• Blackhat

Catching up with Blackhat over the weekend, I found myself reminded—and surprisingly often—of selections in this year’s Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, which I previewed for this week’s issue of the Reader. Michael Mann’s latest is, on one level, a catalogue of textures that can be achieved with digital video. According to IMDB, the filmmakers used no fewer than five different video cameras, ranging from professional-grade equipment to “prosumer” models you can find at Best Buy. In certain shots the camera’s close enough to faces or objects to capture them in hard, ultraprecise detail; in others characters compete for the viewer’s attention with painterly smears of color. Mann and cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh favor small, lightweight cameras during the action sequences so that any movement feels (as in Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s acclaimed experimental documentary Leviathan) shaky, almost vertiginous. Moreover the editing moves unpredictably between these different types of images, resulting in something like a moving photo collage. Blackhat does have a story, but I often got the feeling that Mann was less concerned with narrative than with creating a modern art piece on the theme of cyberterrorism.

One could argue that the editing in question is proof that Blackhat is all form and little story. I’d argue that, as in many avant-garde films, the form is the story. Mann’s famous for his intuitive filmmaking, composing and editing shots on the fly. Here those strategies result in a chronic sense of placelessness—not only in the unusual shifts in location, but in the overly vivid closeups, which can have an otherworldly effect. When Mann first started shooting on digital video with Collateral, he said that he regarded DV imagery as akin to photorealist painting (it’s worth noting that Mann’s wife is a painter). Implicit in this statement is the idea that video is a wholly different medium than celluloid, one that requires a new visual language. In Miami Vice, Public Enemies, and now Blackhat, Mann seems to be searching for stories and characters that can be described in only that language, organizing narratives in blocks of sensations and presenting people as nodes within information networks.