tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28828151747459265632024-03-13T19:42:38.443-04:00Postcards From The Uncanny Valleycinema & videogamesSylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2882815174745926563.post-26909367000567103972013-11-07T21:04:00.001-05:002013-11-09T19:28:52.326-05:00Who Needs a Story Anyway?<div style="text-align: left;">
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I began to write this a couple of
months ago but I never bothered to finish it: I wasn't sure whether I was
actually talking about the game in question or just using it as an arbitrary
starting point for some philosophical musings which are dear to me. But since I
wrote it, and since it doesn’t seem completely without interest, why not put it
online? We’ll see how it’ll do. And if nothing, it’ll at least offer some kind
of counterpoint to my last posts on cinematic video games, a critical
perspective on a game with minimal storytelling. Anyway, here it is: why the
Wii U may be the most moving (as in emotional, expressive, beautiful) video
game console yet. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I bought a Wii U last spring mainly
because of <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/182294/" target="_blank">Ian Bogost’s non-review on Gamasutra</a>: a console expressing
self-doubt? Color me intrigued. My wallet didn’t approve of my inquiries about
the alleged conscience of a video game console, but even though I barely
touched it since, the philosophical leanings of my mind were rewarded despite
the protestations of my bank account. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Playing solo, the two-screens is
barely more than a gimmick, feeling a lot like a DS with your television acting
as a bigger version of the upper screen (or at least it felt that way in the
few games that I played). And just like the DS, hardly any game uses the
two-screens in a meaningful or innovative way. Having a map of your
surroundings always open on your smaller screen may be practical, but it’s
nothing more than that; it doesn’t affect the gameplay in any way, or doesn’t
lead to a new kind of experience. In a game like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mass Effect 3 </i>(which I haven’t played, so, I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">suppose</i>…), I’m still shooting dudes in the face (as the official
saying goes) most of the time, only now I can know exactly where I am when doing
so. Sure, this game wasn’t designed for the Wii U in the first place, so it may
be normal that the second screen remains unused, but it was one of the most publicized
features of this port, and it is the only way most games use this new screen. I
still need to be convinced that this screen in my hand enhance my experience
somehow, or, better, can lead me to new ones.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">But my philosophical investigation was
scarcely aimed at the single player experience anyway: I was way more
interested in the possibilities offered by the asymmetrical gameplay promised
by the multiplayer games. And on this matter, it is, indeed, a whole different
affair: the Wii U becomes a perfect, ludic representation of our relation with
space and time in our modern digital world.</span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">How so? Because one player looks at
the television, the other at the screen of the controller, so both players are
in the same physical space, participating in the same activity. But they’re not
really in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">same </i>space and time
since their attention is directed at their own screen. It is a bit like
watching a movie at home with you dearest one while one of you is playing with
another screen (cell phone, tablet, laptop, etc.) You may be both at the same
place at the same time, but you’re not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">really
</i>in the same space and time. You are there (on the couch) while not there
(wherever your personal screen brings you); you are together (in the same room)
while not together (looking at windows into two different worlds). The obvious
difference, with the Wii U, is that the two screens are related somehow;
they’re not windows showing different worlds, but windows offering different
perspectives on the same world.</span>
</div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">And this is where it becomes genius:
Nintendo uses a quite new everyday situation that normally divides people, or
at least isolates them, and they try to bridge that gap between individuals through
gameplay, or to make the players aware of the paradoxical
togetherness/isolation of their condition. The best example of this is in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Luigi’s Mansion</i>, one of the mini-games
in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nintendo Land </i>collection.
Player one, using the regular wii remote, controls Luigi in a haunted house,
where the ghost, invisible, is manipulated by the other player through the Wii
U screen he holds. So both players are in the same space (the haunted house,
the couch they’re sitting on) while not exactly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">together</i> (they’re looking at two different screens showing a
different image of the virtual space, the haunted house, they both inhabit),
and they must try to find one another: Luigi, with a flashlight, tries to find
the ghost by directing the light at him, while the ghost tries to frighten
Luigi by approaching from behind. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This is, as far as I know, the most
beautiful representation in a video game of the experience of otherness – and
although I first talked above about our ubiquitous screens, what I’ll be
describing from now on is more essential than whatever these technologies
brought with them: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Luigi’s Mansion</i> is
not about how these new technologies change our experience of otherness, but
more fundamentally about otherness itself (inasmuch as the game is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">about </i>something; a better term would be
that it’s a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">representation of</i>). </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">What do I mean here? Well, we live
in the same world as the Other, in the same physical space (the haunted house),
but then again, since we can only know the world through our own eyes, our own
mind, this Other is nothing more than a ghost for us (and here I’m thinking
that maybe <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gone Home</i> can be read in a
similar manner). We (you and me) do not live in the same world because my world
is unique, it exists only through my eyes, just like your world is unique,
existing only through your eyes, and etc. for everyone else. We all live in the
same world, but we all see it from a particular perspective, so we do not live
exactly in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">same </i>world (in fact,
it is not at all the same world, and “through my eyes” is a simplistic metaphor
meant to express something more complex than the mere physical perception of
the world, but let’s not wander too far…) </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Luigi’s Mansion</i>, the haunted house has the same layout for every
player, but all players see it from a different perspective… – so, yeah, sure,
are you saying now, dear shrewd readers, but isn’t it the same for most online multiplayer games? In
most of these games, all the players inhabit the same virtual space and see it through
their own point of view, their own computer or television screen. No doubt, but
the main difference here is in the proximity of the two screens: both players
are in the same room, probably sitting on the same couch, so the game uses this
real situation and underline how the players are actually together and not
together, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in the same room</i>, when
they’re playing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Luigi’s Mansion</i>. The virtual
world of the game becomes a representation of the relationship between the two
players in the physical world. And here, again, I’m not thinking of how new
technologies affect our relationship to the Others: one, two or no screen at
all, it doesn’t matter, you are together/not-together on your couch anyway.
What I’ll say, though, is that these private screens can certainly accentuate
this isolation, or emphasize the fact that we can only know the world through
our subjectivity, or at the very least make it more obvious, and this in turn
can blind us further from the already ghost-like presence of the Others. These
technologies do not make our life “worse” in any way, but they can complicate
our experience of otherness.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">But I’m drifting away from the game
now…</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Despite what the ludologists might
say, or the formalists or whatever you want to call these strange beasts, not
to be neglected here is the representational layer, especially the figure of
the ghost, without which I would not have thought of this interpretation. In the
vast majority of multiplayer games, the goal is to find the Others, but in most
games, when found, these Others must be eliminated, shoot at (in the face,
because where else?) In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Luigi’s Mansion</i>,
the Other must be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">revealed</i>; instead
of killing the other player, as Luigi you must make it appear. And in a sense, if
I may pursue my take on ethics, the Other is invisible since we only know
him/her from the outside, from his/her outward appearances, and so his/her self
remains hidden behind his/her body (the body, which hides as much as it expresses our self). We may never truly know one another, we may
never truly know what the world is for the Other, but still we must strive to
go beyond this difficulty (or rather this impossibility): we must use our
flashlight and try to illuminate the Other, to bring the ghost into the light
and out of the darkness. In other words, we must try to reveal the Other, see
him/her for what he/she is. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">But, and this is probably the most important
part, I can only do this from the boundaries of my own experience. That is, I
have to direct my flashlight (my conscience) towards the Other because even if
this Other make itself available to me, as open and transparent as possible,
he/she will remain invisible until I make an effort to know and understand
him/her. But this knowledge of the Other is fleeting, evanescent, fragile… a
ghost impression that can disappear, morph, reemerge later in a similar but
slightly different form and that must be recognized for what it is: subjective,
momentary. Not really a knowledge then, but an impression indeed. Which is not to say that these impressions are “false”: they only
become false, or rather alienating, dictatorial, when I try to fix them in a
definite, objective form. This is what happens when I say the Other is this and
nothing but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this</i>. The ghost in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Luigi’s Mansion</i> doesn’t change (I didn’t
play much, but as far as I know its appearance remains the same), but since
it’s invisible it can always surprise Luigi by appearing from an unsuspected
direction. The ghost is unpredictable, and it’s not easy to catch him (well, with a good player behind him that is). And
Luigi feels the presence of the ghost, just like we feel the Other’s presence even when we're not completely turned towards him/her:
when the ghost is nearby, the controller rumbles, and then Luigi must find it with his
light before it vanishes again… </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In short: life is a long game of
hide-and-seek where nobody ever finds anybody. I’m no solipsist though, even
less a nihilist. I do not believe in any kind of “objective” truth, but I do
believe that it’s important to try and reach the Others anyway. It’s an act of
faith (I don’t see it as religious, but it can well be). The difficult part is
to recognize my subjectivity for what it is, to learn how to look at myself
looking at the Others, so that I can tell apart what belongs to me (my emotion,
my prejudices, my state of mind at this moment, etc.) and what belongs to
him/her (the actions made, the words used, etc.) Only then can I really see the Other,
through my subjectivity, instead of seeing only what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I</i> feel about the Other (that would be true solipsism). </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Ok, now I’m pushing a bit too far,
in order to explain my own ideas on the subject. The game has nothing to say
about “looking at ourselves looking at the Others”, but it does ask us to reveal
the Other, just there, in the same room. There’s a caveat here: this reading
works only from the perspective of Luigi, obviously, the one chasing/being
afraid of the ghost. The ghost doesn’t try to reveal Luigi: he knows exactly
where he is. My point, I guess, is that Luigi can never know where the ghost
is, although really he is always right next to him – not only in the game, but
also on the couch. And <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Luigi’s Mansion</i>
is asking you to reveal who is sitting beside you, it reminds you that there is
actually someone there, next to you, and that you may never truly know this
person. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">So, what we have here is a console
expressing self-doubt about its existence (as Bogost said, and as I well agree),
while trying to instill in the players a similar existential doubt (with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Luigi’s Mansion</i> at least). For a
so-called “kiddies” console aimed at (or just good for) casual players, I’m
pretty sure it will have much to teach to its upcoming “hardcore” brothers.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">(And, to conclude about my own
self-doubts about this article, which were not meant to be a post-modern-ironic-meta-joke-commentary
in any way, whether or not this interpretation sticks with the game, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Luigi’s Mansion</i> did bring me towards
these thoughts; that must mean something, no?)</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">p.s.: For the possible French readers, Jozef Siroka at <i>La Presse</i> just published <a href="http://blogues.lapresse.ca/moncinema/siroka/2013/11/07/critiques-dici-sylvain-lavallee/" target="_blank">an interview with me</a>, about cinema.</span></div>
Sylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2882815174745926563.post-12688100477469193752013-09-29T23:25:00.000-04:002013-09-30T22:33:32.662-04:00Honoring cinema<div style="text-align: left;">
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><i>This post and the last one were written for the Blogs of the Round Table</i> <i>at </i><a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/" target="_blank">Critical Distance</a><i>, a monthly invitation for video game bloggers to discuss about a proposed topic. The theme this time was </i><a href="http://www.critical-distance.com/2013/08/12/august-2013-whats-the-story/" target="_blank">"What's the Story?"</a>, <i>storytelling in video games. You can find the other entries by following the previous link.</i> </span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/09/for-impure-video-games-in-defense-of.html" target="_blank">My last article</a> was a bit dishonest.
I almost scrap the entire text a couple of times and instead write about how it
would be cool to transfer André Bazin defense of impure cinema to the context
of video games, but how it is not quite possible. I do think that video games
are fundamentally impure, I love the idea<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">
</i>of cinematic video games, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with
linear storytelling or with cutscenes in an interactive medium. The problem I
had was that as soon as I began to write about a particular game, my “defense”
of cinematic video games didn’t look so much like a “defense” anymore. In
truth, I am much more ambivalent about the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">reality</i>
of cinematic video games than what my article implied: let’s say, then, that it
was an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ideal</i> defense of these games. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">So, here are the nuances I lifted
out last time, with some additional musings on the subject, with an ethical
twist, leading to a long coda on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the Last
of Us</i>.</span></div>
<a name='more'></a><div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The usual complaint regarding
cinematic video games is that gameplay and story pull in two different
directions at once, until what is expressed by the gameplay contradicts the
narrative, like the canonical example of Nathan Drake in <i>Uncharted</i>, a psychopath in the gameplay, mowing indifferently waves
after waves of enemies, which would make him a far less relatable human being
than what cutscenes present to us. But this problem arises only if you consider <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Uncharted</i> as a movie and nothing else:
the game uses cinematic devices in its storytelling and tries to look like an action movie, but why interpret the playable sections
of the game as if they were non-interactive? It’s still a game after all. While
it’s true that cinematic action games propose a schizophrenic experience, I
don’t see any incoherency. It’s just that gameplay and cutscenes serve distinct
purposes, so the player has to go back and forth between two different
mindsets. Roughly, cutscenes tell the story proper while gameplay complements
it in various ways, in a more abstract fashion that do not ask for a literal
reading (as in: the formal system is more important than what actually happens
on screen). </span>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">For example, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Uncharted</i>, the shooting sections never move the story forward. On
the contrary, they’re a hindrance in the flow of the narration – especially when
the player is dying repeatedly, which quickly gets frustrating because the story is constantly interrupted by the player’s failures. But this
is exactly the purpose of these sections: they meant to replicate, for the player,
the characters’ experience of thrill and danger (puzzles in an adventure game
work in a similar manner: they put the player in an inquisitive attitude that
often mirrors the story or the characters). <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/03/videogames-as-possibilities.html" target="_blank">As I wrote last winter</a>, allowing to die in a
shoot-out is a way to convey to the player the difficulty of the mission at
hand. In a movie, the spectator cannot control the flow of the story, so these
ideas of “thrill and danger” are translated through other means: reaction shots
from frightened characters (from the main character or, often, through an
observer, a spectator’s substitute whose reaction is meant to tell the audience
how to react), or from the editing, the situation itself, the framing, etc. In
a video game, none of this is possible outside of cutscenes, so the designers,
instead, allow the player to die and give her a challenge to overcome. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">With cinema, one of the first rules
a rookie screenwriter will learn is to translate his character’s psychology
through action, gesture. But like I said earlier <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Uncharted </i>is not a movie, even if it does look like one from time
to time, so these screenwriting rules do not apply here, at least not when it
comes to gameplay. In such a cinematic video game (and in most games focusing
on telling a story), we’re not meant to approach gameplay literally: it’s an
abstraction, a sort of emotional metaphor of what the characters are going
through. It’s more or less what <a href="http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9366466/tom-bissell-naughty-dog-latest-game-last-us" target="_blank">Tom Bissell referred to as “gameism” </a>recently:
these gameisms are only a problem when you forget that they are first and
foremost a formal system and not a direct representation of reality, so why
should we get rid of them? They are what make a game a game. When Drake kills
hundreds of pixels, his most recurrent action, it doesn’t say anything about
him, and it doesn’t intend to. The point is not that he’s a bloodthirsty
psychopath, but that he’s facing a hardship and this is how the game tries to
translate this idea, through a constant flow of enemies. I’m not saying this is
the best way of representing a hardship; I’m only saying this is the way this
game works (as most cinematic video games), and how it asks us to approach it.</span>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">But it is not easy to do so: <a href="http://www.theastronauts.com/2013/04/why-the-next-generation-will-change-games-forever/" target="_blank">like Adrian Chmielarz wrote</a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">, “the more abstract the game
metaphors get while the rest of the game goes towards trying to be a perfect
sim, the less we enjoy the experience.” In other words, the more the game seems
realist, the more the game metaphors seems incoherent: it’s more difficult to
interpret the gunfights in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Uncharted </i>as
metaphors because Drake is not shooting at red triangles, but at realist human
figures, who look quite the same as the human figures presented in the cutscenes
as relatable human beings; the human figures in the gameplay are metaphors,
but the ones in the cutscenes are not. More important than the “sim-toy
dissonance” of Chmielarz (or any other kind of dissonance), t</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">he real problem
</span>brought by this dichotomy is ethical in nature: the
representation of human beings as abstractions whose sole purpose is to be
killed, or a complete negation of the value of human life.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This is not surprising though, even less exceptional, because these games are
inspired by Hollywood action movies, which are plagued by the exact same
problem. In <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Raiders of the Lost Ark</i></b>, to take <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Uncharted</i> most obvious influence, the Nazis are Nazis because it’s
convenient: it sets them as “evil” so we can safely watch Indiana Jones kill
them without worrying about him losing his soul or something. The violence is
devoid of any real world consequences and is thus reduced to a pure aesthetic
pleasure. The Nazis are nothing more than abstractions meant to be killed for
our enjoyment: their function, in these movies, is exactly the same as the
waves of faceless enemies Drake encounters in his game. So what’s the difference
between <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Indiana Jones</i></b> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Uncharted</i>?
Well, Drake does kill more "evil" guys in the first hour of the game than Dr.
Jones in the course of four movies, but I would argue that the amount of people
killed in such an abstract way doesn’t really matter (for me, one is already
too much); the real problem is in how death, violence and human beings are
represented on screen. And this is where I can’t defend cinematic video games
anymore: they tend to emphasize the worst of their role model by taking one of
the most dubious trends in contemporary cinema and they make a game out of it. For
Bazin, a good movie adaptation offers an enlightening perspective on its
source; cinematic video games do exactly the opposite: they demean cinema, or
at the very least their perspective on cinema is extremely shallow*.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This ethical problem
is not exclusive to cinematic video games (it can be extended to pretty much
all video games focusing on violence), but it is more jarring in their cases
since their focus is on telling a realist story (well, realist in a Hollywood
sense) with real human beings – and because cinema should be able to lift video
games out of these muddy waters, not sink them deeper. Not that video games
need to be “saved” somehow: there’s plenty of good non-cinematic video games
out there, and the best way to avoid this problem is still to keep away from
violence altogether (or at least avoid to represent it directly). But if you
want to include guns in a realist setting and if you take cinema as
inspiration, then I’m pretty sure you can find ample examples in movies of how
to represent violence in a meaningful way. </span></div>
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<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Is <i>Uncharted </i>incoherent, weaken by a critical conflict between form and content? Or, more fundamentally, does
linear storytelling have its place in an interactive
medium? In my mind: no, it's not, and yes, it does have its place. Rather, my criticism would be that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Uncharted</i>' story, while well-written, is still quite mundane and the gameplay enhances mainly the worst
part of it, i.e. the shooting. Gameplay-wise, the game is at its best in the
big action set pieces and in some of its platforming sections, but there’s an
awful lot of trivial shooting in between, which doesn’t amount to anything, on
a narrative-level, except to repeat again and again that Drake is facing a
grave danger, or that the arch-villain is ruthless. That would be the main
differences between <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Uncharted </i>and the
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Indiana
Jones</i></b>: Spielberg never uses the same trick twice; he can emphasize with
his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mise en scène </i>(the equivalent of
gameplay) both the overblown spectacle and the characters’ interactions; and
even if he’s guilty of Nazi-as-abstraction-meant-to-be-killed, he’s able to
nuance his use of violence (especially in the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the Last Crusade</i></b>), which
is not something <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Uncharted</i> can claim.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">On that count, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Last of Us</i> is a big step forward and it may well be the only
video game that can claim to be truly “cinematic”. It still has its share of
problems (not counting my own zombie weariness): the game seems to present
violence as a last resort, but some sections cannot be completed by just stealthily
avoiding the enemies, making the carnage obligatory; swinging a plank of wood
at zombies feels all brutal and desperate the first time around, but after fifteen hours
of zombie/human head bashing, the effect begins to wear off; in short, there’s
far too much killing in this game for its own good (Brendan Keogh offered a good summary of these shortcomings, and more, <a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.ca/2013/08/notes-on-last-of-us.html" target="_blank">on his blog</a>).
And the game still represents humans as simple targets, but at least Naughty Dog is
aware of this problem and tries to integrate it by defining its main character
through this kind of gameplay. For once, gameplay doesn’t just enhance the
worst (the violence), but serves also to define the psychology of the main character,
Joel (light spoilers to follow).</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">For example, most human enemies in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the Last of Us</i> are the same than the
enemies facing Drake in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Uncharted</i>: anonymous
guys all wearing more or less the same clothes, moving in a similar manner,
with no personality of their own. In both cases, the player is mostly fighting
insignificant masses of pixels that only bear a superficial resemblance to the
human form. Joel rarely seems to fight human beings; they’re only obstacles to
overcome in order to make the story progress. The difference, then, is that
this representation of the “bad guys” actually corresponds to Joel’s
perspective (which would not be true for Drake): Joel is so narcissist and
withdrawn that he cannot see these men as individuals anymore. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Indeed, Joel has only one goal in
mind: his own survival, so he can only see his fellow survivors in instrumental
terms, as either a threat to eliminate or a resource to exploit. In that sense,
he is as blind as the Clickers or the Runners (the not-zombies of the game) because
he cannot see the humans in front of him for what they are. The Runners offer the
best analogy: with one objective in mind, they run towards it, unaware of their
surroundings. Joel is more careful, but his perspective is as narrow as them;
nothing stands between him and his objective (especially in the last chapters).
He has no use for humanity anymore, so most of the gameplay consists of he/the
player trying to avoid or eliminate almost anything that remotely looks like a
human being. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">And he seems not to be alone with
this egotistical attitude: on numerous occasions, the game implies that he was once just
like the bandits he and Ellie encounter again and again, ready to do anything
for the sake of their survival. In this post-apocalypse world, Joel represents
the average individual, devoid of empathy. The decaying world of <i>the Last of Us</i>, then, correspond to Joel's perspective, a world with no regard for humanity, and the game does encourage us to ask whether this world<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>is dying because
of the infected, the monsters, or because of the humans’ behavior. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The prologue already states clearly
that the humans may be more to fear than the actual monsters (as usual, for a
zombie piece) and the same question resonates in Joel’s final dilemma.</span> The environments complement this ambiguity: while the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">human </i>world is dying, nature, on the contrary, seems to be fine, thriving even, taking back a life
that the humans left behind. The game presents a human apocalyse and not a total destruction of all forms of life; this nuance is crucial (heavy
spoilers now!)</span>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In this perspective, Ellie is a
symbol of hope on two counts: she may be able to cure humanity of the
infestation and she represents how Joel can preserve what’s left of his own
humanity. If humanity is dying not because of the outbreak, but because of our
behavior, then saving Ellie, the only person with whom Joel entertained a real,
human relationship, may be the “right” choice. Scare quotes are in order because
for Joel there is no right or wrong choice: there is no choice at all. He’s
quite aware of the solitude he imposed on himself after his daughter’s death
and he knows that Ellie maybe the only way to salvage the last figments of his
dying humanity, his old self, so he never hesitates. He has to save Ellie, no
matter what. This “no matter what” entails possibly sacrificing the future of humanity,
and killing an awful lot of Fireflies, including Marlene, Ellie's surrogate mother, so, yeah, it’s a selfish brutal action. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Still, even after all this, the ending implies that Joel can rejoin the community of man, literally, by
returning to his brother who seems to have built a real community, a future
that looks bright on the horizon, almost hopeful. If there is hope in the world
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the Last of Us</i>, it seems it
lies inside of us and not in an external cure; we have to cure all the Joels
of their blindness. I'm not sure Joel can be "cured" though: his last deeds are too extreme and selfish, his perspective never seem to widen. He took the only chance he had at redemption and messed up pretty badly. </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Some people complained about the
hospital scene at the very end (<a href="http://www.arcadianrhythms.com/2013/09/what-i-was-looking-for-in-the-ending-of-the-last-of-us/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=what-i-was-looking-for-in-the-ending-of-the-last-of-us" target="_blank">here for example</a>), the obligation to pull the
trigger on the doctor: they were asking for a choice, their choice, not Joel. I
don’t quite understand this criticism: in an interactive medium, withholding
“choice” is a powerful expressive tool. What better way to convey the tragedy of
this man than to give the illusion of choice, than to stop the story until the
player acknowledges the only possible action for this person at this moment?
For me, this moment of hesitation, the moment you realize that you do not have
any choice but to kill the doctor, is the most cinematic moment in a video game
yet – I mean “cinematic” as: it’s not exactly cinema (it’s still an interactive
sequence), and it’s a meaningful way for a video game to honor its cinematic
influence by using its own expressive mean, gameplay. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">To be more precise, in a movie, we can
only see the characters from the outside: there’s always an unbridgeable gap
between them and me. Since I’m only a spectator, in a position of
contemplation, I have no control over a movie, over these fragments of space
coming <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/07/imitation-of-life-3-world-past.html" target="_blank">from a distant time</a>, and it’s in this distance that art arises, in this space
located somewhere between the movie and me, where different points of view
collide (mine, the director, his characters). In a game, there’s rarely a similar
place for contemplation, this distance, because the player is directly engaged
in the action. It is true for most of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the
Last of Us</i>: I’m not exactly Joel, but I play through his perspective (the
gameplay <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is </i>his perspective), so the
gap between him and me is tenuous. While I’m in the game, I cannot step out of
Joel’s shoes; even when the game is at its most quiet (as it happens
surprisingly often for a blockbuster), and I can explore an environment at my
own pace, I’m still playing Joel; the camera is always stuck behind his neck. I
do not have this space for contemplation that all traditional art forms offer,
this spectatorial distance between the artwork and me. And this is exactly what
this moment of hesitation at the end of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the
Last of Us</i> offered me, this distance that the game lacks otherwise: at this
moment, the game still refuse to advance if I don’t act exactly like Joel would,
but it looks as if it’s offering me a choice, and I can linger on the scene as
long as I like. At least, it is my experience of this moment because I tried to
avoid the bloodshed; I wanted to see if the game would allow me to go through without
killing. Time distended, and then suddenly this gap between Joel and me got ripped
open (Joel’s choice was certainly not my choice), through gameplay, or rather the
lack thereof, although not in the way of a cutscene. I was forced to
contemplate the tragedy of the moment, the inevitability of what was about to
happen, when I would dare to pull the trigger, as Joel has to do (I’m sure <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">he</i> didn’t hesitate) because of the
choices he made in the past, after his daughter’s death. The difference between
me, the player, and Joel, the character, is never as potent as in this precious
moment (hesitation is always precious: it means someone is thinking, something modern
Hollywood cinema seems to have forget).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Playing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the Last of Us</i> is playing through Joel’s perspective, an alien
subjectivity, and most of the time I’m so enthralled by the gameplay that I do
not have the distance necessary to contemplate what I’m doing through him. I’m
just like Joel: I have one objective in mind (finishing the game), and I will
do what is asked of me to do so. But <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Last of Us</i> is aware that this type of gameplay is narcissist, utilitarian,
incapable of empathy, just like Joel, so the game gradually distances the
player from this character, first by giving us a glimpse of gameplay
with Ellie, then by showing what Joel is capable of doing in cutscenes
(torture), when we do not directly control him, then by giving us the illusion
of a choice that reinforces his perspective in contrast to what the player
may have chose instead, and finally by Joel’s final lie that serves only to
protect him from what he did. Joel is not “cured” at the end: this lie cuts him
off from Ellie, from the only thing he cares about. He is now more alone than
ever; not even the player is with him: the epilogue is played through Ellie,
and at this point, we’re mere spectators anyway, finally at distance from him </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">(and
this is something <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spec Ops: the Line</i>
failed to realized in its indictment of the player: the problem in these games is
not the player, but the character, a mixed entity between the fiction created
by the designer and what the player has invested in it. As a critique of video games
featuring men-with-guns, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the Last of Us</i>
is far more honest and successful because it focuses on the man holding the gun, not the one with the controller.) </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">(End of spoilers.)</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">So, this is exactly why I like
linear storytelling: the possibility to share another person’s point of view.
Choice, yes, player agency, sure, but when I get to choose anything I want to
do, I’m only confronted to my own subjectivity. In a foreign setting, ok, and
I’m probably role-playing, but ultimately it all comes back to me, to what it
means for me when I decided to do such and such, and what it means for me to be
“evil” or “good”. There’s value in that, for sure, and there’s a lot of nuances
to be made. The obvious one: anything I choose to do, I do not control how my
action is represented on screen, nor its consequences, so my choices are more
like a dialog with the vision of the designers embedded in the game. Linear
storytelling is a more traditional way to confront an audience to an alien
subjectivity, by showing the particular journey of one character, but in a
video game we are literally put in someone else’s shoes, moving around a
foreign body, and this is a new, unique, powerful possibility in art (even in a novel, I
may have access to a character’s thoughts, but I can never control him). </span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The great achievement of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the Last of Us</i>, then, is to throw the player out of these uncomfortable,
stifling shoes we too often have to wear in video games. Alas, this is also its great limit. It’s a good cinematic
video game because for once it uses gameplay to emphasize the character's perspective instead
of just the action, and because it uses cinema to create a much-needed distance between this perspective and ours. For the first time in a video game, <i>the Last of</i> <i>Us </i>honors cinema instead of celebrating the worst of what movies have to offer. Then again, it’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">still</i>
the story of a man with a gun. Naugthy Dog is aware of the limited perspective
offered by a character that can only look at the world through the barrel of a
gun, so they find a way to distance us from that perspective (and only at the
end). But they never dare rise above it, above what they admit themselves to be
problematic (apart from some fleeting moments with Joel's daughter and Ellie).
This would be the cinematic video game I’m waiting for, the one I will heartily
defend, the one who will get rid altogether of this ethical problem.</span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">So, here’s
hoping that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the Last of Us</i> is a
prophetic title, that Joel is really the last of those man with a gun, that we
will know how to preserve that welcome distance the game offered us at the end,
and that next time we can see the world through a more enriching point of
view.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Somehow, I doubt it will happen.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"></span>
</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">*For what it's worth: I do enjoy
these games and these movies (some of them at least) despite of this, but this manner of representing violence still need to be acknowledged. </span></div>
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Sylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2882815174745926563.post-10911429723874135092013-09-21T14:16:00.000-04:002013-09-22T08:14:30.528-04:00For Impure Video Games: In Defense of Cinematic Storytelling<div style="text-align: left;">
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</style><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">With the critical and detached perspective we can now afford on the
video game production of the last ten or fifteen years, one of the dominant phenomena
of its evolution promptly appears to us: the resort, more and more significant,
to the cinematographic heritage.</span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">“</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> is a video game” can we often read about
older games like </i>Super Metroid<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> or the
original </i>X-COM<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, or even with more
recent examples like </i>Deus Ex<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> or </i>Dark
Souls<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">. </i>Few (or no) cinematics!
Expressive and/or emergent gameplay! This is what video games are about! This
is their distinctive and unique quality: interactivity, choice, player agency,
or something to that effect. The story must be told through gameplay, not
through cutscenes!<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> But since cinematic action
games are the most prominent form of video games right now on the mainstream
scene, and in the public eye, at least when it comes to home consoles, is it to
say that we have to forgo the autonomy of our art form? Are video games, or
what remains of them, still able to survive today without the crutch of cinema?
Are they about to become a subordinate art form, depending on another, more
traditional one?</i></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a name='more'></a><br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This problem, it must be said, is nothing new: I’m writing here about how
diverse art forms are mutually influencing one another. If video games were two
or three thousand years old, we would probably see more clearly that their
evolution doesn’t escape the laws that also govern their artful brethren. But
they’re only about 42 years old (counting from 1971, the first commercially
sold video game), so our historical perspectives are prodigiously squeezed. </span></i>
<br />
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<br /></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Adaptation, imitation, borrowing: of these accusations, surely all art
forms are guilty. But what may fool us about video games, just like cinema
before them, is that these phenomena did not appear at the beginning of their
artistic evolution. Indeed: the autonomy of video games’ expressive means and
the novelty of their subject were never as potent as in the first twenty years of
their life. Sure, a new-born art may try to imitate its elders, and then work
from there until it can slowly define its own laws and themes</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">after all, this is how we learn: imitating our parents until we’re
mature enough to develop our own personality.</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">It seems less clear, though, why an infant art form should continue to
incorporate more and more alien aesthetics as time goes by, as if its owns
capacity for invention, for specific creation, were inversely proportional to
its expressive force. Such a paradoxical evolution</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">from “purer” video games like </i>Pac-Man<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> or </i>Pong<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> to a heavily
cinematic one like</i> the Last of Us, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">could
easily be described as decadence, a decline.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGVPBikZ8rJV3Bl9Tebpll8D6K2atQLAmtv7JKI33SxZW-4NS6AFwCo5NQzbBaZHoeiu_bdw3V9h0CHWKKPgpLEzbS-K7a1yvx3a2kv7O4-vXauX3UOLaN3hae2rc8Y63_Dg1P2i7hBs_o/s1600/Pong.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGVPBikZ8rJV3Bl9Tebpll8D6K2atQLAmtv7JKI33SxZW-4NS6AFwCo5NQzbBaZHoeiu_bdw3V9h0CHWKKPgpLEzbS-K7a1yvx3a2kv7O4-vXauX3UOLaN3hae2rc8Y63_Dg1P2i7hBs_o/s400/Pong.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">To say that, though, is to forget<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> that video games were not developed in the
sociological conditions that once defined traditional art forms.</i> Not so
long ago, until the 70’s maybe, the history of art was moving towards the
autonomy and the specificity of each art form. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">This concept of “pure” art (pure literature, pure cinema, etc.) isn’t a
hollow expression; it refers to an aesthetic reality as difficult to define as
it is to contest its existence. </i>Or at least to contest that it was once the
goal of modernism: getting rid of figurative paintings, for example, in order
to move toward the essence of painting, i.e. the composition of colors and
geometric forms on a flat canvas. But if there’s one thing that cinema taught
us in the course of the twentieth century, it’s how an art form can be
fundamentally impure. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Alain Badiou once described cinema
as a culmination of every art forms: cinema is not the seventh art, but the
addition of the previous six plus one (“+1” refers to cinema’s own specificity).
It is not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">an </i>art, defined by its
uniqueness, but rather a specific conjunction of diverse art forms that we once
thought as alien (more on that later). Through this impurity, cinema brought
forth new artistic processes like recycling, sampling, editing, mixing, etc., operations
that came to define our current age of impurity – indeed, the quest for a pure
art is now obsolete, and in that sense, claiming for the supremacy of older,
“purer” video games appears quite vain. After all, video games are a product of
this age, the natural offspring of cinema (see my <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/08/imitation-of-life-4-film-is-dead-long.html" target="_blank">last article</a>) and as such,
they’re also defined by their impurity – albeit in a different way than cinema.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Everything about video games is a
reminder of this fundamental impurity, from the idea of shared-authorship
between the player and the artist to their identity torn between industry and
art (a trait they share with cinema). And to some extent, they’re also a
culmination of previous art forms, or at least of some of them. Theater and
literature are less present, but even the most seemingly “pure” video games are
taking cues from painting, architecture, sculpture, music and, certainly,
cinema. Just like cinema, then, video games have their unique way to assemble
diverse art forms. And just like cinema, they are composed of moving images, so
it’s only natural that they look up to their elder.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">But saying that video games appeared “after” cinema, </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">or that they’re both similarly
impure,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> doesn’t mean that video games are
necessarily some kind of follower, or that they’re aiming for a similar
experience, just like cinema was not theatre even if they share some features
like actors, scenes, dialogs, etc.</i> Cinema and video games may be both
impure, but they are so in their own specific way. In cinema, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mise en scène </i>is what brings together
the tools of painting (the framing), of theater (the actors), of literature
(the storytelling), etc., and assembles these disjointed parts into a coherent
whole that we call a “movie”. As such, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mise
en scène</i> cannot exist by itself, in a sort of “pure” state, because it is a
link, a conjunction. It needs at least two disparate elements in order to
exist. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This is how we should think of
gameplay: not as some pure, isolated element, but as a unique way to coordinate
diverse artistic tools into a coherent whole. There is no such thing as “pure”
gameplay: if we define gameplay, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gameplay" target="_blank">Wikipedia-wise</a>,
as the specific way in which players interact with a game, then the rules and
mechanics that constitute the gameplay must be convey to the players somehow, through
graphics and/or text. After all, I’m writing about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">video </i>games, not about board or card games: the representational
means here are extremely important. And this “video” aspect will always be
heavily influenced by previous art forms, no matter how abstract or minimalist
the image is.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The key word here is “influence”. A
better one would be “adaptation”: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in
order to respect the cinematographic experience, its essence, one cannot just
imitate its images</i>. And this is what video games do: they do not imitate
cinema, but adapt some cinematographic tools for their own purposes, or incorporate
them in their own language. For example: cutscenes. At first glance, a cutscene
is a pure imitation of the cinematic form. The usual complaint is that they do
not belong in a video game because it’s basically a scene from a movie that
negates the essential interactivity of video games. But, hey, there is no such
thing as a cutscene outside of video games. There is no cutscene in a movie,
and a movie is not a long cutscene. It’s a movie. When we make a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGQM0yzg2Jk" target="_blank">three-hours movie out of <i>the Last of Us</i></a>, we do
not watch these images with the same mindset we have when we encounter them in the
context of the full game because a cutscene has some functional purposes with
no equivalent in cinema: cutscenes, on the most basic level, are a tool to
establish the next player’s objective. When watching a cutscene, controller in
hand, we’re not only thinking “oh, look at what’s happening!” but also “oh,
this is what I need to do next”. And anyway, a three-hours movie made of
cutscenes from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the Last of Us</i> is
radically different than what a real movie of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the Last of Us</i> would be like if it was conceived as a movie. For
one, the dramaturgy would be way more focused: it makes sense as it is in the
context of the game because these cutscenes inform the gameplay and affect how
we approach each section by giving different objectives and/or motivations to
the characters, but the same story quickly appears redundant and a bit stale
when condensed in a movie form. This is not a problem in the game: it becomes
one when you cut the game out and try to make a movie out of it. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZEULk1GNiu8iBi2sw_jz2gb9aWSXmIXW0zzKfdsTXRcnm6ZRMq5bhsAEaudQ7d8cm_0R3-0q3OoH9M28LdrtTszhlTwqa2QDzzZd7CRQy-Ni3jU3qpMaQXJf41brBBRUBHQlRAfEZsdWE/s1600/LastOfUs1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZEULk1GNiu8iBi2sw_jz2gb9aWSXmIXW0zzKfdsTXRcnm6ZRMq5bhsAEaudQ7d8cm_0R3-0q3OoH9M28LdrtTszhlTwqa2QDzzZd7CRQy-Ni3jU3qpMaQXJf41brBBRUBHQlRAfEZsdWE/s400/LastOfUs1.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">What I’m saying is that the way cutscenes
are conceived is inherently videogame-y: it may borrow the visual language of
cinema, but only to the same extent that cinema borrows the dialogs of theater.
In both cases, the “alien” aesthetics is given a new purpose when transfer in a
new context: the framing and the editing of a scene can enhance, nuance or
contradict the words spoken by an actor; likewise, a cutscene can enhance the
gameplay by showing you how cool your new gun is or nuance it by trying to
convince you that killing is bad (and vice versa, gameplay can also nuance a
cutscene). A more apt comparison would be music scores in movies: music and
cinema are two different art forms, working in quite different ways. I could
argue that music does not belong in a movie because it is superimposed over the
images and often serves as a crutch to create a mood or sustain an emotion when
the images are unable to do so themselves. In most Hollywoodian movies, music
is omnipresent, overflowing every scene, telling us how to feel: this is
basically how we talk of cutscenes, a recourse to another form to express
something the movie/game is unable to do through its own “pure” means. And in
fact, a good movie score works exactly like a good cutscene: either by contrast
or emphasis, a score works <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">with</i> the images
to create a particular mood, while a good cutscene does the same with the
gameplay in regard to storytelling. Cutscenes, like music, are not necessarily
a crutch: it may often be the case, but they can also create a unique
experience that neither cinema nor video games could achieve alone. </span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Video games may borrow some
cinematographic elements, mainly a linear, non-interactive plot and some storytelling
devices to go with it but by doing so they do not relinquish their “true
nature” as video games because transferring these elements in a new context
grants them a new meaning. Cutscenes are never isolated, so we should not think
of them in isolation: they’re followed or preceded by a sequence of gameplay,
and the interrelations between an interactive sequence and a non-interactive
one can be quite complex (see <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Metal Gear
Solid</i>, especially <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sons of Liberty</i>).</span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This doesn’t mean that “purer” video
games don’t exist, that they’re less valuable or that knowing what’s unique to
a specific medium isn’t worthwhile; on the contrary, you need to understand the
nature of your own medium before beginning to annex new ones. And this is exactly
the point of this article: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">if video games
are able today to properly tackle the cinematographic domain, it’s first and
foremost because they are confident enough in themselves to become transparent
in front of their object. They can finally pretend to faithfulness – not an
illusory fidelity of decal – but an intimate intelligence of their own
aesthetical structures, the prerequisite needed to respect their commitment
toward cinema. The multiplication of cinematic video games shouldn’t bother the
critic worrying about the purity of its art form; on the contrary, these games
are the token of its progress.</i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The idea of valuing “pure” video
games (or cinema) over “impure” ones doesn’t make much sense: impurity is at
the very foundation of video games. Hell, it’s already right there in their
name: a game in video form, a mix of two different, previously unrelated elements,
moving images and games. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">“But come on”, will say at this point the nostalgic of Video games with
a tall V, independent, autonomous, specific, pure of any compromise, “why put
all this artistic effort in service of a cause we do not need? Why make </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Uncharted<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> when we can already see the </i><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Indiana
Jones</b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> on the big screen? Even if
these cinematic video games are accomplished, surely you will not pretend that
they’re more valuable than their inspiration, that </i>Uncharted<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> is more essential than </i><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Indiana Jones</b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, or, above all, that they’re more important than a video game with an
equal artistic value but working on a theme unique to video games? </i>The Last
of Us<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> is a good imitation of movies, but
is it more valuable than </i>The Road<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">
(the book) or than </i>Starseed Pilgrim<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">?
You’re saying this is progress, but on the long run it will only sterilize
video games by reducing them to an annex of cinema. Give back to cinema what
belongs to it, and to video games what can only belong to them.”</i></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">For one: if video games are looking increasingly cinematic, it is a fact
that we can merely record and try to understand because there’s nothing we can
do about this. As architecture, video games and cinema are functional
arts: a house is meaningful only if we can live in it, just like cinema and
video games need a minimal audience to exist (and in their cases, this minimum
is immense). Or, following another system of reference, we should say that for
video games (and cinema) the existence precedes the essence. The critic, even in
its most adventurous extrapolations, must proceed from this existence.</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> It may seem like a naive pragmatism,
but in front of an art form, humility is in order. There’s no point in arguing about
how games should be: the critic must look at what games are right now, what
they’re trying to do, and try to understand what it means. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">And more importantly: why not look
after cinema? <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cinema, a more evolved art
form, and in some of its incarnations more challenging and educated, proposes
to video games complex characters and, concerning the relations between form
and content, a precision and a subtlety that were not used to see in our
interactive medium. Why not use this knowledge? </i>For example, I will not
pretend that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Uncharted </i>is equally
valuable as <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Raiders of the Lost Ark</i></b>: the latter is far superior in every
way, mainly because it belongs to the body of work of a major artist, whose
whole cinema revolves around his search for a responsible spectacle (I amply
talked about Spielberg <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2012/11/the-cinema-of-steven-spielberg-1-toward.html" target="_blank">here</a>, <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2012/12/the-cinema-of-steven-spielberg-2-behind.html" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/04/lincoln-2012-steven-spielberg_12.html" target="_blank">here</a>). And this is exactly what video
games can learn from cinema: not auteurism (I’m not sure it is needed, or even
relevant, in the context of games), but how to use moving images in a
meaningful way, beyond the simple ability to entertain, in order to propose a
vision of the world.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-uGKaZU3M5BcTWD1LPg54rr0Q-SbXDjh5WK_bZ6vn_E6sK5Utdxy8FtcmjaxceDtL1rjE8ixjKiSEshAf977G5_qg456NImvcgtqFE5E4zqKRcrMF0YiBmJtpfZ9uIR5npoJ_GCvtr6C0/s1600/uncharted_2_live_chat.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-uGKaZU3M5BcTWD1LPg54rr0Q-SbXDjh5WK_bZ6vn_E6sK5Utdxy8FtcmjaxceDtL1rjE8ixjKiSEshAf977G5_qg456NImvcgtqFE5E4zqKRcrMF0YiBmJtpfZ9uIR5npoJ_GCvtr6C0/s400/uncharted_2_live_chat.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<div style="margin: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Everything looks now as if the specific themes of video games have been
completely worn out by the techniques that gave birth to them. In order to arouse
emotion, it’s not enough anymore to render a lively 3D open-world. Video games
entered, without a doubt, the age of the scenario; or maybe we’re witnessing a
meaningful inversion between form and content. Not that the former has become irrelevant,
but all this new technique (convincing actor models, credible AI, smooth
animation, etc.) is bringing us towards a transparency of the subject that we
can now appreciate for itself, and for which we are more and more demanding.</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> Maybe we lost something in the
process, something unique to video games, but it is foolish to continue hoping
for some kind of “pure” video games. And why would we? They have been insulated
long enough as it is. Looking out for cinema is sometimes seen as some kind of
apostasy, a negation of what video games can be in order to become something
that they aren’t when really cinema has been part of video games since their
inception. As endless debates have shown us, defining exactly what a video game
is isn’t easy, so why raise arbitrary fences around an imaginary “core purity”
that we have to preserve at all costs from the constant assaults of alien art
forms? </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I’m more inclined to salute this
openness to others.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">(The passages in italics above are
all my clumsy translations of an essay by French film theorist André Bazin, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">For Impure Cinema In Defense of Adaptation </i>(1958).
Obviously he didn’t write about video games, so I had to adapt his sentences for
this new context. Most of the time, it means that I substituted the words
“cinema” for “video games” and “theatrical” for “cinematic”, thus changing his
argument “cinema is impure so it’s normal that it adapts literature and
theatre” to “video games are impure so it’s normal that they’re looking out to
cinema”. Some of my changes were more substantial, but I tried to stay as close
as possible to his ideas while transferring them to the domain of video games. I
complemented this fragmentary translation (the original article is quite
longer) with some ideas concerning video games more specifically (and an
anachronistic reference to Badiou, whom Bazin couldn’t possible know), or else
it wouldn’t make much sense; the end result is a schizophrenic article,
well-suited (I hope) for its schizophrenic subject. My opinion on the subject
is also quite schizophrenic, so I will come back shortly with some important
nuances, that were too cumbersome in the context of the translation. Since Bazin’s
original text seems unavailable online, and because I don’t want any confusion
between what belongs to him and my own words, I decided to differentiate the
sentences and arguments that I lifted directly (or mostly so) from him by
putting them in italics.)</span></div>
Sylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2882815174745926563.post-80848058885382704412013-08-15T23:00:00.000-04:002013-09-11T21:21:36.051-04:00Imitation of Life (4): Film is Dead, Long Live Video Games!<div style="text-align: left;">
I opened this series of articles about CGI on the idea that “Video games are not cinematic and they will never be”, a radical statement that I would not repeat today without a load of nuances; here are some of them (a lot of them actually: be warned, this post is very long! So go grab a cup of coffee, or the entire Bodum, just to be sure…)</div>
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<b>Where I introduce things</b></div>
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My <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/05/the-shape-of-things-to-come.html" target="_blank">initial argument</a> looked like this: CGI is a category of animation and animation is a different art form with different creative processes than live-action cinema, so the idea of a “cinematic” video game doesn’t make much sense. It would be wise, said I, to think of video games in terms of animation instead of cinema. Then, with my <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/06/imitation-of-life-1.html" target="_blank">analysis of <b><i>Who Framed Roger Rabbit</i></b></a> and more importantly <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/06/imitation-of-life-2-fall-of-man.html" target="_blank"><b><i>Terminator 2</i></b></a>, I wanted to show how the photographic image first resisted CGI by representing its digital creations as a radical Other tearing apart the fabric of film and challenging our belief in film’s faithfulness to reality. Again, I made a clear distinction between CGI (animation) and film (a faithful image of the real world, to put it simply), while also noting that this apparent resistance against CGI was in fact a manner of integrating a novelty in the classical visual language of Hollywood cinema. Not a resistance at all, in reality this tactic made the audience aware of the possibilities of the digital image before unleashing its full power in all of our theatres. I know, this wasn’t intentional and only a result of how the technology evolved (you can’t unleash the power of something you haven’t fully developed yet), but movies did support this interpretation. To stick with my previous examples, in about twenty years, we went from the dangerous T-1000 as CGI to the world of Pandora, a CGI heaven meant to replace the flawed, mechanical world of the humans; a perfect CGI Avatar to replace the handicapped human body; and a way for us, spectators, seating in the theatre like the main character on his wheelchair, to get lost and explore a marvelous new technology, and in the process lose sense of the real world (yes, <b><i>Avatar</i></b> is an ideological piece of crap). <br />
<br />
Most people, I think, would easily follow my argument until that point. It stands to reason that CGI is not film, and that these two types of images are quite different in nature. Which lead us to the inevitable question: what does it mean for cinema if CGI is now omnipresent? (And its corollary: what does it mean for “cinematic” video games?) <br />
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But it’s an incomplete question. <br />
<br />
So <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/07/imitation-of-life-3-world-past.html" target="_blank">my last article</a> took a new tangent while trying to deepen the “classical” ontology of cinema (there’s no real unanimity on this, so let’s say it’s classical for me). This time, my conclusion implicitly stated that cinema can exist only on film, and so that all kinds of digital images, not just CGI, are banished from the much-coveted realm of cinematic cultural relevance. This idea (whether we support it or not is irrelevant at this point) gives us a hint about why our first question was misguided: it didn’t take into account the disappearance of film, and the nature of the digital image, which is now the only format used in most regular theatres.<br />
<br />
Obviously, such a radical stance about digital images seems indefensible: I mean, if I refuse to consider a video game as cinematic because of the digital nature of its images, following this idea to its logical conclusion, I would have to explain how, say, <i>the Last of Us</i> is less cinematic than <i><b>Avatar</b></i>, a movie shot with digital cameras and filled with CGI effects. We could always answer that <i>the Last of Us</i> is entirely made with CGI, so it’s closer to an animation movie, while <i><b>Avatar</b></i> still use a lot of live-action footage. But this raises another tricky question: what amount of CGI do we need for “cinema” to become “animation”? If a movie uses CGI in all of its shots, like <i><b>Avatar</b></i> probably did, is it still cinema? Or is it animation, or a mix of both? And how such a cinema or animation or whatever we want to call it is so different than <i>the Last of Us</i>? Interactivity may seem like an obvious answer, but consider this: I can interact with my DVD with a controller, and often the same one I use to play games... Movies may not be intrinsically interactive like video games, but at home we can control the images of cinema, and surely this possibility can’t be inconsequential. Here’s an idea, briefly mentioned in my last article: interaction came with the digital image. Or more precisely with video, but the point is that interaction was impossible with film: you couldn’t press Pause while watching <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> in 1941 in a theatre (because where else?) <br />
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So, what does it mean?<br />
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For one, it brings another round of absurd questions: if digital images can’t be cinema, are movies not cinematic anymore when they’re playing on DVD, a digital, interactive format? Surely it would be silly to think that cinema is such a fragile thing that it cannot survive a simple transfer of format and that all those movies I watched at home are not really, you know, movies? But then, if I want to preserve my <i>cinéphilie</i>, all those countless hours spent in front of my television or, worse, my damn anti-cinematic computer, I have to accept that cinema can live in a digital form... and in that case, why can’t <i>the Last of Us</i> be cinematic? It’s not like we’re saying that this video game is a movie; only that it has some qualities that we usually associate with cinema. Can a video game really be cinematic, in a meaningful way? I guess it depends whether or not watching <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> (the <i>Shadow of Colossus</i> of cinema) on DVD is still cinema. And whether or not a CGI-filled movie like <i><b>Avatar</b></i> can be considered as cinema. <br />
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<i><b>Avatar</b>: A Natural Paradise made of fiber optics, or how the digital image will help us reconnect with the world...</i></div>
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<b>Part 1: Film is dead, or where things get theoretical</b></div>
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But what can be so different with the digital image anyway? If I take the same picture, of the same object, at the same time, with a photographic camera and with a digital camera, why would the former be a re-presentation of a world past, as I argued last time, and not the latter? The two images would look pretty much the same (apart from some minor differences in resolution, textures, colors and so forth), and in both cases we would be in presence of a spatially and temporally distant object. Or so it seems (what follows is largely indebted to D.N. Rodowick masterful book, <i>Virtual Life of Film</i>).<br />
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In the case of the digital image, I would say that we do not feel temporally distant from the object represented; rather, we feel like we’re in the presence of an image of an object. A photographic image is also an image, no doubt, and I don’t want to suggest that the digital image is a mere insignificant simulacrum. My point is that the ontology of each of these images is quite different. Let’s phrase it this way: both are an image of an object, but film puts the emphasis on the object represented (an image of an <i>object</i>), while digital insists on the image (an <i>image</i> of an object). Why is this? <br />
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First, because film has a real, physical presence: the photographic image exists independently of the screen where it is projected. We can take a film strip in our hands and see the images printed on it. On the contrary, a digital image is not a visible object since it’s nothing more than a bunch of 0 and 1, meaningless for the human eye. As such, the digital image has no visual presence for us without a proper display. The digital image is immaterial.<br />
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Furthermore, while a photographic image projected on a screen is the same as its equivalent on the film strip (only larger), the digital image is more like an image of the data stocked on a hard drive, this data already being an image of reality as seen by a computer. In a sense, what we see is one possible interpretation of these 0 and 1, which could be decoded to appear in another fashion (we can always read it as a text file). Consequently, the digital image has no real shape of its own: for example, it adapts itself to the screen where it is displayed. Think of DVDs who can recognize the aspect ratio of a television and automatically adjust the frame accordingly. With a photographic image, it works the other way around: we have to adjust the screen for the image because it has a determined and stable form. <br />
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These are simple differences, maybe, but eloquent ones: the photographic image has a materiality, a constancy that the digital image lacks, which partly explains why Stanley Cavell could write, in <i>The World Viewed</i>, as we saw last time, that cinema does not present us with “likeness” of things, but, “we want to say, with the things themselves”. With film, because the image is really <i>there</i>, in a constant and fixed form, this sense of presence, of materiality, is transferred to the objects represented. But the digital image has no physical presence like film, and its identity is fluid, changing, in a way that feels unnatural: just like the T-1000 in <i><b>Terminator 2</b></i>, the digital image does not act like the world as we know it. As a result, the objects represented suffer from the same instable identity: the digital image offers only “likeness” of things, an image that <i>looks</i> like the things represented, but that could as well look like something else, or that could metamorphose into something else entirely. How can I believe that what I see is “the thing itself”, if the image of this thing is unstable, immaterial?<br />
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This idea is best understood if we consider that a digital image is like a pointillist picture: we perceive it as continuous, although, really, there are microscopic gaps between each pixel. Photographic images have been compared to a mould because the light emitted or reflected by objects is printed through chemical processes on a film strip, which then stores the appearances of these objects. An object is captured on film as a whole, by the direct contact of light on a sensible surface. With a digital camera, light also has to be focused by a lens, but then it is divided in tiny points, and store in the pixels. The resulting image is not a trace of light anymore. Rather, pixels act like samples of reality: reality has to be coded, fragmented in the pixels, and then decoded, reconstructed for an electronic display. The digital image is not a mould, but a reconstruction. <br />
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Indeed, when reality is stored on a hard drive, it is transformed into information. And like any computer data, it then becomes infinitely malleable, volatile: even if there’s no alteration whatsoever of the live-action footage captured by a digital camera, when we see the resulting image on a screen, we’re aware of these possibilities of manipulation, of transformation. For the digital image, reality is a source, one amongst many others, and one who is not necessarily fated to be restored; for the photographic image though, reality is a model that can only be replicate, and there’s no other possible source. The reality we see on film may be distorted in various ways, but something needs to be printed on a film strip in the first place, or else there will be nothing to distort. And this “something” is necessarily reality, even if it isn’t recognizable anymore. From the perspective of the digital image, reality being only a sample, faithfully restoring the source is an arbitrary choice: a sample is made to be manipulated, distorted, put in a new context. Since, as spectators, we recognize these possibilities, we might as well manipulate this image ourselves. In front of a digital image, we don’t want to be mere spectators: we want to control it, to play with it.<br />
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This intrinsic interactivity of the digital image is best understood if we think of how an image appears on an electronic screen. I will let Rodowick himself explain this idea: “The film projector produces movement by animating still images. But as presented on electronic displays, the image is movement or subject to continual change because the screened image is being constantly reconstituted, scanned, or refreshed. Being in a constant state of reconstruction through a process of scanning, the electronic image is never wholly present in either space or time.” (<i>Virtual Life of Film</i>, p.137)<br />
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This state of continual change explains why the digital image stays in the present tense: what we perceive with an electronic display is not change as it happened in a past time, but the perpetual movement of the image as it is happening right now on the screen. With the digital image, movement is recreated by pixels changing rapidly in succession. The image itself is continuously moving, fluctuating, following the constant input of the electric signals sent to the pixels, so there’s never one complete, consistent image, equivalent to the frame of a film strip. We cannot divide the digital image in such unities, in a number of still images by second, because the screen is constantly scanning, moving, even when the image seems motionless. <br />
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On the contrary, with film, movement is created through the rapid succession of still images, so the images themselves are not moving. Movement comes from the succession of still images. True, film is also fundamentally discontinuous, because time is divided into these 24 frames per second, but when a film strip pass in front of a projector, the spatial and temporal unity of a single frame is preserved. Each frame remains continuous, undivided, a unity whole and consistent; so, what we see is really change as it happened between each of these frame. Film restores a past time by this succession of still images that reproduces a movement from the past; the movement we see in the present is the same as the movement that happened in the past. The digital image can still reconstitute a past time, but only by producing <i>another</i> movement, in the present, happening inside a metamorphic, always-changing and therefore never fully whole image. This, again, explains the interactivity: since the images are moving now, in front of us, since they’re imitating the past with their <i>own</i> movement, and since they’re not still photographs fixing a moment for all eternity but images with their own life imitating the past only because we ask of them to do so – because of all this, we can control them. <br />
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(For the sake of clarity: I’m referring here only to the way digital images are screened, and not to how they’re produced, because <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_frame" target="_blank">keyframing</a>, for the most part, works like traditional animation. But since we can only encounter a digital image on an electronic display, it doesn’t matter how it was created: the experience of the digital image is defined by how it is screened, by this present movement on the electronic display. That’s why a movie shot on film, but projected or screened in a digital format is not a representation of a world past anymore. <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> on DVD supposes a whole other experience than <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> in a theatre, even if the images remain the same; we’ll see this in a moment.)<br />
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To summarize: with film, because the image is consistent, continuous, physically present, the world represented seems more present, in a material sense (it’s “we want to say, the things themselves”). At the same time, we’re kept at distance from it, because what we see already happened and we have no control over the past. This is the paradox of film: the present experience of a past time, the presence of a world that is nonetheless absent because of this temporal distance. With the digital image, there’s no distance in time, but in a sense there’s no world either, so this paradox is gone: we’re in the presence of an image, instead of the “things themselves”. This image may be closer to us, because its discontinuous and fluctuating nature is keeping us in the present, but in return the world seems farther away. This image bears signs of the past, but since we can control it, we see it in relation to what it can become, instead of what it was. In place of a time past, this kind of image reconstructs the movement on the screen as we watch it, and so this movement forward does not appear ineluctable: we can stop it, we can rewind it, we can alt-tab it. The digital image is a perpetual present, leaning towards the future, upon which we have some means of control, usually in the form of a controller, a remote, a keyboard, a mouse, etc. <br />
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Or, in as few words as possible: film is the present experience of a world past, while the digital image is the experience of a present image.*<br />
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<i><b>Spring Breakers</b>: Feels as if the world is perfect. Like it's never gonna end... Just pretend it's a video game... </i><br /><i>I got Scarface. On repeat. SCARFACE ON REPEAT. Constant, y'all!...</i></div>
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<b>Pragmatic intermission</b></div>
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At this point, the more pragmatic readers are shouting (if they’re still here): yeah, but who cares? When I’m watching a movie, do I really perceive these differences in how the movement is produced? If I can’t tell the difference between the images of film and digital cinema, how is this supposed to affect me? <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> is <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i>, and it doesn’t matter whether I see it on DVD or on film. It’s still the same masterpiece, the same damn moving images. To which I would answer: I agree that perceptually the difference between film and a digital image is minimal. I’m a nostalgic dinosaur, so I will swear that the digital image is “colder”, more “flat” and more “clean” (in an unnatural way) than film, but then maybe it’s just me and my prejudices. In my mind, this ontology of the digital image explains why it appears “cold”, but I know that most people can’t tell the difference between film and digital cinema in a theatre (hell, most people don’t even know that theatres use digital projectors), so my personal experience surely can’t stand as proof in this matter. Perceptually, for most people, film and digital appear alike; I will concede as much. <br />
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But, and here the pragmatics should be more open to my argument, the context in which we experience cinema does change our perception of these moving images: in a theatre, the difference between film and digital cinema is more superficial because the experience of watching a movie in a dark room full of strangers with no possibilities of controlling the images is quite similar in both cases. However, the experience of watching a movie at home on DVD or with streaming is radically different, mainly because in this context we’re not only spectators: we can interact (albeit minimally) with the images, by stopping them or rewinding them for example. This interaction is made possible by the nature of the digital image, but we don’t feel this possibility quite as well when we don’t actually hold the remote in our hands. In such a context, the experience of a past time is almost gone: we see the images as something we can interact with, here in the present, so there’s no more distance between us and the images (although, again, the world represented is more distant). And we should not neglect the smaller screen: the world represented can’t feel as real when it can be contained in some piece of furniture.<br />
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This context of viewing cinema at home, especially on DVD, an interactive format that gave us far more control over a movie than video ever did, radically altered our perception of cinema, more than anything else. In fact, film was doomed forty years ago when the first person bought the first movie on videotape. In terms of aesthetics, the disappearance of film is not a revolution; this was the real revolution, the moment movies became readily available (and controllable) on video, which was, in retrospect, the first step towards the digital format. <br />
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But my phrasing here is misleading because it implies that our conception of cinema changed because of these new images, because of a new kind of cinematic experience brought by the digital images, when really it works the other way around: since we created these new contexts in which to view cinema, our conception had changed before, or else we would not have considered possible or worthwhile to transfer film into digital, to bring movies in our homes (television must surely be considered as a transitory phase here: movies were already in our homes, but we still had no control over them, except for changing the channel). Maybe it wasn’t clear at first, maybe we were only trying to fulfill some tacit needs (capitalist or consumerist perhaps) to possess cinema, to distribute it in our homes and to control its images. Why exactly I don’t know, but something changed; not only with cinema, but in our whole relationship with the world. Images do not change accidentally, but in order to reflect our own point of view on the world, as we find new ways to represent the world in a manner that is more suited for our needs. <br />
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In truth, then, the old ontology of the photographic image was not needed anymore, so we built new contexts for cinema, and they brought to life this new ontology. In other words, the idea was there before, in some kind of latent state perhaps, but ultimately it is the actual experience of the digital image that operated, in our minds, this transition from cinema as a world past to cinema as a present image. <br />
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Two novelties, mainly, were responsible for this shift. First, as I said, the emergence of new contexts: the theatre is now one possible context amongst many. We’re used to see cinema everywhere, on every possible screens, big or small, and mostly in an interactive form, so we’re more familiar now with the experience of a present image. The ubiquity of the digital images (we can even produce and manipulate them easily with our personal cameras and computers) pushes in the background our previous relationship with photographic images, altering our movie viewing habits. And that’s partly why our theatres are more deserted than ever: we don’t see the purpose of such a context because we think in terms of the digital image and the theater is not suited for it. Digital cinema in a theater doesn’t make much sense; it is meant for our television set, remote in hands, and available on demand. Seeing a movie or a photograph on film may still briefly remind us of the idea of a world past, but these occurrences are getting rarer. They will soon disappear completely: my five years old son, watching a movie in a theatre, wonders why he can’t turn the volume down or skip the previews. His point of reference isn’t film, but digital. <br />
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And second, since the possibility of CGI looms over every image these days (or Photoshop for photography), we can never know if what we see has been manipulated or not in post-production. Like I wrote last time, today, all floors may hide a T-1000, so we lost our belief that a movie corresponds to the actual circumstances of the shooting, to the real world that was in front of the camera. There’s always a doubt, an hesitation about an image’s authenticity; “it may be a trick”, “surely it wasn’t really like that, it was photoshopped”, etc. Because of this, we cannot believe that cinema is the “world itself”; it may be the world, it may be something else… the problem is that we can never know. And from the perspective of the digital image, as it should be self-evident, CGI is not an intruder: like I said, for this kind of image, reality is one possible source that can be mix with any other input, like CGI. Both CGI and a digital image of live action footage are already present images, so there’s no ontological rupture between them. The digital image welcomes CGI (well, CGI <i>is</i> a digital image); that’s why the T-1000 is so dangerous in the photographic world of <i><b>Terminator 2</b></i>, while Pandora can be a paradise in the digital images of <i><b>Avatar</b></i>. Just the same, since we now think in terms of the digital image, we accept the presence of CGI in live-action cinema. CGI is not threatening anymore.<br />
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So not only did the contexts of viewing moving images changed, but in addition we lost our belief in the faithfulness of cinema (and photographs) towards the world, especially in the case of digital cinema. In other words, we slowly got rid of everything film meant. Film is now an artefact, a reminder of a previous manner of representing the world. In that sense, yes, the pragmatist may be right to ask who cares if a movie is shot on film or with digital cameras: the point is not that movies changed (after all, they pretty much look the same), but that we changed. The fact that movies are now mostly digital even in theatres only consecrates our already existing conception of cinema as a present image. The end of film in our theatres (or anywhere, really) only marks the end of a period of transition: we’re officially in the digital age. It doesn’t matter anymore if we see a movie on film or on a digital format; we think in terms of a present image anyway.<br />
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To answer our pragmatists, then, defining the ontology of the digital image is the first step towards understanding what our new relationship with images is; how it still relates to cinema; and what it says about our own outlook on the world. Not a small feat, clearly, and not one I’m pretending to undertake here; this is a mere tentative sketch of some of these ideas.<br />
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<i><b>Pacific Rim</b>: Take that, analogical monsters!</i></div>
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<b>Part 2: It’s Alive! (Or not?)</b></div>
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At this point, it seems we have to reformulate our initial question, but I'm lazy so I will borrow one from <a href="http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=992" target="_blank">Steven "post-cinematic" Shapiro</a>: “What happens to cinema when it is no longer a cultural dominant, when its core technologies of production and reception have become obsolete, or have been subsumed within radically different forces and powers?” I would answer: just like the world it used to represent so well, cinema becomes an image, a sample that can be re-contextualized or repurposed inside new types of images. From cinema, we retain its visual language, but get rid of his previously essential ethical relationship with reality. This is what “post-cinematic” means for me: when cinema is no longer the world itself, but an image, a cultural referent.<br />
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Let’s try to explain this by coming back to our starting point: it becomes clear that if we can easily qualify <i>the Last of Us</i> as “cinematic”, it’s because we do not think anymore of cinema as a world past. If we did, such a statement would be nonsensical. Moreover, the difference between CGI and a digital image of live-action footage is minimal: the digital image can be infinitely manipulated in post-production, and all these possibilities erase the traditional difference between animation and cinema. The creative processes are practically the same now; for cinema, reality is one possible material amongst others. So, since CGI now live happily within cinema, and since we think of cinema as a present image, surely <i>the Last of Us</i> can be cinematic (or more likely post-cinematic, but let’s stick with the usual epithet). We could even argue that it represents the future of cinema, that Naughty Dog took the lessons of our good-old analogical Hollywood on how to use moving images in an expressive manner, and then adapted them for a product of the digital era. I mean: if the digital image is intrinsically interactive, a good digital movie should make use of this essential quality, no? Ok, maybe not, I’m exaggerating: it would be best to say that cinema doesn’t fulfill the potential of the digital images, while video games are perfectly suited for them. But if it so, if the world is now a digital one, whereas the twentieth century was analogical, video games may have to take the place of cinema as the definitive art form of an era. <br />
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Seventeen years ago, Lev Manovich announced “ […] cinema exits the stage. Enters the computer.” In this essay, <a href="http://www.egs.edu/faculty/lev-manovich/articles/cinema-and-digital-media/" target="_blank"><i>Cinema and Digital Media</i></a>, and again in his influential book, <i>the Language of New Media</i>, Manovich presented cinema as a transitory form of moving images that paved the way for the digital media. He wrote this in 1996, at a time we were still clinging (barely) to our old conception of cinema; now that the ontology of the digital image defines our relationship with moving images, cinema as we knew it has definitely served its purpose, and it’s time to move on... but we’re not exactly “moving on”, at least not to something else entirely. As this cinematic leaning in video games shows, cinema is still the respected elder everybody’s looking for. The reason is quite simple, and goes deeper than a desire to share cinema’s acceptance as a valuable form of popular culture. In Manovich’s words, digital media (not just games) have been shaped around cinema visual language: “element by element, cinema is being poured into the computers: first, one-point linear perspective; next, the mobile camera and rectangular window; next, cinematography and editing conventions; and of course, digital personas based on acting conventions borrowed from cinema, to be followed by make-up, set design, and the narrative structures themselves” (<i>Language of New Media</i>). No wonder being cinematic is often the highest praise for a video game! Cinema has shaped our understanding of moving images, and it’s apparently difficult to get free of this decisive influence.<br />
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Indeed, digital images can be anything they want, but for the most part they decided to imitate their photographic predecessor... Here’s another reason why the digital image is an <i>image</i> of an object, especially in the case of CGI: for film, reality was a model, but for the digital image, the real model is not reality, but reality as it was traditionally represented by film – at least when the digital image is trying to be realist, which, obviously, is not always the case. But I’m writing here about the intersection between cinema and video games, and essentially, when we think of CGI in movies and in cinematic video games, the model of the digital image is another image (insert Baudrillard here). Nowhere is this more obvious than in these cinematic video games: when we speak of video games realism, as we’ve heard a lot in the past months concerning the “innovations” that the new consoles by Microsoft and Sony will make possible in terms of visual fidelity, we do not mean that video games are able to simulate reality, but truly that they’re able to simulate the realism of the cinematographic image, and especially realism as defined by the Hollywoodian conventions. <br />
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For example, why use a rectangular frame, when the digital image is malleable at will, unrestricted by the shape of a film strip? Is there something less realist in an oval shape, like some paintings use? Comic books do this all the time, and to great effect: adapt the frame of a panel to the subject represented – a digital image could very well do the same, but for the most part never does. <br />
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A more telling example, when it comes to perspective and the spatial relations between the objects, CGI imitates those we’re used to see in photography, but they were only visual conventions built for the lenses of the camera. Like Manovich said, photography offers a one-point perspective, but in painting other methods were designed to create the impression of depth in a flat image, and they can be equally “realist” as one-point perspective. CGI could represent perspective in any way the artist sees fit, but I don’t think I ever saw something else than the usual monocular perspective in a context where realist human figures where represented in a CGI image (obviously, again, it’s a different affair in abstract works). <br />
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Another eloquent example: looking at this image above, from <i>the Last of Us</i>, we could ask why the background is blurry. In cinematography, depth of field is determined by many factors (the aperture, the focal length, the lighting, the distance between the camera and its subject, the movement in the frame, etc.), but with CGI, in theory everything could be in deep focus. It’s not even a good term, because there’s no such thing as a “focus” with CGI. There’s no lens, no reality, no physical limitation whatsoever, so nothing with which to focus on, and nothing to focus on. I guess it’s probably easier for a digital artist to make a blurry background instead of a sharp and detailed one, but I’m pretty sure that CGI is just imitating the type of image we’re familiar with. <br />
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The same goes for the decoupage: in theory, again, a CGI “shot” can last forever and can be “taken” from any desired angle (I used scare quotes because there’s no such thing as a “shot” with CGI, since there’s no camera to shoot anything). But cinematics in video games still follow the guidelines of Hollywoodian continuity editing: the angle of the virtual camera is always in a “human” position (meaning there’s no extreme low-angle shot for example, or no ostentatious visual distortions), the editing follows the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/180-degree_rule" target="_blank">180-degree</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30-degree_rule" target="_blank">45-degree rules</a>, there’s no apparent cut between the shots, most scenes use the shot reverse shot template, etc. There’s nothing inherently realist in this supposedly invisible style: the purpose of continuity editing is to attenuate the obligatory spatial and temporal discontinuity of the editing process. If we do not see the cuts, and can feel the movie as a continuous flow, we can forget more easily that it’s a movie and think of it instead as a “real” world. At least this is the assumption. But with CGI, if the goal is to preserve the spatial and temporal continuity of a scene, why not make one long take, <i>à la Half-Life</i>? There’s no need for editing at all with CGI. I’m not saying that the long take would be more realist than a shot reverse shot sequence, and obviously cutting to different angles can serve expressive purposes, but all of these techniques were designed around the physical possibilities and limitations of the movie camera. Now that there’s no camera in any real sense of the word, why pursue a style that was designed for this camera?<br />
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Mainly, I guess, because these video games strive for the realism of the cinematographic image. For sure, visual fidelity is equally important in order to produce a convincing impression of reality, but even if CGI could perfectly imitate the textures and movement of real life, would we still feel the image as “realist” if the virtual camera did all sorts of physically impossible acrobatics, or would position itself in weird, incomprehensible angles? Our perception of the image as a convincing imitation of the real world would probably clash with the behaviour of such an unnatural camera (why do we use the word camera anyway?) In recent years, movies began to use virtual cameras moving in a physically impracticable way (all those long and tortuous travelling in the industrial realms of the Orcs in <i><b>Lord of the Ring</b></i> for example), but these movements are still comprehensible from our human point of view: a real camera could theoretically reproduce the same movements if it was attached to some flying device. Such an attempt would just be too expensive and perilous to make. So these prodigious movements are still realist, in the sense that they’re consistent with the physics of our world, but CGI is not tied down by any kind of physics. A virtual camera respecting these laws of physics is an arbitrary constraint.<br />
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This is the paradox of the digital image (I mean here CGI and digital photography, and only in the context of the entertainment industry): a new medium that, instead of inventing its own language, tries to imitate an established one, film, <i>only better</i>. That last part is important: when Peter Jackson moves his virtual camera in <b><i>Lord of the Ring</i></b> like I described above, the idea is that the digital image can attenuate the difficulties of moving a real camera in a real space. These movements are not something a real camera could never do, but rather something that would be too <i>difficult</i> to accomplish with a real camera. In this way, it is implied that the virtual camera helps to fulfill all the possibilities of a real camera; as it is used now, CGI doesn’t open new aesthetics possibilities, but perfects the ones of the photographic image. It’s also the explicit goal of all the re-editions of old movies in DVD and Blu-ray: now you can see your favorite movies like never before! Or better: now we can see the classics like they were really intended! As if Welles, Ford or Hawks meant to film in digital all along, but just couldn’t because it wasn’t yet possible. <br />
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Frankly, and in order to answer one of our opening question, <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> is inconceivable as a digital product because its philosophical discourse, as <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2012/10/i-havent-really-answered-these.html" target="_blank">I briefly described here</a>, is intimately tied down to the idea of film as a world past and to an idea of time that can’t be express by the digital image. So, yes, I will dare to say that <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> on film is not the same as <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> on DVD. And the actual masterpiece is the former, obviously. If, as I like to say, writing a critic is putting into words <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/02/the-experience-of-art.html" target="_blank">our experience of an artwork</a>, watching Welles’ opus on DVD can only give us an idea of what the movie is about, a simili-experience of the movie as intended. You can’t pause <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> (hey, it’s even in its famous contract: no interruption, no alteration whatsoever!), but you can pause its DVD. It’s the same images, but a different experience, and therefore a different movie (I’m not saying that we can’t understand at all <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> when it’s on DVD, but that our way of interacting with it contradicts the vision of the world these images support).<br />
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<i><b>Citizen Kane</b>: Can we really understand what this mean, when seen as a present image?</i></div>
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The experience may change, and our conception of movies with it, but the digital image does not revolutionize the visual language of cinema or photography: for better and for worst, it is the same, only better. The visual language of <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> on DVD remains the same, but the image is certainly cleaner (better!) than an old, badly deteriorated print. Likewise, Hollywood aesthetics didn’t change that much from Griffith to Nolan. The movies may be bigger, faster, louder (and way more expensive), but it’s still our good-old classic, invisible style. Only better! <br />
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This pretension of being “better” is certainly the most irritating aspect of the digital image: it’s not better, nor worse, it’s only different. Understanding how it is different would be wise, or so I think.<br />
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In some ways, I agree with Manovich when he says that cinema was a transitory form of moving images, leading to the modern digital media. With hindsight, we can see how film prepared the way for the digital image: for example, I described the latter as a sample of reality, but the former was also some kind of sample itself. Film takes a fraction of reality and puts it in a new context, adjacent to other images, other fractions of reality that were not really close to each other in the real world. But the comparison doesn’t stick as well with film because it is far less malleable than what we usually mean by a “sample”. Surely, film prepared us for thinking in terms of sampling, even if it doesn’t really function as a sample itself (more like a proto-sample) – so yes, the transition between film and digital cinema is just that, a transition, and not a great divide. After all, the difference between an image of an <i>object</i> and an <i>image</i> of an object is only a matter of emphasis, so it appears quite easy to go from one to the other. And since the digital image, in the entertainment industry at least, insists for following its predecessor, it’s difficult to really see a difference, apart from this seemingly minor emphasis. That’s why I felt I have to include a “pragmatic intermission” in the middle of this article: in terms of visual language, the images are so similar than a careful comparison between film and the digital image seems quasi-superfluous. On the other hand, as I hope this intermission made more convincing, the experience of the digital image as a present image is absolutely novel, and is quite different, if not downright contrary to our experience of film as a past time. And on this matter, there is a divide, a revolution, of which we have yet to fully understand the far-reaching consequences.<br />
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<b>Something like a conclusion</b></div>
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We can feel these resemblances/differences in the movies themselves, especially in blockbusters. Modern blockbusters look like their ancestors (similar continuity editing, same focus on narration, and essentially the same ideology), but they’re quite different in more meaningful ways. I will just write down some preliminary notes for now, because as a good ex-student I know we have to finish an essay by pushing our subject in a new possible direction (no, really, it’s because my ramblings are already quite long). But consider this: blockbusters these days are in love with the idea of “reboots” and “Origin stories”, taking a well-known character, erasing his past, his previous incarnations, and putting him in a new context. Hmmm, it reminds me of something... Or think of super-heroes: humans, only better! <br />
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These are broad examples, but Hollywood movies tend to present space and time in a manner that is quite new, consistent with the ontology of the digital image. I’ve been reading (and enjoying) some of Film Crit Hulk’s WRITINGS lately (he’s the one who convince me it’s ok to publish a 8000 words essay on a blog), and some of his observations can be helpful here. For <a href="http://badassdigest.com/2013/06/12/film-crit-hulk-smash-the-age-of-the-convoluted-blockbuster/" target="_blank">a spoilerish example</a>:<br />
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"STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS CAN CRAFT SYNTHETIC MOMENTS OF HIGH URGENCY, BUT CAN NEVER SUSTAIN IT TERMS OF LARGER MEANING TO THE CHARACTERS. DID YOU NOTICE HOW LITTLE ACTUALLY HAPPENED OF LASTING CONSEQUENCE? HOW LITTLE OF A CHARACTERS EMOTION EVER CARRIES INTO THE NEXT SCENE? THINGS HAPPEN AND THEN THEY DON'T MATTER MOMENTS LATER. OUR DR. MARCUS CAN WATCH HER FATHER GET KILLED IN GRUESOME FASHION AND SCREAM HER LUNGS OUT, BUT IT DOESN'T EVEN HAVE A SINGLE BIT OF IMPACT ONCE IT'S OVER, FOR HER OR ANYONE ELSE. EVEN DEATH IS IMPERMANENT. EVERYTHING IS EXECUTED WITH EXCLAMATION POINTS BUT BECAUSE IS MOMENTARY AND THE END RESULT IS A SURPRISINGLY WEIGHTLESS AND MEANINGLESS FILM; ALL SOUND AND FURY SYMBOLIZING NOTHING" <br />
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The digital image is characterized by this immediacy, a sort of eternal present where the past exist only as a functional device, because it is needed or else there will be no plot. Space and time exist only on the surface of the image, and we’re often under the impression that the filmmakers don’t know what to do with them, so we have these scenes like Hulk describes. Hulk writes about dramatic structure, mostly, but it’s all related: characters don’t develop over time because there’s no such thing as a constitutive “past”; only the present moment of the digital image matters. By the way, I think this is exactly what happens in those cinematic video games, which suffer from what we like to call (unfortunately) ludonarrative dissonance: they’re made of images without a past, existing only in the present. The gameplay has no consequence on the narrative, so the game seems made of isolated, fragmented and unrelated moments. Taken apart, each moment is thrilling, but it doesn’t make much sense when you try to piece them all together. Each moment seems to forget what happened before, hence the “dissonance”.<br />
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Likewise, blockbusters with a coherent, meaningful sense of space are very rare, when it used to be a given. Action movies are the best example: not so long ago (1995!), in a movie like <i><b>Die Hard with a Vengeance</b></i>, much of the suspense was built around the simple fact that going from one place to another takes some time. The city was a real, physical space that McClane couldn’t just traverse in an instant. In the last (awful) movie of the series, he goes from one location to the next, but we never feel as if there's some real distance between them. He’s there one moment, there another, and it doesn’t matter how he got there. Space has no materiality anymore. More tellingly, in the first movie, walking on broken glass was a difficult, painful ordeal, but now McClane can jump off high buildings without consequences. Again, this would make no sense if cinema was the “world itself”, but since it’s only an image now, a visual language, the real world has no presence on screen. McClane cannot be hurt by an immaterial world. <br />
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Cinema, even in its most traditional and apparently inflexible form, has changed more than what we usually acknowledge. And, as you could guess, even if a filmmaker like Christopher Nolan still shoot on film, his movies are undoubtedly products of the digital era (no one is more indifferent to the world than Nolan); shooting on film or not is irrelevant in most cases. <br />
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At this point, I think we can see more clearly why I said that cinema is nothing more than an image for the digital images. Or at least for the digital images as they are used now: the problem is not the digital image itself, but the fact that we haven’t found yet how to use it in a meaningful way. Cinema was the definitive art form of the twentieth century because of the ontology of film, which was a reflection of its time. As Cavell wrote, this position of the spectator standing apart from the world reproduced our own being-in-the-world in the twentieth century, our own sceptical relationship with the real world (sorry for the heideggerian turn of phrase, but I don’t know how else to say this). As an art form, cinema entails a particular ethical commitment towards reality because of the essential link between film and reality. By putting us at distance from the world, the photographic images can help us see reality anew, and in this way restore our own commitment towards the world. A good movie will not merely “show” reality in a sort of neutral stance, but instead will guide us through reality, or illuminate it, in order to find a way to fill that distance between us and the world. A good movie works from the distance created by film and asks the spectator to commit himself with the world represented. <br />
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That’s why, last time, I asked why I feel more engaged, body and mind, with cinema than with a video game: cinema invites me to find a place in the world, and this takes an effort, a will. On the contrary, video games throw me in a world, and that’s it: I’m there, from the moment I start the game. Video games give us a world we can play with, which usually means to conquer it, or to shape it to our image. The effort video games ask of us is not to find our place in a distant world, but to take the present image of a world and make it our own. As <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/03/the-illusion-of-choice_8.html" target="_blank">I said in an earlier post</a>, video games are quite solipsistic: by design, the world is made for the player, and everything in it is at our disposition. Obviously, this is hugely different from the experience of photographic cinema. But if the world is now digital, our ethical commitment has to be redefined, in order to reflect our new relationship with the world, which is not one of spectators anymore. The question, then: if the experience of a world past is outdated, does it mean that solipsism is the way to go? Or is it that video games haven’t found a good use yet of their images? (I’m hoping for the second option, but sometimes I fear I’m wrong...)<br />
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<i><b>Into Darkness</b>: A ship falling upside down; a movie inversing one of the most famous scenes of the series; in order to regain control of the ship, Spock has to learn how to see the world from Kirk's point of view and vice versa; in other words, one must learn from the past... but do we? </i></div>
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<i><b>Star Trek Into Darkness</b></i> is a product of the digital image (and a fascinating movie by the way, because, like <i><b>Oblivion</b></i> earlier this year, it seems to theorize and try to justify its own shallowness; I’ll probably come back to it at some point), but we would look in vain there for any kind of real commitment towards the world. We could say the same for most Hollywood movies of the past years, with a few exceptions: David Fincher, Ang Lee and Michael Mann are probably the most relevant digital authors right now (and probably Lynch if he would just, please, please make another movie!) These authors show that cinema can still be relevant, even in its digital form. Or another example, <i><b>Spring Breakers</b></i>, a movie about the digital image if I ever saw one: the characters long for an everlasting moment (“I wish it never ends”), and the movie throws away all manners of causality, opting instead for a (very) repetitive structure, with fragmented, interpolated scenes with no sense of progression, and a total indifference towards death, completely meaningless in such a context. As the characters say themselves, they live in a video game… (indeed, the ending is strangely reminiscent of <i>Hotline Miami.</i>)<br />
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The digital image entails a whole new way of viewing and interacting with the world, just like the photographic image did in its time. Just to be clear, again: this new relation with the world is not a consequence of the digital image. Rather, the digital image encapsulates, or represents, our modern relationship with the world. So... why imitate film if its particular ontology is not only impossible to emulate with digital images, but also less suited for our current needs? Or, from the point of view of video games: what’s the point of imitating a photographic art form if you can make better use of the digital image, by pushing it in a direction cinema can’t? And this solipsism, couldn’t we resolve it by not imitating another image, and thus avoid reducing the world to a malleable image? <br />
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In my mind, video games are at the best place right now to explore what it means to be a human being in the twenty-first century, just like cinema was the most representative art form of the twentieth century, because video games (and not just the cinematic kind) are the most expressive use we have found yet for the digital images. Unlike cinema, video games are impossible without the digital image: they should use the interactivity and this idea of the present image to lead us back towards the world (I don’t know what would be the purpose of art if it’s not primarily ethical). Maybe it’s possible by imitating cinema, but if it is so, we sure haven’t found the way yet. I must say I’m not even sure video games, cinematic or not, are up to the task right now like cinema surely was very early in his lifetime, but for the most part, I remain hopeful. <br />
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Why my doubts?<br />
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Well, another time (I will write a proper article on the <i>the Last of Us</i>, which is quite good, I think, but we’re really, really far from a Citizen Kane-esque moment – then again, <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> is one of the most important artistic achievement of the twentieth century, so maybe we should try looking for a less intimidating example, ok?)<br />
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At the end of this series, I can state again the ideas I mean to explore with this blog, which I hinted at in my introduction: what we lost with the disappearance of film; what we gain with the digital image; what it means to be in presence of an interactive image; the corresponding ethics and aesthetics; and especially how video games and cinema can explore these ideas.<br />
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THE END </div>
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...</div>
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*It would be interesting to bring Gilles Deleuze into the discussion here, with his famous assertion (well, famous among academics) that the cinematographic image is always at the present tense. But I fear I will never be able to properly write about Deleuze in English, so I will just throw this question out here.Sylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2882815174745926563.post-22016111967568365922013-07-15T21:51:00.001-04:002013-09-11T21:21:35.996-04:00Imitation of Life (3): A World PastIn my <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/06/imitation-of-life-2-fall-of-man.html" target="_blank">last apocalyptic article</a>, I presented computer-generated imagery as a threat to the photographic image, but what can be so dangerous with CGI?<br />
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As previously discussed, <b><i>Terminator 2: Judgment Day</i></b>, James Cameron stages a duel between these two forms of images, CGI vs moving photography. The T-1000 (Robert Patrick), the new Terminator made of liquid metal, is an almost perfect representation of CGI: the T-1000 can morph with its environment or imitate a human body, and he’s a fluid entity, able to metamorphose into almost any shape he wants. Just like CGI, the T-1000 exhibits the appearances of the real object he transforms into, but it’s no more than that, an appearance, because he’s unbound by most of the physical laws that would normally defined this object; the T-1000 looks like reality, but does not act at all like reality as we know it (he can pass through metal bars or reconstitute itself once melted). This is as far as the comparison can go though, because the robot is still a concrete being, made of metal, unlike CGI and its nature as digital information living in some hard drive. Even so, Cameron found in the T-1000 an apt representation of the metamorphic abilities of CGI and its desire to imitate the realism of the photographic image. In one of the most frightening scene of the movie, the T-1000 becomes the floor behind an unsuspecting guard in the asylum: for a moment, we perceive him as if he was a real floor, just like a floor in a movie can be made with CGI. The T-1000 acted as a sort of prophecy about the future of the CGI image, a prediction now fully realized: we cannot know anymore if the environments the characters move in are a real, physical space, a digitally created one, or a mix of both. Nowadays, all floors may hide a T-1000. <br />
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On the opposite front, there’s the original Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a big, slow, solid machine that moves through space and time following the same physical laws as we do... except for the time travel part, but I mean that he has to move from one place to another by using his legs moving at a natural speed, or that he cannot walk through a wall except by breaking it. In comparison with the T-1000, he’s an artefact from the past, a glorious reminder of an obsolete technology. Actually, he may not be so obsolete, since the Terminator, the old-school special effects conceived around the particularity of the photographic image, destroys the T-1000, the evil CGI. In this way, the movie explicitly argues for the pre-eminence of the photographic over CGI – but at the same time, <i><b>Terminator 2</b></i> was an obvious showcase for the possibilities of CGI, a technological landmark in this domain. I have no proof other than my own experience for this, but I’m pretty sure that in the mind of the audience (and the movie industry), the T-1000 made a greater impression than the Terminator. In the fiction, the T-1000 came from the future in order to erase the past, and indeed, for the audience, he was a vision of the future, of what movies could become; maybe we didn’t immediately understood, though, that this new technology does create an image without a past, which complicates, when incorporated into film, our perception of the photographic image as a “world past”.<br />
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A world <i>past</i>… : “The reality in a photograph is present to me while I am not present to it; a world I know, and see, but to which I am nevertheless not present (through no fault of my subjectivity), is a world past.” This quote from Stanley Cavell, in his book <i>The World Viewed</i>, an ontology of cinema, is our best starting point: cinema as a perception of time. Essentially, cinema as a “world past” means that viewing moving photographic images (and Cavell had no other image in mind since he wrote his book in 1971) is the <i>present</i> experience of a <i>past</i> time. In our modern over-familiarity with images (and screens) of all kinds, we tend to forget the profound strangeness of experiencing something that is at once <i>there</i> and <i>not there</i>. Before the advent of photography, in order to perceive a subject, we had to be in presence of this subject. The telescope already allowed the perception of an object that was spatially distant from the perceiver, but photographs were even more alien because the objects we see in a photograph are also distant from us temporally. <br />
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In a single shot of a movie, it is true that we are in presence of a geographically distant space, but this doesn’t seem so bizarre: in theory, I can always bridge such a spatial gap by going on the location where the movie was shot. As far as this place may be, I know it still exists and that it’s possible to go there, even if the means to do so are not accessible for me. But if I go there, what I will find now is not the same as what it was then, when the movie was shot, and this temporal gap is insurmountable. Film puts us in presence of a past time: an overlapping, in our perception, of the present time with a lived time. With film, we can experience (again and again) a slice of time, as it already happened; it allows an infinite repetition of a unique occurrence, of something “that could never be repeated existentially” (Roland Barthes, in <i>Camera Lucida</i>). <br />
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With space, there’s a clearer delimitation between the space the spectator occupy (the theatre) and the space represented in the movie, confined by the frame, and by the screen in front of the audience. This is not so true with time: both the present time of the viewing and the past time of the events represented are taking place simultaneously, and they both have the same duration (again, in the case of a single, unedited shot; it gets more complicated with editing). We can differentiate these two times conceptually, but in truth we experience them in unison. What we experience, then, in a movie, first and foremost, is the passage of time – a “sculpture in time” wrote Tarkovsky (or, since it’s a loose translation of his book title, a “depicted time”). <br />
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A <i>world</i> past… then what about the world? As Cavell wrote, “A photograph does not present us with “likenesses” of things; it presents us, we want to say, with the things themselves. But wanting to say that may well make us ontologically unrest.” What does he mean by those last words? This quote is more complex than it looks, so let’s unravel it from the beginning: when Cavell speaks of “the things themselves”, he doesn’t mean that photographs present a perfect reproduction of their real subjects. As <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/05/the-shape-of-things-to-come.html" target="_blank">I briefly explained before</a>, because of the mechanical way cameras print reality into film, <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/06/imitation-of-life-1.html" target="_blank">we tend to <i>believe</i></a> that photographic images offer an objective reproduction of reality: what we see now is the same as what happened then, or so we assume. Although this indifferent mechanism of the movie camera plays a role here, it is not exactly what Cavell is after: <i>we want to say</i> that photographs are the “things themselves”, but it doesn’t mean that they are entirely one and the same (which would be absurd), or even that we believe that they are; rather, it means that we are absent from this world that we see and recognize, and that we long to be part of it. Film re-presents the world, but we are forever screened from this world – that looks and behaves, for the most part, just like the world we live in – because it is temporally distant from us.<br />
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For example, fiction, in movies, is easily understood by almost everyone because we read the movements of an actor on screen almost exactly like we apprehend a fellow human being in real life: in most situations, I interpret “tears running down the face of someone” as crying, be it in a movie or in real life. This is the main reason why story-centric cinema (the Hollywood kind in particular) is such an accessible art form: no need to learn a grammar, a pictorial or a theatrical convention, how to use a controller, or anything, really. All you need is a basic understanding of human behaviour (at least, this is all you need to understand the story, but reading deeper into a movie requires more insight). It’s this similitude with the world as we know it and the world depicted on screen that makes us “ontologically unrest”: in a movie, we recognize the world, since the photographic image preserves the appearances of an object, which looks on film as he would appear to us in real life, but this world viewed is forever out of reach. This is where the mechanical indifference of the camera plays a role: we can speak of the world, and not of “another world” or even of “the world as represented” because of our belief that when reality is printed into film and then projected on the screen, nothing intervened to modify, alter or in any way transform the reality depicted (obviously, this belief has been strongly challenged in the last twenty years). The main difference between the world on screen and the “real” world would be that we cannot interact with the former, that we can only experience that world as spectator from a distant point in time. In this way, cinema questions us about our own situation in space and time (hence Cavell presentation of film as a “moving image of skepticism”, but this is another discussion). And because of this unbridgeable distance, with film we’re condemned to be spectators: we cannot influence something that has already happened. <br />
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This idea of a “world past” is more difficult to understand nowadays, with our DVDs, multiple screens and the ubiquity of moving images; we tend to forget that there was a time, not so long ago, when the only way to experience cinema was to go in a dark theatre, try to arrive in time because the movie would not wait for us, nor stop when we needed to go to the bathroom, and it was probably the only chance we would have to see that damn movie. The passage from this unique experience to the always-there possibility offered by the VHS in the 70’s is more profound than what we usually acknowledged. Like Jacques Aumont said in his essay <i>Que reste-t-il du cinéma?</i> (<i>What remains of cinema?</i>, 2012), more than the digital advent, I think the most radical novelty of the past forty years is this still quite new possibility that we gain with VHS to “Pause” a moving image. We have to remember that all classic film theories have been thought of with this perspective of cinema being only possible in the dark room of the theatre, in a pre-determined space and time, and with a crowd of unknown persons. There was even a time, rarely remembered, when newspapers didn’t publish movie schedules: theatres had a run of two movies alternating with news clips and cartoons and this program ran continuously, from morning to evening. Thus the expression going <i>at</i> the movies, instead of seeing <i>a</i> movie: people were going in and out of the theatre at all times, sometimes entering randomly, and so may saw the end of the film before its beginning two hours later, with another movie in-between. Or they could stay all day and watch the same movies again and again. When you entered a theatre in the 50’s (this tradition continued until the early 60’s), there was a good chance that a movie was already running, a scene in progress, characters in motion; images had a life of their own. <br />
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On the big screen (less so today, but still), the images of cinema seems autonomous because they do not need me to exist, unlike my DVD who will not play without my intervention. When Stanley Cavell writes of cinema as “the world viewed”, or as a “world past”, it’s extremely important that this “world” is not under the control of the spectator. And DVD, incidentally, is not film: it’s a digital medium. For a number of reasons, that I will present more fully next time, a digital image has no “presence”, in the sense that we usually intent when we speak about film, and even though a digital image may refer to a world past (in the case of live action footage captured by a digital camera), the link between this world past and its image is greatly severed (in short, because the reality captured is coded on an hard drive and then decoded for our eyes, so the link between reality and its image is less direct, altered by two operations of conversion). The digital image, from its very nature as information that can be manipulated at will, is more like a perpetual present, leaning towards the future – it’s especially true for CGI, which doesn’t refer in any way to a world past: CGI can represent the world, or imitate its texture, but whatever we see on our screens is not a past world. I would say it’s neither the past, neither the world; CGI refers only to the present time of the viewing. Unlike film, which puts us at a distance from the world it represents, there is no such temporal gap with the digital image, and in particular with CGI: we want to <i>play</i> with these images, to control them. Film entails passive spectatorship; CGI interaction. Take that, cinematic video games! Or movies filled with CGI for that matter... (Ok, it’s quite a rash judgment, the nuances will come in my next article. One good question to keep in mind for now: if film keeps me at distance from the world, why do I feel more engaged, body and mind, with cinema, than I am with the present tense, or the directness, of video games images?)<br />
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Coming back to <b><i>Terminator 2,</i></b> we could make a comparison with the project of the T-1000: erase the past to preserve the eternal present of the machines he represents, just as CGI threatens the essential relationship between cinema and past time. It’s important to understand that it’s only a “threat” from the perspective of photography: a Pixar movie or a video game is not a threat to anything because their aesthetics are consistent, unified. Both CGI and the photographic images of cinema are forms of moving images, but their ontology is completely different, if not downright antagonist; <b><i>Terminator 2 </i></b>is not a movie about CGI, but about the difficult conciliation of CGI with photography. The distinction is important. CGI is not evil: it is what it is, and like any medium it can be used to wonderful effect. And when I write that CGI threatens photographic images, I do not mean that cinema is dead, only that cinema <i>as we knew it</i> is pretty much a world past by now. <br />
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So, in order to get a better understanding of this CGI, and why we want to interact with its images, let’s leave cinema behind and turn our attention towards the future of moving images: video games. Sylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2882815174745926563.post-55197102213023276232013-06-28T10:11:00.000-04:002013-09-11T21:21:36.024-04:00Imitation of Life (2): The Fall of ManLet's begin with the obvious: Hollywood doesn’t like changes. So, all novelties Hollywood movies may bring have to be firmly counterbalanced by the most rigorously classical visual style possible. This is what I meant <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/06/imitation-of-life-1.html" target="_blank">last time </a>when I wrote about how Hollywood movies first represented computer-generated imagery in an ambiguous way: CGI was a new technology Hollywood admired as much as it feared, so we find this contradiction in most movies figuring CGI, from the 80's up to the end of the 90’s (to take a more recent example than the one I will discuss at length below: in <b><i>the Matrix</i></b>, the digital world is presented as a falsehood that we must tear apart to go back to the real analogical world, but at the end, Sion, the human city in the real world, is saved by Neo, a digital super-God). <br />
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Although Hollywood never hesitated to publicize the many virtues of CGI, filmmakers like producers had several reasons to be anxious about it: CGI was a threat for the photographic image and, more importantly, for the classical language of Hollywood movies (which was conceived around the limitations and possibilities of the photographic image anyway). So, while the movies presented a new kind of image, CGI, they continued to implicitly champion the image of old, photography – a sure way to slowly introduce the radical visual innovations made possible by CGI while anchoring them in the tradition of Hollywood cinema. Ok, we have this new CGI thing, said Hollywood, but don’t worry, our movies will remain the same. Nowadays, movies rarely think about CGI because CGI is a given, an official tool in cinema’s language: the threat has been neutralized, so to speak, in the sense that the limitless possibilities of CGI have been harnessed and restrained by the classical language of Hollywood cinema. In theory, CGI can do anything, but right now, for better and for worst, it continues the narrative tradition previously established by the photographic image. <br />
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But I’m getting ahead of myself: going back to the 80’s, the best example in Hollywood of this theme of ambivalent technology is James Cameron’s cinema, which constantly oscillates between these two poles of fear and worship of technology. His movies typically use state-of-the-art special effects to present the fall of man (judgment day), humanity overcome by technology, an idea best exemplified by the genocidal machines of both <b><i>Terminator</i></b>s and the sinking boat of <i><b>Titanic</b></i> (he also likes to play with representations of man-machine, like the gigantic robot controlled by Ripley at the end of <b><i>Aliens</i></b>, or the cyborgs of <b><i>Terminator</i></b>)*. The strength of his cinema lies precisely in this apparent paradox: the Terminators are terrifying because the special effects that make them feel alive are this very technological prowess we’re meant to fear. In other words, Cameron develops and pushes technology in new directions in order to make technophobic movies. <br />
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It may be more true for <b><i>Terminator 2: Judgment Day</i></b> than for the original movie: in the sequel, the special effects are far more advanced for their time (in 1991, they sure felt otherworldly), and are more convincing (even today) than in the first movie. In that regard, it is important that the T-1000 is brought to live with CGI (while there’s none in the first <b><i>Terminator</i></b>), and not just for technical reasons. I’ll explain this point in length next time, but for now, suffice to say that this story of a superior and autonomous AI that will annihilate humanity seems even more plausible when it is told with the help of a new computer technology capable of merging with an indexical image of the world. After all, if computers can now invade the cinematographic image, “the world viewed” in Stanley Cavell’s words, and become one with that image, why not also the world we live in? The movie appears like a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: we’re fascinated by the T-1000, by the creation of the special effect team, but there’s also something terrifying because we’re lead to wonder if this is not the first technological step towards the dystopian future predicted by the movie.<br />
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Cameron seems aware of this paradox, because he represents it in the time-travel premise of his movies: when the first Terminator was destroyed in 1984, the defense firm Cyberdyne recovered the remains of the CPU and the robot’s right arm, and this discovery lead them to the design of Skynet, the AI that will destroy humanity in 1997. In other words, the movies are stuck in a time loop (at least the first two, I don’t know for the other sequels): the Terminator was sent in the past to kill John Connor’s mother, but the Terminators could not have been designed if one of them wasn’t sent through time in the first place (or in the last place? I dunno...) The characters are imprisoned in a fatalist time-loop, just like the movies predict a future they may be partly responsible for. <br />
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In the end, though, it is suggested that the characters are able to free themselves from this determinism**: the future might not be so bleak. Likewise, <b><i>Judgment Day </i></b>drops the pure technophobia of the first movie, opting instead for a more complex love/fear relationship with technology. It’s quite plain in one of the best ideas of the film: the past villain (Arnold Schwarzenegger) becomes the hero, or what was once feared is now the much-needed companion. The robots are both the threat (the T-1000) and an object of love (the original Terminator). Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) even says at some point that the Terminator is the best father she ever found for his son (Edward Furlong), who has a kind-of friendship with Schwarzenegger’s Terminator. In the first movie, the distrust of technology was more extreme: machines would kill us in the future, and there was no counterpoint to what the Terminator represented (the movie even made fun of a simple answering machine, as if we should not trust such a mundane device). The fascination towards technology came only from the audience, wondering how the special effects were made. In <b><i>Judgment Day</i></b>, though, this fascination is now expressed by the characters, especially by John Connor and Miles Dyson, the future inventor of Skynet: technology can be helpful, but we should still worry. <br />
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<i><b>Judgment Day</b></i> may be Cameron most complex film about technology (I don’t remember enough of <i><b>Titanic</b></i> to really tell), probably because he couldn’t completely reconcile the technophobia of <i><b>Terminator</b></i> with his own technophilia (which he expressed a lot of times in interviews). In <b><i>Judgment Day</i></b>, Cameron still doesn’t trust completely technology, so he stipulates that in order to be reliable, technology has to be educated, or has to learn to be human: our love affair with technology should not blind us about our human nature. The more potent example is John Connor teaching the Terminator some manners (like not killing any human beings), but this idea is also shown throughout the movie in more banal moments. For example, there’s a short scene with Miles Dyson and his family where he has to choose between his work and his family. It’s cliché, for sure, but in this context, the underlying idea is rather interesting: the guy who will bring humanity to an end sacrificed his social life for the sake of computers, so the real reason behind Judgment Day is not an act of self-preservation from an omniscient AI that don’t want to be unplug, but our own removal from the world; computers took the place we left there for them. Indeed, Dyson is shown as an idealist, with seemingly admirable ambitions, but without a clue about what humanity might be: “Imagine a world where we can eliminate the possibility of human error” says he (I’m paraphrasing). He may be right when he defends his work later on (“You’re judging me about something I haven’t done yet” and “How could I’ve known what would happen with my research?”), but he doesn’t seem to understand that eliminating human error may be a way to erase humanity altogether. <br />
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We may or may not agree that humanity is defined by the possibility of making “errors” (it’s certainly a shallow definition, though not without some truth), but the movie surely draws this parallel since the machines are defined on multiple occasions as incapable of error: they do what they’re programmed to do and nothing else. Sarah Connor, on the contrary, cannot bring herself to do what she thinks she must do: kill Dyson. Her incapacity to kill him (and maybe save humanity in the process) is contrasted with the Terminator’s inability to kill humans because he was told not to (or the T-1000 ability to kill because he was told to); while the Terminator doesn’t kill because he cannot make any mistake or disobey, Sarah refusal to kill is a reasoned decision. Or maybe an emotional one, but either way, in Miles Dyson’s language, this would be a human error, the impossibility to accomplish a given task. The ethical problem raised by this situation (can we kill a human being that may be involuntarily responsible in the future for a mass genocide?) is of no concern here (and frankly the movie doesn’t ponder on it either): I’m only speaking of efficiency, the ability to terminate one task. I would say that Sarah did the right thing, but it doesn’t really matter, because the point is that she didn’t do what a robot would have done without hesitation. Indeed, this subplot is a clever re-working of the first movie, because Sarah’s aim has to be considered in parallel with the one of the original Terminator: she wants to kill the one responsible for the rise of the sentient machines before he’s actually guilty of anything, just like the first Terminator tried to kill Sarah before she gave birth to her son, the future leader of the human resistance. Sarah’s refusal to kill is a way to assess her humanity, by contrast with the Terminator of the first movie. <br />
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As we can see, in many ways, Sarah and John represent the survival of the human race, but Cameron portrays them as outcast, misunderstood, so essentially he’s saying that we do not know anymore what it means to be human, to the point that we confine in an asylum our last hope for salvation. In such a context, no wonder that machines can easily infiltrate our world, hiding behind human forms. The Terminators are trying to destroy humanity, but both movies remind us that this process of dehumanization is already well on his way. The last words of <i><b>Judgment Day</b></i> are quite clear: “The unknown future rolls toward us. I face it for the first time with a sense of hope, because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life ... maybe we can too.” The machines may have already won, but we can still change. Strangely though, Cameron didn’t follow his own advice. <i><b>Judgment Day</b></i> was an important turning point for him: since then, he has slowly smoothed his attacks on technology, until <i><b>Avatar</b></i>, which was in some ways a complete reversal of <i><b>Terminator</b></i>. With his last movie, Cameron is saying, with no trace of irony, that we have to leave behind our flawed world and become an avatar in a CGI paradise. The apparent environmentalism of the movie is negated by the highly artificial nature represented (more on this next time). In this way, his cinema follows our own gradual acceptance of technology: what the Terminator represented is pretty much the world we live on now, but, for the most part, we don’t care.<br />
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This discussion on the technophobia of <i><b>Terminator</b></i> may seem tangential to my proposed subject about CGI, but it’s all related because the <i><b>Terminator</b></i> movies are as much about cinema as they are about our relation with technology. These movies may be renowned for their special effects, especially the second one, but we tend to forget the most meaningful one: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body. The Terminator was the perfect role for him: in the first movie especially, Cameron uses the eerie artificiality of his actor’s body to suggest the presence of the machine lurking behind this human form (as if this body was naturally in the uncanny valley). More interestingly, perhaps, this casting made clear that the human body and thus the actors, in the newly-arrived blockbusters, are going to be artificial construct from now on. In my last article, I established an implicit continuity between the musicals and the 80’s action films, but there’s a radical difference between Gene Kelly and Arnold Schwarzenegger (apart from their acting abilities): in a musical, Kelly’s body is really performing, in the sense that we’re astonished by his dancing prowess, by what this body can accomplish. Schwarzenegger’s bodybuilder shape, though, is largely irrelevant in his movies. It establishes the character as strong, and that’s about it. The actor is showing off his body, the artificiality of its bulkiness, but there’s no performance in the usual meaning of the word. In a sense, we’re astonished by the <i>result</i> of the performance of bodybuilding, but not by the performance itself, which happened before, off-screen. Kelly’s performance is defined by the movement of his body, while Schwarzenegger’s “performance” is characterized by its immobility. That’s why he never gets hurt: not because he’s a large, solid, brawny mass of muscles, but because he’s not a real body moving in time. (In a lot of ways, <i><b>Die Hard</b></i> and the vulnerable body of Bruce Willis were a reaction to these artificial bodies of Schwarzenegger and Stallone, as if John McTiernan wanted to beat up the body of the Hollywood actors in a last attempt to revive them. It’s not a coincidence if he made <i><b>Last Action Hero</b></i> with Schwarzenegger a couple of years later, signaling the end of an era.) <br />
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The Terminator is not really different than Conan or John Matrix: all these characters are unstoppable killing machines that cannot be hurt. <i><b>Terminator</b></i> only makes clear what stays implicit in <i><b>Conan</b></i> and <i><b>Commando</b></i>, i.e. the artificiality of the actor’s body, and the danger it represents for traditional, performing actors. Indeed, <i><b>Terminator</b></i> can be seen as an exemplary turning point for the actors in Hollywood: we do no longer need you, says the movie (although they still win at the end). Classical cinema was centered on the star, the actor’s presence on screen, but this started to change in the 80’s, and the bodies of actors like Schwarzenegger and Stallone were the first sign of this revolution. We still admired their presence on screen, but not as human characters moving in time: rather, as artificial bodies defined by their stillness. In the blockbusters of the last decade, the revolution was completed, and now the actors have absolutely no physical presence on screen, not even an artificial one. There’s many reasons for this; one of them is the immaterial nature of the digital image, which I will describe later on, and the other is what David Bordwell calls <a href="http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2007/05/27/intensified-continuity-revisited/" target="_blank">intensified continuity</a>, a visual style that <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/05/tomb-raider-2013-surviving-tutorial.html" target="_blank">I briefly described some weeks ago</a>: most movies are now made almost exclusively of close-up, so actors are condemned to exist on screen only through their heads. There are no more bodies in current blockbusters, only talking heads (the most expressive physical actor right now is Andy Serkis (Gollum, King Kong), and we never see his real body).<br />
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This disappearance of the actors’ bodies coincides with the apparition of the digital image (CGI and digital camera included): as Hollywood cinema got further away from reality and the indexical nature of photographic images, the more the actors’ bodies became disposable. And certainly, there is a parallel to be made with the discourse of <b><i>Terminator 2</i></b>: Judgment Day will come when we will lose sight of reality, of our body, of what it means to be human. Incidentally, in this movie the threat for humanity comes in the form of CGI, a morphing robot than can take human form. So, here we are: CGI as a threat, for the photographic image, for humanity, that can only be stop by an old-school physical special effect...<br />
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*These inquiries and concerns about our interactions with machines was a prevalent sci-fi theme in the 80’s, as we can see, for example, in the emergence of cyberpunk. Early in this decade, technology became ubiquitous, portable, and computers began to invade our homes, so a lot of worries came from this sudden introduction of technology in all aspects of everyday life. <i><b>Terminator</b></i> was only one of the most popular cultural expressions of this technophobia. <br />
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**It doesn’t make much sense, unless the characters are now in some kind of alternate timeline, which the movie never hints as, but I don’t think we should ponder too much on these inconsistencies. Plot-wise, Cameron’s movies are usually quite, hmm, stupid, to use some euphemism, and he’s terrible for dialogue. His cinema is interesting mainly for its <i>mise en scène</i>, its ability to reflect the current state of the world in a series of striking images. Sylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2882815174745926563.post-70715322705458642742013-06-08T10:39:00.000-04:002013-09-11T21:21:36.041-04:00Imitation of Life (1)What is cinema? Does this question still make sense today, in this age of CGI, digital cameras, heavy post-production effects, with movies distributed in a variety of formats, from the smallest screen (cellphones) to the biggest (IMAX), with the proliferation of home-made videos, with television series and video games increasingly looking like movies (and movies increasingly looking like video games), with the ubiquity of all kinds of moving images, with the rise of new media, etc., etc.? “What was cinema” seems like a better question, but I’m not ready yet to declare cinema dead, like it has been quite fashionable to do for some time (since the advent of the VCR in the 80’s at least). Like I wrote last time, I’m mostly interested in computer-generated imagery for this blog, and how it can be incorporated (or not) in the photographic image, but CGI is merely one of many factors responsible for the profound changes happening now in cinema. In this context of ever-changing technologies and constant metamorphosis of the moving image, clinging to the idea of a “pure” cinema, like I did in my <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/05/the-shape-of-things-to-come.html" target="_blank">introduction</a> last week, is clearly hopeless.<br />
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But is there such a thing as “pure” cinema in the first place? Most film theorists (if not all) would say no, there isn’t. There are many reasons for this (the industrial nature of cinema, the fact that it’s a collective effort, Alain Badiou’s mix of art and non-art), but I want to focus on one for now, more related to our subject: cinema, by essence, is an amalgam of many art forms. It’s less the seventh art than the addition of the previous six. So, why is it so different now with CGI? Can’t we just say cinema has integrated animation like it did with theater? In a way, yes, cinema is moving in a new direction due to the influence of CGI, but animation is an intruder in the photographic image, in a way that wasn’t true with other art forms. Indeed, cinema is impure, but even if it can borrow heavily from theater (for the <i>mise en scène</i>), literature (for the screenwriting), painting (for the framing) and music, none of these challenge the specificity of cinema: the succession of photographic moving images. CGI, though, as a form of digital animation, is an intruder, a radical Other that is tearing apart the fabric of the photographic image. It's not necessarily a problem, but then we have to find a way to wed these two opposite forms in a meaningful way; it's the question I want to adress in this series titled <i>Imitation of Life</i>: how did cinema approach this question in movies mixing CGI with the photographic image? <br />
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André Bazin, as always, provides the best starting point for this discussion. In his article “Editing Prohibited” (1953), Bazin seems to be advocating for a natural realism of the photographic image that the editing has to respect: no editing, because cinema should not “cheat” reality. Instead, cinema has to preserve on film the integrity of the situation depicted. This does not mean that cinema has a duty to offer a 1:1 representation of reality, but rather that cinema has to “re-present” reality through the artist’s vision, while conserving the ambiguities and elusiveness of the real world, so that the spectator can see reality <i>again</i> for the first time. It’s this famous passage in “Ontology of the photographic image” (1945), maybe the most beautiful account of cinema: “Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled-up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love.” The following sentence speaks of photography as a “natural image of a world that we neither know nor can see”, but the verb tense is quite different in the original text in French: Bazin uses a past tense that has no equivalent in English (<i>l’imparfait de l’indicatif</i>, an action beginning in the past and still ongoing at the moment of the enunciation), suggesting that we did know, at some point, to see the world, but that, in the turmoil and the habits of everyday life, we somehow lost this knowledge that photography can restore. So this “virginal purity” doesn’t stand for reality as seen in a completely objective way, but rather for a forgotten, unprejudiced look at a naturally ambiguous and mysterious reality. Cinema, then, has an ethical duty towards reality, because it’s his first creative material, and so must stay faithful, as best as possible, to the <i>essence</i> of a situation.<br />
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With these nuances in mind, coming back to “Editing prohibited”, we can say that although Bazin does prefer long takes over rapid editing, because it’s often a good way to preserve the ambiguities inherent in reality, his article is far more nuanced than the title suggests. In a lengthy footnote, he uses the example of a scene from <b><i>Where no vultures fly</i></b> (1951), in which a young boy in Africa finds a baby lion, briefly left alone by his mother. The boy takes the lion in his arms, but the mother is not far; she sees them, and silently begins to track the kidnapper. At first, the sequence is made of shot reverse shot (one shot of the young boy, and cut to another shot of the mother), so that the boy and the mother are never in the same frame. But in the last image of the sequence, the lion’s mother, the boy and his parents all share the same space, in a single wide-angle shot. Like Bazin says, whether or not the predator and his prey are in the same shot doesn’t change the anecdote: either way, it’s still the story of a lion chasing a young boy. But when both the predator and its prey share on screen the same space, the movie reaches the “apex of cinematographic emotion”. It doesn’t matter if the lions were tame, or that the actor is not really in danger like his character is because “here, realism lies in the homogeneity of space”.<br />
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The feeling of danger, the emotional truth of that scene, is made possible by the simultaneous presence of the prey and the predator. The question is not one of realism: a close-up of the mother would not be less “realistic” than the wide-angle shot showing both her and the young boy. Rather, like all art forms, cinema has to stay faithful to the <i>essence</i> of the situation it represents, or to the situation as the artist sees it, and not to reality <i>as it really is, </i>or to <i>how things really happened</i> (if such a thing is even possible). In the case of <b><i>Where no vultures fly</i></b>, the director wants to convey the feeling of danger, but when the boy and the lion are represented in two different shots, as a spectator we know there is a trick, that there is not really a lion behind the young boy, and that the two actions were probably filmed at two different times, maybe even in two different locations. We understand that the character is in peril, but the feeling is far more pregnant in the last shot of the sequence, because the danger inherent to this situation comes from the shared space between the predator and its prey (I would not be afraid of a lion that is not really behind me). Bazin speaks of a “cinematographic emotion” because only cinema can represent a real lion moving towards a real boy in the same frame; animation would have to find another way to represent this feeling of danger, like maybe an aggressive fluidity of the lines, which could convey both the grace and the violence of the beast. But cinema, working with reality, can (or has to even) show what is dangerous in this situation: the spatial relation of proximity between a boy and a lion. So, editing is not prohibited in all and every situation, only “when the essence of an event lies in the simultaneous presence of one or more aspects of the action.”<br />
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To take another, more obvious example: in a movie portraying a magic trick, say the classic bunny-out-of-a-hat, we would probably not be very impressed if there’s a visible cut between the empty hat and the bunny getting out. We would know it’s a simple editing trick, with no “real” magic involved. In order to give a chance to the spectator to believe in the prowess of the prestidigitator, the trick has to be shown in one long take, respecting the integrity of the live performance. Or think of action scenes: the pleasure of seeing a Jackie Chan movie lies in the knowledge that he did all the stunts himself. No wires, no CGI, no trick: this is real. At least this is the promise made by the marketing department and the actor, but it’s telling: the action is supposedly more thrilling because of its faithfulness to the real stunt, because we believe that at some point in the past Jackie Chan really did what we’re seeing on screen. The movie re-presents what Jackie Chan did. In the last decade, the discourse around the movies has changed: movies are not promising thrilling action made by real actors anymore, but instead are trying to amaze us by all their new representational possibilities. Musicals and action films (at least up until the early 90’s), two genres relying on the spectacle of human bodies in motion, were tailored for their performers: look at what the actor/dancer/bodybuilder/athlete can do! Since the advent of CGI, there’s no need for an actor/performer because the performer now is the image itself: look at what I can create, says the digital artist.<br />
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The problem with CGI becomes clear: with current technologies, we can represent any magic tricks we want, but how can we still believe in them if everything is possible? If the ontology of the photographic image supposes that the artist has to re-present reality so that we can see it again in all its “virginal purity”, is such a thing still possible when we seamlessly integrate CGI with film? If the essence of the bunny-out-of-a-hat lies in the continuity of the action, can a movie stay faithful to this essence by using a CGI bunny? If the boy and the lion are in the same frame, but the lion is not real, can we still feel the danger? (As we will see in a later article, this is the question <b><i>Life of Pi</i></b> wants to answer, by using a tiger instead of a lion. That’s why I used Bazin’s footnote instead of his main example in “Editing Prohibited”, Lamorisse’s <b><i>Red Balloon</i></b>, because of this similarity between the wild beast/young boy situation at the heart of Ang Lee’s movie.) We may think that Hollywood doesn’t care about these questions and just want to display on the big screen these new technologies in the most seducing and ostentatious way, but for a while, Hollywood entertained quite an ambiguous relationship with CGI. Sure, the discourse around the movies wasn’t ambiguous at all: in interviews, the artists were mainly delighted to be working with these new tools (there are a few exceptions, of course), and all the promotional material was celebratory (look how convincing this is!), but this is not what the movies themselves were saying. Even one of the most prominent pioneer of CGI like James Cameron was far more pessimist in his movies than in his interviews, at least until <b><i>Avatar</i></b>, where he completely turned his body of work upside down, as we will see.<br />
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It was also the case with Robert Zemeckis, another leading figure in these matters. As far as I know, <i><b>Who Framed Roger Rabbit</b></i> features no CGI, but since we already established last time that CGI is a form of animation, the parallel is quite justifiable. And anyway, animation is a completely different medium than live-action cinema, so a wedding of these two art forms is not easily made, so Zemeckis’ movie can give us a first idea of how to make it meaningful. In <i><b>Who Framed Roger Rabbit</b></i>, toons have a special status that differentiates them from humans; there’s no illusion there, like there is with most CGI nowadays, because toons are meant to be toons and nothing else. Animation is not trying to represent reality, on the contrary, it is explicitly defined as animation, and by doing so the movie preserves the integrity of the photographic image. In fact, the movie presents a lone confusion between animation and real-life, and it is the main villain, a toon trying to hide behind human form. The movie is quite clear: animation and cinema can live together as long as they’re clearly delineated, but the illusion of one trying to look like the other is pure evil. <br />
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But like I said, it’s more ambiguous than this, because at the same time, Zemeckis is trying to accommodate us to the idea of animation and photographic image living in the same space: toons are not exactly intruders in the world of the movie, but the main character, Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins), hates them ever since one of them killed his brother. His mistrust represents this difficult conciliation between animation and photography, the reticence of the photographic image to accept this intrusion of animation. More importantly, Eddie has to learn to love and accept the toons, just like the director, Robert Zemeckis, is trying to convince his audience that animation can be integrated in a photographic image in a meaningful way. It’s no coincidence if Zemeckis has since become one of the chief promoters for CGI: with <b><i>Who Framed Roger Rabbit</i></b>, he was paving the way for his future cinema, subtly introducing the idea of a new hybrid form of cinema, until he could seamlessly integrate a CGI floating feather in a photographic image. This time, though, it was an illusion, a digital magic trick, but in 1994 photorealist CGI was not evil anymore, and rare are the movies that still try to think about the inclusion of intrusive forms like animation.<br />
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This movie doesn’t answer our questions yet, but it’s a small example of how Hollywood represented these new technologies, and what they thought of them. Zemeckis found one way to meaningfully integrate animation, by clearly separating what belongs to animation and what belongs to film, but other means have been used, as I will continue to explore in my coming articles. <br />
<br />Sylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2882815174745926563.post-55426214344725264242013-05-28T21:41:00.000-04:002013-09-11T21:21:36.028-04:00Things to ComeVideogames are not cinematic and they will never be.<br />
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I’m not saying this because I hate these so-called “cinematic” videogames, or because I’m a ludologist who cares only about mechanics and gameplay – quite the contrary, I prefer my videogames with story, and it’s quite difficult for me to write purely about gameplay, without the support of a fiction. It’s not even the gamer in me who’s speaking, but the film lover, which I am first and foremost: calling cut-scenes heavy, high production value and story-centric videogames “cinematic” demonstrates a profound lack of respect for what cinema really is. I think I’ve said it before: I’m coming to videogames through the “video” angle more than the “game” itself, so my take on this is slightly different than the usual one. In general, we complain about this cinematic leaning in recent videogames because it implies a loss of interactivity, a simplification, or even a rarefaction, of the rules of the game, to which the designers substitute a more classical, linear narration upon which the player has almost no control. This is true, of course, but really, most of the time, I don’t mind; it makes for a different experience, less “gamey” maybe, but it can be compelling and meaningful nonetheless. <br />
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But when I’m saying that videogames can never be cinematic, I’m thinking about images, not interaction: I’m an old-school cinephile, already nostalgic for the disappearing celluloid, and a bazinian at heart, so essentially I think it’s impossible to emulate cinema through computer-generated imagery. I’m well aware that what we mean by “cinematic” in videogames is related to the use of camera angles, movement, staging, lighting, etc., and not to the way the images are produced, but it’s a superficial understanding of cinema visual language, as if the content of the images and their ethical relation to reality was insignificant, when actually it is where the very essence of cinema lies. For sure, our conception of cinema has drastically changed in the last twenty years and CGI is pretty much a part of cinema language now, so it may seem foolish or backward-thinking to dismiss everything CGI-related in the name of some pure idea of what cinema once was. Well, I’m not dismissing CGI <i>per se</i> (it is not “evil” or inherently bad), but rather its current use and confusion with cinema. CGI and cinema are too different in essence to be considered as similar means of expression: while an artist working in cinema has to use the real world as his first (or even only) expressive material, CGI is similar to painting or animation in that the artist has to create from scratch everything he wants to represent. How can videogames be “cinematic” when computer-generated imagery is closer in spirit to painting and animation than traditional photographic cinema?<br />
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Yes, I make a distinction between animation and cinema because their aesthetics are practically opposite, irreconcilable. In most art forms, animation included, the artist starts with a blank page, or a blank canvas, but with photography and cinema the artist starts with, well, everything. In his few works on cinema (collected in the book <i>Cinéma</i>, I’m not aware of an English translation), French philosopher Alain Badiou described cinema as an effort of purification, or simplification (to be honest, I’m freely using and interpreting his words here, so this is far from an accurate summary of his thoughts). The painter starts with a blank canvas and from this purity, the whiteness of the empty frame, he can create anything; the great difficulty for the artist is to stay faithful to this “original purity”. In cinema, on the contrary, the artist starts with an “impure infinity” because he has the whole world in front of him and has to select which part of this world he wants to capture. Reality is a mess, confused and cluttered, but art presents a vision of the world; art does not represent the world, but ideas about the world, so how can an artist take this messy reality and manage to represent through it the clarity of his vision? <br />
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In most art forms, the artist can decide (more or less consciously) what he wants to represent and keep only what is relevant for his vision. A painter can choose verisimilitude and copy reality as faithfully as possible, but he can also choose to strip the object represented of any irrelevant details, or to deform it as he sees fit. The photographer, though, when he has chosen the object he wants to capture, is stuck with <i>this</i> object, in all its details, significant or not. A painter, for example, is never really painting <i>this</i> bottle, but his <i>idea</i> of a bottle (if the artist has a personal vision that is; if not, the painted bottle becomes a mere copy, of the real bottle or of a certain painting style). A photographer, though, is stuck with<i> this</i> bottle, in all its particularities, in all its messy reality. In a sense, there’s too much details, so the spectator will only see <i>this</i> bottle; but who wants to see a realist representation of a bottle? I have enough bottles at home, so why would I need an image of a bottle, if it’s nothing more than a convincing imitation of a real bottle? If art is a vision of the world, the bottle in itself is meaningless: how the artist sees the bottle constitutes art. <br />
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This is why, for Badiou, cinema has to purify reality: the artist has to take a real bottle, in all its complexity, and purify it to obtain the idea of a bottle, or more precisely, the artist’s idea of the bottle. If the artist, in photography or cinema, doesn’t purify reality through his image, he stays in the realm of appearances, of imitation (like a painter without vision). When I’m taking a picture of my kids, for example, I’m not making art: my picture is only meant to be a memento. My image is an imitation because it doesn’t go beyond the appearances of my kids, or of the event it portrays. That’s why I took a picture in the first place: to keep a souvenir of how my kids look at that moment. It’s not a statement on my kids, and I’m not expressing an idea of my kids (well, usually not); it’s only my kids, at a certain moment in time. So, in cinema, the artist starts from the trivial, the cliché, these appearances, and from there he can elevate us towards the sublime, the extraordinary, the pure; a good movie would not represent my kids, but would articulate a particular vision of them. In contrast, other art forms already start from the purity, the sublime, and their challenge is to maintain the spectator up there, and not fall down to the level of the imitation, or the trivial (but mostly they fail; real art is rare). The purpose of art is always to offer a vision of the world, but in cinema the default starting point is the imitation (what Badiou also calls non-art) while other art forms start with the pure (art itself), so the creation process in cinema is in reverse. (Small philosophical parenthesis: to rephrase this in a manner more faithful to Badiou’s philosophy, art is one of the four “generic procedures” that can produce truths, with science, mathematics and love, so all art forms can present truths about the world, but each one does so in a different manner because truth is a process and not a revelation. Each art has their own process, so each art can produce their own particular truths. Since the process of cinema belongs only to cinema, it’s impossible for another medium, like animation or CGI, to produce cinema-truths. Videogames imitating cinema are only that: an imitation, and a poor one at that. Videogames, if they’re an art form, would produce videogames-truths, truth that would not be possible to express otherwise. This, a “cinematic” videogame is nonsensical. It doesn’t mean that videogames cannot borrow from cinema (cinema itself is quite impure and borrow a lot from other art forms), but that they cannot express the same truths as cinema.)<br />
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Moreover, in other art forms, the presence of the artist, and thus of his vision, is always implicit, even in the most seemingly impersonal and banal work. In a painting, for example, or in an animation movie, every brush strokes remind us of the perspective of the artist, of his subjectivity, of his stylistic choices, because we know that the same person (in most cases) has painted every element we see in the frame (to be precise: it reminds us of a vision, but not necessarily of a profound and meaningful one). In photography, though, the camera being a mechanical apparatus, the process of representing reality doesn’t need the intervention of a human hand: anyone can press the button and the camera does the rest. Where’s the art in that? Before photography, the operation of representing reality needed the skill of a painter, or of an evocative writer, but now a machine can make it in an instant. Because of this mechanical quality, photography and cinema have the appearances of objectivity, as if a photographic image represents an object as it really is, without the mediation of the artist’s subjectivity, so the artist’s vision may seem less clear than in other art forms since it’s obscured by this “objectivity” of the image. <br />
<br />
Sure, there’s always a human being behind the camera who controls the angle and the frame of the image he wants to make, so photography isn’t entirely objective, but the point is that the process of representation, the printing of reality into film, is mechanical, automatic. Also, any object represented by photography was really there, at some point, in front of the camera, and it looked pretty much the same then as what we can see now on the image. A photograph of an event can be use as a proof in a tribunal, or a recording of a security camera, but not a painting of the same event: we believe that a photograph is “true”, or at least faithful to what we usually call reality, and that there’s no subjective distortion, if you will, of the object represented. André Bazin, in his famous (and much-debated) essay the <i>Ontology of the photographic image</i>, used the metaphor of the mold, or the print (like a fingerprint): reality is printed on celluloid and preserved, mummified. In a cinematographic image, an object is made present, in time and in space, through its re-presentation. Or, to borrow Stanley Cavell’s title, cinema is “the world viewed”: following Bazin, Cavell describes cinema as a re-presentation of a world from which we are cut off, unable to participate in. The world is made present, but we cannot interact with it, thus this title, “the world viewed”.<br />
<br />
From this, it seems quite clear that CGI is a completely different beast than photographic image: there’s no presence in CGI, no “objective” re-presentation of reality. Everything has to be created from scratch, from the blank of an empty computer screen. Like painting, CGI reminds us of the subjectivity of the artist (artists usually). The problem here, in cinema and some videogames, is that CGI is not used like painting, but instead tries to imitate cinema; CGI imitates a bottle and tries to fool us in believing it’s a real bottle. In painting, realism is a choice, one amongst infinite possibilities, so the prowess of a faithful representation of reality is meaningless in itself, unless it’s part of a larger vision. The real prowess is in the depth of this vision, not in the technical skills required to adequately paint reality. The same goes for CGI: who cares if the special effects in a movie feel realist or not? The interesting question should not be: do they look real?, but: why are they there, or what do they mean? Likewise, who cares about videogames capacity to feel naturalistic, visually? Well, a lot of people care, obviously, but we shouldn’t: realism is one option, which is not suited for each and every game, and it’s simply not true that “better realism” equals “more emotion”, or more possibilities for character’s depth. Just think of animation: to take a well-known example, Hayao Miyazaki’s movies are highly stylized, but we are still moved by his characters; the difference is that the expressiveness comes mainly from the artist visual style instead of a “realist” representation of his characters’ emotions. Miyazaki does not purify reality because he doesn’t work with reality to begin with; rather, he found a visual style that corresponds to his vision and the stories he wanted to tell. He maintains us in the purity of the white page. This is traditional, narrative animation, but one of the most profound cinematographic experience I know of is Stan Brakhage’s <i>Untitled (For Marilyn)</i>, and it’s a silent abstract film. Right now, in videogames, “better realism” equals “more emotion” only because we are going for that <a href="http://brindlebrothers.blogspot.ca/2013/02/fuck-holodeck_28.html">stupid holodeck</a>, because we want to represent human characters in a wannabe-photographic image; but again, this is only one option, and frankly it’s the least interesting (and potentially damaging) one.<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZVecwLOFem3Zxu9JhHV-ZKhDq7V1xTshWWzKokEQaAG6htHlMw61usez1ABy3N1ZqZn42LL34dFoTbFAlyjlne8xc0axMofCnaJMqkn7SPhkgPYRL8n77F2g-SikbROUBxxWOFzlGEvRP/s1600/bybrakhageblu00004.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZVecwLOFem3Zxu9JhHV-ZKhDq7V1xTshWWzKokEQaAG6htHlMw61usez1ABy3N1ZqZn42LL34dFoTbFAlyjlne8xc0axMofCnaJMqkn7SPhkgPYRL8n77F2g-SikbROUBxxWOFzlGEvRP/s400/bybrakhageblu00004.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
Why don’t videogames or all things CGI take their cue from animation instead of cinema? Why imitate real life when your medium can represent anything you can imagine or represent reality in any way you see fit? Why limit yourself to copy something which already exists? And what does it mean when CGI tries to imitate reality, or a photographic image that is already a representation of reality? In his <i>Ontology of the photographic image</i>, Bazin wrote: “The quarrel over realism in art stems from a misunderstanding, from a confusion between the aesthetic and the psychological; between true realism, the need that is to give significant expression to the world both concretely and in its essence and the pseudorealism of a deception aimed at fooling the eye (or for that matter the mind); a pseudorealism content in other words with illusory appearances.” (What is cinema?, page 12) What is CGI, as it is generally used now, if not the “pseudorealism of a deception aimed at fooling the eye”? And how can cinema integrate CGI without using it as an illusion? And what can wannabe-cinematic videogames learn from this? Can they use CGI in a non-illusory way, in a context where the image aims for realism (because surely realism has its place too)?<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
*** </div>
<br />
I will not answer these questions now: this is an introductory post, a draft for things to come, a mission statement for this blog. I threw a lot of things here to which I want to come back in the next months, from the philosophies of Badiou, Bazin and Cavell to the question of cinema and animation, or the illusory use of CGI in cinema, and all of those objections you could raise to some points I touch too rapidly (some examples: sure, the presence in photography, but what about post-production effects, and all the possible deformations of the original image? How is that different from the integration of CGI? And how a “trick” like a composite image, transparency, <i>à la Méliès</i>, is so different from this CGI? Etc.) Like I said, I’m interested in videogames as images (which is not to say I will leave gameplay behind, that would just be blind, but images will be my focal point). This desire to write about computer-generated images was the reason why I open this blog in the first place, why I turn myself towards videogames after writing for some time on cinema, at Séquences, and it also explains the logic behind my title: an exploration of the uncanny valley of the CGI as we know it now, both through its use in cinema and in videogames. It took some time to finally come to this introduction (partly because of my lack of confidence about my writing skills in English, and partly because I drifted away, as I tend to do fairly often…), but let’s officially call this blog open. <br />
<br />
I’m feeling a bit ambitious with all this (just while writing this post I felt it is probably more than I can chew), but anyway let’s see where it goes. I have some things prepare for my next articles: I want to approach CGI first through cinema, with some landmark movies that not only use CGI but more importantly are about CGI. I’m thinking, for now, of both <i><b>Tron</b></i> and its recent sequel, <i><b>Tron Legacy</b></i>, James Cameron’s <i><b>Terminator 2</b></i> and <i><b>Avatar</b></i>, and the two most beautiful films on the subject, Ang Lee’s <i><b>Hulk</b></i> and <i><b>Life of Pi</b></i>. This will lead, I hope, to a more specific discussion on videogames, and how they can produce their own videogames-truths, to borrow Badiou’s vocabulary. Also, I’m almost finish with <i><a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/05/tomb-raider-2013-surviving-tutorial.html">Tomb Raider</a></i>, so I will surely come back to it, from the point of view of ethics, the representation of revenge. <br />
<br />
See you soon!<br />
<br />
(And for the improbable French readers who don’t already know about my other blog, well I have another, older <a href="http://ducinematographe.blogspot.ca/">blog in French</a>, dedicated only to cinema, where you can find, amongst others, my take on Terrence Malick’s <a href="http://ducinematographe.blogspot.ca/2013/04/le-cinema-impressionniste-de-terrence.html">two</a> <a href="http://ducinematographe.blogspot.ca/2013/05/le-cinema-impressionniste-de-terrence.html">last</a> films, or my review of one of Eastwood’s masterpieces, <b><i><a href="http://ducinematographe.blogspot.ca/2013/02/the-bridges-of-madison-county-1995.html">Bridges of Madison County</a></i></b>, two of my favorite filmmakers. I’m planning there a retrospective on Gus Van Sant and possibly James Grey.) Sylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2882815174745926563.post-85692291270244838192013-05-09T22:45:00.000-04:002013-09-11T21:21:36.054-04:00Tomb Raider (2013): Surviving a Tutorial<div style="text-align: left;">
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I started to play the new <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tomb Raider</i> recently and as I already
knew the first hour or so is a series of non-ending QTEs. And as I already knew
too, the brand new Lara Croft is represented as vulnerable and terrified as opposed
to our usual invincible arrogant hero. What I didn’t know, though (but should
have guessed), is that these two elements are quite contradictory: simply put, a
hand-holding, heavily scripted, QTEfest’s tutorial does not convey, at all,
vulnerability and terror. There was not one moment during that whole sequence
where I felt vulnerable because everything was so scripted and pre-determined that
nothing seemed threatening. At least not to me as a player: I was watching a
vulnerable character, yes, but I sure wasn’t playing one. In fact, the few
moments I was playing, in control of Lara, I was just like the usual invincible
confident hero I played before in every other third-person action game – I
mean, how can I fail at pressing W? I know where the W key is after all. Pressing
W for half-an-hour can feel meaningful when playing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Proteus</i>, because this minimalism suits the contemplative experience
the game offers, but it doesn’t work as well when you’re running to get out of
a cave which is falling around you: the triviality and impossible-to-fail
action of pressing W just doesn’t match the representation of chaos and
imminent threat on the screen. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The opening sequence
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tomb Raider </i>(the first twenty
minutes in particular) is as bad a case of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludonarrative" target="_blank">ludonarrative dissonance</a> as it can
get, cramming in as few minutes as possible all the biggest problems with how
AAA videogames envision interactive storytelling nowadays, which is a bit sad
because the intentions were good (I want to play a vulnerable character for a
change) and the writing is above average, for the most part, so let’s honor
this eloquent case study by taking it apart.</span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">After the introductory cutscene, the
first moment of gameplay involves Lara tied up in a dark cave, head upside down.
Actually, this is quite an apt metaphor of how the player will feel for the
rest of the sequence, bound by his lack of agency, but I’m not sure it is the
kind of captivity Crystal Dynamics aimed to express. The metaphor doesn’t last
long anyway: cinema-Lara (I mean the Lara on screen and not the one I’m
playing) has to think her way through the situation and use her wits to regain
her freedom, but I don’t have to do any of this because some divine instinct
(the game calls it “survival instinct” but either way it’s only the Designer
showing the way) tells me that I need to press A and D to make the rope swing
back-and-forth. So, while cinema-Lara is trying to survive, improvising and
reacting to a dangerous environment, gameplay-Lara is merely following instructions
on the screen. I really can’t think of two more opposite experiences, and it’s
quite frustrating because normally the beginning of a game can feel like being
thrown on an unknown island of sort, since the player has to discover and
experiment how a new game works, how this unfamiliar virtual space behaves, but
a tutorial negates this feeling of exploration (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dark Souls</i> this is not). You can’t feel vulnerable when
you’re told what to do at every moment, much less explore what’s already explained
for you.</span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This is a lesser problem, but I
still find it quite annoying: one of the lamest tricks in cinema are these
expository voice-overs explaining what’s already happening in the images, but
videogames have their equivalent with “obvious player’s objectives flashing on
the screen”. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tomb Raider</i>, it’s the
game telling me that I need to “find a way out”. Ok, so Lara wakes up hanging
from the ceiling, in a cave adorned with skulls and blood, with two other corpses
besides her: do the designers really think I can’t understand this setting? Do they
feel so unsure of their script that they need to explain it again in words? Even
if I feel insubordinate to the game’s fiction and decide to do some speleology
on my own, it’s not like the game will allow me to do any exploration anyway:
I’m trapped in an artificial hallway so I will follow whatever objectives the
designers have chosen for me, and whether it’s “get out” or “find a good motel”
doesn’t matter. I have no choice on the subject. When the narrative and/or the
level design are clear enough, why does the game need to repeat it in bold
white letters on the screen? (I know some players don’t watch cutscenes, but
these players probably don’t care about the objectives anyway, or else they
would watch the cutscenes, because that’s partly what they’re for, setting up
the next objective.) But I guess it still isn’t clear enough, or some players
are dumber than I can imagine, because the game proceeds to follow in the most
unimaginative way possible the famous rule-of-three<span style="font-size: small;"><b>*</b></span> that reigns over
Hollywood, and Lara says, just in case, “I need to find a way out”. Oh, now I know
what to do: I need to find a way out! Here, the problem is not so much ludonarrative
dissonance but on the contrary an over-emphasis of the already obvious: when
your story or the environments are well defined, as it should be, the game
doesn’t need to reiterate, moreover in such an artificial way, the same information. </span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">But, what’s worse yet, it’s not even
a real objective: I did not “find” my way out because I didn’t need to search
in the first place. Lara is supposed to feel lost, but how can I feel that way if I’m
stuck in a narrow corridor with only one way to go? All I can do is press W and
move forward (even the player's control over the camera is at time restricted). Again,
I was following instructions, the route that was designed for me; survival
seems pretty frivolous in the AAA world. And then, after pressing W some more,
and some wild variations of A and D, I “found” the exit, got out of the cave
and on the island proper. Freedom! A game! But no, alas, once you’re out, your
survival instinct takes over and control your gaze again so you’re sure to
see the wreckage on the island shore (and the title, obviously you want to know
which game you’re playing). But most importantly, it shows you the way forward,
in case you want to turn back and try to hopelessly force your way through the
wall behind you. Oh, what is there? A forest! That looks like something I can
get lost in… but no, it’s still a cramped one-way corridor, green and brown
instead of grey. Then I’m thinking: how lucky Lara is to find herself on an
unknown island made of one-way corridors! That sure is easier to find your way
around! I mean, that’s the kind of island I want to be shipwrecked on (well,
except for the blood-thirsty cultists).</span>
</div>
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<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Still, I appreciate the change of
scenery (I’m so tired of tutorial in caves or dungeons), so I try to move the
camera a bit, because the decor is quite impressive and I want to take the time to… but no, not now, my
survival instinct is still stronger than my natural curiosity and it takes
control of my eyes again, because it wants to make sure that I won’t miss the big remains of
the boat standing in front of Lara, taking half of the frame. You know, there’s
no way I could have missed that boat because this is the only way forward, the
only path I could have take, and the boat stands just after a corner, so the
moment Lara turns that corner, the boat will appear on the screen no matter
what, so why does the designer need to control the camera at that moment? Does
he worry that the player will direct the camera at the road, fearing to walk in
a pool of mud, and somehow miss the boat? Turn around and go back towards an already
established dead-end? A designer taking control of the camera makes sense when
he thinks that a player could miss vital information in the environment, but
when the player has no choice but to go towards that vital information, I think
you can trust that he will stumble upon it by himself at some point.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The game opens up a bit after that boat, the QTEs and corridors mostly disappear, but some of the problems
remain. Notably, the shooting mechanics are so smooth and refined that they
don’t express Lara’s reluctance to kill. Her bow, in particular, is really
enjoyable, and it feels great to hunt those deer at the beginning and
later to silently align head-shots with it, but this is not how cinema-Lara is depicted. She’s not supposed to feel good while killing that deer, even less be
entertained when she kills men later on (not at the point I’m at anyway). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tomb Raider</i> is too good a shooter for its
own good: the game takes the same mechanics that were designed for games with
all those arrogant indestructible soldiers proficiently shooting people in the
face with a smile on their lips, polishes them and then expects to tell a story
about an inexperienced archeologist who unwillingly uses violence and shivers
every time she kills someone. I’m only two hours in now, and I know Lara is
supposed to become more powerful and confident, or that she will discover some <a href="http://www.themarysue.com/tomb-raider-review/" target="_blank">inner strength that was in her all along</a>,
so maybe at that point the shooting mechanics will make sense, but for now,
they sure feel inappropriate. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPB8y1gTWmJfXvMSBfNiGQ1Ab8tVWoHgOsBqoG-Fai8BRb7Fm4oVZPvqWGmt8mPoPU6pTds7dcpf5-YZvsTzwqAiUziU1cgrnwBqd1BFvS8XbVxsM5_5vzh83fRb_f18zVgVnizLgrEWaH/s1600/Tomb-Raider-trailer-E3-2012-500x281.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPB8y1gTWmJfXvMSBfNiGQ1Ab8tVWoHgOsBqoG-Fai8BRb7Fm4oVZPvqWGmt8mPoPU6pTds7dcpf5-YZvsTzwqAiUziU1cgrnwBqd1BFvS8XbVxsM5_5vzh83fRb_f18zVgVnizLgrEWaH/s400/Tomb-Raider-trailer-E3-2012-500x281.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">It reminds me of the state of
Hollywood nowadays, and what film scholar David Bordwell calls “<a href="http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2007/05/27/intensified-continuity-revisited/" target="_blank">intensified continuity</a>”</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">: most modern movies are shot the
same way, a barrage of close-up with extremely fast editing (a shot last 2 to 4
seconds on average). It doesn’t matter whether it’s an action movie, a romantic
comedy or a thriller: the same aesthetic is used in every scene of every movie. This
visual style can be meaningful on occasion (<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the Social Network</i> </b>is a
masterpiece of intensified continuity) but a good director should adapt his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mise en scène </i>to outline the
particularities and subtexts of each of his scenes. Filming everything the same
way is inconsequential and the particular expressiveness of a fast close-up
gets lost if there’s no more contrast with some longer medium shots. The same
can be said about gameplay: in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tomb
Raider </i>the shooting mechanics should evolve throughout the game and follow
the character’s arc. Without this contrast, within the game itself and with
other similar games, the possible meaning of the gameplay disappears. </span>
</div>
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<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Or, like John Teti wrote at <a href="http://gameological.com/2013/03/review-tomb-raider/" target="_blank">Gameological</a>:
“<i>Tomb Raider</i> treats game design as a commodity rather than a venue for
expression—“game-ness” is merely a thing that is bolted onto a preconceived
experience.” </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In other words, the gameplay of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tomb Raider</i> isn’t meant to be expressive
or meaningful, only to be “fun”, even if this “fun” is contradictory with the
fiction. Just like the intensified continuity of blockbusters is for the most
part meaningless (and often incoherent) because ultimately only the flamboyance of the
spectacle matters, the gameplay of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tomb
Raider </i>is<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>insignificant and doesn’t
care about the story it tries to tell. Gameplay becomes a mere obligatory way
to pass time (it’s a game after all) between each set pieces that are the core
of the “experience” envision by the designers. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Just to be
clear: I’m not asking for a simulation of survival and vulnerability. I'm well aware that gameplay
is not a 1:1 simulation of reality; it’s an abstraction, a system that tries to
express a particular emotion, feeling, idea, etc. But at the very least,
gameplay and fiction should work in conjunction, help each other to tell the
same story, not repeat or contradict themselves. A game must adapt its mechanics
to its fiction. And so far, for a game that’s mostly about survival, <i>Tomb Raider </i> feels
pretty familiar and comfortable.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><b>*</b>Screenwriting guides often insist
on the importance of this rule: essential information in a movie has to be repeated three
times to make sure that every spectator will understand it. A good director will
find a way to present the same information in three different ways (a gesture, a
close-up on an object, a dialogue, an expressive cut, etc.), or offer some variations of it, but more often
than not it makes dialogue looks like this: “John, do you see the dust over
there? I think Indians are coming.” “Sorry, what did you just say, Paul?
Indians are coming?” “Yeah, John, that’s what I said, Indians sure are coming this
way.”</span></div>
Sylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2882815174745926563.post-9001277057899591432013-04-12T19:50:00.000-04:002013-09-11T21:21:36.084-04:00Lincoln (2012), Steven Spielberg<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">I didn’t have a proper conclusion for my <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2012/11/the-cinema-of-steven-spielberg-1-toward.html">two</a> <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2012/12/the-cinema-of-steven-spielberg-2-behind.html">articles</a> on Spielberg’s cinema, but now I found it with <i><b>Lincoln</b></i>, his last film, which happens to be also a good follow-up to my last post on ethics. I must say that this is not exactly a review, because I want to focus mainly on one scene that I will use to introduce a new angle from which we can view his cinema; in lieu of proper criticism, I’ll add some general observations at the end.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtitLU-bnpS_8DqfzLlvQNwUEsqs-_1GyPUSHCU9jrcPpp2lUHZ5_MgLiRQ0kqMFGno5c7EWEBhf3W7dR9EOgaPhQ5m1Z5Fi6oJfjgSpuhTwbaiCMwvQAwAxU7AWRXnuKu27WZxa1F2HCa/s1600/093915_wide-47b363f119268834c3b9da1b064a7ce593278a78.jpg"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtitLU-bnpS_8DqfzLlvQNwUEsqs-_1GyPUSHCU9jrcPpp2lUHZ5_MgLiRQ0kqMFGno5c7EWEBhf3W7dR9EOgaPhQ5m1Z5Fi6oJfjgSpuhTwbaiCMwvQAwAxU7AWRXnuKu27WZxa1F2HCa/s400/093915_wide-47b363f119268834c3b9da1b064a7ce593278a78.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">As always with Spielberg, his movie is an answer to a former one; in this case, <i><b>Lincoln</b></i> replies to <i><b>Saving Private Ryan</b></i> (among others, but especially). Both movies open on a similar representation of the war: in <i><b>SPR</b></i>, it was a long virtuosic set-piece of the Normandy landing, the most famous scene of the movie but also the worst. A little nuance would be in order, but with its presentation of violence in a frontal, ostentatious manner, this fluid camera moving cleverly around the scene, travelling from the characters to the gruesome death of unknown soldiers and back to the characters, as if this violence was taking place especially for this omniscient camera, which always happened to be at the right place at the right moment, with all this technical skill on display, well this whole landing didn’t seem chaotic or arbitrary anymore; instead we felt mostly the absolute mastery of the filmmaker, who was using all his ingenuity to set-up the most impressive spectacle possible (and it is impressive, but this doesn’t really serve the purpose). <i><b>Lincoln</b></i> begins on the bloody fields of the Civil War, but this time the violence lasts about one minute: Spielberg turns away from the war itself and heads towards his main character, a Lincoln discussing with two black soldiers. From now on, the filmmaker isn’t interested in the action, but in the ideas behind it (which, incidentally, coincide with his announcement that he will no longer make action movies). </span><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">For the most part, <i><b>SPR</b></i> was a superb movie, but it sometimes stumbled on this violence, especially in the Normandy sequence, which was used mostly to state the obvious, that “war is ugly because people die in atrocious ways” – so obvious that we can ask if it was necessary that we endured such a representation in order to understand the point. <i><b>Lincoln</b></i>, on the contrary, leaves this spectacle behind and reminds us that war, previous to being a physical conflict, comes from a struggle of ideas: in order to win, Lincoln doesn’t need to crush the South; instead he has to convince them to join the Union and abolish slavery. The movie presents itself as a dilemma, Lincoln cannot both put an end to the war and ratify his amendment, or at least that is how his colleagues present the situation to him. But as Lincoln will understand, war and slavery, really it is the same fight.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Let’s come back first to <i><b>SPR</b></i>, which, beyond that simple representation of violence, pondered a much stronger idea, lying at the heart of Spielberg’s cinema: war is an atrocity because it compels us to quantify what cannot be, i.e. human life. Like I stated in my second article on Spielberg, in his movies evil is represented as a destructive, faceless force that stands against reason: the anonymous truck or the shark with unknowable intentions, the masked science men that terrorize E.T., the Nazi regime, the dinosaurs created by science, reason, that managed to get free, the genocidal extra-terrestrials, etc. To this enumeration of men and monsters we have to add war, slavery and terrorism, other kinds of anonymous entities, or with multiple faces that we cannot reduce to a single culprit with comprehensible intentions. These entities, though, do not challenge reason; on the contrary, they are guilty of excessive rationalism since for them individuals are nothing more than a number. A slave is a mere property, with a monetary value that we can bargain, and soldiers are used in equations that are true from the perspective of mathematics, but false from the human one. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">This is the angle from which comes <i><b>SPR</b></i>. Its premise is deliberately absurd, even the soldiers say so a number of times: eight men to find only one, a simple soldier at that, and just because he was dressed up quite arbitrarily as a symbol by the authorities (incidentally, by comparison with a famous letter from Lincoln). The film raises this question in various ways: can we sacrifice one man to save many? Or can we risk the lives of eight men to save one? Or can we leave alive a defeated enemy and take the chance that he will kill our allies in the future? For Spielberg, war is inhuman because it makes these questions appear valid: if a man is more than a number, then there’s nothing absurd in sending eight men to save one because the worth of a human life is priceless, infinite, and for the same reason we always have to save one man even if he may afterwards kill ten; it is these very calculations of “eight against one” that are absurd. But in the context of the war, they appear logical, unavoidable, even if they’re a negation of what it means to be human. War is an atrocity not only because of the physical violence it unleashes, but more fundamentally because of the violence it inflicts to the <i>idea</i> of being human. Likewise, in <i><b>Munich</b></i>, terrorism revolves around the logic of vengeance, the idea that 1 = 1, but this equality is possible only if we consider these unities as replaceable, interchangeable. But, again, man is not a unity that we can substitute to another; rather, man is unique, exceptional.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">So, <i><b>Lincoln</b></i>: at one point, the President must decide when to meet the Southern delegates who are coming to negotiate a possible peace. At first, Lincoln asks to meet them as soon as possible, even if it means that he may lose his amendment, but then he takes a pause and embarks on a long speech about Euclid’s theorem: “things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other”. Equality, Lincoln reminds us, is relative: we all are equal because of our uniqueness, so in a sense we all are equal to 1, and thus equal to each other, but we are not the same 1. The perfection of the whole, of society or of the equilateral triangle, lies on the acknowledgment of this uniqueness of each man, of this relative equality, which both slavery and war flout. After his speech, Lincoln changes his mind and orders to wait for further instructions before bringing the delegates to him; he cannot choose between war and slavery because through Euclid he realizes that they are two evils coming from the same source. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">My first two articles on Spielberg’s cinema were mainly about how he uses the father figure to think about what it means to make a responsible spectacle, which is still the leading thread running through all his movies; the ethical aspect that I tried to outline here is the second major axis in his work. In these articles, I completely neglected his dramas, and by writing now, separately, on <i><b>Lincoln</b></i>, I don’t want to give the impression that his dramas are unrelated to his action movies, because really they are two sides of the same coin. In his movies more focus on action, Spielberg aims to find reality behind the spectacle. He’s trying to find a way to talk about reality through means that we usually associate with escapist entertainment. In his dramas, he wants to show how man can be negated by war, slavery or terrorism, so there’s a similar desire to think about how our perception of man, of his uniqueness, can be distorted by certain events and make us forget the reality, or the truth, of being human. In both cases, his movies are about illusions, while they are searching for new, more truthful ways to look at the world.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Some loose notes on <i><b>Lincoln</b></i>:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">– Lincoln’s relation with his oldest son is a reminder of the one in <i><b>War of the Worlds</b></i>, especially of the scene when Tom Cruise tries to stop his son to participate in the war. Both sons use the same words (“I need to go”) to validate their desire to fight, with the exception that in <b><i>Lincoln</i></b> Joseph Gordon-Levitt doesn’t want to see the spectacle of war. His decision seems more responsible and well thought out, whereas in <i><b>War of the Worlds</b></i> the son merely wanted to be amazed by the light show behind the hills; as a result, Lincoln reacts less fiercely to his son’s decision (who is also older than the son in <i><b>WotW</b></i>, and Lincoln knows that the war is about to end anyway). All in all, <i><b>Lincoln</b></i> presents a more mature variant of a similar scene in <i><b>WotW</b></i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">– Lincoln is the first good father in a Spielberg movie: in one of the first scene, he shows his affection to his younger son. His relationship with his older son is more troublesome, but it is still respectful and loving (in its own cold and distant way). And Lincoln accepts all his responsibilities, as a father of a nation (his sadness towards his people, dead in the war) and as father of a family (the guilt for his third son’s death). This is new for Spielberg, who favored before a father figure who has to become responsible during the course of the movie. This new direction is indicated in the first scene: instead of the irresponsible spectacle of war, the camera turns itself towards the ideas of the man who assumes the responsibility of said war. We’ll have to see if Spielberg will continue in this new direction in his next film.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">– The representation of the African-American is quite strange: as some have noted (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/opinion/in-spielbergs-lincoln-passive-black-characters.html?_r=1&">here</a>, <a href="http://coreyrobin.com/2012/11/25/steven-spielbergs-white-men-of-democracy/">here</a> or <a href="http://jacobinmag.com/2012/11/lincoln-against-the-radicals-2/">here</a>), in the movie they play only a minor role that do not correspond to their real one in history (they appear passive, obsequiously receiving the gift of their freedom from the hands of the good, hard-working white men). Also, the casting is mainly mulatto, to the point that the main black characters (well, they still have minor roles, but the ones who have more than one scene) seem practically white. It may be a manner to underline the equality of men (look, under our skin we are all alike), but this is rather problematic.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">– The worst scene, on that regard, is Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) speech in court, which Spielberg over-emphasizes with exultant music and delirious crowds. This pompous <i>mise en scène</i> serves to represent the victory of Lincoln and his moderate politics over the “radical” position of Stevens: it’s an important step towards the acceptation of the amendment. But at this moment, Stevens is renouncing his most precious convictions, and he’s refusing to publicly acknowledge the racial equality of African-American, instead supporting their legal equality, as Lincoln wanted. I don’t know, but this doesn’t look like something to celebrate. It’s another good example of a tendency in Spielberg’s dramas, to emphasize the spectacle (here, the emotion of the upcoming victory of his main protagonist), while losing in the process the nuances of the scene, as in the opening of <i><b>SPR</b></i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">– The final scene, Lincoln’s assassination, is a superb condensation of some of Spielberg’s most important themes: the young son watching a violent spectacle, the absence of his father being killed off-screen, and the reality of this death interrupting the representation of death on the theater scene.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">– And finally, the beautiful scene after the amendment’s adoption, in which Stevens goes home, official paper in hands, returning to his black lover. Spielberg is thus saying that the amendment is somewhat useless, because the real fight has to take place in the private spheres, in our bedrooms, without our ceremonial wigs; racism is a matter of perception, and no amendment can change that. With this scene, Spielberg is inviting us to take this legal victory in our own hands and carry it on in our private life, because it’s only there that it can make sense, and it’s only through our everyday actions that we can make it true. In a number of ways, the movie is pointing to the present, by presenting Lincoln almost as a ghost-like figure, which walks away from us in his last scene, as if his ideals are not accessible to us anymore, although they could still show us the way forward (for example, the call for peace through his speech in the last scene). But we should not wait for the government to move, because ultimately we are responsible for the society we live in. </span></div>
Sylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2882815174745926563.post-61539732882347167302013-04-05T21:18:00.000-04:002013-09-11T21:21:36.035-04:00To Kill Or Not To KillIn the past week, I’ve been having a little back and forth with Joel Goodwin on his blog <i><a href="http://www.electrondance.com/">Electron Dance</a></i> about ethical choices as they are currently depicted by videogames. As my answer to his last comment grew and grew, and as I realized that I was not arguing anymore, but restating Goodwin's argument in my own words, I thought it would be best to develop it here more fully, as a sort of addendum to my article on <i><a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/03/the-illusion-of-choice_8.html">The Illusion of Choice</a></i>.<br />
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I first intervened on his blog (on the <a href="http://www.electrondance.com/if-all-you-have-is-a-knife/">last part</a> of his excellent series on <i>Dishonored</i>) to comment on this comparison: “The ethical choice of <i>Dishonored</i> and <i>Bioshock</i> is artificial, as worthless as the "trolley problem", <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem">a popular thought experiment in ethics</a>. Here's the cut-down version of the trolley problem: five people will die unless you throw a switch in which case only one person will die. There are variations of the problem but basically Spock said it best with "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few"” My main argument was that the ethical choice in these videogames is more meaningful than the trolley problem because they appear in the context of a precise narrative. In a sense, we should not considered these choices from the point of view of the player (what would I do?), but rather from the one of the fictional character controlled by the player (what would Corvo do?), just like in any other narrative medium dealing with ethics – and unlike the trolley problem, which exists in a vacuum. I still agree with that part, but I would retract from the rest of my argument now and propose instead, as Goodwin did, that this narrative meaning doesn’t make these choices less hollow. In fact, such a context is exactly why we should not even qualify them as “ethical” in the first place. <br />
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Let’s talk of ethics before coming to videogames: I do not think it is possible to meaningfully talk of ethics in general terms, apart from a specific situation. I do not believe it is possible to establish some kind of universal law, or universal value, that we could evenly apply to every situation. We can only evaluate each unique circumstance and try to see what could be the “best” option in this particular case. There is no generalities in ethics; only specifics. I mean, some principles can be adequate almost anytime – I could say for example that no harm should ever be done to an unwilling human being, but the concept of “unwilling” is muddy, to say the least, and can be interpreted in various ways, so even though this principle is true most of the time we still have to consider the specifics of each situation in order to evaluate how exactly “unwilling” (or “harm”) may apply to this context. <br /><br />
He’s not the go-to philosopher when it comes to ethics, and he’s far from the best thinker on the subject (Spinoza is king there), but Wittgenstein’s ideas on the matter will be quite useful here. As he wrote in his <i><a href="http://www.galilean-library.org/manuscript.php?postid=43866">Lecture on Ethics</a></i>: “the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language”. It doesn’t mean that we should avoid talking of ethics, but that our language cannot adequately express something like an “absolute truth” or a “greater good”, frequent expressions in ethics that have no meaning of their own, but instead a contextual meaning that has to be derived from the situation in which they were used. For Wittgenstein “ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts”. Some propositions are not suitable for language, or more exactly cannot be said but only shown, and ethics are among them. In other words, our language may be inadequate to express ethical concerns, general expressions like “absolute truth”, “greater good” and so forth, but it is able to describe a particular situation, and work from there; philosophy is an operation of logical clarification, of elucidation. <br /><br />
Coming back to our trolley problem, we could say that Spock’s “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” is one of these problematic ethical proposition when we consider it apart from the context in which Spock uttered it, but that the trolley problem is better because it is a description of a situation that raises the same question; the trolley problem shows an ethical question, while Spock tries to say it (this is not exactly true, since Spock’s intentions alter the apparent meaning of his words, but I’ll come back to this). This thought experiment is indeed better than Spock’s proposition (again, when taken on its own), but it is still quite awkward, mainly because the description is extremely limited and artificial. This artificiality is due largely to our a priori knowledge of the consequences for each possible action: I can either pull the switch and kill someone or not do it and let five persons die. In real life, an ethical dilemma is difficult precisely because we can never know these consequences beforehand: how can I be absolutely sure that pulling this switch will kill only one person, and not two or three, or that it’s going to work at all? Will I even think of pulling that switch?<br />
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Ethics deal primarily with uncertainties, so the trolley problem is rigged from the start, and can justify dubious behaviors: like Goodwin said in the comments, this kind of artificiality allows us “to make those Jack Bauer decisions”. If I can be absolutely certain that the only way to save the lives of millions of people is to torture this one guy in front of me, then maybe I will consider this option viable; but never in real life will such a clear-cut situation occur, unlike what movies or TV shows often try to imply. I can never know if torture is going to give me the information I need (hell, we even know now that torture doesn’t lead to reliable information), nor can I know if this is the only possible action. For Goodwin, this is what videogames do when they offer only two options (apart from quitting the game): in <i>Dishonored</i>¸ I can either kill my target or make it “disappear”, usually in some dubious manners. The game gives me some agency, but prevents me from refusing this dirty work or engaging in any kind of diplomatic talk, so it tricks me into thinking like Jack Bauer in order to justify the murder I have to commit, or at least the “disappearance” I have to arrange, as if there was no other possibilities. In a movie, it would be easier to question the protagonist’s motives and distance myself from his actions; but in a game, I have to make the choice and carry out these actions, or else there’s no game, or at least I’m not playing it. The distance between the protagonist and me is gone, and I am thinking, à la Bauer, “there is no other choice”, when clearly there is.<br /><br />
In my reply to Goodwin I disagreed with this idea, by arguing that the narrative context shapes the meaning of these so-called ethical choices, even though they are undoubtedly artificial when you consider them apart from the game. I was thinking mainly then of the Little Sisters’ choice in <i>Bioshock</i>, which is quite artificial and hollow, but the structure of this choice is meaningful inside the narrative of the game. As <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/03/the-illusion-of-choice_8.html">I discussed before</a>, this artificiality is pretty much the point: the act of choosing and the subsequent rewards force the player to adopt an Objectivist’s perspective on these Little Sisters, who become nothing more than a resource in the player’s mind. It is true for <i>Bioshock</i>, but then again it is that rare game where choice is deliberately structured to be artificial, because this artificiality is the game’s subject, so it’s only one exception – another proof that we cannot think in absolutes (and incidentally, it is pretty much what the game is about: the inflexibility of Andrew Ryan’s ethics leads to the fall of Rapture). In other words, Goodwin was right: in a game like <i>Dishonored</i>, the so-called ethical choice to kill or not to kill is dubious at best and leads to those Jack Bauer moments.<br /><br />
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And I should have known because this is precisely what I was aiming at in my article on <i>Bioshock</i> (and because I read the <i>Ethic of Computer Games</i> not so long ago, in which Miguel Sicart addressed the same issue): our choices are shallow because we cannot escape the game’s philosophy. In <i>Dishonored</i>, if I choose the violent path, the game will react accordingly: the player’s blade becomes bloody, the world is meaner, the “chaos” meter is higher (essentially more people to kill, Weepers and rats), and there’s a different ending in some characters’ narrative arc. These reactions are logical from the perspective of the fiction (if I murder every guard on duty, surely the authorities are going to double their security system), but these consequences are far from “neutral”, ethically speaking, since we know they have been designed and conceived by someone else: the game has a point to make (violence breeds violence) and this system exposes its own set of ethics. In <i>Dishonored</i>, I can choose to be murderous, but I cannot choose what “violence” means in this context: the game already has the answer for me. <br /><br />
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So, I wasn’t completely wrong because the narrative does change our reading of this choice: the trolley problem aim to ask if it is ethical to sacrifice one human in order to save many, not only in that trolley situation, but in every situation where a similar question could arise. It’s an exemplification of a general ethical problem. This is not the case with <i>Dishonored</i>: the game doesn’t try to argue that diplomatic talk is impossible in every situation, but that for this character, in this fictional universe, in this situation, discussing is not an option. The player cannot talk his way out of a murder because silent Corvo would not do it – and it's up to the player to decide why he won't (this is the whole problem, as we will see). <i>Dishonored</i> is much more specific than the trolley problem, and in that regard it is less troublesome, but this doesn’t completely invalidate Goodwin’s argument.</div>
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A real ethical choice entails an amount of free will (and free thinking) that is just not possible in a videogame (or at least in current videogames). In real life, when I choose one option over another, I’m making an ethical decision because I can also decide what my actions mean. My choice will have consequences in the real world, but since they will not be designed by another fellow human being (they’re “natural” consequences instead of artificial ones), I will be able to interpret them (or ignore them) as I see fit. There is no ethical choice in <i>Dishonored</i>, but a representation of an ethical choice, which is not at all the same thing. In that sense, it may seem similar to how a movie would represent the same dilemma, but there is a major difference: Corvo has no real psychology of its own, except a desire for vengeance, and the player is supposed to fill this empty vessel. Coming back to Wittgenstein, this is quite a problem: the choice to kill or not in <i>Dishonored</i> is like a description of an ethical situation, less one of its most important aspects… the consciousness of the human being engaged in it.<br /><br />Let’s compare with movies: when Spock says “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” in front of a camera, we have more than a simple ethical proposition: we have an individual who says this proposition. And how he says it is as much important as the content of the sentence or the context in which he uses it. This is as good as description as we can get: a precise event, and a defined individual, whom we know not only from his words but also from his body and his actions. Incidentally, when we analyze this scene in <b><i>Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan</i></b>, we can see that these words do not really correspond to the trolley problem because at this moment Spock is trying to justify his own self-sacrifice. As far as I know (my knowledge of <i>Star Trek</i> is pretty superficial), Spock is an utilitarian, but somehow I doubt he would accept the same proposition if he had to order the death of someone else, which is what the trolley problem is about. Superficially, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” apply to both the film and the thought experiment, but these two contexts change our understanding of these words; and no doubt that in <i><b>Star Trek</b></i>, they are far more complex and subtle. Sure, this is still a representation, far less complicated than a real ethical situation, and one under the control of an artist, but a description will always be simpler than real life, even in an academic philosophical context. There are a lot of nuances to be made here, especially since I didn’t talk of the relation of the artist towards his subject (does the filmmaker agree with its protagonist, take a distant, “neutral” approach, or ridicules him for his behavior?), but my point is that a good movie, with its unique relation towards reality (the ability to present real human beings in movement), can offer the best description possible of an ethical situation (there is a lot to be said about this, but I’m preparing a longer paper on a similar subject, and I don’t want to stray too far from the one at hand).<br />
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In <i>Dishonored</i>, Corvo doesn’t say anything; I can role-play as much as I want and shout any ethical maxims at my computer screen, the game will never take this into account. Why I kill is not important, the game only considers my action – but in ethics, the “why” is the whole matter, and where the real conundrums arise. For example, almost everybody will agree that the act of killing another human being is not good, but the opinion is much more divided around the death penalty issue. Circumstances and intentions change our reading of the same action. In <i>Dishonored</i>, in a way it seems like the game wants to give me some interpretative freedom: since he’s mostly blank, I may do what I like with Corvo, and interpret him as I see fit. But how can I reconcile this with the fixed ethics of the game, that will implicitly condemn violence in the same authoritative manner whatever are my intentions? For the most part, I do agree with this outlook: I condemn the use of violence as well, but knowing why violence was used would greatly nuance my judgment, which the game cannot do. <i>Dishonored</i> thus presents an ethical statement that will not consider the most important aspect of the situation represented: the human consciousness. With this lack of nuance, and of what constitutes ethics in the first place, how can this be considered as an ethical choice? <br />
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I ask the question about <i>Dishonored</i>, but it could be addressed to any Bioware games or most videogames that try to depict ethical dilemmas – well, we cannot speak in absolute, so the question will be slightly different for each game, and we would have to see how they all structure their own choices. We can say, though, that unlike movies, videogames struggle to present a good description of a given situation because they cannot take into account the player/protagonist’s intentions (and I’m thinking mainly of single player games, because a discussion about MMORPGs would be completely different). It must be said that in that regard <i>Dishonored</i> is way more subtle than most games: in <i>Mass Effect</i> for example, the important choices are judged a priori by the game, by telling you that the action you’re about to take is either Paragon or Renegade. In <i>Dishonored</i>, this judgment doesn’t come from a similar external moral meter, but rather from the ludic system itself (more enemies), or simple representational aspects (the bloody blade). The player has more interpretative space, and doesn’t necessarily see his actions in a clear-cut manner like in <i>Mass Effect</i>, but then again there is only one main choice (to kill or not), repeated throughout the game (in front of every enemy, really), without much nuance (except when it comes to the main targets). <br /><br />
But as Goodwin says, when you see this choice from the perspective of the game, this does make sense: the path of killing or not killing is best viewed as a preferred playstyle, more than an actual ethical decision. And as a game, <i>Dishonored</i> is quite accomplished; but as an attempt to include ethics in its ludic system, it’s a failure. A failure, maybe, but a meaningful one, which is more than what most game can claim for. Just like philosophy tries to push against the boundaries of language, the inclusion of ethical choices in videogames seems like an attempt to push against the boundaries of videogames own language. This endeavor, although seemingly hopeless, is far from being worthless. After all, ethics are an essential aspect of what it means to be human; any attempt to introduce this human element in one the most questionable aspect of the videogame industry, its love affair with extreme violence, is more than welcome.Sylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2882815174745926563.post-272455619287316922013-03-23T09:25:00.000-04:002013-09-11T21:21:36.006-04:00Videogames as PossibilitiesLet’s resume what I said in my last two articles: on one hand, the <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/03/the-protean-form-of-videogames.html">representational aspect</a> of videogames is always shifting, in the sense that the moving image in front of the player is different in each playthrough, and that no two players will ever see the same game in the same way. On the other hand, we should not forget that the mechanics governing the movement of this image are quite fixed, and are not wholly under <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/03/the-illusion-of-choice_8.html">the player’s control</a>, because it is the designer who decides how much freedom exactly he’s going to allow in his game. Our question now: what lies between these two extremes of the player’s agency and the designer’s control?<br />
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In one word: possibilities. So, here’s my proposal: instead of Sid Meier’s “game as a series of interesting decisions”, let’s try out “game as a series of interesting possibilities”. Or even better: “a good videogame is a series of interesting possibilities”, because I’m thinking mainly here of videogames (although I think this qualitative statement can also stretch out to traditional games), and I’m less trying to understand what games are than what games are good at. Truth be told, I’m not fond of definition (that’s usually when name-dropping Wittgenstein is expected), and this is not a rigorous academic paper, so consider this idea as a modest proposal, without any presumption of being all-encompassing or definite. Still, I have my reasons: I prefer thinking in terms of “possibilities” because it stands closer to this intersection of player and designer while “decisions” puts the focus on the player. These decisions have been designed beforehand, so the designer is not completely neglected in Meier’s canonic definition, but it’s the player who ultimately decides, and therefore the emphasis is on him. “Possibilities”, though, is probably closer to the designer’s end, because he created these possibilities in the first place, but it also represents how the player sees a game, how he experiences it: “this or that may happen, I may do this or not, etc.” Also, “possibilities” is more inclusive since it can cover these so-called not-games like <i>Proteus</i> or <i>Dear Esther</i>, in which the player doesn’t have a lot of options, even though these games are rich in possibilities (the procedurally generated island of <i>Proteus</i> or the random selection of the fragmented narration in <i>Dear Esther</i>). It thus removes the idea of challenge, which I do not find necessary: to use a classic example, how is Snakes & Ladders challenging? The player has no decision to make (he merely follows the dice), but the game is fun because of its numerous possibilities, which are born out of the game’s design, the careful arrangement of snakes and ladders on the board. <br />
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In short, I prefer “possibilities” because of its inclusiveness, and because I’m more interested in how a game presents itself as a series of possibilities than in the decision-making process that goes inside the player’s head. As I stated in my <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/03/the-illusion-of-choice_8.html">last article</a>, videogame criticism should not focus on what the player actually decided to do in his playthrough, but on the fact that he was confronted with a choice to begin with. And this is what “possibilities” refers to: not exclusively to one player’s experience of the game, but also to all possible experiences of the game. This is the key difference between videogames and traditional art forms: like I wrote in my <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/03/the-protean-form-of-videogames.html">first article</a>, a videogame critic has to review an object that will never appear again in the same way he encountered it, and that he probably didn’t fully explore, maybe didn’t even finish. What would be inexcusable in film criticism (leaving a theater before the end of a movie you have to review) is pretty much expected in videogames criticism, at least for longer games or MMOs (even for the average 6-8 hours games, we don’t ask reviewers to evaluate every difficulty level, find every collectibles and hidden passages, or unlock all achievements). Like Richard Terrell said recently, the "<a href="http://critical-gaming.squarespace.com/blog/2013/2/11/the-full-experience-points.html">full experience</a>" of a game is an elusive concept.<br />
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I think “decision” doesn’t properly convey this elusiveness typical of videogames: after a decision is made, a game seems more linear than it really is, because our decision transforms one of the game’s possibilities in an actual event. One playthrough of a game is a linear experience, but it does not constitute the entirety of what a game can be; as <a href="http://www.esquire.com/features/chuck-klostermans-america/ESQ0706KLOSTER_66">Chuck Klosterman</a> proposed some years ago, instead of “what does this mean” maybe we should ask “what <i>could</i> this mean”. A game is ever-changing, but the process of deciding is always the same, even though the decisions themselves are not. Focusing on “decision” thus hides the protean form of videogames by referencing a well-known process that we can experience daily. “Possibilities” though is harder to define, partly because strictly speaking they don’t exist: by definition, a possibility is something that could be but never will, because if it does happen it’s not a possibility anymore but something real.<br />
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Let’s take the most essential possibility in most games: losing. Winning a game is satisfactory because I could have lost but didn’t. The possibility of losing enhance my winning (or more exactly make it possible, because if I can’t lose, I cannot really win either), but the fact of losing is less satisfactory than its mere possibility. We can say then that the possibility of failing is interesting as long as it remains a possibility – it’s true though that failing isn’t always frustrating, and that the more we fail beforehand, the more we’re going to savor our victory, so it’s best if losing doesn’t remain at all time a possibility, at least when challenge is an important part of the game design. In our last attempt though, when we do win and finish the game, this time we didn’t lose, but we could have failed again, and for this last try losing remained a possibility. The other times we lost before just help to make this possibility even more potent. A good game, then, is a game where losing represents an interesting possibility, where failing is integrated in the gameplay in a meaningful way (<i>Dark Souls</i> would be a good example).<br />
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For most games, there are at least two possible meaningful possibilities: losing and winning. In a narrative game, the knowledge of the various possibilities offered by the game informs how we value our own playthrough: the more options I have for customizing my character in a RPG, the more my avatar is going to feel personal because of all the other possibilities I did not choose. We tend to forget these possibilities we didn’t explore when we talk about a narrative game: when we analyze a game like <i>Mass Effect</i>, we do not speak of all the times Shepard died and was miraculously reborn. The numerous deaths of our Shepard are apocryphal or alternate universes that we put aside when we tell the game’s story, but we shouldn’t because they are an integral part of the game, even if it doesn’t make much sense story-wise. The Reapers feel like a real threat because I can die while trying to stop them, so the challenge helps me understand the difficulty of Shepard’s task (it’s not challenging enough considering the nature of the Reapers, but this is <a href="http://ontologicalgeek.com/the-call-of-leviathan-mass-effect-and-lovecraft/">another discussion</a>). In a movie, I can feel the danger indirectly, when the movie tries to suggest that a character could die, but this possibility is artificial because the story is fixed and pre-determined, while in <i>Mass Effect</i> Sheppard can really die at any moment. <br />
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Most narrative games use the player’s failure in this manner, by offering a challenge that supposedly mirrors the one the character is going through. In such a game, actually failing is not interesting plot-wise, because it creates incoherence in the story (unless you stop playing after your first death, but this usually makes for a rather short and disappointing game); however, the possibility of failing is meaningful, because it can enhance our identification with the character. <i>Mass Effect</i> is a representation of the challenge Shepard is facing, and the game expresses itself partly through the various possibilities it offers (obviously in such a RPG, which focuses on player’s decision, there is a lot of other meaningful possibilities besides the character’s death). This is where the unique expressiveness of videogames lies: in what can happen but didn’t, more so than in what the player really did. Or, more aptly put, the value or the meaning of what the player did comes chiefly from the other possibilities that remain as such in the course of a playthrough. <br />
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Hence this proposal, which I will try to adopt on this blog: a good videogames is a series of interesting possibilities.Sylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2882815174745926563.post-75926916220667981432013-03-08T21:18:00.003-05:002013-09-11T21:21:36.044-04:00The Illusion of Choice<div style="text-align: left;">
<i></i>“A game is a series of interesting decisions.” We all know this famous assertion made by Sid Meier (does anyone know when and in which context he said it, or do we just have to take it for granted because it has been repeated so many times that it became its own truth?), but what did he mean by “interesting decisions”? </div>
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Let’s take strategy games, maybe the more “gamey” genre of game,<i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">or</span> at least the one closer to traditional games, and the one Meier is renowned for: they’re a precarious balancing act, where every decision must lead to various consequences, preferably with some degree of unpredictability, or else there’s no strategy at all, just an optimal tactic that will work in every situation. But in a narrative-centric game, what makes a decision interesting is completely different, and is not necessarily coherent with what would be best from a purely ludic’s perspective: for example, it is not always wise to present equally seductive rewards when a player has to choose between a “good” and an “evil” option. The designer would say we should not penalize a player for prefering one or the other path, because who will want to be “good” if the game becomes dull or too hard or too easy? But what does it say, from the point of view of ethics, when a game presents such “interesting decisions”, based on a system of rewards? <br />
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In my last article, I deliberately exaggerated the formlessness of videogames (surely, all players will experience a narrative linear game like <i>Uncharted</i> in quite a similar fashion, unlike the players of an open-world game like <i>Skyrim</i>), so now I want to go to the other extreme: there’s no real player agency in a game, because every decision has been design beforehand, and in that sense, videogames are closer to traditional arts than what we generally admit. The critic, then, should not focus on what choice he made and how much fun he had when following this and that option, he should rather analyze the structure of the choice itself, how the designers present these options, and what such a design means. <br />
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Ken Levine's <i>Bioshock</i> is the canonic example of a videogame directly addressing this problem of the player’s freedom: with its famous plot-twist, the revelation that the main protanogist was mind-controlled since the beginning by Atlas/Fontaine through certain key words like "Would you kindly", the game tells the player that he never really had any agency, and that he was simply following Atlas/Fontaine/the designer’s will*. Whatever you do in a game, even in the most open playground, your actions will always be restricted by what the game allows, and more essentially by what kind of philosophy sustains the game’s experience; in order to progress in <i>Bioshock</i>, the only thing you can do is follow Atlas’ instructions, and espouse <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_%28Ayn_Rand%29">Randian Objectivism</a>, or more exactly, the Objectivists' ethics (which I will summarize rapidly through Ayn Rand's own words: "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute".)</div>
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In an oft-quoted <a href="http://clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2007/10/ludonarrative-d.html">article</a> about the ludonarrative dissonance in <i>Bioshock</i>, Clint Hocking analyzed the choice of harvesting or saving the Little Sisters as a manner to present through the game’s mechanics this philosophy of Objectivism depicted in the story. For Hocking, the player can either accept this philosophy (by harvesting the Little Sisters in pursuit of the player’s self-interest) or reject it (by saving them). In the context of the game, harvesting them seems like the “best choice”, so to speak: “The game literally made me feel a cold detachment from the fate of the Little Sisters, who I assumed could not be saved (or even if they could, would suffer some worse fate at the hands of Tenenbaum). Harvesting them in pursuit of my own self-interest seems not only the best choice mechanically, but also the right choice. This is exactly what this game needed to do – make me experience – feel – what it means to embrace a social philosophy that I would not under normal circumstances consider.”</div>
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The dissonance, then, comes from the freedom of either choosing or rejecting Objectivism through the Little Sisters, while the narrative specifically emphasizes the player’s lack of freedom, which would be quite a patent contradiction if it was true. But I don’t think it is. As Hocking says, the Little Sisters’ mechanic serve to impose on the player a particular mindset, but it doesn’t work as he describes: no matter what the player actually chooses, the game still forces him to see his decision through an Objectivist lenses, because mechanically speaking the Little Sisters are nothing more than a precious resource. Some players probably rescue them without even considering the alternative, because they see them as children and nothing more, but I suspect most people are carefully measuring the two options (I know I did), and probably more than once, maybe each time a new Little Sister appeared: in order to survive, how much Adam do I need? Can I live with 200 Adam, or do I need 300? From the moment a human life can be calculated in such a way, we do not see this individual for what he is (unique thus immeasurable), and we adopt, consciously or not, an Objectivist perspective towards him (he becomes a mean to an end, or, to use a vocabulary closer to Rand's philosophy, he's objectified in a manner that suppress his subjectivity). If the game wanted us to be able to reject Objectivism (from within the game’s fiction that is, because as a thinker outside the game I can freely form my own ideas about it, but I’ll come back to this), no rewards would be given when the player rescue the Little Sisters: they would either be a resource or not at all.<br />
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And this is precisely the point: in almost every game I can think of, ethical choices such as the Little Sisters’ one are presented in a similar manner, offering different rewards for each possible paths. In RPGs, even the most altruist action will be rewarded, minimally, by experience points: from a design’s perspective, NPCs are resources, and I can never really help them selflessly, because I know that whatever I do will make my character progress. Helping others is first and foremost a way to build my own power, and videogames will constantly show how my actions are shaping the world, effectively demonstrating my supremacy over it – but oh, so rarely does the world affect me! It’s a one-way relation: the world has been build specifically for me, everything in it is put to my service, everyone I encounter has been designed to help me become more powerful (if they’re an obstacle, I defeat them and get experience points; if not, I can help them and get experience points, or they can join my team and help me get experience points, etc.), and everything is a mean for my personal pleasure as a player. In that context, the player’s freedom is quite shallow because whatever I choose will be framed in such an Objectivist’ perspective, where every individual I will encounter can be substitute by a numerical value that I can just add up until I reach the level cap. Outside of the game itself, a player can decide to ignore these rewards, or play a good guy because he genuinely wants to be a good guy, but this is not what the game is thinking itself through its mechanics: this is what the player is thinking <i>despite</i> the game. </div>
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Like any other art form, videogames present a perspective on the world, and through this kind of design, of “interesting decisions”, they tell us that every action should be rewarded, and that helping others is good as long as it helps you become more powerful. And like any other art form, I can agree or not with this perspective, but I cannot do it within the game’s perimeter: I cannot refuse to receive any Adam, and totally ignoring the Little Sisters is not helping because they will remain zombies chained to their Big Daddy; the only thing I can do to reject the Objectivism <i>Bioshock</i> forces on me is to quit the game. (I feel like I’m repeating myself a bit, but I think these ideas are not so easy to grasp, or at least I have a hard time defining them properly!)</div>
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As it was often said, <i>Bioshock</i>’s plot-twist is a metaphor for the designer’s control over the player, but more importantly, in conjunction with the Little Sister’s mechanic, it states that whatever the player do, he cannot escape the philosophy behind the game’s design, i.e. Andrew Ryan’s philosophy – which is present not just in <i>Bioshock</i>, but in every videogames adopting a similar approach to ethical choices: Rapture, the underwater world of <i>Bioshock</i>, is a vision of the kind of society that could arise out of the ethics currently depicted by videogames (and the visual design references the 50’s, the golden era of this American dream based on individual triumph, and thus tie this philosophy to the American psyche). Sure, <i>Bioshock</i> is also a mechanically Objectivist game, but unlike others, it puts its own philosophy forward and represents its consequences through the apocalyptic decadence of the game world. It’s not hidden behind the design: it’s right there in front of you. By doing so, the player is made aware of his lack of freedom, and of his obligatory adoption of an Objectivist attitude, and can thus approach this philosophy critically (the game falls apart at the end though, after the big reveal, because the player can get rid of Fontaine’s control and regain his freedom in the fiction, but really the player is still under the control of the designer). </div>
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It’s no secret: videogames are for the most part a power fantasy, and <i>Bioshock</i> is a cautionary tale against this fantasy. The game tries to underline the philosophy at its foundation: videogames are Objectivist tools that serve to provide an illusory power, while foreclosing any possibility of thinking about individuals as if they were, well, individuals. At least, that’s what most videogames do mechanically, through the game’s design, but it doesn’t mean that the fiction cannot be emotionally resonant. This is the real ludonarrative dissonance inside most narrative videogames: a conflict between a plot that tries to depict real human beings (it’s not always convincing, but it’s the intention anyway) and a design that reduces these characters to resources available for the player engaged in a quest for power. </div>
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One of the rare games that successfully sidesteps this dissonance is <i>The Walking Dead</i> (it has its share of problems too, but at least it got its human relationships right, which is a huge accomplishment). No rewards there, no experience points, no quest for power, no kind of numerical values whatsoever, and the only possible reason you can help another character is because you think it’s the right thing to do. The game tends to over-emphasize its choices (at the end of Episode 4 for example, when the guy on the radio ostentatiously tells Lee to carefully choose his next words), but it’s never as annoying as it can get in most games (you know, when time freezes and the game screams at you: YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE! but take your time, it’s the end of the world and all, but we’re going to suspend it until you decide). More importantly, some seemingly crucial decisions have no real consequences: the player cannot change the world through his actions (Lee is going to end up dead anyway), and the diverse ramifications of the plot are mostly superficial. The player does have an influence on the world (surely we all do), but it’s a small one, not one of those save-the-world-before-it-falls-apart or see-how-all-the-places-you-went-have-been-radically-changed-by-your-presence affairs, which serves only to emphasize the power fantasy; mostly, in <i>The Walking Dead</i>, the player can only affect the characters around him. And even then, it remains unusually ambiguous: we don’t know how Clementine is going to turn out. </div>
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Videogames are often quite solipsistic, because who you are as a player shape the world around you, as if the world was only an image of your own self, or as if this world wouldn’t exist without you (which is true, technically, since the game has been designed for the player). But in <i>The Walking Dead</i>, the world is quite indifferent to the player’s presence – not always though: some moments at the end are quite ridiculous, for example when all characters were waiting for my one-arm-soon-zombified Lee to find some solutions, because “only you can do it Lee”. I’m crippled! Why are you all standing there, waiting for me to move? Anyway… The game asks you who you are, sure, but in order to find the answer the player has to look inward, and use his own thinking. The only morality guide here is the character’s reactions to the player’s actions (which is the most valuable one, a dialogue between the diverse experiences of the Others and your own, something Objectivists can't understand with their pretense of objectivity). This absence of a paternalistic morality gauge (paternalistic in the sense that the game judges your actions for you, like the Paragon/Renegade system in <i>Mass Effect</i>) is coherent with the narrative: in this dying world, where even death is not what it’s used to be, you must find your own meaning. Instead of Objectivism, <i>The Walking Dead</i> offers agnosticism: there’s no definite answer, only a constant doubt.<br />
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What is an “interesting decision” then? Mechanically speaking, the choice between a “good” option that will boost my healing abilities or a “bad” option that will increase the amount of damage I can inflict is an interesting one, if the two options are adequately balanced in the gameplay. From the point of view of ethics though, there’s nothing interesting there (even if the choice is less binary, more ambiguous, than this banal example), because, as demonstrated, the structure underlying this kind of choice implies an Objectivist philosophy (someone could always argue that Objectivism is a good thing, but frankly we should not take this hypothetical detractor too seriously). </div>
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The ethics of videogames is a difficult problem, and I will come back to it from another angle at the end of this series. For the moment, this situation may seem unfortunate (well, it is), but the appeal of videogames lies precisely in their unique form, oscillating between these two extremes of player’s agency and designer’s control. And if videogames possess any artistic possibilities (as I like to believe), they will arise out of this duality. </div>
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* I’m now playing the recently re-released <i>System Shock 2</i>, from the same Ken Levine, and I’m quite surprise it is never mention in this discussion since one of the first plot-twist is quite similar: when you consider that Shodan is an A.I. and thus a self-aware representation of the game itself, which the player has to defeat in order to “win”, the revelation that Polito is dead look as if the game is exposing its very structure to the player. It’s not exactly about player’s freedom, but it's still a game telling its player that he has to follow the designer/Shodan’s will in order to progress; I’ll surely come back to <i>System Shock 2</i> once I finish it.</div>
Sylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2882815174745926563.post-49884890143321296012013-03-01T20:52:00.000-05:002013-09-11T21:21:36.020-04:00The Protean Form of Videogames<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Maybe this can explain why I find videogame criticism so difficult or at least so alien for me, with my background in cinema: it is the only form of criticism relying both on what the critic hasn’t experienced himself and on an object that will appear differently for each player. The videogame critic has to write about an object so fluid that nobody else (not even him) will encounter it again the same way he did. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivQpmbNzBEzxgAApQCAnn1eiub8ZhmbajI0Y2hnRMjaUYTxJvYGJ6rDE8MNjqKzJ80-5QmAUkLwqMT10vX8T9UWrnO-2JzitQYrOlepBdbnfHPe6ZyUjnGE7lzLPUCAprBxYpUZbu_uomy/s1600/Proteus-2013-03-01-%5B96;uP;uB;1151274715%5D-0006.png"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivQpmbNzBEzxgAApQCAnn1eiub8ZhmbajI0Y2hnRMjaUYTxJvYGJ6rDE8MNjqKzJ80-5QmAUkLwqMT10vX8T9UWrnO-2JzitQYrOlepBdbnfHPe6ZyUjnGE7lzLPUCAprBxYpUZbu_uomy/s400/Proteus-2013-03-01-%5B96;uP;uB;1151274715%5D-0006.png" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Sure, seeing a movie in the (usually) respectful ambiance of an almost empty morning press screening is clearly different from seeing the same movie the night of the premiere in a crowded frantic theater, or as seeing it in the comfort of your own sofa, but we’re more or less able to abstract the physical context of our encounter with a movie and concentrate our criticism on the moving images themselves, even if we know that this context contributed to our appreciation. And sure, every individual brings his own experience to an artwork, but in traditional art forms, these subjectivities still confront the same immutable object made by the artist; an artwork may exist only once it’s interpreted, and therefore the same object may produce different artworks (like I wrote <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.com/2012/10/citizen-kane-and-me.html">before</a>, my <b><i>Citizen Kane</i></b> is not your <b><i>Citizen Kane</i></b>), but every spectator should be able to describe the same physical object that sustains each of their unique interpretation. Indeed, an interpretation is only as good as its capacity to properly encompass the whole of an artist’s work, in the most coherent way possible, so it’s not an entirely subjective process.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">If we come back to Arthur Danto’s equation which I quoted in my last <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.ca/2013/02/the-experience-of-art.html">article</a>, normally an artwork (W) results from a subjective interpretation (I) of an immutable object (o): I(o) = W. For a movie, the object (o) can easily be defined by every spectator, because all of them will see the exact same moving images with sound, so the influence of context remains minor. In a game though, this equation doesn’t really stick, because this object (o) is not the same for every player, each playthrough being unique, even in a simple platformer or in the most linear wannabe-cinematic shooter (no two players will press the same buttons at the exact same time at every moment); or, more exactly, the rules of the game constitutes this fixed object (o), but the player doesn’t have a direct access to them (or at least all of them), so he can only gain an approximate knowledge of these rules. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2D0DAwwXbac8eDhEIxu1i9_BPitJQwCiK-YZXdBw1bJRHC64smfnFOuoFqKxnGRFGIUVgPz_mIEYvBrGK0R7gWmeVEvGOGAC61gpn7gthhI2uFX5ZR2lbZG_3swVmD8LHI2ROQUGj-nUl/s1600/proteustree.png"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2D0DAwwXbac8eDhEIxu1i9_BPitJQwCiK-YZXdBw1bJRHC64smfnFOuoFqKxnGRFGIUVgPz_mIEYvBrGK0R7gWmeVEvGOGAC61gpn7gthhI2uFX5ZR2lbZG_3swVmD8LHI2ROQUGj-nUl/s400/proteustree.png" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This is where videogames differ from traditional games: in order to play chess with a friend, we both need to know the rules, or else we’re not really playing chess. But when I play a shooter, I never know exactly how the game calculates the damage I can inflict with my gun, and anyway there’s too many variables: the ballistics, the physics, the type of gun and ammo I’m using, the type of armor (if any) the enemy is wearing, if I shoot the head, the torso or the groin, if the game uses some kind of skill system, is there any possibility that the gun brakes or deteriorates, etc. I’m not even sure we can use the term “rule” in that kind of situation, something like “simulation” seems more apt, although I don’t really like that word (maybe “affordances” would be best, but I’m not familiar enough with the concept to be sure). I know approximately how these “rules” work (I know shooting the head will be more lethal than shooting the feet, or that a shotgun works best at close range, because that’s how it works in real life, or because I played other shooters before), but I don’t know exactly how the game implements them. Even in a simple game like <i>Pong</i>, I know the rules of the scoring system (my opponent doesn’t stop the ball, I get one point), but I do not know exactly how the program calculates the trajectory and the speed of the ball; I can only guess the trajectory depending on the angle from which the ball hit my paddle. The point is: when I play a videogame, I have no direct access to the “rules” (I’ll just stick to that word for lack of a better one), and for the most part I can only “feel” them, through the representational aspects of the game. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We say a videogame “feels” right when the controls are responsive, but more importantly when each action we make find an adequate representation on screen. In a game of chess, I need to know exactly how each pieces move; how I move them (am I clumsy, swift, hesitant, etc.) is unimportant to the comprehension of the game (my opponent can interpret my gestures though, but this has nothing to do with the rules themselves). A game of chess doesn’t “feel” right: it is right. In a sense, more than playing a videogame, we live through its gameplay, discovering as we advance in our playthrough how the simulation works, how to move in this particular virtual space, and how this space reacts to our presence. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc1t9Q0IdyFPTfb1RzyGFtVuo34wt8w7l_j1DtUIgWlDPS3jT4TXt-GtSgRId2Poy6LQ-TUmWXgV7X6H8gUX3PWcF7hH3qIhNAr4gEyAxRjM_QVdO66QqquSX38SXYQjd9fMXa1PaAVCqo/s1600/proteusnight.png"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc1t9Q0IdyFPTfb1RzyGFtVuo34wt8w7l_j1DtUIgWlDPS3jT4TXt-GtSgRId2Poy6LQ-TUmWXgV7X6H8gUX3PWcF7hH3qIhNAr4gEyAxRjM_QVdO66QqquSX38SXYQjd9fMXa1PaAVCqo/s400/proteusnight.png" /> </a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The unique expressiveness of videogames comes mainly from the interrelation between this obscure gameplay (obscure in the sense that we do not know the rules governing it) and the virtual space in which it takes place. Let’s take a game like <i>Proteus</i> – well, not everyone will agree that it’s a game, but I’ll say it is undoubtedly a videogame, which is not the same thing (a little aside: I think it would be wise to understand videogames on their own terms, and see traditional games only as a close parent, but not as the same individual). By reducing its gameplay to the bare minimum (walking and sitting), <i>Proteus</i> gets to the core of what a videogame is: the exploration of a virtual space sustained by unknown rules. Just like every playthrough of any game is unique, <i>Proteus</i> randomly generates a new island each time you start the game, an island that will disappear under the clouds as you float over it at the end, never to be seen again. As the title implies, it’s a game about change, about the passage of time (<i>Proteus</i> is a formless Greek deity, as elusive as the sea where he lives). The gameplay is kept to a minimum because the game is not about you, the player, but about the world of the game you inhabit, unlike most videogames that instead focus on how your actions are shaping the world. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">To be precise: my actions do have an influence on <i>Proteus</i>’ islands (animals flee when I approach them, the music changes according to where I walk), but I have no influence on the principal alterations of the world, and this is precisely the point. Is this the same tree I saw before, only pink instead of green? And when winter comes, when this tree is reduced to a naked, scrawny, mournful figure, does he still retain his previous identity, or does he wear a new one, according to my new perception of him? The island is in constant metamorphosis, the colors in particular are always shifting, depending on the time of day or the season, so everything you see will soon disappear under the inescapable pressure of time. And then, at night, strange things can happened, such as a meteor shower or more inexplicable events like this one:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmfGBbTURDzprULdYo5y970DH-v9mfjUjt3-haP3VEhp8XhXQYG4ADJ66__NKS_fgym1GSjwiiUCptQmS7iMpCprFdFsoZaCmpJ0TbDP8xZhH4-kKmMnLfQNUzSnGEqzjBh2Vi0uIbshcs/s1600/proteuswtf.png"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmfGBbTURDzprULdYo5y970DH-v9mfjUjt3-haP3VEhp8XhXQYG4ADJ66__NKS_fgym1GSjwiiUCptQmS7iMpCprFdFsoZaCmpJ0TbDP8xZhH4-kKmMnLfQNUzSnGEqzjBh2Vi0uIbshcs/s400/proteuswtf.png" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNiKlnI6E5Lh7525tlsV_mlzOyTFCiKzR5qTfxhLXfOTq1DtxksKYOJA3z_Aghsy_AlFEjegYdJ6Bs245wCxHXnLJVxMKfYDpmS0Z6AeEdt-r6Kxun4prU2sOQYv9L2b44roVO7brd1i-A/s1600/proteuswtf2.png"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNiKlnI6E5Lh7525tlsV_mlzOyTFCiKzR5qTfxhLXfOTq1DtxksKYOJA3z_Aghsy_AlFEjegYdJ6Bs245wCxHXnLJVxMKfYDpmS0Z6AeEdt-r6Kxun4prU2sOQYv9L2b44roVO7brd1i-A/s400/proteuswtf2.png" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Only during winter does the island become still, but only if you stay below the clouds: as soon as you climb to a higher point, the sky appears again, the setting sun gently spreading its rosy hue on the clouds at your (virtual) feet, moving, alive, nothing like the dark, motionless and heavy mass they were from underneath. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFp5Fm9ECPA4XCX6wLdeaORpk6gBobG58dj_5_0l8jcLfrwR4rSF1bQ5AjBZxPe6VM8mNU7lb7WqtqQIA8YV2Ln27wtiRQV5dUc19zOMLJ7A5ns0WZLsUvDh5iwsCGX5J_ciXnBxga0rl4/s1600/proteuswinter.png"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFp5Fm9ECPA4XCX6wLdeaORpk6gBobG58dj_5_0l8jcLfrwR4rSF1bQ5AjBZxPe6VM8mNU7lb7WqtqQIA8YV2Ln27wtiRQV5dUc19zOMLJ7A5ns0WZLsUvDh5iwsCGX5J_ciXnBxga0rl4/s400/proteuswinter.png" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilMdVDapylZoP7FzM5B1n8H3JaUSy-K3ptuSS_WSb4bw9ImiV82n0MB-4INOTRCbWU9xT7W7jQN0ISnFV0txm30cfYKf6nBUlKKfiwr8CCVHVrFaTvs0mbLMJCcY_-sAVLmGmqnWygzLdi/s1600/proteusabove.png"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilMdVDapylZoP7FzM5B1n8H3JaUSy-K3ptuSS_WSb4bw9ImiV82n0MB-4INOTRCbWU9xT7W7jQN0ISnFV0txm30cfYKf6nBUlKKfiwr8CCVHVrFaTvs0mbLMJCcY_-sAVLmGmqnWygzLdi/s400/proteusabove.png" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> And if you emerge out of them at night, maybe you’re going to find this:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkFPBrfoKle1pKNDicz3PBdtnUQSDViPuAVHpQ15wFn57TlMc9knerlnw4LuKl0-qRKYrpBV0O2JAHAKV-B0P7ZgJOWk23NlQdaJQLGpcqwAZghH2HDMQv7DUzoCOiPy2rd_dMnst7cDrU/s1600/proteusky.png"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkFPBrfoKle1pKNDicz3PBdtnUQSDViPuAVHpQ15wFn57TlMc9knerlnw4LuKl0-qRKYrpBV0O2JAHAKV-B0P7ZgJOWk23NlQdaJQLGpcqwAZghH2HDMQv7DUzoCOiPy2rd_dMnst7cDrU/s400/proteusky.png" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVujEW7E3sTg4cX2FLeucpOhmzjRw5Zwgj59FE_xHErcvtEuxd4tIvdFMM85q-PW2MQ-nnuVJDcQ5-Lq6VghpmAL0EpZZQgs_iYFwf1S02Qrt6BpokebpDZqagbYdsEBcaWlrab4hAevP3/s1600/proteusky2.png"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVujEW7E3sTg4cX2FLeucpOhmzjRw5Zwgj59FE_xHErcvtEuxd4tIvdFMM85q-PW2MQ-nnuVJDcQ5-Lq6VghpmAL0EpZZQgs_iYFwf1S02Qrt6BpokebpDZqagbYdsEBcaWlrab4hAevP3/s400/proteusky2.png" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">What can I do to conserve at least a part of this world before it fades away forever? Well, take a picture. In<i> Proteus</i>, the possibility to grab a “postcard” of the game at any moment, an action which may seem decorative or inconsequential, is the most meaningful one available to the player: freezing the world in a frame is exactly what traditional arts do, so with this mechanic the game offers a contrast between art forms that capture a fleeting impression – by trying to find the best angle, the best instant, that will make comprehensible for the others how this moment appear to the artist – and the unique possibility of videogames to actually live through these changes and witness them from your own ideal angle. Like I wrote in <i><a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.com/2013/02/author-as-style.html">Author as Style</a></i> about Marcel Proust, the world is ever-changing in front of our eyes, anything can instantly shatter a previous impression, fragile as they are, and what we thought we knew becomes something else entirely. Art can stop that movement forward, freeze one of these fleeting impressions or more importantly capture the transitions between them, the continuous movement of conscience, and thus revive through the artist’s vision a part of the world that would have died otherwise. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But obviously <i>Proteus</i> is not the world: it’s a virtual space, a representation made possible by the unique vision of its artists, Ed Key and David Kanaga. The island isn’t made to be a representation of the real world, but an incarnation of the movement of change itself; that’s why we can describe it as an impressionist game: not because of its color scheme, or its low-res visual style not unlike the blurred shapes typical of impressionist’s paintings, but because the game is trying to emphasize the very instability of our impressions, their volatility, just like the impressionists aimed to do. In a sense, the island is the artist’s conscience in movement, into which another conscience, the player, can enter and try to understand by interacting with it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">When I freeze a moment in <i>Proteus</i>, I’m not taking a picture of the world, but a picture of a picture of the world. Through these pictures, I’m commenting on the work of Key and Kanaga, by trying to translate my impression of their game. Taking a picture is a form of criticism, because it’s an image of my experience of the game that I try to share by exposing it (I’ll say I’m not very fond of my postcards though: I don’t think they properly represent the alien beauty of this game, especially a moment like those northern lights, which have to be seen in movement to be fully experienced). It may be why videogame criticism often consists of a narrative of the critic’s playthrough, as we can see a lot with games like<i> DayZ </i>and this kind of emergent gameplay: the elusive nature of videogames forces the critic to find a way to translate it in a stable form, and narration (like pictures in <i>Proteus</i>) is one way to do so. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbcEdXj4kFOj0xycSOPlgMSiU_6OUKptmZWPGGMcgDtCSadwmnvt8DEcPivXnApRhOsUsHGFxvRmUk-d_ppixwfCECkG5nwagpxKJ_xNjYyHJR8q6MEzyG-xLpn2ayVRzTDrV0ALpjZn-F/s1600/Proteus-strangetree.png"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbcEdXj4kFOj0xycSOPlgMSiU_6OUKptmZWPGGMcgDtCSadwmnvt8DEcPivXnApRhOsUsHGFxvRmUk-d_ppixwfCECkG5nwagpxKJ_xNjYyHJR8q6MEzyG-xLpn2ayVRzTDrV0ALpjZn-F/s400/Proteus-strangetree.png" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipO2ccGSyiIxz89fe2COxnA_soX-sgeezHgPeDGh-Ybx-n1hQqTkrorAZoR1OrGdJ5TPHgGIn1E-_mYkmaeqExYqt5E0u50QU7IZmlGp-aNvUMkdCmrM-8UJNqof72DJ32K82dfFg3F5Ml/s1600/Proteus-autumn.png"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipO2ccGSyiIxz89fe2COxnA_soX-sgeezHgPeDGh-Ybx-n1hQqTkrorAZoR1OrGdJ5TPHgGIn1E-_mYkmaeqExYqt5E0u50QU7IZmlGp-aNvUMkdCmrM-8UJNqof72DJ32K82dfFg3F5Ml/s400/Proteus-autumn.png" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">How can I approach something as elusive, unique, and ever-changing as a videogame? How can I review a piece of software that I haven’t completely experienced? Or how can I share an artwork that only me will ever see in the precise way I encountered it? I thought I would begin this text with these questions, but they're more appropriate as a conclusion, since I don’t have any definite answer for them: my article may seem to lead to the idea that the videogame critic (or any player really) is a sort of artist himself, restoring order in the virtual worlds of the videogame’s artists through his writing, and while I think there is some truth to that idea, it would be wise not to push it too far. After all, some modesty is in order: if videogames tend to encourage the player’s creativity, especially in an open-world design, we should not forget that the player’s freedom will always be restricted by what the design allows. And, more importantly, the artist's creation is a unique window on the world, whereas the narrative, or the pictures, of a critic's playthrough is only a retelling of something already existing. That's why my postcards of <i>Proteus</i> seem kind of void: not only are they a poor substitue for the actual experience of the game, because of their lack of movement, they're also a representation of a representation. So, as a critic I should not focus on what I did (these postcards) with the tools at my disposal, but on how the artist allowed me to be creative: it's the possibility of sharing postcards which is meaningful, not my postcards. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Like I wrote above, this action of taking a picture in <i>Proteus</i> represents an idea of art, of the nature of art, but by executing this action, I do not become an artist, because I'm only acting inside a virtual world, following pre-defined parameters. My actions are mere illusions; meaningful ones (in the context of Proteus at least), but illusions nonetheless.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>to be followed...</i></span></div>
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Inspirations:</div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />Ian Bogost's <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/186735/proteus_a_trio_of_artisanal_game_.php">A Trio Of Artisanal Game Reviews</a><br />Ed Key on <a href="http://www.visitproteus.com/what-are-game/">What Are Games</a><br />Chris DeLeon on <a href="http://www.hobbygamedev.com/spx/games-are-artificial-videogames-are-not-games-have-rules-videogames-do-not/">Games Are Artificial. Videogames Are Not. Games Have Rules. Videogames Do Not.</a></span></div>
Sylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2882815174745926563.post-42943209800143255062013-02-15T09:18:00.001-05:002013-09-11T21:21:36.013-04:00The Experience of Art<div style="text-align: left;">
I should have learned by now: never announce an article that is not yet written. I will not answer (for now) the questions raised at the end of my <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.com/2013/02/author-as-style.html">last article</a>. I want to write about videogames, but strangely every time I begin an article on the subject, I struggle with my ideas and come back to what I’m more comfortable with: cinema, authors, nature of art, Spielberg, etc. Maybe all those numerous re-definitions of what games are (or not) are confusing me, and now I just can’t grasp the concept anymore? I don’t know, but for now, I have an article on my favorite subject, criticism, which is going to lead, hopefully, to another one on videogame criticism, and we will then be a little closer to the subject – but it’s another not-yet-written text, so I’m not going to promise anything…<br />
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If it wasn’t clear already: I come to cinema and videogames through the perspective of art. Without directly addressing the “videogame as art” question, I’ll just say that I believe all videogames have the potential to be art, and in the end it’s all that matters. Likewise, not all movies can be described as artworks, but cinema has the potential to produce artworks, so for me all movies should be considered on that level. I don’t even understand what would be the point of doing otherwise, unless you have a very low opinion of criticism and just want to know where to invest your entertainment money. I guess many people are looking just for that, a consumer’s guide, but they’re the ones we should convince that there is more to cinema and videogames than a good way to spend some time. And I guess, also, that for most people this consumer’s guide approach makes more sense with videogames: after all, the first thing we associate with games is “fun”, as if there’s nothing else to look for in a game, or rather as if everything else is tangential to the “fun” factor (it’s partly true for cinema also, but we’re more accustomed to the idea of movies as something more than pure entertainment). Videogames are still struggling to be considered as a “serious” expressive medium, but in order to achieve this, the first step would be to offer good criticism; we have to prove that we can write about games seriously before we can convince an outsider of their value. All this has been said before in the last decade, and it’s not difficult nowadays to find meaningful videogame criticism, but I think we still lack a proper theoretical framing akin to what was auteurism for cinema, something that could reach outside of the (relatively) small videogame community. One could argue that this is exactly what New Games Journalism did in 2004, and while it is undeniable that Kieron Gillen’s <a href="http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/assorted-essays/the-new-games-journalism/">manifesto</a> inspired some important pieces of videogame criticism, I’m not sure it really helped to show how videogames can be important for people who are not a New Games Journalist. <br />
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This is not really surprising, since New Games Journalism’s philosophy is the exact opposite of the <i>politique des auteurs</i>: it asks that we focus on the author of the review instead of the author of the game, so instead of establishing some canonic videogames' authors, we now have a bunch of critics’ authors. It’s a very strange approach, I must say, of which I can’t quite understand the appeal: it seems the idea is to use these (apparently) autobiographical stories to show how videogames can affect someone personally, or to understand how they interact with our everyday life, with the underlying assumption that if a videogame changed our own life, then it must mean that videogames are important. Frankly, this is not the case: if a videogame changed your life, it doesn’t mean anything, except for you, and anyway almost anything can change our life in the right circumstances. For some persons, it happens to be a game, but it could be anything else, so what does it say, really, about games? Not much, but it does say a lot about the writer. Similarly, if a game made you feel something, it doesn't say much, because emotions arise for a lot of reasons, that may or may not be related to the actual mechanics and representational aspects of the game. The real question is why and how the game made you feel this, and what does it say about you, the world, the game, and the relationships between all this.<br />
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I could write a travelogue essay about my discovery and subsequent exploration of cinema, but I would never argue that movies are an essential expressive medium because of their interrelation with my own life; my experience informs my views on cinema, undeniably, but I do not need to directly transcribe the more intimate part of my experience in order to give meaning to my views. In a way, this kind of personal writing centered on the writer’s personal experience may seem related to what I describe in my first <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.com/2012/10/citizen-kane-and-me.html">post</a> on this blog: interpretation is subjective and based on our experience of the work, so there is as much possible interpretations as there are interpreters. “Experience” is a loaded word, appearing in almost every videogame reviews, but it’s difficult to know precisely what each writer means by this term. So, before committing the same mistake of vagueness myself, I’ll go a little technical here, and explain what I mean by “experience” and “criticism”, and then we’ll see how it differs from the kind of “experience” New Games Journalism talks about.<br />
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In his book <i>Transfiguration of the Commonplace</i>, art theorist Arthur Danto used a mathematical equation to illustrate how interpretation functions: I(o) = W. Simply put, there’s this object (o), unchanging, the same one each spectator will see, and this object once interpreted (I) results in the actual work (W). Minimally, we interpret as soon as we perceive, since understanding the story in a movie or what is represented in a painting already requires an interpretation. We usually think of interpretation as giving meaning to something that appears ambiguous or uncertain, like a David Lynch’s movie or an abstract painting for example, but even the simplest plot or representation needs an interpretation to be comprehensible (this blue spot of paint here is the sky, he killed her husband because he was jealous, etc.) The difference is mainly that a movie like, say, <b><i>Inland Empire</i></b>, generates more diverse interpretations than the latest blockbuster, at least plot-wise (a necessary precision because blockbusters can have a lot of hidden sub-texts even though the plot itself is usually as clear as possible).<br />
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Criticism is closely intertwined with interpretation: in general, we can say that criticism measures the worth of an artwork, while interpretation makes sense out of it, but in most cases these two operations cannot easily be separated. Since criticism evaluates the merit of a work (W), which is defined here as the spectator’s interpretation of the object made by the artist, we can say that criticism is a dialogue between a spectator and an artwork, between the critic’s interpretation (I) and this object (o). Like interpretation, criticism begins as soon as a spectator (or a player) is in direct contact with an artwork: crying during a movie is a form of criticism, just like laughing, sleeping, vomiting, thinking, smashing our controller in the case of a game, or any other reactions attributable, at least partially, to our encounter with the artwork. We can laugh for any number of reasons during a movie: because there’s a funny line of dialogue, because a situation reminds us of a similar funny event in our own life, because the movie is so bad that it becomes ridiculous, etc., and each of these reactions already contains an implicit appreciation of the movie; emotions are our first appraisal of our interpretation of what’s on the screen, although we won’t always take them into account in our final verdict (if you cry because a stupid, manipulative melodrama reminds you of a tragic recent event in your own life, you will probably leave that part out of your text) The critic’s job is to take this experience and explain why the movie made him feel those emotions, or think about these ideas, but his readers doesn’t need to know that he actually cried, or laughed, or went to the bathroom; the focus should be on the movie, on how it is able to produce meaning and emotions, not on what happened inside the critic.<br />
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By essence, an artwork asks for an interpretation because there is no art without an interpreter (in Danto’s equation, there is no W without an I). Criticism, when defined as an experience of an artwork, is thus a necessity; there’s no art without criticism. But the emphasis, here, is on the idea of dialogue, of an encounter with a radical Other: an artwork needs an interpretation, just like an interpreter exists only if he’s interpreting something, so an interpret worthy of his name has to interpret something else than himself. Coming back to Danto’s essay, an interpretation isn’t really one if there is no object (o), or at least it doesn’t lead to a work (W); it would be a tautology where I = I. Like I wrote last time while talking about intentionalism, a critic has to focus on the text in front of him, and not on the author’s presumed intention nor on the critic himself.<br />
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I guess my point of view on the autobiographical approach of New Games Journalism is beginning to be quite obvious, but I’ll just add a last definition of criticism, my favorite one, and a perfect, simple summary of my long explanation. Here’s André Bazin: “Truth in criticism isn’t defined by some exactness, measurable and objective, but first and foremost by the intellectual excitement induced in the reader: its quality and amplitude. The critic’s role isn’t to bring on a silver plate a truth that doesn’t exist, but to prolong as far as possible in the intelligence and the sensibility of those who read him, the impact of the artwork.” (my translation) A good critic is a guide, a simple intermediary who uses his knowledge and insight to illuminate an artwork for its possible audience, by underlining the artist’s work. In order to do this, a critic mustn’t step over the artist; on the contrary, the critic has to use his writing to let the artist speaks through it.<br />
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I'm not going to <a href="http://nightmaremode.net/2012/07/indie-devs-vs-new-games-journalism-feedback-loop-21415/">be</a><a href="http://www.lostgarden.com/2011/05/blunt-critique-of-game-criticism.html"><i><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"> </span></span></span></i>the </a><a href="http://www.electrondance.com/the-ethics-of-selling-children/">first </a><a href="http://www.secondquest.vg/2012/12/11/in-praise-of-patricia-hernandezs-gaming-made-me-fallout-2/">one </a><a href="http://www.electrondance.com/after-the-dust-ethics-followup/">to </a><a href="http://www.artfulgamer.com/new-games-journalism-is-dead-long-live-new-new-games-journalism/">say </a><a href="http://thiscageisworms.com/2012/07/20/on-new-games-journalism/">this</a> (that bunch of links meant to show my agreement with <a href="http://thiscageisworms.com/2013/02/13/on-citation-in-video-games-criticism-or-lighting-someone-elses-candle/">Cameron Kunzelman</a> when he wrote yesterday about the importance of quoting, or at least mentioning, the articles that inspired us in order to maintain a conversation with other writers): I’m not against confessional writing per se, but in general it doesn’t make for good criticism, mainly because videogames become a means for another end – a good end, I must say, since most personal writing comes from social minorities, and I do share their concerns about the restrictive point of view adopted by the vast majority of videogames and the discourse around them. From the perspective of criticism though, there’s a major problem here: when someone uses a private experience to talk about an artwork, the object (o) disappears under an interpretation (I) that can exist only in the particular circumstances describe by the critic, and then the meaning ascribed to the artwork seems superimposed arbitrarily. It’s a case of I = I, where the videogame is integrated in an account of the critic’s life until they’re undistinguishable. How the game produces meaning doesn’t matter anymore, on the contrary this kind of essay shows what sort of events lead the critic to found some meaning in a game, a meaning that may or may not be related to what the game is really about. Sure, like I wrote last time, the author’s intention doesn’t matter and the interpreter is the ultimate judge of an artwork, but that doesn’t mean that every interpretation is equally valid. An interpretation doesn’t amount to much if the interpreter doesn’t go out of himself to find it. In short, confessional writing rarely makes for good criticism, even if it can lead to valuable articles.<br />
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This kind of writing is not a problem in itself, but it becomes one when it is presented as an example of good criticism, and because they are by far the most popular articles about videogames on the Internet. I must say I'm quite concerned by this prominence of pure subjectivity, that sometimes explicitly advocates for a complete rejection of reason (I'm not even sure it's possible to separate Reason and Subjectivity, but it's usually how the discussion is framed, more or less consciously), because apparently we must get rid of that dreadful academic, intellectual writing (like, I guess, this article more or less belongs to). But publicizing privacy is pretty much the norm now, and it doesn't disrupt anything, on the contrary it is exactly what society expects at this point, especially on the web. I'm never shocked by a confessional article, nor do I find them disquieting, because I see this exposition of privacy everywhere, on Facebook, reality shows, autobiographies, in how we use our technological gadgets (Apple knows this better than everyone, with their emphasis on the I), on blogs, etc. The rise of the "I" in videogame criticism was quite inevitable, I think, mainly because videogames are part of the current technologies that are re-shaping society in a way that puts us further and further away from the world (it's a bold statement as it is, but I'll eventually come back to it), and because we <i>play</i> games, we enter in their world with a first-person perspective. But it doesn't have to be that way: like I wrote at the beginning, I come to videogames from the perspective of art, and art is far greater than the personal experience of any individual. Alas, confessional writing tends to reduce an artwork into one possible experience, and the artwork is engulfed by the writer's life, when it should be the other way around. My first post on this blog started with the question of the possible existence of a <b><i>Citizen Kane</i></b> of videogames; I do not think there is one, but even if there was, I'm not sure a New Games Journalist would be able to recognize it.</div>
Sylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2882815174745926563.post-26236584943779113782013-02-01T09:01:00.001-05:002013-09-11T21:21:36.003-04:00Author as Style<div style="text-align: left;">
What is an author? Or rather: how does the idea of “author” fit into an interpretation of a work of art?</div>
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Let’s begin by the obvious: <i>The Death of the Author</i>, by Roland Barthes, published in 1968, a famous essay arguing against intentionalism, or what we can call biographical criticism, i.e. interpretation relying on the author’s intentions, or what we know of the author’s life. For Barthes, on the contrary, the coherence of a text comes first and foremost from the reader, who provides its meaning to the text, the author himself being nothing more than the person who happens to write the text. This person, the artist, the facts of his social life or his opinions expressed outside of his texts, all this is trivial, only the work itself matters (although the context of its publication is still important). Analysis must then concentrate on the writing itself, on the style, because “the language speaks, not the author”. But then, what about my <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-cinema-of-steven-spielberg-1-toward.html">two</a> <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-cinema-of-steven-spielberg-2-behind.html">articles</a> on Spielberg, which tried to define him as an author? Surely I must think Spielberg is able to impose his will, or his intentions, on his creation, because what would be the point of analyzing his whole body of work if the fact that these movies were all made by an individual who goes by the name of Steven Spielberg is ultimately irrelevant? And, if we follow the logic of anti-intentionalism to its extreme, if we effectively kill the notion of author in interpretation, how can we even make the difference between a man-made work of art and a pile of garbage aimlessly thrown together by the wind, since both of them are created without intention?<br />
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Obviously, no need to go to this extreme, we just have to understand exactly what Barthes meant, which is more complex than what his provocative title seems to say. His main argument was quite irrefutable: how can we know, for sure, what are the author’s intentions? Surely, when an author writes a sentence, he does so consciously (I know I do), with a precise intention (his words are not coming out against his own will), but nothing can assure us that the intended meaning is the one the reader will perceive, or that the sentence means exclusively what the writer meant. If only the intentions matter, how can we account, in a review, of an intention that cannot be found in the final text? Some years before Barthes, William K Wimsatt and Monroe Beardley raised that same question in their seminal article, <a href="http://faculty.smu.edu/nschwart/seminar/Fallacy.htm">The Intentional Fallacy</a>, published in 1946, the most important statement coming out of New Criticism, an American theoretical movement that dealt mostly with poetry, and which contended, like Barthes, that the writing is more important than the writer. For Wimsatt and Beardley, it is rather difficult, maybe impossible, to really know what are the actual intentions of an author, but even if we knew them, it can be misleading to use these intentions as a measure of the worth of an artwork: “One must ask how a critic expects to get an answer to the question about intention. How is he to find out what the poet tried to do? If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed, then the poem is not adequate evidence, and the critic must go outside the poem for evidence of an intention that did not become effective in the poem.”<br />
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Much have been written recently about <i>Far Cry 3</i>, mostly about its story and its writer, Jeffrey Yohalem, who explained his intentions at large in an <a href="http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/12/19/far-cry-3s-jeffrey-yohalem-on-racism-torture-and-satire/">interview</a> for <i>Rock, Paper, Shotgun</i>. It seems, though, that many critics didn’t play the same game Yohalem intended to make, like John Walker who conducted the interview for RPS, or Brendan Keogh at <a href="http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/01/17/good-intentions/">Unwinnable</a>, who both seem to think the game is plenty of fun, but that it certainly doesn’t work as a critique of the genre. I haven’t played <i>Far Cry 3</i>, so I’m not saying they’re right (although I’m prejudiced enough to think they are), but since Yohalem was so vehement in his interviews, so keen to defend his perspective, I just want to ask him: who cares about your intentions? The game you described, the one you wanted to make, is apparently not the one the critics played, and unfortunately for you their experience of the game can only account for the latter. In his interview at RPS, Yohalem certainly advocates, quite arrogantly I must say, for a purely intentionalist reading of his script: my game is full of irony, so exaggerated and stupid, how can you miss the satire? My intended meaning is the only true interpretation, so listen to me because you’re wrong, you just have to look harder for the clues I left for you. At this point, it’s not even interpretation: if the only thing a critic has to do is find the author’s intentions, then Yohalem’s interview is a better piece of criticism than Jim Rossignol actual <a href="http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/11/21/wot-i-think-far-cry-3-single-player/">review</a>, and critics, who are supposed to interpret an artwork from their experience of it, become journalists, looking for the factual intentions behind it. No need to even play the game, or see the movie: just ask the writer, or the director.<br />
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In his piece for Unwinnable about <i>Far Cry 3</i>, Keogh wrote that: “the artist’s intent isn’t the be-all and end-all of what the artwork means, but neither is it to be entirely discounted. When we judge an artwork as either being a good or a bad piece of art, we are usually judging it in relation to what the author intended to do when they created it – or, at least, in relation to what we surmise are the author’s intentions from the artwork itself.” So we don’t need to declare death to the author until his work becomes formless, like my example of the pile of garbage in introduction; even for Barthes anyway, it’s always implied that an artwork is guided by the author’s intent, however to know them isn’t necessarily important, and certainly not sufficient. I would go further than Keogh, though, and claim that we can entirely discount an artist’s intent; in fact, we have to. For example, my interpretation of Spielberg’s cinema doesn’t revolve around what I assume are his intentions: I hope my reading is close to his real intent, and for the most part I think it is, but in the end it doesn’t matter. When I write a critic, I merely describe what I see, without a thought about what is or isn’t the artist’s intent; I just want to define the ideas that comes to me when I see those images. The value of Spielberg’s cinema comes only from these ideas, which form his perspective on the world; or rather, the value of Spielberg’s cinema as an artwork comes only from these ideas.<br />
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This distinction is important, because in a sense, we could say that, yes, when Spielberg wants to make an action set-piece like the convoy sequence at the end of <b><i>Raiders of the Lost Ark</i></b>, he can make one hell of an action set-piece, and in that regard Keogh is right: we have here an instance where our pleasure in the theater comes at least partly from an adhesion between what we perceive is the author's intent (make an action sequence) and the expressiveness of this intent (it's a thrilling sequence), but this efficiency, although important, has nothing to do with what art is. Art is not a communication exercice, where an artist has to adequately communicate his intentions to his audience: like I wrote before, it's a perspective on the world, and the value of an artwork comes first and foremost from the value of that perspective, which is brought to us through the artist's style, or his mise en scène. More to the point: the work of a true author, a true artist, will always display this personal perspective, by default, because an author's style is always present in his artworks, even the failed ones, even when he fails to properly communicate what we can assume were his intentions (or, more often than not, when an unpredicted meaning comes out of a scene, like the racism in <i>Far Cry 3</i>, which wasn't intended, I hope, by Ubisoft). So, am I suddenly trying to revive the author in order to preserve my love for some of them?</div>
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Not at all. When Barthes writes something like “The Death of the Author”, we need to understand which author, exactly, he wishes the death of: when interpreting a text, we have to dissociate the living person who wrote the book, the social author who has a life and opinions outside of his books, from the literary author that lives throughout his books. The idea of this division between two different authors comes from Marcel Proust, who first defined it more directly in his unfinished essay <i>Contre Sainte-Beuve</i>, that grew and evolved until it became his masterpiece, <i>À la Recherche du Temps Perdu</i>, where this division of the artist functions as one of the book’s main structural device. For example, the narrator is enamored with a novelist named Bergotte, but when he finally meets him in one of Swann’s dinner, he cannot reconcile the Bergotte he knew from the books with the Bergotte he has in front of him. The same goes for Vinteuil, the composer who wrote the musical piece that Swann hears when he falls in love with Odette (Swann knows the piece was written by a man named Vinteuil, but he’s persuaded that it cannot be the same Vinteuil he knows, an acrimonious old man Swann thinks incapable of producing such beauty), or the unnamed narrator himself, who is not Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust, the French novelist born in 1871 with a name as long as his books are, even though la <i>Recherche</i> is partly autobiographical.<br />
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A quick glance at Proust’s views on aesthetics, which is quite close to mine, will prove helpful here: through its numerous comparisons, Proust’s style constantly reflects the interrelations between his narrator’s state of mind, the world around him and art. The artworks (books, music and paintings mainly) quoted by the narrator helps him get a clearer view of the world, or see it in a different way, inaccessible otherwise (like Swann who can only fall in love with Odette when he finds a look-alike in a Boticelli’s portrait, as if he needed the painter’s eyes to see the beauty in his future wife). For Proust, our self is largely determined by the world around it, so as the world changes (not necessarily in a radical way, the simple arrival or disappearance of a new object in our daily life suffice), or as we move in a new environment, our self changes also, and thus who we are change at every moment. Every time these changes in our self occur, an entire universe is destroyed, a way of seeing the world disappears. Our impressions, our emotions, our souvenirs, all are associated with the objects that surround us, as if they’re stored inside of them, and a simple gesture, an odor or a taste, like the famous madeleine in the tea, can awake our past, this lost universe (l’édifice immense du souvenir). Art, then, can capture those fleeting impressions and keep them alive for all eternity: an artwork is an object that stores the artist’s impressions, but unlike other objects, these impressions are made available for everyone. An artwork is the testimony of an artist’s sensibility towards the world. Or, in Proust own words: “The style is by no means an embellishment like certain persons believe, it’s not even a technical matter, it is – like the color for painters – a quality of the vision, the revelation of a particular universe that each of us sees, but that no one else can see. The artist gives us the pleasure of knowing another universe.” (in an interview for <i>Le Temps</i>, 13th November 1913, my translation) And that’s why art is so important: it can restore the world, by making it more complete, both the world and art being incomplete without one another.<br />
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The critic’s job, then, is to define an artist’s style, and as we can see, this has nothing to do with the artist’ intentions, because how an author speaks is more important than what he actually says (although the two are related, obviously, a matter I will return to shortly, in another article). We can now understand Barthes’ argument more clearly: the ideal reader isn’t concerned with the living artist; although knowing his opinions, or be familiar with an author’s life can be useful, a reader must stay inside the text, where he will find the only author that matters, in the language itself, the style. By ordering death to the author, Barthes wasn’t advocating a total relativism, where all readers’ interpretations are to be considered equal; on the contrary, he was asking the critics to come back to the text, the only objective point of reference for every reader. Quoting Proust in an interview, like I just did, can prove useful, because I used it as a reinforcement of a previous argument I made through the literary author (not that you should care, but it was my intent anyway…), just like a gamer could use Yohalem’s interview to validate his own experience if it happens to coincide with the writer’s perspective.<br />
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When it comes to videogames, though, it gets a bit more complicated: is such a concept of author, based on a personal vision, even possible in such an industry? How can the perspective of one individual find his way in such a collaborative effort? Cinema, also an industry, can give us an idea of how it’s possible, but the creation of a videogame, especially in the case of AAA games, is way more complex than the making of a film. And anyway, if the definition of the author I gave here is to be accepted, in order to use it in the context of videogames we must assume that they are an art form, which is not so obvious. But these are questions I reserve for next time.</div>
Sylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2882815174745926563.post-57377023513375181482013-01-17T13:49:00.000-05:002013-09-11T21:21:36.031-04:00Coming soon<div style="text-align: left;">
Well, I never finished my Spielberg’s articles, and now I feel too far away from them to be able to write a proper conclusion. But I just want to clarify one thing before moving forward: although I first intended to, I didn’t include Spielberg’s dramas in my analysis, mainly because it was already long enough and I didn’t want to linger longer on the subject. This omission may seem like they are, in some ways, lesser movies, or that they’re not concerned with the same ideas than their more spectacular brethren, but all of Spielberg’s movies are, indeed, interrelated, and a proper, complete, picture of his cinema isn’t possible without them. Maybe I’ll come back to it someday (when I'll finally see <b><i>Lincoln</i></b>?)<br />
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Now, for what’s coming next: I will slowly come to the subject of videogames, as the subtitle of my blog says I should, by first developing a bit about the notion of the author I lightly touch upon in one of my <a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.com/2012/11/a-thoughtful-love.html">previous article</a>, before trying to see how it can fit in the context of videogames. Both my analysis of Welles and Spielberg were means to implicitly introduce the critical approach I want to apply to videogames: both filmmakers laid down in their movies their aesthetic philosophy, which I tried to outline, while using myself a somewhat similar approach to the one I tried to describe (at least that was the intent). These are two of my closest friend-filmmakers, not so much because of what they think, but more essentially because of how they think. This is probably still vague for now, but I’ll try to make it clearer, starting soon enough. </div>
Sylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2882815174745926563.post-43625023693124900972012-12-10T10:35:00.001-05:002013-09-11T21:21:36.016-04:00The Cinema of Steven Spielberg (2): Behind the ImagesIf the first part of Steven Spielberg’s career can be summarize by a general movement toward the lights in the sky, like Roy Neary in <b><i>Close Encounters of the Third Kind</i></b>, from the 90’s and forward his cinema is exemplified by characters trying to flee artifices that have become dangerous: now, they have to get out of <i><b>Jurassic Park</b></i>’s island.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">I wouldn't follow those lights... </span></div>
<br />This change of course came gradually: it was clearly in effect in <i><b>Jurassic Park</b></i> (1993), the second major stepping stone in Spielberg’s cinema after <b><i>CEot3K</i></b>, but it was first introduced at the end of <b><i>Always</i></b> (1989), where Richard Dreyfuss (Pete) has to learn the responsibilities he eschewed as Roy Neary. Dorinda (Holy Hunter) is constantly trying to keep her aviator lover (Dreyfuss) on the ground, or at least to stop his dangerous behavior. “You’re not a movie hero” she says to him at one point, “you’re not saving any life here”, so no need to seek these narcissistic adrenaline thrills because you got some responsibilities, here with me. Or, if you will, no need for this pure entertainment, or to revel in your own technical virtuosity: cinema has a duty towards reality, and images should not be used to escape from or to hide the real world (as <b><i>Jaws </i></b>already implied). In the last sequence of <b><i>Always</i></b>, Dorinda’s plane crashes in a lake where she lets herself drown, hoping to leave a reality she doesn’t want to participate in anymore. This time, Dreyfuss (remember he’s Spielberg’s alter ego) takes her hand and brings her back on the ground, back to her earthly responsibilities, thus correcting his own decision at the end of <i><b>CEot3K</b></i>. This time, we need to stay with our two feet on the ground, not in the sky or at the bottom of a lake. And if it wasn’t clear enough, when Pete and Dorinda are walking together in one of the last shot, we distinctly hear in the music the characteristic notes used in <b><i>CEot3K</i></b> to communicate with the aliens. <br />
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Admittedly, it’s a rather oblique self-critic, and maybe we wouldn’t even notice it if Spielberg didn’t carry it and develop it further in his later movies, but that’s exactly how we can view movies through the lens of an author: a small scene in an apparently minor movie finds a new meaning when you see it in context with what came before and after. Like I wrote in my introductory post <i><a href="http://uncannypostcards.blogspot.com/2012/11/a-thoughtful-love.html">A Thoughtful Love</a></i>, we follow an author’s images as if they were his chain of thoughts, and the ending of Always is the bridge between <b><i>CEot3K</i></b> and <b><i>Jurassic Park</i></b>. We could always interpret <b><i>Always</i></b> outside of Spielberg’s oeuvre, but then we would miss a large part of what the movie means. This kind of self-reflecting moment is what makes an author so precious, and what makes the experience of his movies so intimate, even when they seem trivial (although I think <i><b>Always</b></i> is quite good).<br /><br />
In 1993, Spielberg brought to the screens two seemingly antagonist productions: <b><i>Schindler’s List</i></b>, a serious movie on the most difficult subject possible, and <i><b>Jurassic Park</b></i>, another light entertainment from the guy who gave us <i><b>the Indiana Jones</b></i>. These dissimilarities are superficial at best: <i><b>Jurassic Park</b></i> is as personal as <i><b>Schindler’s List</b></i>, maybe more so, and together they operate quite a radical rupture in Spielberg’s career, the latter by explicitly presenting the filmmaker’s desire to speak about reality with a new-found maturity, the former by expressing some doubts about his past movies’ aesthetic. With <b><i>Jurassic Park</i></b>, Spielberg was trying to get rid of his reputation as a perpetually amazed child before he could present to the world what he probably considered as his most important and intimate work yet – but in vain, his virtual dinosaurs are renowned for their breakthrough in the special effect department, while they were really a cautionary tale on how these very artifices can go wrong.<br /><br />
So, Sam Neill plays Dr. Grant, an archeologist, but unlike his other spielbergian colleague, Indiana Jones the lone adventurer, Grant has a real job; he’s no fantasy hero. He’s even stuck with a kind of adoptive (and unwanted) family, two children who he has to protect, forcing him to learn his responsibilities as a father. Also, as implied in my introduction, <i><b>Jurassic Park</b></i>’s structure is an answer to <b><i>CEot3K</i></b>: this time, the characters are imprisoned inside the spectacle, in an attraction park from which they try to escape, and when they leave for the sky at the end, they’re fleeing from the island of illusions in order to go back in the real world. Spielberg’s “magic” is now criticize, with the character of John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) standing as another alter ego for Spielberg: they’re both creators of their own <b><i>Jurassic Park</i></b> (the movie and the attraction park), and Hammond’s childish naivety is similar to our usual perception of the filmmaker. By showing how Hammond’s ambitions become dangerous, Spielberg is also raising questions about his own movies and their artifices.<br /><br />
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For example, when the visitors see the dinosaurs for the first time, the spectator shares their wonderment toward these magnificent creatures (at least we’re supposed to): the characters are bewildered by Hammond who successfully recreated through genetics a lost species, while the spectator is astonished by Spielberg’s technical mastery, capable of presenting seemingly realist dinosaurs on the screen. But this is the only moment where wonderment is possible, for us and the characters, because after that everything goes wrong: the dinosaurs are sick, they managed to procreate, they get out of their cages, and the three doctors (Grant, Sattler, Malcolm) repeatedly state their apprehensions toward Hammond’s project. Only the lawyer demonstrates some enthusiasm, but he’s clearly not meant to be a likeable character, and it's no coincidence if he’s the first one killed by this dangerous spectacle of which he saw only the commercial potential. Toward the end of the movie, Dr. Sattler (Laura Dern) confronts Hammond one last time, and he then defends his spectacle in a speech that could have come directly out of Spielberg’s mouth: “You know the first attraction I built when I came down from Scotland was a flea circus. Petticoat Lane. Really quite wonderful. We had a wee trapeze, a merry-go carousel. And a see-saw. They all moved, motorized, of course, but people would say they could see the fleas. “No, I can see the fleas. Mummy, can’t you see the fleas?” Clown fleas, highwire fleas and fleas on parade. But with this place … I wanted to give them something that wasn’t an illusion. Something that was real. Something they could see, and touch. An aim not devoid of merit.” “It’s still the flea circus. It’s all an illusion” answers Sattler, speaking to both Hammond and Spielberg. My cinema was based on illusions, says Spielberg in <b><i>Jurassic Park</i></b>, and now it’s time to go back in the world. <br /><br />
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Not only illusions, should I say, but also potentially dangerous ones, and especially so for the kids, whose parents seem unwilling to educate them on how to interpret an image: in <b><i>Jurassic Park</i></b>, it’s as if Spielberg was saying: “why are you bringing your kids to see my violent movies, my attraction park? See how it’s unsafe for them? See how, as a parent, you need to educate them on how to see a spectacle, how you need to protect them from this horror, like Grant does?” This idea gets clearer in <b><i>Jurassic Park: The Lost World</i></b> (1996) coming after three years of silence, the longest pause in Spielberg’s career (during which he started his production company, Dreamworks): the first scene shows a kid getting eaten alive by dinosaurs, the consequence of inattentive parents letting her roam alone. <i><b>The Lost World</b></i> is darker, more violent, the <b><i>King Kong</i></b> reference (another spectacle gone wrong) gets more obvious, as if Spielberg was shouting and amplifying everything he said the first time, just to make sure that we can now understand him (every important scene from the first movie is treated this way: now there’s two T-Rex chasing a car, or instead of a car hanging from a tree we have a trailer hanging from a cliff, etc.) But it’s more than a louder repetition: Spielberg adds a new dimension by introducing some doubts about his new role as a producer trying to commercialize a successful spectacle. Hammond’s figure is now transposed into the promoter for the dinosaurs hunt who makes the return to the island possible, despite Malcolm’s warnings (who even says to that producer, making the parallel explicit: “This time, you are Hammond.”) It’s a strange movie (although, in some respect, it’s more accomplished than the first one), unsure about the worth of its very existence, which can also explain the somber tone: it feels as if Spielberg, like Malcolm, didn’t want to go back on the island, but he needed to because <b><i>Jurassic Park</i></b> was misunderstood (or not understood at all), so the movie bears his despair and his doubts about this necessary but unwanted repetition.<br /><br />It’s usually said that Spielberg is not as good as he once was, that his best works are far behind him, but actually he became one of the greatest author in Hollywood at the turn of the millennium, with his three sci-fi masterpieces, in which his thoughts on images took the forefront, thus casting a new light on his whole body of work and revealing what was more or less hidden up until that point. First there’s the dystopia of <b><i>A.I.</i></b> (2001), a sort of future in which Spielberg’s cinema of illusions became reality, with artifices (the robots) now more human than the actual humans. Spielberg, here, makes his point perfectly clear, in case we missed it again in <i><b>The Lost World</b></i>: in the fair scene, artifices are thrown apart, destroyed, as if the filmmaker was also getting rid of his own artifices from the past. And in case we're still not listening, he uses one of his best-loved movie from the 80's, <i><b>E.T.</b></i>, as a sort of companion piece in reverse (at the outset, there’s a similarity in the titles, a two letters abbreviation and the complete word it stands for): these two movies invite us to love a central character used as a representation of the Other, an hideous alien and an impassive robot, two metaphors for how we epistemologically relate to the others (forever unknowable and alien; we can only guess what’s going on behind someone’s else body). In <i><b>A.I.</b></i>, the iconic moon from <i><b>E.T.</b></i> (symbol of comfort, synonym of home) becomes a balloon chasing the robots, refusing them the home they seek for. And the ending, probably Spielberg’s most misunderstood scene, is another reversal of <i><b>E.T.</b></i>, which was closing on a real reconstituted family (with Peter Coyote as Elliot’s substitute father), while in <i><b>A.I.</b></i> the family is so dysfunctional that the only hope of reunion lies in a simulacra. The mother isn’t real (the robots can only maintain her image for a day), and her boy is a robot, so the only instance of mutual love in this movie occurs between a machine and an illusion; how some people may find this over-sentimental or optimist, I will never understand (it’s bleaker than anything Kubrick himself ever done!) The movie also follows Pinocchio’s structure, presenting a disenchanted version of what was (no coincidence here) Roy Neary’s favorite movie in <i><b>CEot3K</b></i>. But the parallel between these two movies goes deeper: the boy-robot is just like Roy Neary, both looking for a fantasy (aliens, the impossible love of a mother) that will help them escape an unbearable reality; both obtain what they wish for, but in <i><b>A.I.</b></i> an immense sense of loss envelops every scene, especially the end, therefore casting some doubts on the value of artifices as a salutary mean. And like in <i><b>Always</b></i>, the movie ends with a character stuck inside his vehicle at the bottom of the sea, until some implausible savior (a ghost, robots) comes and bring them back to life. In <i><b>A.I.</b></i> though, the robot is resurrected in a world of illusions where humanity is just a fading image, where he can only love a ghost mother because there’s nothing else out there (unlike Dorinda who learns to accept her lover’s death and keep her love for the living). <br /><br />
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Then we have the future of <i><b>Minority Report</b></i> (2002) with its oppressive surveillance system (you can be arrested before you even commit a crime), and where ubiquitous images seem to be the only way to interact with reality. The movie is less an examination of free will and determinism than an inquiry about the value of images, an exploration of their intrinsic ambiguity: can we trust images? Anderton (Tom Cruise) has to interpret the precogs’ images in order to find clues about where the next murder will occur, and when he discovers that he will himself commit a murder, Spielberg superposes an image of him-the-criminal to his current face-still-innocent, as if the future was already in effect in the present, or as if seeing this image will make this vision a reality. Even if Anderton cannot reconcile this image of him-criminal with how he perceives himself, he tries to stop it from becoming true instead of seeking for another possible interpretation of this image. But Anderton, like all the PreCrime program, doesn’t know how to interpret an image: for them, an image is a direct representation of a reality and nothing more, even if the movie makes perfectly clear, with the existence of the minority reports (when one precog doesn’t perceive the same future as the others) that these images are a perspective on a possible reality. Spielberg’s first movies were almost entirely constructed on a similar belief: for example, the ending of <i><b>CEot3K</b></i> presents the image of a better world that Spielberg offers as a substitute for the real world. And it’s exactly what he will then put into question in the <i><b>Jurassic Park</b></i>’s speech: “It’s all an illusion.” An illusion is an image trying to replace reality, or trying to hide it momentarily, but in <b><i>Minority Report</i></b> this image of Anderton-criminal isn’t an illusion: the problem here is one of interpretation.<br /><br />
Images, even when they’re factually true, offer only a partial understanding of reality: like the precogs saw, Anderton will hold his victim at gunpoint, and he will for a moment consider the option of murder. But Anderton never transfers this thought into action, so although the images of the precogs were right, he never commits the murder he’s accused of (the victim presses the trigger for him). In a sense though, the image of Anderton-the-murderer is still revealing something true, an inner part of himself that Anderton ignored before, these murderous thoughts he will indeed entertain for a moment. Here lies all the ambiguities of this image: it’s misleading only if we think of it as a reality, as a faithful rendition of a real event, but if view properly, on the contrary, this image can reveal something that was hidden inside of his interpreter. So Anderton has to lose his innocence toward images and learn to correctly interpret them, literally getting a new pair of eyes in the process. And this is what we have to learn about Spielberg’s cinema: <i><b>Jurassic Park</b></i> is only a movie about ferocious dinosaurs on a superficial level, or, as we will see, <i><b>War of the Worlds</b></i> (2005) isn’t simply a movie about an alien invasion. If we think of these movies only in plot terms, as if they’re merely telling a good entertaining story and nothing more, in a way they’re still illusions, at least for the eyes of such a shallow interpreter. When correctly interpreted though, these movies reveal ideas (on images, artifices, interpretation, etc.), lurking just behind the surface. Not all images have that revealing power though: not the image forged by Burgess, the director of PreCrime who exploits this naive belief in the veracity of images to hide his murder, nor the numerous publicities that constantly surround the characters in <i><b>Minority Report</b></i>, trying to sell the false idea of a better reality, but then they’re only illusions, potentially dangerous. Images are powerful because they shape our perception of reality, but the best images do this by offering us an idea of reality, not by trying to replace it.<br /><br />
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It’s exactly what Spielberg does with <i><b>War of the Worlds</b></i>: finding a visual equivalent to the Shoah without directly representing it, trying to convey its horror in a purely visual form, while concluding this long-going query we’ve been following until now. Let’s just say I’m not afraid of superlatives when it comes to that movie: it’s the culmination of his career, his great masterpiece, and without a doubt the most important Hollywood movie of the blockbuster era. After a long period of self-questioning, during which he was trying to get rid of his narcissist artifices and open his movies to reality, Spielberg finally found a way to use the ambiguity described in <i><b>Minority Report</b></i> to make his most “responsible” fiction (yet, we’ll see if someday he outdoes it, but somehow I doubt it). Instead of taking us far away from a broken reality, his images now reveal it, looking to represent it as adequately as possible, in all its complexity. <br /><br />
As <b><i>A.I.</i></b> was a companion piece to <i><b>E.T.</b></i>, <i><b>War of the Worlds</b></i> uses <i><b>Sugarland Express</b></i> like a similar structural device: both are road movies where the characters are fleeing, one where the parents are trying to get their child back, at first unaware of the consequences of their irresponsible behavior (and a cartoon, images, will be the trigger that will wake up the father from his immaturity), the other with a father trying to get his children back to their mother because he doesn’t want to be responsible for them. Each time, the pursuit comes to a halt when the movie needs to establish a new step in the introspective quest of the father (in <i><b>War the Worlds</b></i>, as we will see, the car stops each time Ray needs to find a new way to protect his daughter’s eye from the horror). And, no surprise, the premise is another inversion of <b><i>CEot3K</i></b>: instead of leaving his family, the father has to protect it against the aliens (and the father’s names are quite close, Roy and Ray). As I briefly noted in my last post, about the <i><b>Indiana Jones</b></i>, the more responsible Spielberg’s fathers are, the more responsible his cinema becomes. I like to think of Spielberg himself as the father of a whole generation of filmmakers who imitated only the most superficial aspects of his cinema, the escape through artifice, without the personal vision and the self-doubts that grant its beauty and its significance to their father’s wandering. Now, aware of his irresponsible influence on contemporary cinema, Spielberg tries to re-educate his children-filmmaker (and film lovers) by using his images to speak about reality, while showing what was wrong with his first movies so we can stop emulating them in such a shallow manner. <i><b>War of the Worlds</b></i>, essentially, is a record of his failure: toward the end of the movie, Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) tries to hold back his son who wants to go alone and help the army. But his son doesn’t really want to fight back: first and foremost, he wants to see the war, represented in the background, beyond the hill, as flashes of white lights, as a spectacular visual ballet. “I have to see this, Dad. You have to let me go. I want to fight. Please! I have to see this”, says the son before running toward the hill, leaving his father behind. Ray, alone, stares desperately at his own conscience, now fully aware of the consequences of his education and of his absence as a father.<br /><br />
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But there’s still one hope in his daughter. At the beginning of the movie, Ray forces her to watch the electric storm, even if she’s afraid of it. “Wanna see something cool? It’s just like the 4th of July”: look at this spectacle, even if it may be dangerous it’s still entertaining, no? Ray’s relationship to his daughter is centered on the act of seeing, as he progressively learns to direct her eyes in an ethical manner: “You keep your eyes only on me, you understand? Don’t look down. Don’t look around me. I’m taking you to the car and you’re gonna want to look around… but you’re not going to, are you?” When she wants to pee in the woods (a mirror scene of a moment in <i><b>Sugarland Express</b></i> where the father has to protect his wife who wants to pee in a WC provided by the police), Ray argues with her about what “looking” means: him: “Stay where I can see you.”, her: “I don’t want you looking at me!”, him: “I won’t, but stay in sight.”, and her: “That’s looking!” At first, he makes her watch what she shouldn’t see, the electric storm; then, he fails to protect her as she goes in the wood and see the floating corpses on the river (he puts his hand on her eyes, but it’s too late); and finally he makes her close her eyes at the right moment, when he disappears in the dark and kills Tim Robbin’s character. In <b><i>Raiders of the Lost Ark</i></b>, Indy has to close his eyes to protect himself from the violent spectacle erupting from the Ark; Spielberg, though, doesn’t respect his own perspective and the spectator stays with his eyes wide open, eager to fully savor this vengeful spectacle of melting Nazis. In <i><b>War of the Worlds</b></i>, Spielberg doesn’t want to offer the spectacle of a man killing another man, so he keeps our eyes close like those of Ray’s daughter.<br /><br />
There’s a difficult balance act here: surely a child should not see some things, but on the other hand we cannot completely hide the reality from them, because then we will go back to the illusion. Essentially, it was the major problem with Benigni’s despicable <i><b>La vita è bella</b></i>: the main character makes a game out of one of the most horrible event in human history, and tries to protect his child by concealing the existence of the Shoah and replacing it with an illusion, while the filmmaker is doing the same thing with the spectator, erasing history to protect our well-being. <i><b>War of the Worlds</b></i> is Spielberg best movie about the Shoah, far better than <i><b>Schindler’s List</b></i>, which suffers from an ending that puts too much emphasis on the survivors, while using the genocide as a tool to create melodrama (as it is shown in the infamous shower scene: Spielberg isn’t interested by the people who died in such a shower, he’s making a movie about those who survived, which in itself isn’t bad, but ethical problems arise when he uses our knowledge of the deceased to create a suspense around the shower, or a melodrama when Schindler breaks apart at the end). In <b><i>War of the Worlds</i></b>, Spielberg doesn’t try to directly represent the Holocaust, he uses iconic images like the river full of corpses, the ashes of the aliens’ victims, or a train on fire (a condensation of the two most recognizable images of the Holocaust, the trains and the oven). Furthermore, the aliens are explicitly committing genocide. They are an incomprehensible force destroying everything, which is a common idea for Spielberg: the anonymous truck, the shark, the faceless science men that terrifies E.T., the dinosaurs, etc. Evil never has a human face because it possesses no Reason (as the war in <i><b>Saving Private Ryan</b></i>, presented as an aberration because it obliges us to rationalize what cannot be, i.e. the value of a human life). We may know that the aliens in <i><b>War of the Worlds</b></i> are using humans for food, as we may know how the Nazi regime and the circumstances of the Second World War gradually lead to the Shoah, but we can’t still fully comprehend how such a thing is possible. When Ray stumbles upon an ocean of blood, this is the most perfect representation possible of the Shoah, an indirect image revealing an idea of this event, without having to show what cannot be shown, what stands beyond man’s reason. <br /><br />
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Just like Ray protects his daughter by letting her have an idea of what’s happening while trying to prevent her from directly seeing the horror, Spielberg represents this horror indirectly, through visual ideas. It must be said: we should not mistake him for some kind of moralist trying to condemn all forms of representation of violence. He’s merely raising questions by juggling with his usual themes and situations, mixing them in a new way in each movie until he finds the best configuration possible, which for now seems to be <i><b>War of the Worlds</b></i>. And anyway, like any ethical situation, there’s no universal law dictating what’s right or good: we can only examine the precise circumstances of each situation, and the solution, if there is one, will be different each time. But the question stands: how can we represent the horror, especially a real and historical one, while avoiding the trappings of an aesthetic that either finds some pleasure in the representation of this violence, or tone down its impact by staying too far away? For the German theorist Siegfried Kracauer, in his book <i>Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality</i> (1960), cinema is similar to Perseus’ mirror-shield: with its help we can approach the horror of the Medusa and decapitate it, just like cinema can help us to confront the horror through the use of representation. At two moments, two similar scenes in different movies, Spielberg uses this image of the mirror-shield: in <i><b>Jurassic Park</b></i>, the raptors are chasing the kids in a kitchen, where they hide themselves inside a metallic cupboard reflecting the raptors like a mirror. In <i><b>War of the Worlds</b></i>, in the basement where Ferrier and his daughter are hiding, an alien inspects the location with a sprawling camera on a tentacle (a superb image, by the way, of the invasion of the camera in the private sphere). Like the kids in <i><b>Jurassic Park</b></i>, Ferrier hides behind a mirror, where the monster only finds his own image; they’re not hiding from the horror behind an illusion, but behind a mirror of reality. And, a little aside, this camera looking at a mirror, both reflecting themselves eternally (allegory for a narcissist artifice if I ever saw one), isn’t it one of the most accurate image of our modern world?<br /><br />
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(Since this article is already quite long, a proper conclusion will follow shortly…)Sylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2882815174745926563.post-68762396751150801912012-11-11T09:45:00.000-05:002013-09-11T21:21:36.038-04:00The Cinema of Steven Spielberg (1): Toward the LightsA quick note about my last post: it wasn’t made clear that the author theory is an interpretative angle amongst others, one I particularly like, but it’s certainly not exclusive. So, for my analysis of Steven Spielberg’s cinema that follows, which will be divided in two or three parts, I’m only using scenes, motives or images that are most relevant for him as an author, but it’s not to say that it’s all there is. His cinema is a tapestry with multiple intertwining threads, like it was once said about Hitchcock, and the closer we look, the better we see the subtleties and the complexity of his work. I’m trying to describe the main picture as I see it, following with my words his leading thread, but whole other subtexts are just waiting to be revealed underneath. Here’s part one:<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">
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Steven Spielberg lost the respect he once had: at first, he was celebrated as a young genius, a virtuoso with an undeniable cinematic flair, but now we talk of him with a whiff of suspicion, mainly because he’s often depicted as the prime architect of the blockbusters, this so-called plague of modern cinema. For his detractors, <i><b>Jaws</b></i>’ massive box-office success in 1975 signaled the end of a New Hollywood apparently bursting with creativity, this haven of artistic freedom slowly disappearing under the pressure of a newfound interest for monetary gain, until soulless teenage flicks reigned over the patently commercial Hollywood of today. This, maybe, we could forgive, after all Spielberg didn’t intend to make the first blockbuster in cinema history; however, he also shaped our conception of escapist entertainment by popularizing a form of grandiloquent and boisterous spectacle, movies so obsessed with their own artifices that they get lost inside their technological prowess, without a thought about a reality they try to evacuate – at least, that’s what we say about him, but do these reproaches hold up? Well, they do sometimes for certain scenes in some of his movies, but that would be quite a superficial outlook on an exceptional author trying to introduce the notion of responsibility in these infantile blockbusters he supposedly gave birth to. <br />
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It may well be the most masterful and visually stunning moment of a career full of virtuosic set-pieces, but still, the ending of <i><b>Close Encounters of the Third Kind</b></i> (<i><b>CEot3K</b></i> for short, 1977) crystallize everything we can criticize about Spielberg’s cinema: a triumphant escape from reality through artifice. The first time we see the main character, Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), in a long shot with a fixed camera, he stands in the foreground, playing with a miniature train, while in the background his youngest son is trying to catch his attention by hitting continuously on his cradle with his doll. In vain: his father turns his back on him, Neary clearly prefers his toys to his family. After his first encounter with moving lights in the sky, this indifference only gets worse, as Neary begins to lose all sense of reality by entertaining his extra-terrestrial obsessions. We can understand why he wants to distance himself from his family life though: Spielberg represents a dreary and dull suburban life invaded by publicity logos (this is true for many of his movies, especially in the 70’s, with these numerous references to brand names in <i><b>Sugarland Express</b></i> and <i><b>CEot3K</b></i>), and Neary’s family is shown as dysfunctional. During about the first two-third of the movie, Spielberg maintains a superb tension between Neary’s desire to flee what he considers as an oppressive day to day life and the importance of staying near his family that undoubtedly needs an attentive father – but as soon as his wife leaves him, his family seems insignificant, and the movie never comes back to them, they just disappear, as if Neary’s neglectful attitude was trivial and without consequences. In the final act, Neary can finally flee reality: he’s so seduced by an extraordinary spectacle of light and sound that he decides to abandon all his earthly responsibilities in favor of them, an apt allegory of escapist entertainment if I ever saw one. To some extent, Spielberg contrasts Neary’s actions with those of Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon’s character), a mother who is trying to get her son back, but in certain scenes she seems more interested in those lights than by her son. And anyway, when Neary steps into the spaceship at the end, his departure is celebratory, nobody questions him or tries to hold him off. Spielberg’s mise en scène is quite clear: why try to improve a bleak reality when you can just take off for a better world? <br /><br />
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Absent or irresponsible father is the central motif of Spielberg’s cinema, but before <i><b>CEof3K</b></i>, these fathers had to learn their responsibilities one way or another, they weren’t allowed to leave their families behind. In <i><b>Duel</b></i> (1971), although it’s more ambiguous, the main character also look as if he’s fleeing his family: we know his wife is angry at him for not defending her against a friend, who made a pass at her in a party, but we don’t know exactly how the husband feels about this incident. We do get the impression though that his business trip may also be a temporary escape for him, and not coincidentally, much of the radio he listens to talks about male weaknesses. The film, then, can be interpreted as a male protagonist trying to conquer back his virility, represented by an anonymous truck, and he can only come back to his family when he has retrieved his manhood. Or maybe he’s punished for leaving his family when he should try to talk with his wife (he’s dodging their conversation more than anything else), but whichever interpretation you prefer, it’s still the story of a father having to deal with his fear about having a family. <br /><br />
<i><b>Sugarland Express</b></i> (1974), by contrast, is one of the few instances in Spielberg’s cinema where the parents are trying to reach their children. In fact, the synopsis is the exact opposite of <i><b>CEot3K</b></i>: this time, the protagonists are escaping towards their son, and even if they are quite irresponsible, at least they genuinely love him. Around them, Spielberg accumulates father figures who are far less caring, from Lou’s father who rejects her publicly on the radio to the father of an inmate who wants to disown his son because of his benign crimes, to these two hunters who bring a child in a shooting (they even give him a gun to help them kill the two criminals). Fathers don’t love their sons, seems to say Spielberg, and even when they do, society still tries to keep them apart; Lou Jean will have her son back, as we learn in the end credits, but Clovis will never get to see him. We could say that he’s far less enthusiast than Lou Jean about their quest, he’s merely following her, but contrarily to her, he knows their situation is a dead-end, and he wants to see his son in better circumstances. Where she’s just a child, who will learn maturity at a great cost, he’s the first (kind of) mature father in Spielberg’s cinema, even if he still makes a lot of dumb decisions in order to reach his son. Tellingly, he will not live (who ever said Spielberg was an optimist?)<br /><br />
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<i><b>Jaws</b></i> offers a different kind of irresponsible father, given that Brody (Roy Scheider) is a good father for his family, but fails as a father for his community: when he’s watching the beach after the first shark attack, it takes a short moment of distraction for a kid to get kill (the editing clearly emphasizes Brody’s responsibility in this incident, or rather that he feels guilty, as he will states later, and it’s no coincidence that Spielberg decides that this victim should be a young boy instead of an adult). More importantly, <i><b>Jaws</b></i> lightly touches for the first time one of Spielberg’s favorite theme: the relation between a reality and his image, or how an image can either hide a reality or help to see it. In <i><b>Sugarland Express</b></i>, the medias already were an important presence but Spielberg doesn’t do much with it, apart from offering a contrast between how the journalists look at the two protagonists and how Spielberg’s own movie represents them (there’s a short scene where the characters are disappointed by how they look in the newspapers, saying that their images do not reflect who they are, but that’s about all). In <i><b>Jaws</b></i>, though, the movie’s central conflict between Brody and the mayor revolves around the importance of images: the small community of Amity thrives on tourism, so the murderous shark mustn’t be publicized. The mayor tries to protect the calm and attractive image of his city, and through Brody and the consequences of the mayor’s decisions, the movie quite explicitly condemn this attitude of camouflaging an awful reality (the shark) with a pretty image (the panel announcing the city of Amity is prominent in a couple of shots). Again, we are here at the opposite of <i><b>CEot3K</b></i>: reality must be dealt with, not hidden.<br /><br />
So why did Spielberg change his discourse, turning it on his head, in <i><b>CEot3K</b></i>? I don’t know, but from that point on and until the 90’s, his aesthetic became highly artificial, as if the filmmaker took off for the sky with his character, Roy Neary (Spielberg often said that Dreyfuss was his alter ego): <i><b>Duel</b></i>, <i><b>Sugarland Express </b></i>and <i><b>Jaws</b></i> were quite close, aesthetically, to the New Hollywood, they were grounded in a coarse image of America, in a day to day life of the average American, but after <i><b>CEot3K</b></i> his movies are closing in on themselves, with <i><b>1941</b></i> (1979) irresponsible extravaganza, which begins on a self-referential scene, a parody of <i><b>Jaw</b><b>s</b></i>, or with the artificial decors of <i><b>E.T.</b></i> (1982), or the<i><b> Indiana Jones</b></i> (1981, 1984, 1989) robbing, like good archeologists, the adventure movies of classical cinema, reshaping them into a new form without any ties with reality, presenting a dematerialized violence that is used purely for the aesthetic pleasure, or with this <i><b>The Color Purple</b></i> (1985) representing an atrocious violence through colorful and pretty images trying to soften the horror. <br /><br />
(I feel now as if I should make clear that I’m not judging these movies on the basis that they are more or less “responsible”: <i><b>CEot3K</b></i> is certainly not worst than<i><b> Sugarland Express</b></i> because of its last scene, although I can’t really endorse what Neary’s departure implies (and neither can Spielberg, as we will see). Like I explained last time, when approaching cinema from the authors’ angle, you can’t judge the movies individually, you have to see the whole. So I’m trying to follow Spielberg’s thoughts, I’m interested in how his movies react one with the other, and the last scene in <i><b>CEot3K</b></i> is one of the most important moments of his career, a foundation upon which he will build much of his later movies. It may be a <i>faux pas</i>, but it’s a rich and meaningful one, taking place in one of his most beautiful masterpiece.) <br /><br />
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Parenthesis aside, there are a lot of nuances to be made about his movies from the 80’s: in <i><b>The Color Purple</b></i>, for example, the artificial look is espousing the perspective of the main character (Whoopie Goldberg), who tries to distance herself from her husband’s violence by perceiving it in a burlesque mode, especially in the second half of the movie, but we are still under the impression that Spielberg is more interested in finding original ways to represents the violence than by the actual human drama (and it’s also a form of escape through fiction, a denial of reality that is rather timidly criticize by the movie). And in the <i><b>Indiana Jones</b></i>, the idea of parenthood is gradually introduced, first by making Jones a substitute father to Short Round in <i><b>Temple of Doom</b></i>, and then with Sean Connery as the absent father who has to get reunited with his son in <i><b>the Last Crusade</b></i> (and in the fourth one, Jones will get to have an actual son). Each time, like he will do with much more confidence later, Spielberg uses these father-son relationships to nuance his spectacle, by having these fathers educate their sons in how to look (or not) at the violence in front of them. In <i><b>the Last Crusade</b></i>, for example, Jones’ father is quite astonished by his son’s ability to kill, which he learned mainly because his father wasn’t there for him, like the first sequence with the young Indy implies (here it’s played for laughs, but a similar scene occurs more dramatically in <i><b>War of the Worlds</b></i>). It’s no coincidence that <i><b>Last Crusade</b></i> is the least violent film of the original trilogy, since it’s where father and son are reunited; in Spielberg’s cinema, a responsible spectacle is possible only if the characters, usually the fathers but sometimes the sons, are willing to learn their responsibilities (an idea subtly presented for now, but it will get quasi-explicit in his later films).<br /><br />
In <i><b>E.T.</b></i>, his best movie from the 80’s and, apart from a small detail at the end, by far his most “responsible” film of that period, it’s the son, Elliot, who has to grow up by himself: a bit like <i><b>The Color Purple</b></i>, in <i><b>E.T.</b></i> the artificial look of the suburbs serves to emphasize that the movie is meant to be a theater of Elliot’s conscience. Elliot has to deal with his parents’ divorce, and learning to leave his space friend is an obvious metaphor for the acceptance of his father’s absence, but more deeply, through <i><b>E.T.</b></i> Elliot gains access to the adult world. With the exception of Elliot’s mother, we never fully see the adults before the last act, Spielberg only shows their legs, and he uses mostly low-angle shots to imitates a kid’s perspective: Elliot accepts his mother in his world, but the rest is out of reach, his world is confined. Without going too deep into the psychoanalytical angle (ever notice how <i><b>E.T.</b></i> looks like an excrement?), Elliot (or rather E.llio.T.) must separate from his friend (or father substitute) in order to earn his place in the world. The first grown-up we see is a scientific shouting “They’re separating!”, then Spielberg uses several close shots of doctors, as the adults are finally allowed to enter the movie, i.e. Elliot’s conscience. <br /><br />
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The religious reading of <i><b>E.T.</b></i> is well-known: the creature from space stands as a modern Jesus descending on Earth, doing miracles with his luminous finger, dying, resurrecting and transmitting his message of love through his apostle Elliot before going back in the sky. The adults live in a corrupted world, with their pollution (the hunters at the beginning are first introduced with their car blowing out smoke just after E.T. was carefully observing the plants in the forest) and their violence (the police try to stop the kids with guns!), so Elliot learns through E.T. not only to enter this flawed adult world, but also how to change it for the better. Again, we are here at the opposite of <i><b>CEot3K</b></i>, E.T. (the artifice, a metaphor inside Elliot’s mind, or the movie itself) serves to get access to reality or as a gateway to a better world. In other words, Spielberg is celebrating classical cinema: in a famous scene, John Ford’s <i><b>The Quiet Man</b></i> influences the actions of Elliot/E.T. who reconstitutes a scene playing on television; for Spielberg, images can shape reality, and movies are a powerful tool, capable of producing some of the most transformative images. The problem with <i><b>E.T.</b></i>, though, is in the last scene, when E.T. goes back in his spaceship: only Elliot and his family are allowed to see him go, which undermines the preaching about universal love the movie wants to make. We feel as if E.T. merely helped Elliot reconstitute his family, with Peter Coyote’s character standing as a new father; the presence of other witnesses would have open the movie beyond the personal drama of the main characters (although, if memory serves me right, Spielberg somewhat corrected this later, with the special edition DVD, on which he added one shot where we see Elliot’s friends).<br /><br />
Spielberg can be damn frustrating when you try to follow him: unlike other authors, there is no clear trajectory in his oeuvre, as he sometimes seems to go in one direction for one or two movies, only to regress one movie later, before correcting his course again in a new way. Someone like Clint Eastwood, on the contrary, went on a straight path from <i><b>Dirty Harry</b></i> to <i><b>Gran Torino</b></i>, his thoughts evolved in a clear direction movie after movie. However, both him and Spielberg work in a similar self-reflexive manner, with movies revolving around a series of motifs, repeating certain scenes and situations to give them each time a new meaning – and this is what we will see next time, how the last scene of <i><b>Always</b></i> (1989), for example, corrects the ending of <i><b>CEot3K</b></i>, or how <i><b>Jurassic Park</b></i> (1993) is one of the most poignant self-critic a filmmaker has ever done, or how <i><b>War of the Worlds</b></i> (2005) is the logical conclusion of Spielberg’s career, a masterful summary of all his ideas wrapped in his most “responsible” spectacle that also stands as a treatise in how to look at the horror.<br /><br />
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<i>to be continued...</i> </div>
Sylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2882815174745926563.post-24685125751085414592012-11-04T20:08:00.001-05:002013-09-11T21:21:35.999-04:00A Thoughtful LoveThe author theory seems to be greatly misunderstood nowadays. Or maybe it’s not new, I don’t know, but for sure, now, the idea of defending all movies made by a single filmmaker is seen as poor criticism, or as blindness to the possible (unavoidable) faults of an artist; apparently it’s far more relevant to judge every movie on its own basis, and to forget who made it because this knowledge can cloud our judgment. I’m slightly exaggerating, but how many times to we read things like “if you didn’t know this movie was made by X, you would not be so lenient”; well, that’s the point, it is made by X, so why pretend it is not?<br />
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Recently, amongst the many articles written about Paul Thomas Anderson latest movie, <i><b>The Master</b></i>, we got another good example of this attitude, in a <a href="http://www.avclub.com/articles/should-some-movies-be-taken-more-seriously-than-ot,85182/">text by Stephanie Zacharek</a> published by the <i>A.V. Club</i>, where she wrote “The idea that certain filmmakers reach a point where respect is their due, rather than something they earn film by film, defies one of the most immediate and visceral pleasures of movie going: the pleasure of seeing for yourself. Plus, isn’t it a lot more boring to march around on a filmmaker’s behalf, trumpeting the significance of intentions and reputations, than it is to wrangle with the actual movies?” But doesn’t wrangling with the movies also imply to consider who actually made them? When Steven Spielberg shows a rising moon giving chase to robots in <i><b>A.I.</b></i>, are we supposed to forget it’s the same man who gave us the iconic image from <i><b>E.T.</b></i>, this gentle and heartwarming moon, which also happens to be the logo of his company, Amblin? I haven’t seen <i><b>Lincoln</b></i> yet, which will come out in a few days, but I know already that I will love it, as I did with <i><b>War Horse</b></i> even though it was Spielberg at its worst. This is not blindness: I can see what’s wrong with the movie, but these flaws are far less interesting than my encounter with the moving thoughts of a true author. Sure, he can faltered from time to time, but being able to follow someone else’s train of thoughts is a fascinating and deeply intimate experience, much more rare and precious than the experience of a good but impersonal movie, so why should we deny ourselves this pleasure? In my mind, some filmmakers undoubtedly have earned their respect: we can’t easily dismiss any movie made by Terrence Malick, to take an example used by Zacharek, because even if <i><b>To the Wonder</b></i> is a piece of shit (I don’t know, but I doubt it), it will still be the outcome of a great mind struggling with itself, and there’s nothing boring, or simple, in trying to understand the thought process of an author thinking through images. At worse, it’s infuriating, “how can he fall so low?”, but never boring. <br />
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Spielberg certainly is one of these true authors (who also has his share of infuriating moments), and I will try to explain why in my next article, but before stepping inside this great mind, I want to talk briefly about the author theory. A little history course is in order, because it seems even the Wikipedia page can’t be trusted on that matter: contrarily to what it says, the first definition of the <i>Politique des Auteurs</i> appeared in a review by François Truffaut for <i>Les Cahiers du Cinéma</i> in February 1955, titled <i>Ali Baba et la Politique des Auteurs</i>. In it, Truffaut defended a small movie directed by Jacques Becker, <i><b>Ali Baba et les quarante voleurs</b></i>, by arguing that a misstep by Becker is still more worthwhile than a good movie made by an average guy. It was the first time someone used the expression politique des auteurs, but we can trace back the idea of the author and the preeminence of the mise en scène still further, in the more well-known article <i>Une certain tendance du cinéma français</i> (<i>A certain tendency in French cinema</i>) by the same Truffaut (in January 1954), in which he opposed the pen of Aurenche and Bost (two filmmakers renowned for their literary scripts) to the camera of Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson. Or further still with his review of Lang’s Big Heat, titled <i>Aimer Fritz Lang</i>, <i>Loving Fritz Lang</i>, or to Alexandre Astruc’s concept of the pen-camera, which was one of the first attempt to define the idea of mise en scène and its importance, by arguing that cinema is similar to writing with a camera. It was a new and important idea, to demonstrate how an individual can articulate a personal vision while working in what was seen primarily as an industry: even if someone like Howard Hawks used a somewhat conventional visual language, he could still incorporate his own ideas into his images, which reflect his perspective on the world. Essentially, the author theory served to prove that there were, indeed, great artists working in cinema; it was probably the most important step for the acknowledgment of cinema as an official art, but this we knew already.<br />
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The idea of a cinematic author doesn’t apply strictly to Hollywood, but personally I find it more interesting when we use it with someone like Spielberg or Hawks, because it’s quite obvious that Robert Bresson, for example, or more recently Belà Tarr are working within their own visual language, but it’s not so true for Spielberg, who use basically the same language as his more conventional colleagues in Hollywood. Cinema is an industrial art, and the most overtly industrial branch of this media, classical cinema, or Hollywood, has found more or less one way to guarantee this accessibility so important from a mercantile standpoint: the use of an extremely conventional and repetitive language, easily understandable and identifiable for all. But as we can see when cinema becomes art inside this industry, these conventions have nothing intrinsically impersonal: it is possible to express our individuality from within an apparently indifferent mass without directly antagonizing it, and this possibility of being who we are while living inside the crowd seems like a more essential testimony for our time than the marginal putting his difference on display. It’s not to say that Spielberg is a better filmmaker than Bresson, or Tarr or any other art house director, but it seems futile and redundant to declare them authors since their idiosyncrasies are self-evident – then again, it’s not true for all art house directors, conventions exist outside of Hollywood too, they’re just different, but even the most conformist art house director is still working outside of the patently industrial part of cinema. <br />
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Anyway, this Politic was more than a theory: in the words of Antoine de Baecque, a French critic and cinema historian, it was “an intimate approach of cinema by an act of love”. To brandish a filmmaker as an author was the equivalent of a love declaration, and since the real discourse of a movie isn’t its content but its mise en scène, or the manner in which the artist presents the world, you know you will love a priori all movies made by this author since his style will necessarily be present even in his worst films. Today, this idea of love has evaporated, at least from mainstream journalism (I don’t see anyone still clinging to this notion except the <i>Cahiers</i>, even if they have refined and redefined the original politic). And maybe that’s why we don’t accept easily this idea that some minor movies from an exceptional author are still better, or at least more fulfilling, than a good, or even an excellent movie from a competent journeyman without vision. When you love a filmmaker, you may prefer one movie to another but you will always admire all of them because each of these movies represents a moment in the development of an author’s thoughts, and what may seem at first glance as a shallow or futile detour may reveal itself later as a necessary step towards a new and brilliant idea. When you follow an author, you follow the development of his mind, and like I argue last time with <b><i>Citizen Kane</i></b>, the process itself is more important than where it leads: to admire an author is to admire how he thinks, or how he sees the world, and this thought process, this vision, will be present even when it wanders in the most erroneous way. So, sure, one movie produced during one of these drifting moments may appear trivial, and you may want to boo it in a festival’s screening, but if you look at the whole instead of this isolated fraction, then you may see something else entirely. It’s not blind love, surely I’m not arguing it’s sufficient to say: “it’s Malick, therefore it’s good”. A good critic still has to describe how it is a typical Malick's film, how it is a misstep, and more importantly how it is a meaningful misstep and what it says about Malick and his other movies. It’s not always obvious or easy at first, we may only understand a couple of movies later why this error was necessary, but it’s always possible to see how it fits with what came before, and how it’s an extension or a retreat from past ideas.<br />
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And this is what I want to demonstrate with Spielberg: he has been blamed for creating the Hollywood we know now, with these infantile blockbusters driven by a simple sense of wonder, detached from a reality that they’re trying to make us forget. These accusations do hold up for a part of his career, but at least since <b><i>Jurassic Park</i></b>, Spielberg has been trying to make responsible fictions, and most of his movies since then are strongly opposed to this form of escapism. His movies revolves around wonder, but for him this naïve outlook of life has been shattered by adulthood, and the last part of his career cast a different light on his first movies: it would be too simplistic to state that they were driven by an innocent wonderment, because Spielberg is always coming from the angle of an adult whose own sense of awe has vanished, and thus he oscillates between movies trying to evacuate an awful reality while trying to recover this lost childhood and movies where wonder just isn’t possible anymore because we need to see this awfulness for what it is, but these two extremes are always present, even when he’s nearly going for pure escapism, and anyway they need each other to be meaningful because Spielberg creates a dialogue between them, between, to take an example I used above, <i><b>E.T.</b></i> and <i><b>A.I.</b></i>, or <i><b>Color Purple</b></i> and <i><b>Amistad</b></i>, or <i><b>Close Encounter of the Third Kind </b></i>and <i><b>War of the Worlds</b></i>. We can’t judge an individual moment from his career because it would neglect the importance of this dialogue: we have to take his movies as a whole, follow them in their detour, their moments of stagnation, their hesitations until they come to a moment of illumination, that would not be felt as revelatory and moving if we didn’t trace back the author’s trajectory up to that point.<br />
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That’s what I’ll try to do next time: follow Spielberg’s thoughts until <b><i>War of the Worlds</i></b>, his absolute masterpiece and great moment of enlightenment. Sylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2882815174745926563.post-77666932019168002922012-10-26T20:53:00.000-04:002013-09-11T21:21:36.047-04:00Citizen Kane and Me (2): Citizen KaneI haven’t really answered these questions yet: what is <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i>, and what does it represent? <br />
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The first time I saw <b><i>Citizen Kane</i></b> I remained blind to its munificence, I didn’t understand Welles’ genius. I saw only a good story told in an innovative way with a surprise ending implying a simple moral about “wealth doesn’t provide happiness”. Sure, I appreciated how Welles uses deep focus, ellipsis or a fragmented chronology, but for me these techniques were simple narrative tools, not a way to shape the world, as they really are. If, as I was arguing last time, an artwork is more than a material object, then a description of this object can’t stand as a valid critic. When I write “in the suicide scene, Welles uses a deep focus that economically tells the story by condensing all the necessary information in the same shot”, I’m merely describing the film. It’s not like I’m wrong, but it’s trivial. What do these images tell us, why did Welles use deep focus instead of rapid editing? An artwork presents a singular perspective on the world, and the critic’s job is to illuminate this perspective through a retelling of his experience with this oeuvre.<br />
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<b><i>Citizen Kane</i></b> introduced a lot of new techniques and ideas, but Welles’ innovations are less important than how he used them to frame the world, or how they were able to bring forth his vision. There’s no inherent value in originality: novelty is an historical fact and we can’t judge a technique by its mere existence (“it’s good because it didn’t exist before!”), it can be judge only by its function or on how well it accomplishes its purpose. Welles introduced all these well-known formal innovations, like the long shots, deep focus, shattered chronology or rapid editing, because he was questioning the nature of knowledge and truth through a deliberately artificial visual style; his movies are epistemological inquiries at heart. <br />
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The first film project he proposed to RKO was an adaption of Joseph Conrad’s <i>Heart of Darkness</i>. Welles meant to translate the book’s first person narrative with a subjective camera which would have represented at all time the point of view of the narrator, Marlow. Welles intended to play both Marlow (or rather his voice, if Marlow is the camera we would not see him) and Kurtz, the person the narrator-camera-spectator was chasing through the heart of darkness. For Welles and Conrad, form is content, Marlow’s narration is the real subject of the book, not the anecdote itself, and with his choice of <i>mise en scène</i> the filmmaker wanted to give prominence to Marlow’s fascination towards Kurtz, their kinship even, while at the same time including the spectator in this identity quest by using this subjective camera that would have merged the perspective of the narrator with the point of view of the spectator. <br />
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This ambiguous identity of Kurtz/Marlow is the perfect example of Welles’ artistic persona (while he was working in cinema) which was divided in two parts, seemingly antagonist but really complementary, that roughly corresponded to Welles the filmmaker and Welles the actor. Kane (<i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i>), Quinlan (<b><i>Touch of Evil</i></b>), Arkadin (<b><i>Mr. Arkadin</i></b>), Welles’ specialty as an actor were these megalomaniac tyrants, these demiurges who abuse of their power through fictions they plant around them, of which Kurtz would have been the apex. Welles knew that he was an artist living in a media world, so, more than anybody else at that time, and not unlike his own characters, he liked to manipulate his public image (by lying on his childhood for example), or, more precisely, he was building his own image while tearing it down in the same gesture (<b><i>F for Fake</i></b>). But if Kane, Arkadin and Kurtz appear despotic, unlike Welles (although we do sometimes have this idea of him), it’s because their lies do not concern art. <br />
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In classical art, being and appearance have to be united (meaning a chair has to look like a real normal chair), but Welles is one of the first in mainstream cinema to dissociate them. This rupture, or more to the point this antinomy, dictate at once his visual mannerism, his work on his own image and the structure of <i>Citizen Kane</i>, <b><i>Mr. Arkadin</i></b> and partially also <i><b>Heart of Darkness</b></i>, three scripts that use as a central motif a quest for identity in a world of fake (which is also at the heart of <b><i>F for Fake</i></b>). Obviously, there’s always a subjectivity at work behind any piece of art, but in a classical esthetic the artist tries to hide himself behind the representation: it has to look “realist” or “objective”, the human presence must not be felt. The Aristotelian <i>mimesis</i> is an imitation of nature, which has to be perfected through art, but Welles doesn’t try to imitate nature. On the contrary, his subjectivity is so powerful that the frame explodes under this great pressure, and so we have these shots with extreme deep focus, ostentatious lighting and these strange expressionist camera angles. Sure, we can still identify the persons or the objects on screen, Welles is no abstractionist, but the perspective is not natural, and the presence of the camera in every scene is made visible. By thus hindering the resemblance of a subject to his image, Welles was going against all of Hollywood esthetic norms: to realism he substituted artifice, to an invisible style he preferred an obvious camera, and to the transparency of a subject he favored his opacity (there’s no easy definition of Kane or Arkadin). This breaking of the tradition was necessary: we are living in a world of appearances and uncertainty, and so for Welles, if art presents itself as an appearance among others, it can thus create truth. <br />
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As many have noted before, the key figure in Welles’ cinema is the forger. But the forger can’t be defined as a simple liar or a cheat since the original model of the forger’s copy is already a fake. Where can you draw the difference between truth and falsehood if everything is appearances? Take Quinlan for example, Welles’ character in <i><b>Touch of Evil</b></i>, who plants false evidence to convict real criminals: are we in a position to judge him? Is judgment even possible in a world without truth (think of Welles’ adaptation of <b><i>The Trial</i></b>)? The artist is similar to the forger in that he uses appearances to make his model, but he’s different because he doesn’t try to fool the audience: Welles’ artifices are presented as artifices, unlike Quinlan who has to conceal his trickery. The artist is like an honest forger, he’s shaping the world through his perspective, and he can thus create truth. Truth, then, is a process, following the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze we could say it’s the process of creating something new. <br />
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The truth of art is shown in the famous ending shot of <b><i>Citizen Kane</i></b>: the journalist will never uncover the identity of Rosebud, but Welles’ camera sure can, by travelling through a cluttered warehouse until it finds the answer everybody was looking for just before it fades out forever, and thus giving to the audience a certain knowledge of a truth that will remain hidden for the characters. There’s no definitive answer about Kane, the journalist is wrong from the start: Rosebud isn’t the only key to understand Kane, it’s only one of them, no more valuable than all the memories of the persons interviewed during the movie, or the actuality reel at the beginning. These perspectives are also a part of Kane’s identity, but the journalist doesn’t see it: he thinks that these stories are part of Kane’s myth, that they’re only fictions and so he wants to go behind them to find the truth. He doesn’t understand though that, first, truth is not behind the fiction, it is buried inside, and second, he’s looking for one simple answer where none exists. Contrarily to the journalist, <b><i>Citizen Kane</i></b> can approach the truth about Kane because its structure reunites different perspectives on him, but then again, the movie isn’t really about Kane, it’s about how (or if) it is possible to know someone, especially when this person tries to conceal his past and impose an image of him. Truth is not only fleeting, it is also partial, there’s no objective truth about Kane, and anyway if it exists it’s unreachable and useless, so the only way to get closer to truth is by comparing and intercutting different perspectives on a subject. And even then, truth is not really at the intersection of these perspectives, but in the process of comparing them, i.e. in the act of editing. <br />
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By definition, a perspective is subjective, it’s an interpretation of reality, so we cannot reduce <b><i>Citizen Kane</i></b>, for example, to the lost childhood of Kane, like many seems to do, it is only one perspective among many, in that case the filmmaker’s one (he’s moving the camera for us to see his Rosebud, it is his interpretation of his character). “Wealth doesn’t provide happiness”, as I first thought, would be a very shallow interpretation of this movie (although it’s not entirely wrong either): Kane’s solitude is not a result of his lost childhood, more profoundly, and like everyone, he’s lonely because nobody can know who he is. Kane comes to realize that he is, as we all are, nothing but appearances (maybe more so in his case because of this myth he creates around him), and that we all have to live alone with ourselves since we can only be known through these appearances (that can be more or less reliable, but necessarily shallow and insufficient). At the beginning of the movie, Kane is imprisoned in his mansion, inside these black impenetrable walls and closed gates. “No trespassing” says the sign, we can never know what’s behind, but the camera do trespass, art can go past these appearances, but only to get a fleeting image of Kane (in this scene we can only see his lips and his hand). Likewise, in the final shot of the movie, the sleigh itself has no importance, it could have been any other object. What’s of significance though is that the sleigh is burning, and that nobody at that point is still looking for Rosebud: like Kane, our lives are empty, there’s no meaning to look for, and we are nothing but ashes when no one wants to remember us anymore. Art can thus create meaning where there is none, and capture a truth about Kane, which is not the answer(s) at the end of the story, but <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i>, the movie itself, and how we can view the world through it. <br />
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So, by presenting a world of falsehood in which a search for truth is made possible by an esthetic of artifice, Welles was able to articulate his investigation on the possibilities and the limits of knowledge, while at the same time offering a portrait of the modern man living in a world newly invaded by images. This approach and these themes are typical of modern art, and Welles is one of the first to bring this modernity in what was seen as an industrial and impersonal media (especially since he was working inside Hollywood, although he was cast out after <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i>). So, yes, Welles is an important stepping stone for the acknowledgment of cinema as an art form, <b><i>Citizen Kane</i></b> showed that it’s possible to use the tools of an industry to shape a strong and personal vision of the world, but it wasn’t the first movie to do so. Chaplin, Keaton, Murnau, Hawks, Renoir, Stroheim, many directors before Welles presented through cinema their personal vision; Welles’ authorship was merely more obvious, more imposing. Welles’ artistic approach was (and still is) particularly relevant, he offered us one of the most precious and pertinent perspective on the world in the 20th century, and ultimately this is all that matters.<br />
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Coming back to our initial question now, if this is what <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> represents, is there an equivalent in videogames? Well, no... But the long answer will have to wait for another time. <br />
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(This article is greatly indebted to Youssef Ishaghpour masterful volumes on Welles, <i>Orson Welles, cinéaste, une caméra visible</i> (I'm not aware of any English translation), and partially also to Gilles Deleuze' s pages on Welles in his second book on cinema, <i>Cinema 2: The Time-Image</i>.) Sylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2882815174745926563.post-35808194299150394982012-10-20T14:53:00.000-04:002013-09-11T21:21:36.010-04:00Citizen Kane and Me (1): MeWhat is <b><i>Citizen Kane</i></b>? Obviously it’s a movie, but what does <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> represent, or what do we mean when we say “this is the <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> of videogames”, or “there is no <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> in videogames”? <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">
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<br />Orson Welles’ masterpiece is usually recognized as the “best movie of all time”, it’s a symbol, it's the pinnacle of what cinema is capable of. If cinema is an art, then <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> is the truest artistic expression of this medium; it represents the idea of perfection of an artistic idiom. So when we say “this is the <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> of videogame”, we’re really saying “cinema became an art with <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i>, or at least this movie helped cinema to be officially acknowledged as an art form, or <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> is the undeniable proof that cinema is art, so the game X accomplishes the same operation of artistic validation for the videogame industry”. But <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> didn’t become <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> (this symbol of absolute perfection) until the 60’s, when cinema was already largely considered as an art, and anyway cinema, at first a simple parlor trick shown in fun fairs, did not become an art because of one movie. Art didn’t suddenly appear during a projection for the benefit of unwary spectators: cinema became an art form because it was conceived and discussed as such by critics, theoreticians and the audience. I could describe <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> as a simple product created by several individuals working in an industrial fashion, mass produced and distributed in many copies that were more or less the same. I could write about <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> without even mentioning that it’s a work of art, the same way I would do about some can coming out of an ordinary factory. Would I be wrong? I don’t think so, cinema is by essence an industry, my description of <b><i>Citizen Kane</i></b> would be incomplete, but it would still express some undeniable aspects of this object. <br />
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So <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> didn’t appear instantly as a masterpiece for whomever was there the first time it was shown, critics had to present and defend this piece of industrial celluloid as an artwork. When we say, for example, “<i>Shadow of the Colossus</i> is the <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> of videogame”, we try to bypass this necessary demonstration by bringing art from the outside, as if it was some kind of virus that could travel between words when we compare them, but the sentence “<i>Shadow of the Colossus</i> is the <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> of videogame” doesn’t mean anything, or it doesn’t unless it’s the coda of a larger argument about the possible artistic value of this game. <br /><br />
More importantly, <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> doesn’t prove that every movies ever done are works of art, it only shows that cinema can be art. I would argue that <i>Shadow of the Colossus</i> is one of the few examples that videogames can also be art, but again, this doesn’t mean that all games are artworks. I don’t want to step in now in the “game as art” argument, but let’s just say that if any human creation can be art under certain conditions, so why not games? Games do stretch our usual conception of what art is, but there is no universal dictionary containing the one and only definition of every word, especially not of something as subjective and elusive as art (and it’s certainly not the first time in the 20th century that our perception of art gets challenged). An artwork is by essence a singularity, and thus no comparison is possible between two or more art pieces, not in terms of value anyway, and there’s no point in doing so. Lists such as the famous <i>Sight and Sound</i> one are merely tools of discovery, they’re a guide for new cinema enthusiasts trying to find their way in the short but prolific history of moving pictures; <i><b>Vertigo</b></i> isn’t a better film than Citizen Kane by any means, it’s only a different one, both masterpieces in their own way. <br /><br />
What common measure or criteria could we use to make this comparison possible? By definition, a masterpiece is immeasurable, eternal and its possibilities are endless, so what tools do the critics possess that could quantify and compare an infinite value? A work of art is more than the simple material object created by the artist, in cinema’s case it is not merely this continuous flow of sound and images that stays more or less the same even if the physical format on which they’re viewed can greatly vary (film, digital, DVD, etc.); a work of art is born out of a personal relationship, art lives in this small gap between an object and his spectator, so my <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> isn’t your <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i>, nor is it the same <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> I will see again for the first time tomorrow. But my private relation to <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> doesn’t constitute the whole of what <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i> is or can be, and if you’re looking for some objectivity in art then it lies in the dialog between all these private relationships this movie made possible throughout the years: if Citizen Kane entertained all these profound and complex conversations between thousands of people for over seventy years, if this movie is still able to generate new reactions and ideas today, then we have to acknowledge this rare and precious potential, even if I myself have no interest towards this movie. <br /><br />
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<br /> I like to think of our relationship with art as a dialogue, and a real dialogue needs to take into account the perspective of the Other. If I can’t listen to the Other, I’m soliloquizing, and art cannot thrive without an attentive and altruist audience. I’m not advocating for a total relativism here, but it is impossible to define any piece of art in a definitive manner: there is no ultimate truth in art. <br /><br />
Thus, to acknowledge the artistic value of <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i>, or any movie, I’ve got to make my private dialogue with this movie public, I’ve got to share it with others so it can lives and grows beyond me. So there it is, the purpose of this blog: to share my experiences of movies and videogames. <br /><br />*** <br /><br />Re-reading this now, it seems like an abrupt manner of opening a new blog, far less cordial than the usual personal introduction, so let’s do this necessary presentation as briefly as possible: I’m a movie critic in Montreal, where I write for a film magazine, <i><a href="http://www.revuesequences.org/category/blogue/">Séquences</a></i>, and I recently began a passionate relationship with videogames, so I’m mainly interested in the interrelations between these two mediums, especially in terms of images. I'm first and foremost a film lover, but over the last year my passion towards movies began to weaken, while my love of games continued to grow. I wrote a lot in the last four years about cinema, in French, at first on my own <a href="http://ducinematographe.blogspot.ca/">blog</a> and then for the magazine I'm still working for, but now I'm obsessed with games, mainly with their potential as a possible art form, so I decided to create a new private virtual space, away from cinema and closer to games. Writing in English is new for me, so you'll have to excuse my grammar and syntax – although I'm quite familiar with this language, I'm still insecure when it comes to writing (or talking). Since you have no choice but to write in English when it comes to games (there's almost no French litterature on this subject), well here I am. Like all blog, this one is a work in progress, so I'm hoping my writing skills will improve with time, and become more natural. <br /><br />
This first post outlined some of the principal ideas underlying what I intend to discuss on this blog, not only cinema and videogame, but also the nature of art and criticism. And as we will see next time, everything comes back to <i><b>Citizen Kane</b></i>. Sylvain L.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06595178160544184217noreply@blogger.com0