by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

December 11th, 2008. Cold day in Chicago. Snow is piled along the curb. You have to tuck your hand halfway into your sleeve if you want to smoke a cigarette. Salt stains your shoes. At the Nightingale Theatre, a beautiful space seating a few dozen (the kind there should be more of in this country–or any country), Michael Almereyda is getting ready to show a rough version of his new project, Paradise.

Everyone is drinking the free apple cider, some adding in brandy. Outside, we few and lonely cigarette smokers get into a snowball fight with the kids from across the street. They start throwing ice, because children, give the opportunity, will always be cruel to adults. Gabe Klinger, one of the heads of the non-profit that’s put the event together, Chicago Cinema Forum, asks me to help him fix his bowtie. Today is Manoel de Oliveira’s 100th birthday and Gabe intends to make an announcement. Almereyda is standing at the back of the room as people trickle in. He has a gentle voice; a listener, a watcher, as Paradise will suggest. During the question-and-answer discussion that’ll happen after the screening, he won’t stand up, instead remaining seated on a low table next to the wall, his back against a painted mural of the Nightingale’s wind-up bird logo.

There’s a brief introduction, and then the movie starts. Paradise hearkens back to the Lumières–or at least the Lumières Jean Eustache believed in, because here the camcorder is put to the same use that the 16mm camera and Nagra were in Le Cochon and La Rosière de Pessac (even more appropriately, the video’s grainy browns and grays resemble the colors of the Lumières’ experimental Autochrome process). Here are episodes of varying length, separated by little walls (or doors) of black screen, like the projectionist changing films at the Grand Café. There are, of course, children, animals, big social gatherings, famous performers. Colin Farrell and the back of Terrence Malick’s head make an appearance in a bit originally intended for an unfinished documentary about the shooting of The New World. The camera relishes in the gentle anachronisms of period film production: costumed Indians sitting in folding chairs, assistants holding props, Farrell chain smoking between takes, sometimes just putting his cigarette out of view when he has to deliver a line of dialogue.

Movies, which involve so many people and so much money, are the most morally and ethically concerned of all media. A cinematic decision is always an economic decision and an ethical decision. This gives movies shot and edited digitally a certain ambiguity. On celluloid, filming something ephemeral has a weight to it. It is always a decision to record something, or to do another take–film is stock is the bulk of the cost, not the camera. Digitally-recorded pictures and sounds, which are so easily made, erased and manipulated, have, as gestures, a certain indecisiveness. But Paradise, like its name suggests, has a Utopian goal: to restore to the digital image the power that the moving picture had when it was invented. The in-camera microphone is here capturing exotic sounds–the noise of foreign plazas, unsubtitled languages and street music. Nothing in the film had, at the time it happened, anything but a fleeting importance: a little boy falling into a reflecting pool, a herd of buffalo spotted on a drive through Wyoming, perfectly ordinary firemen putting out a perfectly ordinary fire, a drunken man falling asleep while holding on to the leash of his dog.

But Paradise reminds me of the Minister of Interior’s speech to the French Chamber of Deputies. It was 170 years ago, in the summer of 1839. I like to imagine the room as hot and stuffy, the Minister addressing a somewhat indifferent crowd.

“You all know,” he begins, reading from a prepared statement, “and some of you, Gentlemen, may have already had the opportunity of convincing yourselves of the fact, that, after fifteen years of expensive and persevering labor, Mr. Daguerre has at length succeeded in discovering a process to fix the different objects reflected in a camera obscura, and also, to describe, in four or five minutes, by the power of light drawings, in which the objects preserve their mathematical delineation in its most minute details, and in which the effects of linear perspective, and the diminution of shades arising from aerial perspective, are produced with a degree of nicety quite unprecedented.

“We shall not dwell here on the immense utility of such an innovation. It will easily be conceived what resources, what new facility it will afford to the study of science, and, as regards the fine arts, the services it is capable of rendering are beyond calculation.”