French film critic Andre Bazin would probably admire the genre, favoring as he did the spiritual purity of a single, unedited shot. An outstanding example is KBR Convoy Ambushed in Iraq (7 minutes, 6 seconds). I defy anyone not to be scared, really scared, by this extraordinary film, one of YouTube's flourishing "ambush" sub-genre from Iraq. Watching it, and going through it in real time, is genuinely disturbing.
Snuff comedy
The Dogme film movement of Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg explored minimalism, and film-makers such as Michael Haneke, Andrea Arnold and Christopher Petit have exploited the eerie, disquieting quality of video-surveillance footage. They might all be fascinated by, and even learn something from, what I think of as YouTube's snuff comedy genre: bizarre things captured more by accident than design, which often have a sublime quality.
Fat Woman Falls Down Hole (13 seconds) is a clip of CCTV; the camera is apparently fixed above a bar in a busy pub. Someone opens up a trap door directly behind a woman serving drinks, with results that Buster Keaton himself would have admired. The scene is shot and framed with unshowy formal perfection; a professional director and crew could work for months on a slapstick scene and not get it as right as this. It's something in the way the woman disappears so utterly from view.
The genre takes on a darker tinge with its elements of cruelty and even sadism. Amateur Slamball (1 minute, 17 seconds) could have been made by Michael Haneke in a facetious moment. Three teenage boys are playing basketball on a trampoline. Something goes terribly wrong. But the awful event happens just 17 seconds in; for the remaining minute, the camera is just trained, implacably, on the boy writhing in agony. Wobbles and zooms indicate that there is someone holding this camera: not helping the guy, just filming, filming, filming. There is a worrying level of unconscious cruelty in the camera not looking away: as in Haneke's Hidden or Powell's Peeping Tom, the audience is implicated in this callous detachment.
On a TV "funny videos" show the presenter would cut this off after 20 seconds and you would never know that the film's most compelling aspect is this blank, extended aftermath in which nothing is happening, yet the story is there in its entirety.
Happily, the genre has its U-certificate side. Black and White (28 seconds) is a brilliant and sweet little home movie, which just shows two rabbits gobbling away at their food and looking into the lens with the utter calm of cartoon creatures or young children.
The cinema of YouTube has, at its best, a transcendental amateurism, un-housetrained by the conventions of narrative interest or good taste. It is a quality to be savored, and quite different from documentary or the classic verite effect of realism in feature films.
What makes it so involving is that the viewers extend this amateur process in choosing, playing and sharing the files: they supplement production with a new, vernacular type of distribution. It's this that makes YouTube so addictive.
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