![]() ![]() For Tarkovsky, an abstract cinema is thus impossible.īut 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? 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. He replied that there can be no such thing. Once, during a public discussion in Moscow in the 1970s, he was asked the question as to whether he was interested in making abstract films. Cinema is the art of the index it is an attempt to make art out of a footprint.Įven for Andrei Tarkovsky, film-painter par excellence, cinema’s identity lay in its ability to record reality. Cinema emerged out of the same impulse that engendered naturalism, court stenography, and wax museums. 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. And yet behind even the most stylized cinematic images we can discern the bluntness, the sterility, the banality of early 19th-century photographs. ĭuring cinema’s history, a whole repertoire of techniques (lighting, art direction, the use of different film stocks and lenses, etc.) was developed to modify the basic record obtained by a film apparatus. This essay is concerned with the effect of the so-called digital revolution on cinema as defined by its “super-genre” of fictional live-action film. 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 significant than this common feature: that they relied on lens-based recordings of reality. Today, in the age of computer simulation and digital compositing, invoking this characteristic becomes crucial in defining the specificity of 20th-century cinema. they largely consist of unmodified photographic recordings of real events which took place in real physical space. In identifying fictional films as a “super-genre” of 20th-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. 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’ ” (402). ![]() This “crisis” of cinema’s identity also affects the terms and the categories used to theorize cinema’s past. When, given enough time and money, almost everything can be simulated in a computer, filming physical reality is just one possibility. When one can “enter” a virtual three-dimensional space, viewing flat images projected on the screen is hardly the only option. In a symposium that 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.” As these terms accurately suggest, what used to be cinema’s defining characteristics have become just the default options, with many others available. Digital media redefines the very identity of cinema. The challenge which digital media poses to cinema extends far beyond the issue of narrative. 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. It is not hard to understand why: since the majority of viewers and critics equate cinema with storytelling, digital media is understood as something that will let cinema tell its stories in a new way. Thus far, most discussions of cinema in the digital age have focused on the possibilities of interactive narrative. ![]()
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