Thus far, most discussions of cinema in the digital age have focused on the possibilities of interactive narrative. It is not hard to understand why: since the majority of viewers and critics equate cinema with storytelling, digital media is understood as something which will let cinema tell its stories in a new way. Yet as exciting as the ideas of a viewer participating in a story, choosing different paths through the narrative space and interacting with characters may be, they only address one aspect of cinema which is neither unique nor, as many will argue, essential to it: narrative.
The challenge which digital media poses to cinema extends far beyond the issue of narrative. Digital media redefines the very identity of cinema. In a symposium which took place in Hollywood in the Spring of 1996, one of the participants provocatively referred to movies as “flatties” and to human actors as “organics” and “soft fuzzies. “[2] As these terms accurately suggest, what used to be cinema’s defining characteristics have become just the default options, with many others available. When one can “enter” a virtual three-dimensional space, to view flat images projected on the screen is hardly the only option.
When, given enough time and money, almost everything can be simulated in a computer, to film physical reality is just one possibility. This “crisis” of cinema’s identity also affects the terms and the categories used to theorize cinema’s past. French film theorist Christian Metz wrote in the 1970s that “Most films shot today, good or bad, original or not, ‘commercial’ or not, have as a common characteristic that they tell a story; in this measure they all belong to one and the same genre, which is, rather, a sort of ‘super-genre’ [‘sur-genre’]. [3]
In identifying fictional films as a “super-genre’ of twentieth century cinema, Metz did not bother to mention another characteristic of this genre because at that time it was too obvious: fictional films are live action films, i. e. they largely consist of unmodified photographic recordings of real events which took place in real physical space. Today, in the age of computer simulation and digital compositing, invoking this characteristic becomes crucial in defining the specificity of twentieth century cinema.
From the perspective of a future historian of visual culture, the differences between classical Hollywood films, European art films and avant-garde films (apart from abstract ones) may appear less significance than this common feature: that they relied on lens-based recordings of reality. This essay is concerned with the effect of the so-called digital revolotution on cinema as defined by its”super genre” as fictional live action film. [4] During cinema’s history, a whole repertoire of techniques (lighting, art direction, the use of different film stocks and lens, etc. was developed to modify the basic record obtained by a film apparatus.
And yet behind even the most stylized cinematic images we can discern the bluntness, the sterility, the banality of early nineteenth century photographs. No matter how complex its stylistic innovations, the cinema has found its base in these deposits of reality, these samples obtained by a methodical and prosaic process. Cinema emerged out of the same impulse which engendered naturalism, court stenography and wax museums.
Cinema is the art of the index; it is an attempt to make art out of a footprint. Even for Andrey Tarkovsky, film-painter par excellence, cinema’s identity lay in its ability to record reality. Once, during a public discussion in Moscow sometime in the 1970s he was asked the question as to whether he was interested in making abstract films. He replied that there can be no such thing. Cinema’s most basic gesture is to open the shutter and to start the film rolling, recording whatever happens to be in front of the lens. For Tarkovsky, an abstract cinema is thus impossible.
But what happens to cinema’s indexical identity if it is now possible to generate photorealistic scenes entirely in a computer using 3-D computer animation; to modify individual frames or whole scenes with the help a digital paint program; to cut, bend, stretch and stitch digitized film images into something which has perfect photographic credibility, although it was never actually filmed? This essay will address the meaning of these changes in the filmmaking process from the point of view of the larger cultural history of the moving image.
Seen in this context, the manual construction of images in digital cinema represents a return to nineteenth century pre-cinematic practices, when images were hand-painted and hand-animated. At the turn of the twentieth century, cinema was to delegate these manual techniques to animation and define itself as a recording medium. As cinema enters the digital age, these techniques are again becoming the commonplace in the filmmaking process. Consequently, cinema can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation.
It is no longer an indexical media technology but, rather, a sub-genre of painting. This argument will be developed in three stages. I will first follow a historical trajectory from nineteenth century techniques for creating moving images to twentieth-century cinema and animation. Next I will arrive at a definition of digital cinema by abstracting the common features and interface metaphors of a variety of computer software and hardware which are currently replacing traditional film technology. Seen together, these features and metaphors suggest a distinct logic of a digital moving image.
This logic subordinates the photographic and the cinematic to the painterly and the graphic, destroying cinema’s identity as a media art. Finally, I will examine different production contexts which already use digital moving images — Hollywood films, music videos, CD-ROM games and artworks — in order to see if and how this logic has begun to manifest itself. A Brief Archeology of Moving Pictures As testified by its original names (kinetoscope, cinematograph, moving pictures), cinema was understood, from its birth, as the art of motion, the art which finally succeeded in creating a convincing illusion of dynamic reality.
If we approach cinema in this way (rather than the art of audio-visual narrative, or the art of a projected image, or the art of collective spectatorship, etc. ), we can see it superseding previous techniques for creating and displaying moving images. These earlier techniques shared a number of common characteristics. First, they all relied on hand-painted or hand-drawn images. The magic lantern slides were painted at least until the 1850s; so were the images used in the Phenakistiscope, the Thaumatrope, the Zootrope, the Praxinoscope, the Choreutoscope and numerous other nineteenth century pro-cinematic devices.
Even Muybridge’s celebrated Zoopraxiscope lectures of the 1880s featured not actual photographs but colored drawings painted after the photographs. [5] Not only were the images created manually, they were also manually animated. In Robertson’s Phantasmagoria, which premiered in 1799, magic lantern operators moved behind the screen in order to make projected images appear to advance and withdraw. [6] More often, an exhibitor used only his hands, rather than his whole body, to put the images into motion. One animation technique involved using mechanical slides consisting of a number of layers.
An exhibitor would slide the layers to animate the image. [7] Another technique was to slowly move a long slide containing separate images in front of a magic lantern lens. Nineteenth century optical toys enjoyed in private homes also required manual action to create movement — twirling the strings of the Thaumatrope, rotating the Zootrope’s cylinder, turning the Viviscope’s handle. It was not until the last decade of the nineteenth century that the automatic generation of images and their automatic projection were finally combined.
A mechanical eye became coupled with a mechanical heart; photography met the motor. As a result, cinema — a very particular regime of the visible — was born. Irregularity, non-uniformity, the accident and other traces of the human body, which previously inevitably accompanied moving image exhibitions, were replaced by the uniformity of machine vision. [8] A machine, which like a conveyer belt, was now spitting out images, all sharing the same appearance, all the same size, all moving at the same speed, like a line of marching soldiers.
Cinema also eliminated the discrete character of both space and movement in moving images. Before cinema, the moving element was visually separated from the static background as with a mechanical slide show or Reynaud’s Praxinoscope Theater (1892). [9] The movement itself was limited in range and affected only a clearly defined figure rather than the whole image. Thus, typical actions would include a bouncing ball, a raised hand or eyes, a butterfly moving back and forth over the heads of fascinated children — simple vectors charted across still fields. Cinema’s most immediate predecessors share something else.
As the nineteenth-century obsession with movement intensified, devices which could animate more than just a few images became increasingly popular. All of them — the Zootrope, the Phonoscope, the Tachyscope, the Kinetoscope — were based on loops, sequences of images featuring complete actions which can be played repeatedly. The Thaumatrope (1825), in which a disk with two different images painted on each face was rapidly rotated by twirling a strings attached to it, was in its essence a loop in its most minimal form: two elements replacing one another in succession.
In the Zootrope (1867) and its numerous variations, approximately a dozen images were arranged around the perimeter of a circle. [10] The Mutoscope, popular in America throughout the 1890s, increased the duration of the loop by placing a larger number of images radially on an axle. [11] Even Edison’s Kinetoscope (1892-1896), the first modern cinematic machine to employ film, continued to arrange images in a loop. [12] 50 feet of film translated to an approximately 20 second long presentation — a genre whose potential development was cut short when cinema adopted a much longer narrative form. From Animation to Cinema
Once the cinema was stabilized as a technology, it cut all references to its origins in artifice. Everything which characterized moving pictures before the twentieth century — the manual construction of images, loop actions, the discrete nature of space and movement — all of this was delegated to cinema’s bastard relative, its supplement, its shadow — animation. Twentieth century animation became a depository for nineteenth century moving image techniques left behind by cinema. The opposition between the styles of animation and cinema defined the culture of the moving image in the twentieth century.
Animation foregrounds its artificial character, openly admitting that its images are mere representations. Its visual language is more aligned to the graphic than to the photographic. It is discrete and self-consciously discontinuous: crudely rendered characters moving against a stationary and detailed background; sparsely and irregularly sampled motion (in contrast to the uniform sampling of motion by a film camera — recall Jean-Luc Godard’s definition of cinema as “truth 24 frames per second”), and finally space constructed from separate image layers.
In contrast, cinema works hard to erase any traces of its own production process, including any indication that the images which we see could have been constructed rather than recorded. It denies that the reality it shows often does not exist outside of the film image, the image which was arrived at by photographing an already impossible space, itself put together with the use of models, mirrors, and matte paintings, and which was then combined with other images through optical printing. It pretends to be a simple recording of an already existing reality — both to a viewer and to itself. 13]
Cinema’s public image stressed the aura of reality “captured” on film, thus implying that cinema was about photographing what existed before the camera, rather than “creating the ‘never-was'” of special effects. [14] Rear projection and blue screen photography, matte paintings and glass shots, mirrors and miniatures, push development, optical effects and other techniques which allowed filmmakers to construct and alter the moving images, and thus could reveal that cinema was not really different from animation, were pushed to cinema’s periphery by its practitioners, historians and critics. [15]
