Digital Cinema

Stephen Prince

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813596280
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Digital Cinema considers how new technologies have revolutionized the medium, while investigating the continuities that might remain from filmmaking's analog era. In the process, it raises provocative questions about the status of realism in a pixel-generated digital medium whose scenes often defy the laws of physics. It also considers what these changes might bode for the future of cinema. How will digital works be preserved and shared? And will the emergence of virtual reality finally consign cinema to obsolescence?Stephen Prince offers a clear, concise account of how digital cinema both extends longstanding traditions of filmmaking and challenges some fundamental assumptions about film. It is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how movies are shot, produced, distributed, and consumed in the twenty-first century.

1

Cinema as Construction

Then and Now

Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) was not the first film with digital visual effects, but its box-office success made it the one that caused Hollywood to sit up and take notice. Those digital dinosaurs were revenue heaven. Over the film’s lifetime, Jurassic Park earned more than $1 billion, and, of course, it spawned numerous profitable sequels. It seems reasonable, therefore, to ask a couple of questions in relation to the film and to what it may signify for cinema at large. If any single film can be taken as a benchmark, a historical marker gesturing toward that moment when cinema’s analog identity and heritage gives way to a digital future, is it Jurassic Park? Or might it be Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones (2002), the first high-profile blockbuster to be shot digitally? In a larger context, what is the relation between cinema’s analog past and its digital present? Is this relationship best understood as one of continuity or rupture? Is there an analog/digital divide, much as there was with silent and sound cinema?

The idea of a “divide” tends to suggest that a break has occurred between modes, eras, or technologies. Sound filmmaking did replace silent cinema; digital image capture has largely replaced shooting on film. But in significant respects, the transition from film-based to digital formats has been slower and more gradual than was the industry’s conversion to sound. Twenty years before Jurassic Park, computer graphics had appeared in Hollywood movies in the science fiction films Westworld (1973) and Futureworld (1976). Other films, as well, had included computer graphics: Looker (1981), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Tron (1982), The Last Starfighter (1984), Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2 (1991). Prior to this, in the 1960s, basic research was under way to create pictures by digital means. Electronic computers have been around since the 1940s, and the U.S. Navy had a digital computer in 1951 that displayed real-time screen graphics. Numerous artists and engineers pursued the development of computer graphics in military, industrial, and academic research labs. They felt that computers could take pictures into new domains and offer powerful new tools and methods for manipulating and constructing images. Art and science commingled. A digital artist working at Bell Labs published a paper in 1967 titled “The Digital Computer as a Creative Medium,” in which he perceptively wrote that computer imaging would make a decisive and profound entry into art and culture. Michael Noll wrote that traditional artistic media would not be replaced or swept away, “but they will undoubtedly be influenced by this new active medium. The introduction of photography—the new medium of the last century—helped to drive painting away from representation, but it did not drive out painting. What the new creative computer medium will do to all of the art forms—painting, writing, dance, music, movies—should be exciting to observe” (90).

Jurassic Park, then, seems to mark that moment when digital imaging, built on decades of research into computer graphics, became salient in the imagination of popular audiences and that moment when the movie industry saw digital effects as a new engine for box-office growth. But the film does not mark a moment of historical transition, because the influx of digital tools into cinema was relatively slow and gradual. It is difficult to say exactly when a decisive shift occurred. It had been clear since the 1960s that computers were going to play a huge role in the future of picture making. Aware of the research under way on digital imaging, George Lucas funded a computer-graphics division at Lucasfilm in 1978 because he wanted new filmmaking tools: a nonlinear editing system, a platform for digitally processing and mixing sound, and a digital printer for compositing shots that would replace the existing optical printers. These ambitions were consistent with the directions in which filmmaking overall was moving. Lucas had the first two tools a few years later. At the end of the 1980s and into the early ’90s, Avid, Lightworks, and Adobe brought digital editing systems to market, and Hollywood embraced electronic cutting and splicing. In this same period, digital compositing displaced optical printing, and Disney was the first studio to move in this direction, with an all-digital composite on The Rescuers Down Under (1989). A decade later, digital cinematography began challenging traditional methods of shooting on film. John Bailey shot The Anniversary Party (2001) on digital video, and the following year, Lucas released Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones, which had been shot using specially commissioned Sony CineAlta cameras running at the film rate of twenty-four frames per second. In the same period, digital grading offered filmmakers new and more powerful electronic tools for adjusting light, color, and other image values in their footage. Pleasantville (1998) and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) were the first films to carry digital grades. As with the optical printer and shooting on film, another venerable method of filmmaking was displaced. Digital grading succeeded traditional methods of color timing achieved by photochemical printing in a lab. Digital production methods, then, were making numerous interventions into professional filmmaking, and digital visual effects were merely one outcome (albeit the most visible one for popular audiences) of the massive shifts of industry practice that were under way.

If these tectonic shifts occurred relatively slowly, does that mean there has been no rupture or divide in cinema history between the analog and digital eras? As I hope to show in these pages, this question can be answered affirmatively or negatively, depending on what factors one emphasizes. To write of cinema’s analog identity or analog past is to make reference above all to the presence of film, a physically based medium rooted in photochemical processes from which positive prints or images were struck from a camera negative. The term film remains with us today, but if it is used in connection with contemporary cinema, it most often has a generic meaning, designating cinema generally or moving images generally. Although some movies continue to be shot on film, for all practical purposes, movies today are a thoroughly digital medium, from their inception to their creation and through the numerous ways that viewers today encounter them.

There are striking differences between photochemical images and electronic ones, between images that reside on film and those that are composed of pixels. In some ways, film and digital video are opposites. Film handles highlights very well but does not see much information in shadows or dark areas. Digital video enables a filmmaker to extract a lot of information from shadow regions but presents numerous challenges in controlling highlights. Moreover, film has a granular structure. Photographic film has a plastic base attaching to a layer of emulsion gelatin containing light-sensitive silver halide crystals, and if it is color film, there are multiple layers of color dyes in the emulsion. The microscopic crystals are known as “grain,” and their distribution varies frame by frame, as does the degree to which they are activated by light. As a result, when motion-picture film is projected, it has a special luminous quality that digital projection does not. It glows. By contrast, a digital image is composed of an array of pixels whose location is fixed. The release of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) made these differences disturbingly apparent. Shot digitally in a high frame rate of forty-eight frames per second, the hyperclarity of the projected images seemed radically unlike the look of film, to the chagrin of many critics and audiences. The Toronto Star wrote, “Watching 48fps is a bit disconcerting at first, a bit like gazing at a high-definition TV showing a live theatre presentation” (Fox). The Village Voice wrote, “This ‘high-frame rate’ Hobbit features exceptionally sharp, plasticine images the likes of which we might never have seen on a movie screen before, but which do resemble what we see all the time on our HD television screens” (Fox). Hollywood’s trade journal, Variety, wrote, “everything takes on an overblown, artificial quality in which the phoniness of the sets and costumes becomes obvious” (Fox).

The ironic lesson here is that the softer look of film seemed preferable for these viewers to a pristine, hard-edged, hyperclear look resembling HD television. Digital suites today offer filmmakers numerous tools for placing filmic artifacts into digitally captured or created images, including grain, motion blur, lens flares, bokeh, and crushed blacks. Perhaps this is a form of technostalgia—a longing for a technology that has vanished—but it remains a striking development that film, while largely ceasing to exist as a physical medium, has maintained a kind of virtual presence amid the pixels and electronic circuitry that constitute contemporary cinema. Cinematographers have varying attitudes about the relative differences between film and digital video. Some prize the unique look of film, while others embrace the advantages that digital video affords them or feel that modern digital cameras capture images in a resolution matching that of film. The Revenant (2016), for example, about the nineteenth-century explorer Hugh Glass, who was mauled by a bear and left for dead by his companions, was shot on location under harsh conditions in the Rocky Mountain region of Canada’s Alberta province. Daylight was scarce, and the forested locations offered numerous dark, shadowed regions. The film was shot using natural light, and under these conditions, it would be harder for a film camera than for a digital camera to see the details in shadow regions. The cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki shot digitally because he did not think film would work as well. “In the weather conditions and the short windows [of sunlight], the Alexa [camera] did great work. Even if the dynamic range is not exactly the same as film, what the Alexa was able to do in the low end was something we could never do with film. In these conditions, with lots of shadows and limited time with sunlight, it was a very good decision” (Goldman, “Left” 38, 40).

The visual effects artist John Knoll says, “I’m a fan of modern digital cameras; I like their stable colorimetry, their signal-to-noise characteristics and their tremendous light sensitivity. But you hear a lot of people saying there’s a sort of harshness or coldness to digital, and that film has a warmth to it. . . . People like the stylization that film has” (Benjamin B, “Rebel” 50). In recognition of this preference, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2017) was shot digitally, and the images were then output with a film curve that emulated the nonlinear color response of cinema’s more traditional look.

Rodrigo Prieto, who shot Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2017), about Jesuit priests in seventeenth-century Japan, valued the look of film for the production. “From the beginning, Marty and I agreed we’d shoot film and anamorphic. Film negative has a color depth that no digital camera has yet been able to reproduce, and Silence takes place in the natural world, so color nuance was important” (Bosley 41). The cinematographer Ed Lachman feels that the grain structure and color separation of film (due to the layers of dye in the emulsion) cannot be represented digitally. These things “create a sense of depth of color in the image that I find lacking in digital photography” (Stasukevich 56).

Is film, then, “better” than digital video? It depends on whom you ask. This is not a very useful question because each format follows a different path to creating images, and each has unique strengths and weaknesses. The formats are quite different, and today film has receded into a historical past. On the one hand, the analog and digital eras seem very distinct from each other—a photochemical medium has been replaced by an electronic medium, photographic images have been succeeded by pixels and binary numbers. Thus, we might conclude that the changeover from film to digital video resembles the silent cinema / sound cinema divide, as a kind of rupture occurring within the flow of cinema history when an older format gets replaced by a newer one. And, indeed, early commentary about the analog to digital transition showed concern about what this change might mean for cinema. The title of a book published in 2001—The End of Cinema as We Know It (Lewis)—encapsulated the sense of crisis that the loss of a photochemical medium for a digital one seemed to portend. This sense of crisis had multiple causes. One involved fears about the potential loss of industry crafts and the artists who practiced them. If everything could be done in the computer, what would happen to the people and the skills involved in such areas as matte painting, miniature model design, or even production design with its reliance on physical sets? Digital tools threatened to remap existing craft areas. Cinematographers held great control and authority over how a film looked during the era of photochemical lab timing because only the cinematographer had the professional expertise of knowing how the timing lights worked and affected color balance. But the graphical user interface in a digital grading suite seemingly invited numerous participants to make changes in various picture elements. Digital grading threatened to alter the professional domain and responsibilities of the cinematographer.

Moreover, if the realities of real, physical props and locations were eroded by digital tools, then those tools might also weaken the connections between narrative and its investiture in real things and places. Spectacle—sheer visual excess—might take over from narrative and displace it. The onset of digital imaging revived a long-standing critical tradition that favored live-action drama over visual effects genres, such as fantasy and science fiction. Aylish Wood pointed to a “great divide of spectacle versus narrative” in film theory and criticism (370). Shilo T. McClean noted that the vast body of argument about visual effects and spectacle in the early digital era saw these as intrusions on narrative (34). Digital effects enabled filmmakers to extend and emphasize fantasy elements beyond what analog tools made possible. Michele Pierson suggested that the digital display of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park brought the narrative to a stop so that the visual effects could be savored by viewers (120). Spectacle is “the antithesis of narrative,” wrote Andrew Darley. “Spectacle effectively halts motivated movement. . . . It exists for itself” (104). Scott Bukatman found that visual effects often evoke “a hallucinatory excess as narrative yields to kinetic spectatorial experience” (Matters 113). Annette Kuhn wrote that visual effects “tend to eclipse narrative, plot and character” (5). And Viva Paci found that “high tech” effects films capture audience attention not through plot development but through gaudy, “shooting star effects” that address viewers at a sheer physical level (122). These concerns suggested that the digital intensification of visual effects might alter the terms of cinema’s investment in narrative. But as scholars such as Geoff King, Dan North, and McClean and Wood have noted, narrative has persisted quite well in the digital realm, and visual effects artists themselves agree that a well-told story is the most important ingredient in any film.

Moreover, in regard to the physical props used in movies—matte paintings, models, sets—these have not been displaced by digital tools. Weta Workshop, for example, created numerous miniatures for use in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films; the miniatures were then composited with matte paintings and live action. Physical sets create a sense of reality for the actors performing on them, and filmmakers in the digital era overwhelmingly value this attribute. David Fincher, who has used digital tools very innovatively in Zodiac (2007), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), and The Social Network (2010), maintains that “sets are very important, . . . almost more important for directors than actors” (63). J. J. Abrams, the director of Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013) and Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), emphasizes the importance of balancing digital elements with actual locations or physical sets “to create a world that isn’t synthetic or sterile, but feels very, very real” (Set Decor Online).

Star Wars: The Force Awakens had more than seventy physical sets, many of which were massive, such as the Niima Outpost, a marketplace for scavengers, which was constructed on location in Abu Dhabi. “It was like building a whole town out in the desert,” said one of the production’s designers (Witmer 74). Director Abrams wanted to anchor the digital elements in real, built environments: “making sure we were on actual sets and builds and locations whenever possible.” He felt it made little sense to invest resources in postproduction, “trying to make something that nature is often giving you for free” (Fish 42). The digitally created locations in Kong: Skull Island (2017) were anchored with a full-scale village set, inhabited by the Skull Islanders, which was constructed in Vietnam (Edwards, “Lonely” 70).

Another, and major, set of factors that underlay the sense of crisis that the digital transition elicited involved attitudes about photographic images and the epistemology that attached to them. Photographic and digital images were taken as being inherently and fundamentally different from each other. Although many people use digital cameras today to take photographs, in that context, the term has a generic meaning. The specific meaning of photograph involves its connection with film, and it is in regard to this connection that photographs and digital images are said to be inherently different. A photograph on film is said to be an indexical referent of that which is photographed. An index is causally connected to what it represents. As an index, a photograph testifies that what it pictures was present before the lens of the camera. The philosopher Charles S. Pierce devised a triadic model of communicational signs, and for him, the index communicated in terms of physical connection. “Photographs,” he wrote, are in certain respects “exactly like the objects they represent. . . . They . . . correspond point by point to nature” (qtd. in Wollen 123–24). Roland Barthes emphasized that photographs can never be divorced from their referents, from what they picture. “I call ‘photographic referent’ not the optionally real thing to which an image or sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens without which there would be no photograph” (5). For Barthes, photographs signify the presence of some object, scene, or event that was in front of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Cinema as Construction: Then and Now
• 2. Reasons for Realism
• 3. Cheating Physics
• 4. Beyond Cinema
• 5. Everywhere and Nowhere
• Acknowledgments
• Further Reading
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author