TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Monster Movie (Takeshi Murata, digital video, 2005), by Samy Benammar

Monster Movie  re-uses excerpts from the American comedy film Caveman (Carl Gottlieb, 1981), featuring a large ape with long fur and an inexpressive look straight out of the prehistoric age. The excerpts were selected so that the monster would always be alone in the frame, rising up out of the water or walking across its cave. The absence of interaction with other beings deprives it of some of its fictional attributes – in particular that of inspiring dread – so that in Takeshi Murata’s film the monster exists and has value only for itself. What counts instead are the awkward movements of its disproportionate body, accompanied by the rippling of its fur. The reason these two elements are so striking in Monster Movie may be because of the dialogue established between the images of this tottering body and the particular digital technique applied to them: that of the bloom effect, which is one of the modifications of video data made possible by datamoshing.

Datamoshing consists in corrupting the encoded data of a video in order to bring out, via this manipulation of encoded digital flows, images and image relations not foreseen by the compression techniques used by the digital image industries. While Monster Movie carries out several kinds of intervention in this data, there is one which is especially striking by virtue of the regularity of its occurrence. When the monster raises its head out of water, its movement is indefinitely repeated, taking with it a viscous mass of pixels which end up making the monster unrecognizable. The colours become especially bright as well, spreading like a drop of ink in water. These are some of the aesthetic manifestations or consequences of the bloom effect, which consists in duplicating a P-frame, thereby playing with the relations between macroblocks. The first image in a digital shot is called an I-frame (or keyframe), and does not vary for the length of the shot. The following images are called P-frames. The movement of an object in a sequence, recorded and encoded as a vector of movement, is the result of a synthesis of an I-frame and “variant” blocks of P-frames. The bloom effect consists in reading the video using software which divides it into its frames, in removing the I-frame from one or several shots and then in choosing a specific P-frame and duplicating it as many times as one likes. Two things then occur: the P-frames no longer refer to an I-frame, but to the first P-frame, which the video player will treat as a keyframe; in this way, the corrupted keyframe is always identical and perpetually applies itself to itself. Visually, the result is that the same movement continues without stopping, producing thick lines of rippling colours, which in a sense are movement vectors materialized on screen, made visible at the same time as the “real” objects. The brightness of these abstract lines is accounted for by the fact that “the P-frame’s colour information degrades each time the P-frame repeats, because each individual P-frame only has the exact same colour information as the one before it. When the motion prediction is added, the colours get simplified.”^[2] Motion prediction, generally speaking, is the process of differentiating between two images by algorithm in order to locate the elements’ movements.

The monster in Monster Movie, cut off from all interaction, turns in circles. No longer having anything to do other than support its own movement, it turns its destructive action against itself. Appearing to withdraw into itself, it is as if it has turned its own skin inside out. Its appearance now less mannered, it finds in the chaotic swirls of the image a body much more adapted to its wanderings and clumsy behaviour.