Film/Video.
What it feels like to see it differently.
Language has limits. The same way that AI is many things but none of them are either A or I, so the lexicon of “film and TV” is confused and confusing. Words intended for form or format have been overburdened meaning, as technologies converge, we’re left with “TV” you watch on your phone made the same way as “films” that aren’t shot on film. It’s a mess and when teaching I long for language that is more exact, more accurate to save me explaining again that I don’t mean “film”, I just mean, you know, “film”.
To be fair, the division has always been messy. For years TV operated under a weird compromise where action in a studio was shot on video tape but if the characters went outdoors they’d enter a world of celluloid film. This was because tape was more cost effective but early video cameras struggled when not on smooth studio floors. It was entirely pragmatic and the audience were not supposed to notice - it’s still people moving about the place, what’s the problem? Just follow the story - look he’s about to hit his car with a tree branch…
Of course I did notice the difference and I’m sure you did too. The distinctly different styles of analogue fuzz offered by film and video are a little obscured in this low-res online version of the Monty Python sketch that mocks this bizarre convention but it’ll give you the flavour… (Feel free to stop once the Nazis come in) (both in this sketch and generally in life).
As a child the cognitive dissonance of this unspoken film/video divide spun me out but then so did a lot of things - that’s what it feels like to grow up neurodiverse. It’s always clear that something is happening but also clear that you’re not supposed to talk about it.
I should pause here to say that I’m an OG ND. I have no contemporary diagnosis of how my brain works but as a child I was assessed as “cross lateral” and whilst that doesn’t exist anymore, I haven’t changed. I mean I mask a lot better than I did back then, but fundamentally I’m still that boy. And if you saw that boy through the eyes of today’s SEN provision then we’re ticking all the boxes. The Dr. Who obsessed kid who wore velvet smoking jackets and had panic attacks at the overwhelming sound of swimming pools? I mean yeah, I should get an assessment but it feels like paying someone to tell me up is up (though if I could pay someone to tell me my left and right I would, because my brain doesn’t seem to process that shit).
My experience of growing up in the 1980s is uncannily mirrored by the unspoken film/video transitions of the TV shows I watched. I could see that the logic of life was not applied seamlessly, that different rules silently applied to different people or at different times, yet it was clear I wasn’t supposed to be bothered by it. Like when Princess Diana died and everyone pretended that they were sad because they had a special connection to her and not because they had all been members of some weird crowd funded stalking campaign, obsessively buying newspapers to fund the constant intrusion into her life. A national outpouring sure, but of sadness or shame? Film and video - we can all see it - can’t we?
This is why I hate the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Quick recap - a totalitarian despot is tricked into believing his new suit is invisible to fools so, not wanting to be seen as a fool, he and his entire fawning court all silently overlook the truth that he is now stark naked, instead loudly insisting that he’s wearing the finest clothes ever made; at least that’s what people are saying, the best clothes they say, he’s wearing the best clothes and he should know because he’s worn A LOT of CLOTHES.
So far so Iran war, but the story then insists that when an (autistic) child points out that the Emperor is naked everyone else is shamed into accepting their mistake and agrees. Let’s ask Greta Thunberg how that’s working out in real life.
If a child pointed out the Emperor was naked they wouldn’t be lauded as a helpful innocent, they would be called a “shrieking pyscho brat” and men would joke with hungry longing about them being raped or drowned at sea. In an accurate version of the tale, not only would most people ignore the kid, they would themselves get naked and then record podcasts about their imaginary clothes. The streets would be full of self-righteous penises flapping in angry denial of the idiot child’s arrogant suggestion that there was any sort of a problem here at all.
Sadly, whilst neurotypicals share a herd mentality, an obsession with status and a love of convoluted and self-important job titles, they do not have a monopoly on self delusion. After all, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” was written by Hans Christian Andersen and whilst it’s rude to diagnose people in history, he also wrote both “The Little Mermaid” and “The Ugly Duckling” so don’t tell me he wasn’t a fan of trains. So yes, neurotypicals can draw false comfort from the idea that truth spoken in innocence will eventually save them but the final irony of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is that it convinces neurodiverse naysayers that they will be thanked.
It’s the same with Erasmus’ pithy line that “In the land of the blind of the one-eyed man is king”; a deeply ableist delusion that fails to see how surely, in the land of the blind, society will be entirely ordered around other senses and the one-eyed man will be shunned as a delusional freak whose insights will be largely incomprehensible to an audience of blind people. Don’t let Hans Andersen lull you, the true patron saint of neurodiverse naysayers is still Cassandra, cursed to always be right and never believed. “Government thanks autistic child for sharing uncomfortable truth” is not a headline we will read any day soon.
I’m not saying you should stop saying what you see, just accept that for the majority of people seeing is not believing, believing is much more powerful. You may well be right, but is that helping?
In the end this is the power of inaccurate language. That a word like “film” can mean both “film” and, you know, “film”, gives us the power to say and not say to an audience who want to hear and not hear at the same time. What we lose in clarity we gain in forgiveness.
As it turns out Hans Christian Anderson was a fan of trains he also once mistook Dickens’ social politeness for an invitation to stay and spent a month or more as an uninvented guest with Charles and his family unable to see that they all wanted him to leave. This doesn’t prove he was autistic but if you’re about to argue that point you might want to ask yourself why you need him not to be.
Privately I’d still love to find better language for 20th Century’s most important art form. So much of what we have falls short. “Cinema” and “TV” are where you find it not what it is. Painting is an action but it turns into “art” not “gallery” or “wall” or “Swiss bank vault”. At least “plays” hints at what’s happening in a theatre. I like “movies” for the same reason, but we’re beyond the point when a rationale person can argue that 10 hours on HBO can be “a movie” you must see.
I like the term “vertical” for the rising tide of watch-on-your-phone drama intended to be seen in a ratio that preferences the portrait style framing of the intimate human face. I doubt we’ll move to call all widescreen work “landscapes”, set against “portraits”, but I’d be happy if we did.
Apropos nothing at all, but as I’ve been writing about forgiveness and generosity I’d like to point out that it’s perfectly possible to forgive someone and also not give them a headline slot at a music festival. There are ways to forgive that fall short of buying tickets. Forgiving is not forgetting.