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.

Imitation 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 introduction last week, is clearly hopeless.

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 mise en scène), 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 Imitation of Life: how did cinema approach this question in movies mixing CGI with the photographic image?

Things to Come

Videogames are not cinematic and they will never be.

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.

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 per se (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?