Bibliography:

Elsaesser, Thomas & Hoffmann, Kay [ed] Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable: The Screen Arts in a Digital Age. Amsterdam University Press. 1998.

de Lauretis, Teresa & Heath, Stephen [eds]. The Cinematic Apparatus. Macmillan. 1980.

Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1997.

Neale, Steve. Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Colour. BFI. 1985.

Sobchack, Vivian [ed] Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick Change. University of Minnesota Press. 2000.

Technology

Technologies affect every aspect of moving pictures - production, distribution, exhibition and reception and aesthetics.   This lecture briefly visits some of the main areas of this subject and merely begins to approach interpretation of The Matrix as a text that addresses its own status as technology and the issue of spectator/text - spectator/technology relations.

Reception

Moving pictures – indeed photography too - are possible only through technology, they are the very expression of technology. In an important sense moving pictures took photography an essential step further: in photography the eye was allowed to gaze on a mechanical reproduction of a frozen moment as a version of reality (compensating for the lack of colour). Moving pictures went further by exploited the mechanism of the eye itself (persistence of vision).

In this case it can be claimed that moving pictures essentially internalise a vital aspect of the technological process, making the explicit workings of an illusion of movement part of our bodily function (specifically the mechanism of the eye). Of course art theorists claim that all visual artifice employs this internalising tendency of the human act of looking. Art in the 20^th century is increasingly defined as the manipulation of our look to make us see again those objects presented (one might think of Duchamp here!)

This should not be such a leap were it not that western society has separated science and technology from art and aesthetics: Martin Heidegger (see "The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays". Harper & Row, New York.  English Translation 1977) points to the Greek root of the word ‘technology’ coming from ‘Techne ’, which translates as not simply technology, but art too. For the ancients both art and technology bore the name techne . The artist manipulates the tools of her chosen field just as the scientist explores phenomena, aiming at a formal expression, which reveals a truth. The age of mechanical reproduction has brought this aspect of visual re-presentation – this techne - to the fore in art.

1916 Hugo Münsterberg, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University "The Film: A Psychological Study", claims the essence of film lies in its ability to re-produce, or "objectify" not just physical entities but also mental functions: "The photoplay obeys the laws of the mind rather than those of the outer world." Thus a further internalisation of human activity is claimed; film is free to shape material into, for example, flashes of memory, flights of imagination etc. Whereas, in theater events have to follow each other in time, in film the action can suddenly jump back and forth, just like imagination.

Münsterberg correlated cinematic techniques to mental functions (i.e. attention and memory). In the close-up, "everything which our mind wants to disregard has been suddenly banished from our sight and has disappeared." Similarly our attention can select an object from the environment on which we want to focus.

"In both cases," Münsterberg wrote, "the act which in the ordinary theatre would go on in our mind alone is here in the photography projected into the pictures themselves."

Manovich: "The psychological laboratory became indistinguishable from the movie house; the textbook of experimental psychology -- from the cinematographer's manual. The mind was projected on the screen; the inside became the outside."

German psychologist, Kurt Levin, first to use film in his experiments: "fiction film attempts to objectify certain psychological processes for the viewer. Psychological (scientific) film studies to what extent these psychological processes can be objectified." (1924-5)

The project of the Soviet filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein, showed a desire to reverse process - externalise the mind and develop film as means of mass communication (of Marxist ideas).

"Far from simply representing God or deities, as they did for centuries, here images serve a totally new function -- to provoke and direct reasoning, reasoning of a particular kind -- "Marxist dialectics." [Manovich]

Production

American filmmakers have always been ready and willing to embrace new technology. Perhaps one reason why America produced Hollywood – a very technically rich Cinema, devoted to rendering as invisible as possible (i.e. invisible editing) the ability of film to internalise and externalise.

Hollywood restricted access to production by making prod dependent on capital – making an expensive Cinema.   Provides another definition of Hollywood – an economic one, relating to the politics of capital: Hollywood = a cinema above/beyond the financial means of the ‘ordinary’ – average? – citizen {to make } However, it must ALWAYS be within her means to see!

Another definition :– Hollywood is a cinema with guaranteed means of putting product before spectator.

Therefore: Hollywood = Production (restricted access) + Distribution (restricted access) + Exhibition (less restricted access) + Consumption (open access)  New, digital technologies potentially disrupt this hegemony, as Manovich notes - the computer fulfills the [original] promise of [moving pictures]… in contrast to cinema where most of its "users" were able to "understand" cinematic language (i.e. be spectators) but not "speak" it (i.e., make films), all computer users can "speak" the language of the interface.

Distribution

Another area that new technologies are affecting radically – witness the scramble in the music business over the Napster case, where people were free to swap musical tracks online, downloading them for future use without paying. There is essentially no difference between sound files and moving picture files (mpegs). The quality is not yet there but soon will be – then movies will be able to be downloaded via the internet. Implications for regionalised DVDs?

TECHNOLOGIES – note implications for exhibition!

PROJECTOR

SOUND

COLOUR

WIDESCREEN

3D

SMELLOVISION!

IMAX – Inc 3D

IMMERSIVE VR – RIDES? – compare phantom rides?

GAMES

Note: As games return to the singular viewing context of the peep-show machines that Edison tried to market (to find communal viewing of theatres took over), so new technologies rely on the language of the cinema. Tools of production are also now absorbed into the virtual:

The incorporation of virtual camera controls into the very hardware of a game consoles is truly a historical event. Directing the virtual camera becomes as important as controlling the hero's actions. This is admitted by the game industry itself. For instance, a package for Dungeon Keeper lists four key features of the game, out of which the first two concern control over the camera: "switch your perspective," "rotate your view," "take on your friend," "unveil hidden levels." In games such as this one, cinematic perception functions as the subject in its own right.[22] Here, the computer games are returning to "The New Vision" movement of the 1920s (Moholy-Nagy, Rodchenko, Vertov and others), which foregrounded new mobility of a photo and film camera, and made unconventional points of view the key part of their poetics.

CINEMA AS CULTURAL INTERFACE Lev Manovich

Aesthetic Question:

HOW is narrative mapped across these technologies? When is CINEMA still CINEMA and when does it give space to … something else? When is it no longer CINEMA … depends on our definition of CINEMA. Is narrative a vital ingredient? How do we define narrative?

What is Cinema? Do we want to change our definition of Cinema because of new technologies? i.e. SOUND – led to a different aesthetic – a new definition?

Does each new technology reproduce a process that has happened in the past?

Sound is perhaps the best example of a technology that most radically changed our definition of Cinema.

Before sound the Art of a visual language allowed for a medium that was arguably more penetrating and universally understood than any other that had existed in history. Sound brought the dialectic of another sense into the equation of internalised techne: VO and oral expression of emotional intensity could be factored into the cognitive mechanism of cinema. With the interactivity of computerised virtual reality

Self-Referentiality

[i.e. when this notion of internalisation of the mechanism becomes the subject of the narrative]

Robo-cop

T2

Videodrome [any Cronenberg text!   But is he Hollywood?]

Gods and Monsters

End