In this essay, Giuliana Bruno discusses the information behind Warhol and Tsai Ming-Liang’s Reel Images. “No more actors, no more story, no more sets,” the films back to reality by simply recording the very normal activity or change in daily life with the moving of time. The concept of “Zero degrees film” can well explain it.
In that case, walking into a cinema is like giving you a motivation to have a good look at the surroundings. The movies record people exhibiting daily behavior, enjoying leisure inactivity or pleasure time, even things like a man sleeping can be a material for audiences to watch for several hours. People at that time questioned whether these reel images were movies or not, but for Warhol and Tsai Ming-Liang, they were movies that encourage people to find themselves, by reserve their space of thinking independently, rather than use thousands of stories, sets and actors to lead the audiences.
Comparing to the normal life, walking into a cinema is like walking into a black room which keeps all the mass in black but put the very pure and simple things in light. When focus only on one thing, the passing of time appears. Architectures in movies, in that case, are just property, a property to show time passing by with the change of light. At the same time, architectures built in different time shows the identity of the specific area, and the time then has double meaning on the architectures. Focusing on the very daily things and make stargazing rose up at the postwar time when people began to care about the life of everybody, not only the upper class. And films in that kind of straightforward expression guide people to think independently rather than guide them having a tour without any reflection.
To some extent, the film is about conveying motion, by visual and acoustics. Unlike traditional movies, the postwar films didn’t send motions by telling stories, or shaping characters to help people understand something, they just show what is happening in real life, which is “Zero degree”, they create atmosphere and convey the emotion by letting the audiences themselves to entirely walking into the atmosphere, and think about their reality.
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A good understanding about Bruno’s idea of zero degrees of film. Both Warhol and Tsai manipulate the difference between reel and real time to highlight the details of everyday lives. Moving beyond the mass reproduction times of Warhol, it might be interesting to share your opinion on the idea of “zero degree” in a modern technological era where film is too ready available.