Digital cinema is animation
For those of us in fiction film theory, you may or may not have read this already, but one of our reading assignments this week talks a lot about the relationship between cinema and animation. It's an abridged version of this essay by Lev Manovich called What Is Digital Cinema?
At one point he makes a pretty bold claim about cinema & animation that I thought applied really well to the kinds of discussions we've been having in class about hyperhybrid and VFX. He says:
"Digital cinema is a particular case of animation which uses live action footage as one of its many elements... Born from animation, cinema pushed animation to its boundary, only to become one particular case of animation in the end... In retrospect, we can see that twentieth-century cinema's regime of visual realism, the result of automatically recording visual reality, was only an exception, an isolated accident in the history of visual representation which has always involved, and now again involves the manual construction of images. Cinema becomes a particular branch of painting - painting in time. No longer a kino-eye, but a kino-brush."
I just thought this was a really interesting point. He's basically saying that cinema started because of animation, tried to make this identity for itself as separate from animation by completely negating the use of manually constructed images by using strictly live action (or desperately trying to cover up the fact when its live action images were constructed), but now we've come full circle with digital cinema back to the constructed image, except everything's made of pixels, so everything is infinitely alterable.
I enjoy this concept of film fighting for realism, constantly trying to cover up the fact that it is entirely artificial. But what separates new GCI from a set in a play? We know that they are fake, that behind the facade of that painted building there is nothing but scaffolding, just like we know that 30 foot transformer is just a bunch of 1s and 0s, but we let ourself believe it all the same. Cinema is just really really really effective lying, thats all acting is. Why does it matter that GCI is animation if its still trying to be photo realistic? If it is "constructing" an image instead of abstracting while still striving for realism doesn't that fundamentally set it apart from traditional animation? Idk I'm just rambling.
ReplyDeleteI do really enjoy the "painting in time" part of the quote, because thats what separates cinema from painting, the fact that it can change and morph and exists within four dimensions even though we only perceive three of them.