Digital Cinema
IMPACT AESTHETICS: BACK TO THE FUTURE IN DIGITAL CINEMA?
Scott McQuire
Millennial fantasies As anyone interested in film culture knows, the last decade has witnessed an explosion of pronouncements concerning the future of cinema. Many are fuelled by naked technological determinism, resulting in apocalyptic scenarios in which cinema either undergoes digital rebirth to emerge more powerful than ever in the new millennium, or is marginalised by a range of ‘new media’ which inevitably include some kind of broadband digital pipe capable of delivering full screen ‘cinema quality’ pictures on demand to home consumers. The fact that the doubleedged possibility of digital renaissance or death by bytes has coincided with celebrations of the ‘centenary of cinema’ has undoubtedly accentuated desire to reflect more broadly on the history of cinema as a social and cultural institution. It has also intersected with a significant transformation of film history, in which the centrality of ‘narrative’ as the primary category for uniting accounts of the technological, the economic and the aesthetic in film theory, has become subject to new questions. Writing in 1986 Thomas Elsaesser joined the revisionist project concerning ‘early cinema’ to cinema’s potential demise: ‘A new interest in its beginnings is justified by the very fact that we might be witnessing the end: movies on the big screen could soon be the exception rather than the rule’.1 Of course, Elsaesser’s speculation, which was largely driven by the deregulation of television broadcasting in Europe in conjunction with the emergence of new technologies such as video, cable and satellite in the 1980s, has been contradicted by the decade long cinema boom in the multiplexed 1990s.2 It has also been challenged from another direction, as the giant screen ‘experience’ of large format cinema has been rather unexpectedly transformed from a bit player into a prospective force. However, in the same article, Elsaesser raised another
Scott McQuire
Millennial fantasies As anyone interested in film culture knows, the last decade has witnessed an explosion of pronouncements concerning the future of cinema. Many are fuelled by naked technological determinism, resulting in apocalyptic scenarios in which cinema either undergoes digital rebirth to emerge more powerful than ever in the new millennium, or is marginalised by a range of ‘new media’ which inevitably include some kind of broadband digital pipe capable of delivering full screen ‘cinema quality’ pictures on demand to home consumers. The fact that the doubleedged possibility of digital renaissance or death by bytes has coincided with celebrations of the ‘centenary of cinema’ has undoubtedly accentuated desire to reflect more broadly on the history of cinema as a social and cultural institution. It has also intersected with a significant transformation of film history, in which the centrality of ‘narrative’ as the primary category for uniting accounts of the technological, the economic and the aesthetic in film theory, has become subject to new questions. Writing in 1986 Thomas Elsaesser joined the revisionist project concerning ‘early cinema’ to cinema’s potential demise: ‘A new interest in its beginnings is justified by the very fact that we might be witnessing the end: movies on the big screen could soon be the exception rather than the rule’.1 Of course, Elsaesser’s speculation, which was largely driven by the deregulation of television broadcasting in Europe in conjunction with the emergence of new technologies such as video, cable and satellite in the 1980s, has been contradicted by the decade long cinema boom in the multiplexed 1990s.2 It has also been challenged from another direction, as the giant screen ‘experience’ of large format cinema has been rather unexpectedly transformed from a bit player into a prospective force. However, in the same article, Elsaesser raised another
Cited: in Escape from Gravity’, Sight and Sound, (May 1995), p. 17. 36 The Negative Re-Invention of Cinema’, pp. 38, 41. 37 ‘Cinema of Attraction’, p. 70. Gunning also explicitly cautioned against seeing the ‘cinema of attraction’ as an oppositional cinema. We should also recall that one of the principal qualities that he attributes to the ‘exhibitionist’ ‘cinema of attraction’ is the direct look at the camera, which became so heavily restricted in ‘voyeuristic’ classical narrative. While contemporary cinema is undoubtedly self-consciously reflexive in some areas, such as genre, it is still rare for films to deploy the mechanism of direct address, which has been largely annexed by television. 38 See in particular his essay ‘Cult of Distraction’ in The Mass Ornament (Trans. T.Y. Levin), Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 323-328. It should be noted that Kracauer argues distracted spectatorship assumes moral significance ‘only if distraction is not an end in itself’. (p. 326) 39 See Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Cinema – The Irresponsible Signifier or “The Gamble with History”: Film Theory or Cinema Theory’, New German Critique 40 (1987), p. 86. For a further discussion of this issue, see my ‘The Go-for-Broke Game of History’, Arena no. 4 (1994/95), 201-227. 40 See ‘The Mass Ornament’ in The Mass Ornament, pp. 75-86. 41 Hollywood is now drawing more total revenue from global than domestic markets. Average spending on recreation and entertainment in the USA in 1997 was US$1900 per annum, a figure which is projected to more than double to US$4900 by 2007. ( Figures from Kagan’s MediaCast 2007, reported in Business Wire, February 19, 1999.) While the media, entertainment and communications sector is forecast to grow faster than the rest of the economy, the highest growth is anticipated in new media, such as the Internet, while traditional film and publishing avenues will experience slightly less than average growth. In this context, international film revenues assume heightened importance for the US based multinationals which own the major Hollywood studios. 42 I have discussed this issues at greater length in ‘Pure Speed: From Transport to Teleport’ in Jeremy Millar (ed.) Speed.: Visions of an Accelerated Age, (London, Photogrpahers Gallery, 1998). 43 See my Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera, London, Sage, 1998. 44 ‘Digital Cinema: Delivery, Event, Time’ in Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffman (eds), Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? (Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 1998), p. 203. 45 Quoted in Paula Parisi, ‘The New Hollywood’.