Winter 2003 Editorial
The state of cinema technology today has been aptly compared to a sandwich. The filling – editing, sound-mix, special effects – is all digital, and has been for a while (it is not a fresh sandwich). But outside are two slices of analogue bread. Principal photography is still done on 35mm film and so is projection of the final product in the majority of cinemas. Meanwhile the prediction is that the sandwich will shortly lose its analogue coating. In a few years, industry sources reckon, films for cinema release will be all digital; they will be shot on a high-definition digital format and projected in cinemas on digital projectors, similar- – but much superior – to the projectors used in classrooms and elsewhere for PowerPoint displays and such like. When this happens, maybe as soon as 2006, the cinema will have gone the way of the rest of the communications and culture industries. Computerised technology will be used from start to finish, but not in order to produce a computer-like product. Just as the music CD reproduces – more or less – the sound properties of the vinyl LP, so the new digital film will basically reproduce the aesthetic properties associated with celluloid.
In fact the situation is altogether more messy and the future somewhat cloudier than the above paragraph suggests. Fully analogue cinema still exists, though a film editor working with strips of celluloid is about as common as a field reporter hammering out copy on an old Olivetti Lettera and dictating from a phone box rather than using a laptop and a satellite up-link. Fully digital cinema also exists, and a handful of films – the recent 'Star Wars' continuation Attack of the Clones (Lucas, 2002) being one such – have been shot all-digital and shown (in selected cinemas) on digital projectors. Meanwhile the aesthetic is changing, both in the mainstream and on the fringes, as the potential of digital shooting, editing and morphing is absorbed by the industry and individual filmmakers. As for the future, there are still technical and (above all) economic hurdles to be overcome before the industry can risk undertaking the massive switchover to digital projection which has been so widely predicted. Meanwhile, on a broader front, it is still utterly unclear whether d-cinema, as it is sometimes called, will prove to be more than a new technology for delivery of a product basically similar to what we have already, or whether technological change will open up the field for the emergence of a new film aesthetic whose driving force is in the culture – whether of filmmakers or of audiences – rather than in the industry.
Speaking for the moment purely industrially, the most likely scenario is that the present two-slice sandwich will become an open sandwich first, before analogue bread can be entirely dispensed with. Small and medium-budget filmmaking is increasingly turning to digital shooting to save costs or to take advantage of lightweight, low-light digital cameras for location work, though it continues to need film for cinema projection purposes. At the high end, film will continue for some time to be used for capturing a top-quality image, but at some point in the future – maybe two years hence, more likely five or more – there is likely to be a large-scale roll-out of new digital projection equipment worldwide and the days of celluloid film jerking its way through cinema projectors will be over. Acquisition of the original image will go digital less abruptly, as and when cameras of a suitable quality become available.
But suppose this happens – and it almost certainly will happen, and indeed already is happening, at least in part – what difference will this make to the ordinary filmgoer, and to the culture at large? One thing has already happened, though not in the cinemas, and that is the widespread availability of near-cinema images in the home in the form of DVD. For years more people have been watching movies at home on TV and VHS video than ever go to the cinema, and this small-screen video watching is steadily being replaced by the viewing of better images on larger screens in DVD and/or digital TV format. If the cinema simply becomes a superior form of DVD for use in public places, what's so great or so novel about that? Should digital cinema be seen as neither more nor less than yet another example of convergence, as a universal digitised form of storing and manipulating information spreads its tentacles into another area of life, bringing music-movies-broadcasting-games-information into a single compact web?
There is at least one reason why a ‘convergence’ thesis on digital cinema is not a sufficient one, and that is that cinema continues to stand apart. Where the money is being spent (always a good indicator) in digitising cinema is precisely not in making movies convergent with the console-centred world where media products are made available for mixing, consuming and refashioning in the home. On the contrary the mega-budgets expended on d-cinema are devoted to fashioning to a product which is strictly stand-alone and which drags people away from their home console for a unique, self-contained, public experience which remains, recognisably, cinema. Though there are spin-offs for the industry in using a single support for cinematic and home viewing, and though there is digital filmmaking which is small-scale and totally compatible with non-cinematic technology, the current trend is towards reaffirming cinema as a separate realm.
But to the extent that cinema remains stand-alone it is also conservative. By concentrating on preserving the quintessential 'movie experience', the film industry, it can be argued, is failing to take advantage of the full potential of the new technology.
This issue of Convergence is in three sections, devoted first to debating general issues, second to examining the impact of digital on production and post-production, and third to impending changes in the system of distribution and exhibition.
In the opening Debates section, Keith Griffiths compares films that use digital technology to save money or increase spectacular effects to those which seem to be moving, however tentatively, towards a new digital aesthetic. This new aesthetic is found, he claims, mainly at the ‘low’ end of film production – in films which take advantage of the flexibility of digital filming to create a new intimacy between film and audience, and in films which exploit the technology to generate non-naturalistic special effects. While this is only a small part of the cinema, it is the one with the most to gain – as well, of course, as the least to lose.
For his part, Mike Leggett is resolutely optimistic about the potential of a convergence of cinema and the digital, and is the only writer to consider what the cinema might do for the digital, rather than what digital does for/to the cinema. What fascinates him is the potential interactivity of the digital, and the way interactive installations can free the spectator from the linear, pre-ordained completeness of a conventional movie, whether supplied by analogue or half-heartedly digital carriers. As with the experimental cinema of the 1920s, a new technology seems to offer the possibility of figuring the flux of experience in radically new ways and opening up to the spectator a world of which he/she is an active part.
In the section on production and post-production, Monica Mak questions the widely accepted notion that non-linear editing is changing the nature of cinematic narrative and leading to the abandonment of classical storytelling. She suggests instead that the main contribution of digital technology lies in its facility to generate special effects, either covertly, in a form of which the ordinary spectator is not aware, or overtly. The latter creates what she calls a ‘two-pronged relationship of astonishment’ which offers both an enhancement of the spectator's traditional pleasure, and a sense of admiration for the filmmaker’s craft in evoking it. For the moment, therefore, rather than laying waste to Hollywood storytelling norms, digital post-production has upped the special-effects stakes and reasserted the character of cinema as spectacle.
One change that digital post-production has introduced, argues Mark Wolf, is to re-ignite the crisis of authorship which besets the collaboratively produced technological performance. As digital technology significantly enhances the ability to reduce acting performances to, and reassemble them from, a myriad of separate components, this makes the film actor less and less the sole producer of the image through which the audience knows them. Though this is no newer than the stunt double or continuity editing, the star system's continuing importance to blockbuster cinema makes any increased challenges to the centrality of the star actor's talent and inspiration most unwelcome. Wolf notes with interest that the producers of Lord of the Rings (Jackson, 2001-2003) have taken the trouble to extract from the Academy a public assurance that Any Serkis, who plays the synthespian Gollum, would be eligible for an Oscar despite his body never appearing in the film. That is, it is the inspired actor Serkis who is the main author of the performance, not the (equally hyped) ground-breaking special effects team that assembled it.
Scott Higgins observes that the extreme potential of digital post--production to create new colour effects is in practice often muted. Though certain early films, like Pleasantville (Ross, 1998), foregrounded the new technology with distinctly non-naturalistic effects, Higgins argues that this ‘demonstration mode’ has quickly given way to ‘prototypes’ like O Brother, Where Art Thou (Coen brothers, 2000), whose moderate and covert deployment colour grading offer concrete examples of how to reign the technology to extant craft norms (nb. classical storytelling priorities). This distinction between the demonstration and the prototype film, he notes, has a precedent in the early days of Technicolor, where the virtuosity of Becky Sharp (Mamoulian, Sherman, 1935) was soon replaced by the soberer effects of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (Hathaway, 1936).
Films such as Pleasantville and O Brother, however, are still ‘sandwich’ films, shot on 35mm and projected from celluloid. In our third section we look more closely at the consequences of the much trumpeted impending change to a cinema which is digital from end to end. Nigel Culkin and Keith Randle explain how the mainstream industry is preparing for this change: what its technical requisites are, and what the consequences will be for the industry and (to a lesser extent) the audience. While digital image-acquisition is mainly a matter of refining an already developing technology, digital distribution and exhibition involves a massive programme of investment whose costs look like falling on the exhibitors, while the advantages will mainly be felt by the big distributing and releasing companies. When the ‘roll-out’ of digital projection will take place, they argue, is now partly dependent on the agreement of technical standards, but even more so on the scope for cost reduction and an equitable solution to the vexed question of who pays.
The EU, meanwhile, is struggling to make sure that the roll-out is not yet another roll-over, such as took place at the end of the First World War and again with the coming of sound, when Europe found itself at a serious disadvantage in relation to the weight of the American industry. As Anna Herold shows, there is also a concern in Europe to make the advantages of the digital available not just to the major companies (whether American or European), but also to small-scale filmmaking and, even more, to rural and small-town audiences who have increasingly lost the opportunity to view films cinematically. Digital projection offers the possibility of reviving non-theatrical exhibition in non-dedicated venues such as community centres, and thus of expanding the cinematic franchise in the production, distribution and consumption areas. In particular, if used to better integrate a European distribution network, then advantages of a digitally integrated Europe--wide distribution territory could provide European companies with a much needed (and long sought) counterweight in their ongoing battle against Hollywood dominance.
Thus, in this examination of the sandwich period and its possible resolutions, the recurring question is how much difference will the digital make? In the struggle between new opportunities and old vested interests, will ‘the digital’ allow the flourishing of previously suppressed or unavailable possibilities, or see the white-knuckled reassertion of the status quo?
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
Peter Thomas