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 (3): A World Past

In my last apocalyptic article, I presented computer-generated imagery as a threat to the photographic image, but what can be so dangerous with CGI?

As previously discussed, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 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.

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, Terminator 2 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”.

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.