Aesthetics of digital cinema

Taking a schizoanalytic approach to audio-visual images, this article explores some of the radical potential for deterritorialisation found within David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999). The film’s potential for deterritorialisation is initially located in an exploration of the film’s form and content, which appear designed to interrogate and transcend a series of false binaries between mind and body, inside and outside, male and female. Paying attention to the construction of photorealistic
digital spaces and composited images, we examine the actual (and possible) ways viewers relate to the film, both during and after screenings. Recognising the film as an affective force performing within our world, we also investigate some of the real-world effects the film catalysed. Finally, we propose that schizoanalysis, when applied to a Hollywood film, suggests that Deleuze underestimated the deterritorialising potential of contemporary, special effects-driven cinema. If schizoanalysis has thus been reterritorialised by mainstream products, we argue that new, ‘post-Deleuzian’ lines of flight are required
to disrupt this ‘de-re-territorialisation’.

This article explores the ways in which digital special effects cinema shares some of the principles and effects of surrealist cinema, namely by rendering indistinguishable waking and dream images. Although there is much debate concerning the ‘true’ nature of surrealism, this article endorses the view of André Breton (2000) in his second surrealist manifesto that surrealism works best in a political and moral sense when it is hidden in the mainstream. To this end, the article proposes that the recent French film, Amélie (J.-P. Jeunet 2001), is potentially more ‘surrealist’ and thus subversive than surrealist films that are signalled as such. This is because Amélie seamlessly blends fantasy/fantastic images into the ‘real’ world, such that both seemingly share the same ontological status. Furthermore, where classic surrealist films like Un Chien Andalou and L'Âge d'Or (L. Buñuel and S. Dalí 1929 and 1930) juxtapose waking and dream images one after the other, Amélie, through digital compositing, has the two work in harmony, in shot together and therefore at the same time. This ‘spatialized’ harmony as opposed to temporal juxtaposition might even constitute a stylistic, if improbable, form of surrealism that potentially makes mainstream digital effects in cinema a ‘liberating’ experience.

Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf (2007) is the latest film made using motion capture technology, a film that tells the story of a hero’s quest to defeat a series of monsters. This article examines not only the thematic role of monstrosity in the film, but also the way in which the film’s very construction, through motion capture and CGI, can be understood as monstrous. That is, after Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time Image(1989[1985]), Beowulf can be understood as typifying a cinema that has seen a shift from montage to montrage, a cinema that shows. Analysing the aesthetics of monstrosity in Beowulf, the author also considers how the film’s motion capture synthespian performances can be understood as comic through Henri Bergson’s (1912 [1900]) theory of laughter, which suggests that humans laugh at mechanized human beings.

Current trends in film and television production styles have favoured the use of aesthetics associated with prosumer and social media products. These aesthetics, including handheld shaky-cam, variable audio and open acknowledgement of the
camera, have been utilised for their ability to imitate reality, to take away a little of the polish of professional film and television production and to inject the raw, ad hoc immediacy of actuality. Yet an emotional connection between a film and its spectator cannot be disregarded, and represents another form of reality in film: that of emotional realism. Indeed conventional cinema relies on aural and visual techniques to generate emotional authenticity for its characters and to align them with spectators as a means to encourage investment in a believable fictional world.

The application of techniques associated with real-world aesthetics in narrative contexts seems instinctively to be at odds with the aims of fictional cinema. Through a close analysis of Chronicle, this paper explores the function of prosumer aesthetics in a fictional context and examines how tropes of “reality” can inform emotional realism.

Rossellini’s year zero is also a year zero for images: the year when the cinema depicts a teenager committing suicide is the year when the innocence of the movement-image seems insufficient to understand a world ripped apart. It is Jacques Rancière who calls into question the relationship established by Deleuze between his taxonomy of the film image and the unfolding of History. Deleuze warns us that he is not writing a history of cinema but a classification of signs, and Rancière shows that Deleuze, like Bresson, aims to draw a map of the things of the world, some kind of natural philosophy where “the image need not be constituted at all” because, following Henri Bergson, “[i]t exists in itself”. The sudden and emphatic connection between the time-image and the postwar period may seem to contradict Deleuze’s assertion that he doesn’t want to write a history of images, but in fact it does not. Deleuze is definitely indebted to André Bazin, the first theorist to admit Neorealism looks into the inside of human beings when forcing them to look to the outside. But Deleuze takes the Bazinian idea beyond realism and into the field of thought – if we once had nice, organic representations, then due to the crisis of faith in human actions, all we have now is a cliché we tirelessly come back to in order not to forget how worn out it is. That is why Rancière thinks of the movement-image as a philosophy of nature – much closer to Bazin’s theory about realism – and of the time-image as a philosophy of spirit.

Another suicide, also of a child, marks the reincarnation of the time-image in contemporary cinema. Two and a half months before the Twin Towers attack, Spielberg’s A.I flooded Manhattan: feet dangling over an aquatic abyss, David (Haley Joel Osment), a robot with the capacity for unlimited love, discovers that he is nothing but a circuit of cables programmed for affection. His silent wandering through a ruined city is not so different from Edmund’s in Germany Year Zero: the only difference – a big difference – between them is that David, raised in the infinite innocence of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, cannot die.

To some extent, 21st-century cinema has gone through a transit space similar to the David’s immortality: it studied the perseverance of the time-image, it watched the gestures of its body free falling before surviving and transforming into something else. And it did so to confirm the emergence of that “something else” to which it naturally tends, materializing partly thanks to electronic and digital media images, made of pixels or non-time particles (or particles of eternal time, unable to die, like Spielberg’s David).

What if this “something else” was the natural sequel to the brilliant Deleuze cinema theory?

Au cours de la dernière décennie, le cinéma équatorien a connu un essor important, dû en grande partie à la démocratisation des caméras numériques, mais l’essentiel de ce développement s’est produit dans le cadre d’un système économique informel, apparu en marge du cinéma officiel et baptisé « cinéma EBT » (« Ecuador Bajo Tierra »). Après avoir proposé dans un premier temps une définition de cette catégorie générique, l’article cherche à cerner les contours du phénomène « EBT », en insistant sur ses caractéristiques les plus singulières, notamment en termes de production et de distribution, et en analysant les défis économiques que doivent relever les acteurs du secteur afin d’assurer son développement.

Over the last decade, Ecuadorian cinema has experienced a significant expansion, largely due to the democratization of digital cameras, but most of this development has occurred within the framework of an informal economic system, which emerged on the fringes of the official cinema and was called "Cinema EBT" ("Ecuador Bajo Tierra"). After first proposing a definition of this generic category, the article seeks to define the contours of the "EBT" phenomenon, by insisting on its most singular characteristics, particularly in terms of production and distribution, and by analyzing the economic challenges that the actors of the sector must take up in order to ensure its development.

A lo largo de la última década, el cine ecuatoriano ha conocido un notable auge, en gran parte gracias a la amplia difusión de las cámaras digitales, pero la mayor parte de este crecimiento se ha producido dentro de un sistema económico informal, nacido al margen del cine oficial y designado como “cine EBT” (“Ecuador Bajo Tierra”). Después de proponer una definición de esta categoría genérica, el artículo presenta en detalles el fenómeno del cine EBT, insistiendo sobre sus características más singulares, en particular a nivel de la producción y la distribución, y analizando los retos económicos que deben afrontar los promotores de esta corriente para afianzar su desarrollo.

La digitalización y virtualización del mundo es un proceso que no da luces de parar, en ello el cine ha sido un testigo privilegiado de estos cambios, desde sus primeros esbozos digitales en los años ochenta hasta las tecnologías 3D y formatos K de la actualidad. Pero ¿qué hay detrás de esto?, ¿qué imaginarios, operaciones estético-audiovisuales y discursos se están articulando en las imágenes sintéticas del cine contemporáneo? Este libro se introduce en estas problemáticas para posar su mirada en el Romanticismo de la primera mitad del siglo XIX como clave de lectura. Ahí donde este comparte con el presente haber nacido en el seno de una profunda revolución tecnológica en todos los espectros de la vida personal, social y política, pero donde aún se recordaba vivir material y espiritualmente en mundos premodernos. ¿Existe hoy una reactivación de los idearios románticos? ¿Nos enfrentamos a una nueva confianza en la modernidad? ¿Cuál es la relación entre arte y técnica en estos entornos digitalizados? ¿Se puede hablar a propósito del cine de un «Neorromanticismo sintético»? ¿En qué formas este se cristaliza? Son las incógnitas que este texto intenta resolver.

The Lady and The Duke (2001) is an atypical movie by its duality in unity, mainly resulting from the digital incrustation of real actors in pictorial settings. Éric Rohmer, resorting to that obvious a visual technique and to that improbable effect, has paradoxically wished to produce an impression of truth in the audience. The Lady and the Duke is a movie on perspectives and distance putting: the one that can be found at the heart of the creation of directing and of composite image, that of the heroine, who cannot interact with her environment and that of the audience, taken aback by the ambiguity of cinematographic artifice, as real effects are present while there are no probable illusion. In having an audience watch a story in history, Rohmer invites them to observe between the layers of images and memories that compose this palimpsest-movie, that make appear in filigree the (dis)illusions of past and present.

El cine de José Luis Guerin, situado en los márgenes de la industria (unas veces en el lado de acá con todas las implicaciones de un equipo y de una producción; otras en el lado de allá, a modo de soliloquio reflexivo) se ha venido caracterizando por su condición fronteriza aparejada a un formalismo estricto y pensativo en cada nuevo paso de su carrera cinematog ráfica. Con la irrupción de la tecnología digital, el ritmo de producción de este cineasta catalán se duplica, dando rienda suelta a las hibridaciones, juegos formales y prácticas de ro daje con notas - por acumulación - como una búsqueda siempre en diálogo c on la tradición cinematográfica. De esta manera, conceptos como "poética del esbozo" o nociones como la del cine como un gran arte del retrato encuentran un desarrollo continuado que merece la pena documentar, como base y pretexto para futuras investigaciones.

Il saggio analizza  due importanti innovazioni avvenute nel cinema negli ultimi anni, e che hanno impattato sopratutto nella distribuzione dei contenuti audiovisivi: da un lato lʼemergere di tecnologie di produzione e proiezione 3D in grado di fornire unʼesperienza sempre più immersiva del prodotto filmico, e, dallʼaltro, la moltiplicazione degli spazi, degli schermi e dei contesti di fruizione del film, dovuta alla possibilità di veicolare il video su diverse piattaforme e devices, dallo schermo del cinema e quelli, mobili e interattivi, del telefonino.
In particolare, sarà interessante osservare come queste due direttrici di innovazione possano essere interpretate come approcci profondamente diversi allʼesperienza cinematografica, interpreti di istanze del cinema che potremmo definire antitetiche, dal punto di vista estetico e fruitivo.
Il saggio esplora così queste due forme tecnologiche del cinema in relazione ai divergenti modelli di fruizione che esse veicolano e alle possibili implicazioni sui linguaggi e le estetiche del futuro.

In light of the current transition from celluloid to digital cinema, this paper will explore the relation between old and new technologies as a means for understanding medium specificity as an activity of mediation. While the ongoing debate in screen studies aims at clarifying the extent of digital technology’s effects, it seems that the new technology is either being interpreted as inducing a rupture in film history clearly distinct from celluloid, or as directly repeating strategies, goals, forms, and impulses specific to an indexical and analogical visual culture. Indeed, the desire to acknowledge points of divergence or close interaction between technological forms is unquestionably useful; but my own approach to the technological change takes into account both the differences and similarities of forms as a means of exploring medium specificity. This will be a matter of dealing with the new as not new or old, but new and old – as simultaneously distinct and interactively interrelated, so that each medium acquires a space of its own without fixed boundaries. Rather than merge the one form into the other, the ontological explication of a medium may take account of its specific technological base while simultaneously paying attention to previous technologies that reside in it intact yet affected by the contextual possibilities of the new. Newness, thus understood, becomes a complex concurrency of differences and similarities that shift the borders of distinct forms in unexpected and continually renewable ways. With this in mind, I will discuss an example of digital mediation through Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001), with a focus on the digital’s power for a creative interpretation of reality’s experience.

This essay looks at digital special effects in contemporary mainstream cinema through the theoretical lens of posthumanism. It argues that digital cinema retains the (humanist) tenets of analogue cinema (particularly the cut), but that it does not need to.