It's not video. On AI "video" and post-cinema.
From cinematic Tik Toks to AI filmmaking.
AI generated video now seems to be at the place AI images were about a year ago. How are we going to think about these motion images? Are they videos? Film? Something new? Certainly they’re not cinema, perhaps they will be used in cinema?
These questions aren’t fundamentally different from the questions raised about the relationship between AI images and photography. A while back Andy Adams covered this question in his substack post It’s Not Photography. He writes about “AI Photography,” and how it causes us to ask “what is photography?” and “what is post-photography?” It engaged with some thoughts I’ve been having about “post-cinema” that I thought might be worth digging into here.
The Kids These Days
Post-Cinema appeared long before AI generated motion images. One thing I’ve been occasionally astounded by on TikTok, is the ease with which some of the creators wield what is essentially a “cinematic” visual language.
There’s a whole world of absurdist and bizarro sketch comedy, where little holds together the thread of things except for the use of film and TV stylistic conventions. It’s not just cinema, some creators are very adepts at mimicking or mocking the tone and style of reality TV, commercials, documentaries, and basically any other media form in addition to “cinema.” There was also that whole trend a while back I’m sure you all saw, where TikTokers were channeling a simulacra of Wes Anderson’s vibe pretty effectively.
These videos themselves of course vary in quality, but it’s clear that many young people now deeply understand the stylistic language of the media they’ve grown up surrounded by. They can speak that language, remix it, and repurpose it with ease. There are lots of very cinematic TikToks, but that doesn’t mean they are cinema, it just means they can speak the visual language that was originally developed within the medium of cinema.
When cinema was the dominant moving-image medium, there would have been no need for the word “cinematic.” Things were “cinematic” simply because they were cinema. We only need the word cinematic to describe things that look and feel like cinema that exist outside of cinema itself.1 A TV show can be cinematic, and music video or a commercial can be cinematic, a TikTok cinematic.
This is interesting, not because categorizing things as cinema or “not cinema” really matters, but because cinema is a foundational part of the visual language that “post-cinema” mediums are speaking. To really understand digital moving images, you need to understand cinema.
Identifying Post-Mediums?
This brings me back to Andy’s post on AI Photography. He includes a definition of post-photography written by ChatGPT, which describes it largely as an “expansion” of photography, and what we consider to be photography:
“Post-photography is often associated with the digital revolution, which has transformed the way we create, manipulate, and distribute images. In this context, post-photography refers to the shift away from traditional photographic techniques and the embrace of digital technologies, which have enabled new forms of image-making and distribution.”
This definition focus on how technique changes. We go from capturing an image on film, to capturing and image on a digital sensor, etc. I think this makes sense, but I think there’s also another more intuitive way of thinking about a “post-medium” like post-photography or post-cinema.
I think these "post-mediums" are signified by the visual, formal, stylistic language of a medium being divorced from its technique. Post-cinema is when things “look cinematic” but have very little to do with the original form or context of cinema. It’s just folks adopting cinema's language for use in other mediums. Post-photography similarly, looks photographic, but is partly or completely divorced from the original processes used to create photography. It's not just an "expansion" of what photography is, but a carrying over of the visual form of photography into other mediums (digital/ai/etc).
Here’s an easy to spot example of what I mean: Grain, light-leaks, and film scratches are all elements of the “form” of film photography that were defined by the technique.2 But in post-photography, those elements are applied to a completely digitally rendered image, to make it appears as-if it were a photograph, even though none of the original technique that produced those elements is present. Post-photography carries elements of the form into a new medium where that form isn’t inherent.
The same thing happens in post-cinema. Aspect ratio, is a nice, concrete example of this. Wide aspect ratios like 2.39:1 were originally defined by the technique of shooting in anamorphic. But it’s not uncommon to see a YouTuber crop the video in a 2.39:1 letterbox for a more “cinematic” look. There’s nothing inherently more dramatic to a wider aspect ratio on YouTube, but the YouTube video, by taking on aspects of cinema (in this case literally taking “the shape of cinema”) manages to feel more like something from cinema. It feels cinematic.
I’m using concrete visual examples like grain and aspect ratio because they’re easy to point out, but this applies to any aspect of a form, even the really difficult to define ones. Sometimes what’s carried over to a piece of cellphone video that makes it look or feel cinematic is the lighting, the tone of performance on screen, the way the camera is positioned or moved. Post-cinema, or things that are cinematic but aren’t cinema, are simply things that capture the feeling of cinema or at least a part of that feeling.
In a world where all moving images are democratized onto the same screens (our phones, TVs, or laptops) and are viewed in more-or-less similar contexts (streaming services), the distinction between Cinema, TV, and “web content” becomes more and more a distinction of genre and style rather than actual technique or presentation. “Post-cinema” is a genre of video, “post-photography” is a genre of digital image. AI generated videos are all “post-cinema” completely divorced from any of the original technique of cinema. The technique of “filmmaking” has entirely evaporated, that which “looks cinematic” is all that’s left.
To some, this kind of discussion of labels feels like insignificant semantic quibbling. But if “The Medium is The Message” then to understand the messages we’re absorbing via the mediums we need to be able to accurately identify where one medium ends, another starts, and how they influence each other.
Of course “cinematic” or “not cinematic” as descriptors can and sometimes are now critically applied to what is still in fact Cinema, but this is only possible now that Cinema has exist long enough for “cinematic” to codify.
Interestingly these elements that come to define a form to some extent, may not have initially been desired or intentional by those using the original form. Many early photographers tried to reduce or mitigate these things.
A solid read. This resonates deeply in 2024. 🎬✂️