Part 1

Nearing the turn of the century, two filmmakers both subversive, curious and in tension with their position in the Hollywood landscape, concerned themselves with feelings of fear, guilt, and mania for all nightmares past, decked and charmed by various new technologies and plethora of screens. 

Abel Ferrara’s 1997 deeply personal film The Blackout coincidentally contains the same aesthetic and narrative intentions as David Lynch’s film from the same year, Lost Highway. How striking they are in the same ways and in the same year posits questions about what the changes could’ve been in the media landscape as celluloid became video and therefore as cinema was no longer dominant and rather in flux with all digital video, and the specific cognitive troubles that year may have caused, within the context of the 90s as a whole and of their filmmaking careers. 

Stills from Thelma and Louise (1991) and Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989)

The decade had already seen considerations of surveillance and videotaping, like James Spader’s character’s taped interviews as a way to distance himself from his own sexuality and surrounding reality in Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989) and the surveillance camera seen in the robbery scene in Thelma and Louise (1991) which puts Thelma’s agency in this moment in question. Although with the nearing of the 21st century, its new technology as well as developments like that of the 1996 Telecommunications Act which opened up doors for the tech changes to have effect, clearly disrupted all that filmmakers had previously done and know filmmaking and cinema to be as. For example, in 1996 the first film was made entirely with digital post production techniques, and in 1997 the HDCAM was released, a 1080p digital camera which put into question accessibility, limitations of 35mm vs. the possibilities of digital video within the realm of different formal and economic agents of cinematography. Or VCRs slowly being replaced by DVD recorders which expands interfaces, making the technology and our experience of it more immaterial. 

Stills from The Blackout (1997)

The Blackout is a film about a repressed and hungover Hollywood actor, Matty, trying to mend and connect with a specific wild night in Miami years ago. Dennis Hopper’s character seems to possess a sleazy digital empire of documents of his past recorded with his aggressive wielding of a handicam. This has clear parallels to the Mystery Man in Lost Highway’s wide-eyed ghostly apparition as he threateningly holds a camera up to his eye in Lynch’s own approach. 

See Part 2. 

Cami Sarram 33737747