Wired magazine has just posted an article online about Adam Rifkin’s (Mousehunt, Underdog) new film, Look.
Prefaced by a factoid asserting that 30 million surveillance cameras in the United States capture images of the average American 200 times a day, Look dramatizes a week in the life of department-store sex addicts, a high school seductress, a pedophile, a “straight” family man who’s having an affair with a gay lawyer, convenience-store slackers and thieves who’ve stashed a body in the trunk of their car. The gimmick: Everything is filmed from the perspective of security cameras.
My first reaction to this was only 30 million? I would hazard a guess that there are more cameras in the UK.
And interesting choice of focus for the theme of the film too – sex and crime, nerdy teens tracking shoppers for later posting on YouTube – rather than the security state and official snooping/paranoia/infringement of civil liberties side of CCTV.
The film’s trailer claims that the film is “shot entirely with surveillance cameras”, but as the director Rifkin reveals in the interview with Wired, the film is actually proteur: professionally-shot, amateur-look, fictional content.
WN: With the different time codes and grainy video quality that varies from scene to scene, the footage in your movie really looks like it was captured by actual security cameras. Did you in fact use the cameras installed at each location?
Rifkin: No, but every location you see in the movie did have real surveillance cameras. We then placed our cameras exactly where the actual security cams were and shot the scenes in HD using Sony F-900s and F-950s — the same cameras they used on movies like Sin City. When we finished shooting, the movie looked beautiful. Then we spent an enormous amount of time and enormous amount of money making it look like shit.
WN: You were trying to make it look artfully crappy.
Rifkin: Exactly.
Thinking about it, ‘artfully crappy’ could in some ways be a definition of ‘proteur’, at least as far as this kind of fake surveillance camera work goes. It certainly fits with Joe Matsushima’s “4 Tips for Getting the User-Generated Look“.
There are many examples of fake surveillance camera work in feature film and television, especially police procedurals, of course. (I was working up to writing something about proteur content in Dexter when I read this story on Look.)
And there may be the beginnings of a typology of the use of “surveillance camera footage”, from films built around the voyeuristic experience with criminal veneer (The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse, Fritz Lang 1960; Sliver, Philip Noyce, 1991; and most interestingly Andrea Arnold’s recent Glasgow-set drama Red Road, 2006), to films which use surveillance cameras in the opening titles and in the initial set up (Guy Ritchie’s Snatch 2000). In my Screenscapes conference paper a couple of weeks ago I talked about the fake police interview surveillance footage in Butterfly Kiss
and in the Australian television series Dangerous which screened on Foxtel earlier in 2007
Then there is the use of surveillance camera footage that is irrelevant to the plot, though important to fleshing out character. My favourite recent example here is in the Australian feature Clubland, retitled Introducing the Dwights in the US. Frankie J Holden plays a security guard, ex-husband of the film’s main character and father of her two boys. He’s a terminal performer, an ageing ham who has just released an album of covers of Conway Twitty love songs. In the scene from which the still below is taken, Frankie has just appeared from behind the postbox as a customer enters the supermarket to the front of frame. Frankie is pretending to be a cowboy, shooting the customer with his finger gun. This brief scene provides a welcome laugh, and fills in some detail of this character: doesn’t take his job seriously, will perform or play up for any audience. But in his acknowledgement of the camera there is a transgression here of the norms of surveillance, a subversion of it. Raises the question ‘to whom is this gaze directed’?
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