Norman Taylor 13 January, 2004.

At the beginning of the 21^st century it looks as if the motion picture camera and projector – loosely based on Edison’s kinetograph and kinetoscope of the late 1880's – are about to bite the dust. In "The Phantom Menace" (1999) George Lucas, the "Star Wars" patriarch, went out of his way to spotlight the impending death of film. Not of movies or of cinema, but of motion picture film. In that film in particular we have an example of a devotee of digital technology setting out to prove that both the distribution and projection of film-quality images in cinemas is now technically viable by purely electronic means.

Let’s set out some definitions: According to cinematographer Steven Poster (Donnie Darko, Stuart Little 2), "when you use the term ‘digital cinema’, you lump it into one kind of thing, but it’s really three things: It’s image acquisition, it’s post-production and it’s exhibition." (Zacharek, Stephanie. Film’s not dead, damn it! Salon.com July 3, 2003) Let’s deal with the last of these, first. We can define cinema as ‘the art of presenting motion pictures’. This presenting is not in itself technology dependent. Neither does a definition of digital cinema refer to digitally produced images. The source technology is not important. There is however an important issue of image quality here. According to Michael Karagosian of MKPE Consulting partners there are 150 trial digital cinema systems in the world today in place for studios and exhibitors to assess quality and viability. (Karagosian, Michael. Introduction to Digital Cinema. INS Asian Magazine. Dec 2003)

Studios have strong incentive to pursue and support this development. It costs $1,500 - $2,000 to duplicate a single celluloid 35-millimeter print of a major feature and transport it to and from the cinema for exhibition. All of which cost has to come out of the ticket price. And several thousand have to be copied for opening weekends – only to be junked as multiplex operators make way for fresh titles.

I want to start this talk by considering the impact of digital technology on us film-goers; spectators – we happy few in the auditorium. I want to start here because this is where cinema was – and is – conceived. It was our fascination with the uncanny semblance of life that makers of moving pictures sought to cultivate as pleasure; our pleasure that the first nickelodeons sought to commodify; our commodified self that the first picture personalities appealed to; our pleasure that the first picture palaces sought to gentrify. And it was our enduring pleasure that the earliest studios banked on when they began to build Hollywood. Without us there would be no cinema, no dedicated theatres, no studios, no stars, no auteur directors, no blockbusters. So as far as I’m concerned film analysis must stay grounded in the realities of the act and context of consumption for us wonderful people out here in the dark.

EXHIBITION, DISTRIBUTION, CONSUMPTION

The connection between the exhibitor and the punter is where it all began – the exhibitor moving enough product to keep the you stumping up the price of a ticket. Moving enough product soon became the key to cinema’s success! The first point to note in a discussion of digital technology then is that electronic cinema eliminates the initial labour of cinema – all that weighty transportation. Reducing a film to digital data means that studios will be able to send releases to theatres via satellite, fibre-optic cable or cheap optical media like DVDs. It offers cinema operators the opportunity to more or less instantly switch features to maximise attendance. And there is no loss of quality in second, third or any generation copy. Scratches, dirt, wear on the prints are eliminated; every digital copy looks as good as the master. There are, of course, copyright issues here that are being addressed both legally and technologically by interested parties.

But what does this revolution, at the delivery end of the movie industry, mean? What sort of ‘revolution’ simply allows the big companies to continue dominating marketing and distribution? Hardly a revolution at all – unless by revolution we mean potential disaster for creativity! In 1999 New York film critic, Godfrey Cheshire, described the following nightmare scenario of a depleted cinema culture of the future. Basing his assumptions on a fairly rudimentary expansion of already available technology and on a current trend for interactivity and so-called ‘reality’ TV, Cheshire saw the American movie-going experience being re-shaped by the ‘give-‘em-what-they-want’ mentality of the networks:

It shouldn’t be difficult to install automated cameras and mics in most movie theaters. So let’s say you go to see one of the new, theatrical specials like, say, Oprah’s America. Thanks to the new technology, you can punch a button in the console on your armrest, and if the host chooses you, you’ll be able to talk to Oprah or Dave from your seat, live, as people in theaters around the country watch you and hope for their own moment in the limelight.

Cheshire, Godfrey. New York Press 29 July 1999. Vol 12, Issues 30 and 31 .

The notion of re-equipping cinemas with new technology like this – or even for digital projection only – should bring to mind the first great technological and economic change that happened to cinema: the introduction of synchronised sound. But Cheshire’s vision is potentially more destabilising than was the coming of sound for the industry and for its aesthetic (because don’t forget that with cinema art and industry go together). A digital delivery system will be able to cater for both home and cinema. This finally obliterates the conditions of controlled exhibition that cinemas had perfected in the first half of the 20^th century and which gave rise to a cinema culture. But in fairness we should view this degenerative process beginning in the 1980s with the VCR – or arguably in the 50s with TV.

In the future it is possible that the battle over marketability will be waged even more hotly for a medium capable of targeting niche audiences – through Web or TiVo technology. In the future there may well be a range of digital film archives available (such as TMC, AMC, SciFi, Indie etc.), from which a choice of product can be downloaded. In the future fierce competition is likely to develop between the providers of these services – just as competition can develop for ISPs – though I’m not sure if it has.

As such competition develops, you may be able to download direct from a studio or even the independent filmmaker herself. In the 1920s it was the small studios such as Warners that made the big gains with the coming of sound and the future may be similarly exciting for independent filmmakers. But it is also ominous, because the likelihood is that the big studios will probably be able to close down potential opportunities for indie producers to find audiences – just as they always have. We should always look to the past for lessons about the future.

With this is mind we should note that the idea of electronic cinema is not new. It was discussed even before the introduction of television. Recently though, two manufacturers have developed breakthrough projectors that overcome these obstacles. Texas Instruments and Hughes-JVC Technology. For four weeks in the summer of 1999, the first digital exhibition of full-length features were available to audiences in New York and Los Angeles to sample these systems in addition to a regular film version of the same film. In an act of dedication worthy of an OBE, Rob Sabin of the New York Times compared both systems in one day and also took in the celluloid film version as well – of "The Phantom Menace" (Rob Sabin. Digital Movies: Taking Film Out of Films. NYT September 5, 1999),

The Texas Instruments technology, (which goes under the trade name Digital Light Processing - DLP) mounted 1.3 million microscopic aluminium mirrors on a silicon chip measuring just 0.9 by 1.1 inches - similar to the liquid crystal display screen on a laptop computer. Individual pixels, or picture elements, are directly fed digital information that fires up each one in just the right brightness – at just the right time, to create the desired image – but with a digital micro-mirror device, each pixel is represented by a mirror on a swivel post. The digital bits fed to each mirror controls its orientation. The mirrors can change state up to 50,000 times a second. [To make colours, the DLP Texas Instruments projector used three micro-mirror chips, one each for the primary red, green and blue picture information. The light from all three converged in the projector using optics and blasted onto the 40-by-20-foot screen through a single lens.]

Sabin was impressed: "The image was bright, with sharply defined edges around objects and excellent detail. Contrast, while not so deep as the best film can offer, was very good. Colours were rich and natural, with realistic and saturated flesh tones and lush, inviting greens and blues in the landscapes and sky. The pixel structure … was never obvious, even from the first few rows. "

He found it better than conventional film in some respects: "The pristine electronic projection … guaranteed an ideal presentation. There was no image flicker from the projection lamp or shutter, as in the film version, and there was less grain in the image. Color also appeared to be optimized to a degree not evident even on the film, perhaps partly because of corrections made during the digital transfer. Some of the movie's bright desert scenes seemed to show better contrast and color saturation."

He concluded that the average spectator "would have been unlikely to detect that this was an electronic image and would have no reason to complain". The DLP system has a wider colour space from television and has proved to be consistent, stable and reliable. A second generation DLP Cinema projection technology was introduced in early 2003 with even better contrast ratios.

With the Hughes-JVC Technology, the projector relied on something called an Image Light Amplifier (ILA), which used a 1.5-by-2-inch glass window in a frame, but it is actually a complex, multi-layered device. A photosensitive layer on one side generates a tiny electrostatic field when excited by the picture playing on a small, cathode-ray tube-style video monitor that faces it. The image is then transferred simultaneously to a high-resolution liquid crystal layer on the other side of the amplifier, which is sensitive to the electrostatic field. Light from a projection lamp is then directed through the liquid crystal layer, to a mirror behind it, and the brightened image reflects off the mirror and back toward the screen.

It requires fancy tricks with prisms and polarised light; the amplifier itself is not a digital device. The projector is fed analogue video, already converted from stored digital data to primary red, green and blue components, to individual video monitors inside the projector, which excite three amplifiers. Light from a 7,000-watt lamp bounces off each amplifier through separate lenses, whose beams then converge on the screen to create accurate colours.

The result is a flickerless, clean, infinitely repeatable digital source that, according to Sabin, "is a step up from a worn third-generation film print". High-definition analogue cathode-ray tubes produce a silky, soft picture more in keeping with a film image. At other times, Sabin notes, the picture was reminiscent of video, or a "television set with its contrast control turned up".

Both the Texas Instruments system and Hughes-JVC ILA system passed the same test and while experts might quibble, typical moviegoers, according to Sabin, would neither recognise nor fault them. So the "Phantom Menace" run proved, at least to Sabin, that technology for electronic projection had arrived. When it will arrive in our local cinema is another matter. Sabin noted that the projectors were costly: the Hughes-JVC ILA model cost $250,000, and Texas Instruments wouldn't even attach a price to DLP prototype. Since 1999 the Hughes ILA system has suffered from maintenance and alignment issues while the DLP Texas Instruments system poses no maintenance problems. The cost of the system was expected to fall to that of today's film projectors.

There is still a lot to do. New arrangements for distribution of digital data and on technical standards have yet to be agreed. New standards for projector calibration and digital transfer have to be set. According to cinematographer Steven Poster, the current cost of equipping a theatre for digital projection is $150,000 per screen, with a likely obsolescence in 5 years (as opposed to $30.000 for a regular projector lasting 20 years according to  Zacharek). Then there's the politics: what happens to film factory workers, print processors, projectionists and drivers who stand to lose their jobs to digital cinema?

The question is; will it only be critics who bemoan the loss of more than a century of film and film culture? Has the end come for Edison's form of cinematic magic for us wonderful people out here in the dark?

I want to return now to Poster’s definition of digital cinema and his previous categories - image acquisition and postproduction.

PRODUCTION AND AESTHETICS

In "The Question Concerning Technology", Martin Heidegger argues that technology is more than a means to an end, but is a way of revealing. "The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging … [which] happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew." (Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Harpers & Row, New York. 1977. Trans. William Lovitt. 14 - 16)  Of course there is a question about Heidegger's definition of the word "nature" here, but the chain of processes described seems extraordinarily useful for looking at the impact of digitality in our field.

Essentially what Heidegger suggests is that technology does more than offer a better way to carry out the same procedures as had been performed without technology (or with old technology). Technology interjects by suggesting unsuspected outcomes, regulating those outcomes and mediating the way outcome is conceived. Technology also highlights elements in the deployment of labour in this process. As we have noted, we can see the way digital moviemaking challenges the practices of those who consume its product. So how is the behaviour of those involved in its production affected? To answer this question and begin to understand these processes, we need to interrogate perceptions of workers in the industry or those who are close to the processes of production. A note of caution then: any assessment of the impact of digital technology on production is thus fraught with subjective distortions by interested parties.

An example of this can be detected in a critical essay in Film Quarterly (Summer, 2002) by film teacher, Jean-Pierre Geuens, of the Art Centre College of Design in Pasedena, California. Geuens looks first at the elements of ‘old’ filmmaking, which he considers to be under threat. He is nostalgic in his reference to "the eeriness of the setting: the cavernous hall … the hard-shelled camera … on a solid tripod, the lights … the small microphone perched at the very end of a long pole, the tracks on the floor. …" He then becomes poetic: "[T]he actual filming … looked and felt like a ritual … [a] choreographed ballet of actors and crew. …" And finally reverently sentimental: "[E]ven hardened veterans felt a sense of awe when the director called ‘action!’ … realis[ing] that something magical was bound to take place … [as] shards of that reality ended up on the surface of the celluloid." Such poetry! But Geuens injects a sense of noble toil when he speaks also of the sweat and drive, of "the brute materiality of the medium", and reminds us that "operators could not be certain, until … a day later, that their framing and focusing had been up to par." That it took "years of apprenticeship" for all involved to negotiate the obstacles and dangers. That film’s nitrate base, for example, meant that even the editing process was potentially explosive. That anything could go wrong. And he points out that none of this deterred crews, claiming that instead it spurred them on; that difficulties foster pride in one’s work. "What demarcates film work [is] the sense of magic that permeates the shoot and the sense of accomplishment that comes from working out miracles in the face of incredible odds." (Geuens, Jean-Pierre. The Digital World Picture. Film Quarterly. Summer, 2002.)

The digital process simplifies all this and the implication is that it thereby uncouples the work of filmmaking from these intrinsic qualities. One is reminded of Walter Benjamin’s claim that the ‘aura’ of art is shed when it is mechanically reproduced. But we should not be too quick to make this comparison: where Benjamin was concerned with consumption and appreciation in the presence of an art object, Geuen’s is focused on the processes of production of such an object. And Geuens seems to be contemplating only one context of production – and a specific one at that. A personal investment is also betrayed in claims that digital technology’s transparency "pensions off these heroic features of film" (my italics). With digital technology the image, claims Geuens, is given immediately. "It does not have to be imagined, produced, begged for, cajoled into existence," he says. And because it comes so cheaply and demands very little knowledge, it can be accomplished "with second-rate personnel." Quite how we define the ‘second-rate’ nature of these personnel is unclear, but Geuens reasons nevertheless that "actors and crew lower their expectations accordingly".

The second problem Geuens picks up concerns Heidegger’s notion of technology unlocking energy. He differentiates ways in which digital technology unlocks and transforms the work of filmmaking. Where old technology was no more than a recording device, digital cameras offer a range of options, such as automatic adjustment of exposure, tweaking of colours for expressionistic effects, altering of tone, grain, contrast or density, shutter adjustments can be refined and immediate fades, dissolves etc. can be affected. In other words, where ‘old’ film technology focused attention on the moment of ‘Action!’, digital filmmaking redirects attention back to the camera – and here I confess to finding myself agreeing with him. "The scene," says Geuens – by which I understand him to mean the ‘reality’ in front of the camera, "is no longer the primary focus." But then he spoils this observation: "Moviemaking," he says, "has now become a question of looks."

Well excuse me but for us wonderful people out here in the dark, film has always only ever been a question of looks! Geuens argues next, with the help of Lev Manovich, that this amounts to no more than a postmodern attention to surface. In "The Language of New Media", Manovich notes that new technology has resulted in artists relying less on imagination and more on a "tissue of quotations"; imagination has thus become externalised so that one simply has to select from what already exists. "[A]nybody can become a creator," says Manovich, "by simply providing a new menu, that is, by making a new selection from the total corpus available." (Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. MIT Press, 2001. 127)

Of course any cultural creativity requires such synthesis. Authorship is historically determined and culturally specific, as Foucault has reminded us in his influential essay, ‘What is an Author?’ In these technological menus a fixed pre-selection of dominant ideology has occurred, as Geuens notes. The fear that Geuens’ articulates is that their ready-made nature may "displace or eliminate the less visible, more fragile influences that normally compete" for expression in the artistic process … and in so doing they become more dependent on the latest hype.

Now we come to the impact of technology on the aesthetics of film. Recall that the coming of synchronised sound shifted the poetic artifice of silent movies in the direction of realism. It did so by offering a fixed, technologically specific menu of techniques such as off-screen sound, tone of voice, music and sound effect. These became integrated with the visual sign to create layered narratives, which were quite different from the visually dominated aesthetic that had pertained. It is now clear that the work of Lucas and others are reversing the work that synchronised sound wrought in fixing an aesthetic of verisimilitude. Propelling the film aesthetic into the digital age seems to mean un-hooking the moving image from its conventional links to a sense of the ‘real’. It should be remembered of course that this sense of the ‘real’ was itself an illusion.

Digital image manipulation was at first subtractive, eliminating unwanted details like TV antennas from the background of historical dramas. It should be noted in passing that the convenience of being able to erase what doesn’t fit can arguably lead to sloppy preparation. But soon this intervention became more narratively integrated, removing Gary Sinise’s leg in Forrest Gump, for example, and allowing a fictional conversation to take place with a ‘real’, documented, archival President Kennedy. The phenomenal success of the second attempt to adapt Lord of the Rings demonstrates how a complete world can now be remade on the screen in literally awe-full detail. The primacy of the image no longer bows to the authority of the photographic. In fact Lucas is on record as taking pride in being able to disconnect the film medium from "all that real stuff".(Magid, Ron. "Master of his Universe: George Lucas Discusses the The Phantom Menace and the Impact of Digital Filmmaking on the Industry’s Future" American Cinematographer, vol 8, no. 9  September, 1999. p.27. Quoted in Geuens)

There are potential problems with this. Geuens reminds us that actors need no longer be in each others’ presence to play scenes together. They can be shot separately and pasted into a background together, making the skills of blocking redundant and cutting out all the imponderables of actors responding to each other in rehearsal to work up a performance. According to Geuens such continuity and interaction "provide us with our sense of identity". He allows that actors have always had to adjust to the medium – through the use of stunt experts, for example, or addressing lines to or passed the lens with no one there. And film actors have always had to do without the stage actor’s luxury of responding to the audience during a performance. Does digital technology exacerbate this discrepancy? Can we reasonably expect to enjoy great acting performances in the future?

NEW TECHNOLOGIES, NEW BOUNDARIES, NEW CONVERGENCES

Actually the practice of compositing per se is not new. Nineteenth century photographers were known to use combination printing to correct the "un-picturesque". It is worth noting that in fact the attraction of all mechanical reproduction lies in its potential for control over accidental events, the chance configuration of shadow, a random view of objects, the very contingency of the real that can affect the success of a film text.

Let us re-cap. Shooting a movie with high-definition digital video cameras simplifies post-production considerably. Portions of many films are now translated into digital form for colour correction and editing processes. ‘Birthing’ a movie in the digital domain allows the filmmakers to work on special effects without incurring the cost, time or loss of quality associated with going from raw film to video and then back. That is a plus for the science-fiction and action-adventure genres prevalent today. Today's best high-definition video cameras aren't ready to replace their film counterparts. But the next generation of experimental cameras is due any minute.

We need to come back now to the issue of Geuens’ first complaint about the given nature of the image. The convenience of being able to edit and create special effects, rewrite, re-stage and re-shoot, offer a better way to carry out the same procedures as had been performed with the old technology. Importantly the combination of discrete operations into one general interface, as Heidegger had noted in "The Question Concerning Technology", gives rise to new unsuspected outcomes. This can be seen in the tendency to micromanage, which has obvious ramification for the redeployment of labour. It also privileges the animator over the actor – the image maker over the articulator of the specialised articulator of the human condition.

In so doing, however, digital technology caters to a modern tendency to identify with the image-maker (the auteur?) by considering others (actors) as objects in a world picture that exists to serve us. This complies with the view, articulated by Heidegger, that in the modern age the individual "becomes the relational centre of … the modern world … When we reflect on the modern world, we are questioning concerning the modern world picture … [which] does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture …" "The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture." (Heidegger pp 128 - 129, p134)

By this logic, digital technology has simply made more literal a sense of the will to power. For Geuens this is represented in a drive towards nihilism and a new protocol for directors, whose omnipotence is free to produce or retrieve anything "from an ever-expendable digital back lot …[for directors] no longer embroiled in the complexity, the otherness and the resistance of the everyday". He finally characterises Lucas as a Marquis de Sade figure, playing with the mincemeat of his actor/victim’s bodies as long as pleasure can be attained. We may be reminded here of Hitchcock’s oft-quoted attitude to his actors (he is said to have trated them like cattle before his camera). Which should in turn prompt us to question how far this argument has anything to do with digital technology per se. The recent success of the character of Golum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, while owing an enormous amount to CGI technology, was still associated with an actor.

The main thrust of Geuens’ article centres on the primacy of the actor and deplores how humanity is taken out of performance with the rise of synthespians. But is this a red herring? Is the synthespian already a lost cause?

In fairness, Geuens closes with some consideration of how digital technology offers an antidote to these excesses at of high cost end of the industry (which have actually always been present). The most potential for digital technology may lie in the opportunities it offers at the low budget end of the film industry. Digital cameras finally fulfil Alexandre Astruc’s notion of "le camera stylo", with all that phrase’s implied relation between writing and image-making, where instant correction and re-writing is open to a personal vision at last. In contradiction to everything he has argued through his article, Geuens closes by observing that "What is lost – careful compositions, harmonious lighting, exacting camera movements etc. – is amore than complensated for by the authenticity, restlessness and unpredictability of a real-life situation."

What Geuens fails to comment on is the obvious contradiction in the observable effects of digital technology. On the one hand he deplores the professional sloppiness and lack of aesthetic integrity and condemns the resulting break with ‘realism’ at the high cost end of the industry. On the other, he celebrates the return to a sense of the immediate and the real that digital technology brings to the low budget project. On the one hand the digital menu eliminates the director’s creative function, and on the other the director is afforded auteur status by that same technology that robs the actor of her autonomy and makes a Sadist of the director. Such emotive distortions need to be ironed out.

It seems that digital technology in and of itself is not a culprit to be identified as having this or that affect. For McLuhan technology is an extension of humanity. Any assessment of the impact of digital technology on contemporary film has to differentiate clearly between the main branches of its industrial anatomy. Production, distribution and exhibition must be treated quite separately and the digital influences in each of these domain economies analysed in a mode that recognises both their autonomy and their inter-dependence. As Andrew Feenberg has noted, "The values of a specific social system and the interests of its ruling classes are installed in the very design of rational procedures and machines even before these [machines] are assigned specific gaols." (Feenberg, Andrew. Transforming Technology: a Critical Theory Revisited. Oxford University Press. 2002. 14) Feenberg puts a tendency for technology to impose rationality and control on human beings and resources, at the intersection between ideology and technique and refers to ‘technical codes’. These codes "invisibly sediment values and interests in rules and procedures, devices and artefacts that routinise the pursuit of power and advantage by a dominant hegemony." (Ibid. 15) Technology is therefore always a site of struggle.

Finally I want to suggest another element of the impact of digital technology on film – specifically on film narrative. As a relatively ‘pure’ medium (in as much as film texts are not created with the expectation of being ruptured by commercials or subjected to daily schedules) film is perhaps more susceptible than other narrative media to the influences of cultural ideology. By this I mean to suggest that subtle changes have occurred in the acknowledgement of our humanity. Feenberg’s "invisible sedimentation" has allowed us to make symptomatic readings of films. Films of the 1950s and 60s, which frame television in their narrative, have been theorised as articulating a hegemonic relation between the two media. (See Barr, Charles. ‘Broadcasting and Cinema 2: Screens within Screens’. in Barr, Charles [ed] All our Yesterdays: Ninety years of British Cinema. BFI. 1986.)

The TV set in the corner of the room in films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Reisz, 1960. UK) or All that Heaven Allows (Sirk. 1965 USA) as was invariably depicted as inadequate to society and distracting to the lives of the protagonists. Similarly a rash of films of the 1990s presented digital technology and the internet as sinister. I am thinking of films such as The Net and Lawnmower Man (Leonard, 1992. USA), which presented the internet as the monster.

Films of the 1980s too can be read in this light. The Terminator (Cameron, 1984) can now be seen as a marker of the beginning of a paradigm shift. Cameron’s 1991 sequel (T2) provided a sort of closing bracket for an initial discourse around that shift. A striking interpretation of these film texts has configured Schwarzenegger’s two portrayals of the robots in their texts as symbolic of Detroit’s car industry. The 1980s saw widespread redundancies caused by the introduction of robots on the production line: by the 1990s this process had run its course. The automobile industry had completed its downsizing and was ready to promote robots and computerised systems as valuable aids to a diminished workforce. This would be just another Marxist reading of two film texts, except films of the 1980s in general can be seen in retrospect as articulating uncertainty – a love/hate relationship that was developing with digital technology.

War Games (1983), Robocop (Verhoeven, 1986), Short Circuit (1986, 1988), even the TV series Metal Mickey (1980) can be read as expressions of this anxiety. Using this perspective, a film like Gorillas in the Mist (1988) emerges as a sort of lament at the loss of our connection with Nature and a Darwinian heritage. Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) offered its flip-side – a postmodern inscription of Poe’s (Modernist?) horror story, which seemed to introduce into the mix a plethora of nightmare scenarios from a collective unconscious. The film embraces micro-biology by effectively combining Doctors Frankenstein and Jekyll in an arrogant character who experiments with the digital prototype of Star Trek’s transporter. All these contemporary concerns became narrative ‘symptoms’ in the predicament of The Fly’s protagonist, whose transformation into an insect reviewers commonly read at the time as analogy for the AIDS virus rather than unearth a Kafkaesque dialectic in its text. Underlining the Faustian pact mankind had now struck with technology, the poster for the film displayed Jeff Goldblum crouched in a womb-like, metal transporter system – a veritable parody of Renaissance man!

Significantly Donna Haraway’s seminal article, A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism for the 1980s, appeared in 1985 (Socialist Review 80, vol. 15, 2 March-April). Haraway articulated political (and feminist) implications of these very trends. And as if finally (mis)understanding Haraway, Lawnmower Man (Leonard, 1992) introduced a sexual dynamic in its thematic interfacing of body and technology, while at the same time predicting imminent fears about the emerging internet and what would soon be the male dominated World Wide Web.

By 2001 digital animation had crossed the border, mixing seamlessly with live action and creating virtual, animated characters with whom we identify in a different way from the traditionally animated cast of Disney. Now we have had to negotiate the digital trickery of special effect advances in Toy Story, Toy Story 2 (Lasseter, 1999, 2000) and Star Wars: Episode 1 (2000). But these were clearly referenced, fictional worlds (as in the cartoon or Science Fiction). Titanic (Cameron 1997) disguised and melded digital animation and live action actors, resurrected concerns over the distortion of history by such films as JFK (Stone, 1991) Natural Born Killers (1994), Forrest Gump (1994) and Wag the Dog (1997), each of which provoked Baudrillardian fears about what media do to our perceptions of history. The digital animation of Shrek (2001) directly addresses the Disney aesthetic and opened to scrutiny an inherently virtual, self-referentiality of the traditional cartoon.

Meanwhile, as testament to the successful promotion of digital technology to the status of a culture of its own, and confirmation that it has created a separate reality, cinema appropriated the cyber-created Lara Croft in the flesh of Tomb Raider’s Angelina Jolie (2001). There is a sense in which the very narrative conceits of films like The Matrix trilogy or even Monsters Inc. could not have happened without this ubiquitous knowledge of a separate reality being able to exist through (or ven in) technology. Final Fantasy (2001), inspired by the video game, but narratively independent, launched the most comprehensive attempt yet to produce entirely computer generated actors (and possibly a more comprehensively cinematic cyber-star) in a genre that is arguably the logical stepping stone to a ‘realistic’ aesthetic.

These films sparked a fresh round of discussion in the media (and possibly the first serious concern in the film industry). A summer 2001 edition of ABCs Nightline, hosted by Ted Copple, invited a director, film reviewer and the actor who played the T1000 robot from T2, to comment on whether computers were about to cause redundancies – or at least affect actor employment. And it is worth pondering the fact that, while voices of ‘star’ actors are still used to dub animation, the technology is now being developed to generate whole audio vocabularies from a few words enunciated by, say, Humphrey Bogart. Star voices may thus be liberated from the bodies of actors, or ‘dis-incarnate’ in future. But a note of caution for any would-be virtual actor/stars out there is to be found in the case of Aki Ross, star of Final Fantasy. If digital people dream, Aki Ross's dreams of sequels and future stardom were dashed in 2003 when the Honolulu-based studio that created her and produced the movie failed to cover its cost of $145 million. The photo-realistic Ross was just beginning to be accepted as a real star and probably the most co-operative female lead in Hollywood history, even posing in a bikini alongside real models in the men's magazine Maxim in 2002. ``We could have used the same characters in different roles,'' said studio president, Jun Aida. But after four years on the project, he had formed no lasting relationship with Ross or the other computer-generated actors and so the decision to lay them to rest was not difficult.

In conclusion then it no longer seems appropriate to ask about the impact of digital technology on film. Perhaps the question should concern the impact of film on digital technology and an emerging digital culture. Or perhaps the question concerning technology and film should address in what ways they impact on each other, with a view to investigating their symbiotic relationship. It seems clear that there is something of a continuum to be traced in their trajectories.

© Norman Taylor

This lecture was delivered to students of the MA in Film at University of West of England, 13 January, 2004.