Lev Manovich asks WHAT IS DIGITAL CINEMA? His answers are almost too McLuhan for me. However, since I like McLuhan, I like his answers.
1. Digital cinema is NOT live-action film. Live-action film (a 20th century construction) consists of what we see in front of our eyes – the stuff of the real world. What the camera captures, then, is live-action. Lev raises yet another interesting point – 20th century cinema is the stuff of a mechanical heart (motor) and mechanical eye (photography). Simply said, 20th century cinema is a child of the industrial revolution – 21st century cinema (digital cinema) is a child of the digital revolution. One of Lev’s more interesting moves is to frame Apple’s Quicktime, non-linear editing, and other video tools as revolutionary as Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope. For those of us who use it everyday to compress, watch, and edit video, it is quite disorienting to think of it as a revolution – yet it is.
Not only is digital video revolutionary, it is quite literally changing the way we see and experience cinema. Once you have an image, you have pixels. And because everything can be reduced down the pixel level, there is very little to distinguish one image from another (aside from resolution). Assuming we have the same resolution, the act of compositing images and pixels once again flattens the image. So, pixelating and digitizing actually have a flattening effect on images. However, the net effect is actually very layered. What was once a group of men with a green screen is now a scene in Lord of the Rings.
2. In essence, anything – as long as it can take the form of pixels – can become digital cinema. Digital cinema, then, is animated pixels. The “real world” is no longer the source of Lev’s digital cinema. Virtual 3D worlds crafted by a digital animator now have the same value as a scene directed by a David Lynch, Spielberg, or NYU film student.
The implication of Lev’s work, here, is essentially this – digital cinema does not favor any kind of content, whether it is “real” or “virtual.” As McLuhan predicted, digital cinema (new media) has freed itself of the constraints that film and cinema (old media) used to have – realism. We can now film and animate anything we may imagine.
Through the creation of imaginative universes, we now begin to visualize virtual utopias. More importantly, we communicate them dynamically, visually. Like in architecture, digital cinema can create, design, and animate virtual worlds to build real-life physical worlds. With cinema moving into animation, even experimental
non-linear cinema will begin to have an effect of reality-tv.
Lev’s work is sweeping. Yet, I find it slightly reductiveTo say that digital film is animation reduces the work to a previous work. The truly revolutionary claim would be that digital film is expanding the role, definition, and discourse of animation.
Traditionally, animation creates associations with cartoons.
Many blogs, writers, and critics (Steven Johnson and Janet Murray, among others) dump video games into the discourse. As a $30 billion industry, it’s no wonder video games are getting this kind of attention. Janet Murray, though, is more apt to call these video games non-linear narratives. Where Lev’s explanation of digital cinema falls short, Janet Murray’s explanation does not. As video games are expanding the definition of narrative, digital cinema should be expanding the definition of animation.
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