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Art Obituary: This Time Entire Media by Doniphan Blair
The Death of Paper: tragedy + time = comedy. photo: courtesy C. Allens
ON SEPTEMBER 10th, MACWORLD, A
magazine devoted to Apple products, fired most of its staff and announced its last print issue will be in November. The very next day, Apple brought out its smartwatch and larger-screened iPhone but a spokeswoman for IDG, Macworld’s owner, said the timing was coincidental.
As it happened, Macworld debuted on April 1, 1984, this time the exact same day as Apple's Macintosh, which, as we all know, changed personal computing forever. Riding on its coattails as well as covering all the peripheral software and hardware, the mag achieved a circulation high of 135,000. It will continue online at Macworld.com, with print editions remaining overseas.
This is nothing new, of course, given we've been watching the "Death of Paper" for two decades now, although slow death is more like it. The "paper-less" office, promoted obsessively in the naughts, has not come to pass. A plane ticket, which used to entail about a sheet of paper, can now run over five full pages until smartphone boarding passes completely take over.
Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines are bigger than ever. Their large, luscious glossy ads making the quarter-inchers at the bottom of iPhones look like food smears—or a recipe for Mad Men madness, if they were informed about the future of advertising.
Of course, many paper entities were terminated with extreme prejudice, witness the end of Newsweek, in 2012, with Esquire, Playboy and the New Yorker now staggering on at fractions of their former, page-count selves.
The hand cranked Bolex, like the bicycle, is one of technologies 'perfect' machines and ready for a cargo cult. photo: D. Blair
Meanwhile, the film and photography industries have endured their own Death of Acetate, which will be more complete than paper's, in fact. 35mm production and distribution will probably continue for decades in India and elsewhere but only the tippy-top of American filmmakers remain analog today.
That esteemed pantheon includes the Andersons, Paul Thomas and Wes (unrelated), Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg but given this list is from July 2012, probably only Spielberg still acetates.
My aunt Doris, who recently passed at 90, worked as a chemist in Kodak's Acetate Department, in Rochester, NY. My father, Vachel, was also there in the late '40s before becoming a cinematographer in New York City, where he shot mostly 16mm. I grew up working with him, and then on my own 16mm productions.
Indeed, I still have my 16mm rewinds and splicers, and keep a hand-crank Bolex H16 with magnificent color-rich Palliard lenses, on my dining room table: a Shrine to Acetate. Like the bicycle, the Bolex is a perfect machine, a butterfly of technology.
As with the extinction of any species, the passing of a medium, no matter how inevitable and cost-effective, is a tragic, especially to its practitioners but also the culture at large. It automatically removes a set of technical tropes, the film scratches and end of roll blow-outs that they now have an app for, often diminishing the art form's range.
But take heart! Vinyl is enjoying a comeback by delivering better fidelity than MP3, the ability for limited pressings and manual distribution and fantastic cover art, an essential graphic attribute. Meanwhile it was the CD that took the bullet.
Acetate will never die entirely. Film, I predict, will fetishize and cargo cult. Even if theaters don't keep showing 16mm and 35mm prints, private rituals, perhaps with the projector clanging away in the middle of the audience, will arise to preserve the medium anthropologically.
While Marshall McLuhan did say, "The medium is the message", in point of fact, it was an typo by the typesetter setting his book's cover. What McLuhan meant to say was "The medium is the massage," which he sometimes varied as, "The medium is the mass age."
But he was quickly converted by this serendipitous happenstance to "The medium is the message," which has become its own sort of cargo cult, given it has been hailed as one of the great insights into the communication era. Ironically, it was a fortuitous error which would have been impossible in film or most other arts—meaning that the medium of writing influenced the messages and that, in the end, the error was correct.
Marshall McLuhan played himself in the famous scene from 'Annie Hall' 1977. photo: courtesy W. Allen
Sure enough, Oakland has its Black Hole Cinemateque, in an old-firehouse in West Oakland, where the classics of avant-garde and noir can be seen in their original form, while San Francisco has the Vortex Room, specializing in grade "A" B films, like Russ Meyers. Alas, the Vortex Room is being evicted.
Both those towns also have the Castro and the Paramount theaters, where high-end 35 mm projectors periodically show pristine newly struck prints of films like "El Topo" and "Dr. Strangelove"—both of which I saw, and was GOBSMACKED—not to mention "Lawrence of Arabia"!
Imagine taking your daughter to "Lawrence of Arabia", the 1962, David Lean epic where one shot—that of Omar Sharif riding in from the horizon line—lasts for TEN minutes, as long as a half a dozen of her recent YouTube views? After millions in preservation, reprints and projector rebuilds, will she buy into classic cinema?
My eight-year old daughter did, in fact, back in 1989, although we should have attended the matinee. At three hours and 48 minutes—and the 1989 restoration of "Lawrence of Arabia" is 20 minutes longer than the original), plus the 20 minute intermission, the evening show ran far too late for a school day.
Still, she sat entranced on the edge of her seat through almost the entire film until Peter O'Toole, in his role of a lifetime, delivered the final political wrapup and plot exposition, by which time she was sleeping soundly, dreaming of deserts, another convert to the glory of cinemascopic cinema. Will iMax make it to the 22nd century?
The tiny speck, with a plume of white dust, is Omar Sharif, who takes a full ten minutes to ride in—although there were some cutaways—in 'Lawrence of Arabia', 1962. photo: courtesy D. Lean
And "The Glory of Paper?" Ironically, we started printing the paper CineSource just in time to experience The Death of Paper. Two and half years ago, in August 2010, CineSource Magazine, the paper version, passed. By September, advertising dropped 96%.
Experiencing the Death of Paper was an honor in a sense, allowing us to observe this unique cultural event from within. Unable to imagine the Death of Paper in its totality, we failed to fully ramp up house ads or transform our identity.
Meanwhile, our former clients, mostly the owners of equipment rental, production and related companies, who enjoyed seeing their ads in actual magazines at locations around town, were—or had on staff—web designers. They saw no need for Internet advertising even if it might finance an ongoing CIneSource reportage on their business environment.
Our selling points, that the paper published only 5,000 copies monthly, while the site was soon getting ten times that, and that a full-page paper ad cost at least $1500 while the web equivalent was only $400, seemed, to them, laughable.
CineSource supporters have recommended a redesign and perhaps KickStarter Campaign, to cover costs, pay the writers again and to assign them to cover community interests—commercial production, celebrities, media corporations.
CineSource's print publication produced some nice covers with interesting juxtapositions. photo: courtesy CineSource
But redesign impales us on the horns of another dilemma. If we switch to the new blog-style, with a "white-look", lots of space but with ads jammed in willy-nilly—so your eye can't avoid them—that means we'd have to slit the throat of our web design which harkens back to the paper design. Both feature(d) a big, left-hand vertical photo, generally of a standing filmmaker, which made the cineaste monumental while offsetting cinema's built-in horizontality.
Do we want to toss the human-proportioned element and French schoolboy blue, the last vestige of the paper mag but symbols of much more? Or should we keep the "classical" look, with a redesign of course, and wait 'til the mass market gets massaged (by avant-garde culture, in case you were wondering) on a pendulum swing back to its antecedents.
If we can just stagger through another six years, perhaps CineSource will be the vinyl of film 'zines and that much more empowered, since we stuck by our art guns. Perhaps from that fortress we will be better able to defended acetate projection and preservation.
99.9% of filmmaking will, should be, and probably already is, digital. But, given that the medium is the message, as well as the massage, we need to keep as many of its tropes as possible, the serendipitous discoveries, like the scratches and end-of-roll light flashes that are now popular digital effects.
While MacWorld was born to announce the birth of the machine that its publishers must have known would eventually bring its own demise, audiences come and go but art is eternal.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .Posted on Oct 03, 2014 - 02:04 AM