Imitation of Life (4): Film is Dead, Long Live Video Games!

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…)

Imitation of Life (2): The Fall of Man

Let'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 last time 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 the Matrix, 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).

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.

The Cinema of Steven Spielberg (2): Behind the Images

If 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 Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 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 Jurassic Park’s island.

I wouldn't follow those lights...

This change of course came gradually: it was clearly in effect in Jurassic Park (1993), the second major stepping stone in Spielberg’s cinema after CEot3K, but it was first introduced at the end of Always (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 Jaws already implied). In the last sequence of Always, 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 CEot3K. 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 CEot3K to communicate with the aliens.

The Cinema of Steven Spielberg (1): Toward the Lights

A 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:

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, Jaws’ 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.

Citizen Kane and Me (2): Citizen Kane

I haven’t really answered these questions yet: what is Citizen Kane, and what does it represent?

The first time I saw Citizen Kane 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.