Digital Media, Artificial life and Post Classical
Cinema: Condition,Symptom, or a Rhetoric of Funding?
(First
published in Leonardo vol 31, no 5. 1998)
Michael Punt
Abstract.
Technological
determinism would argue that the popular cinema is driven by new technologies
(especially digital media) in a very straight forward way. Digital
imaging, for example has produced special effects and animations which
were unimaginable before computer technology, and audiences are attracted
to intellectually empty blockbuster films to experience the trilling
spectacle of new technology. Moreover the organisation of the industry
from camera control to box office has also been transformed by computer
control systems. This paper proceeds from an acknowledgement of this
technological change has altered films and the structure of the industry,
but argues that there is also a relationship between the way that
mainstream cinema organises its narratives and science and technology.
As our understanding of these changes so does the internal logic of
cause and effect in stories that we see. However unlike a determinist
position this paper uses an historical approach to show the complexity
of this interaction, and especially that it is not simply 'one way
traffic'. On the contrary the extent to which science, technology
and entertainment track the same trajectory throughout the century
is apparent in the ways in which scientists have approached the problem
of artificial intelligence. The paper concludes by posing the question;
if digital technology is changing culture why is it that its closest
cousins -- radio and television -- are creatively less responsive
to it than its antique ancestor -- the cinema?
Digital
Media, Artificial life and Post Classical Cinema: Condition, Symptom,
or a Rhetoric of Funding?
Digital Culture and
Cinema; an issue of history
It
may seem odd to discuss an analogue media such as cinema in the same
context as digital technology, especially since even when it was reputed
to have been invented between 1890 and 1895, the Cinematographe and
the Kinetoscope were technologically rather old fashioned. The late
nineteenth century was a period when electricity became the symbol
of progress and, in
New Hollywood; economic recovery or creative decline?
Even
for those who never go to the cinema, the movies provide a powerful
economic and cultural influence.Three decades ago this seemed unlikely
as the new technology of television met the change in postwar demographics.
The studio response of prestige pictures -- over length literary adaptations
and biblical epics -- combined with a failure to respond to youth
culture and the burgeoning diversity in the media market all but bankrupted
some studios. Miraculously Hollywood has seemed to recover
from the disaster of economic extinction which seemed all but inevitable
in the late 1960s. (5) This recovery, in which cinema has become more
profitable than it has ever been before, is the effect not simply
of a radical restructuring of the studio system, but also a new kind
of product which is actively engages with (and even shapes) digital
technology. The New Hollywood product is a multimedia marketing concept
spearheaded by the theatrical exhibition of massively promoted blockbusters.
The films are presold to family audiences through book publishing,
television and magazine coverage, and finally expensive advertising
campaigns prior to a theatrical release around the major holidays.
After worldwide saturation as theatrical releases they are then resold
to the same audiences as both broadcast television and video commodities.
To further increase profits, a wide range of entertainment franchises
are tied into the film and launched with the theatrical release ranging
from computer games and fashion garments to fast food. Only a small
portion of the final profits come are calculated to come from the
screening of the film, and more often than not the movie is nothing
more than a spectacular advertisement for these other products. As
a consequence, since the middle of the 1970s, mainstream movies have
become a significant feature of contemporary life even for those people
who never visit the cinema or even watch television.
The
Hollywood
blockbuster movie, as this product has become known, for some is symptomatic
of Hollywood's drive for profit
and is something of an artistic pariah for traditional cinefiles.
It is undeniable that invariably blockbusters are effects driven action
films with little time for character development or plot depth. However
they represent new narrative forms which have been developed to meet
the changing market for high investment products. They must appeal
to both the youth market and have a wide family audience. Frequently
they are a thinly disguised children's story or action spectacle structured
around a simple struggle between overdetermined moral absolutes --
as for example in Star Wars. The problematic of these films is almost
always how to restore social equilibrium in the face of massive disruption,
rather than any higher aspirations for cinema as a site for social
reform. Consequently, for many cinephile commentators the economic
recovery of the industry has been at the cost of a substantial loss
of content in popular films. Most especially popular cinema is condemned
for its profoundly reactionary conservatism, the reduction of story
to concept, and the collapse of character to one-dimensional stereotype.
The hope for art film in this critical framework rests with an alternative
cinema of independents, foreign, and third world productions which
currently have small audiences and the economics of the industry may
seem something of a Dinosaur.
The
survival of this alternative cinema, however, is essential to the
blockbuster. Although high investment films have proved to be far
the most effective economic strategy for the film industry, the number
of opportunities for such products is necessarily restricted to no
more than a few each year. Consequently, between blockbuster launches
it is commercially important to maintain the economic infrastructure
of the industry and nurture a public enthusiasm for the cinema as
an exhibition medium. Ticket sales are vital since while theatrical
reception may directly account for only a minority of a film's revenue,
box office receipts determine the price of the product to franchisers,
television companies, and video distributors. Less expensive films
(often referred to as 'smaller' productions) that are not so expensively
presold are used to sustain an appetite for moviegoing and generate
expectations for the major holiday release. These smaller films often
provide a limited opportunity for variety, experiment, and risk in
filmmaking and sometimes produce an unexpected hit in the so-called
'sleeper'. Public controversy around other small films produces a
sense of variety in the medium and also raises awareness of the cinema
in an indifferent consumer. In the past decades, many of the films
whose economic purpose was primarily to sustain interest in preparation
for the high-earning blockbuster are notable for their disturbing
plots and excesses of violence. Consequently, while the blockbuster
may be the source of greatest profit for the investor, it is often
films that challenge the idealized values implicit in the family film
which are influential in defining the public perception of the movies
as an expressive medium. Even "art cinema" is shaped by the blockbuster
logic of Hollywood.
Many
of these smaller productions have shown socially dysfunctional individuals
whose confrontation with the very social and political norms of the
blockbuster family provides the story. In most, these are relatively
mild expressions of rebellion; for example, unfettered ambition and
irrational love (Ghost), a sanitized hippie lifestyle (House Sitter)
or psychological damage and unstable erotic power relations (Pretty
Woman). In others, however, full rein is given to controversial scenarios
of extreme social and mental dysfunctionality. Most obviously this
is seen in horror "'teenpics", sexploitation slasher films, and the
currently chic nouvelle violence movies. Advertising budgets are low
for smaller films, and often they acquire cult status by being promoted
through word of mouth or go straight to video and a domestic subculture.Much
of the impact and appeal of these films is undoubtedly attributable
to a particular relaxation of the public conventions of self-expression
and the institutional constraints on the depiction of nudity and sex
that effective film censorship has imposed. In addition, many of these
films confront blockbuster conservatism by sympathetically portraying
disintegrating families, horrific crimes, and pathological criminals
as intrinsic features of the social landscape. Some have a restricted
exhibition through art house venues and out of town second-run cinemas,
others go straight to video. The underground frisson of these movies
promotes a culture of art house and cult auteurs which can migrate
to mainstream big-budget productions. Some, like David Cronenberg,
Jonathan Demme, David Lynch, Quentin Tarentino and the Joel and Ethan
Cohen gain a high public profile, and their subsequent films find
mainstream distribution and even significant theatrical profits. They
take with them a legacy of many of the darker themes of their films,
and these can be integrated with blockbusters as subtexts for a cinephile
audience to appreciate. Some of the licence and obsession of cult
films has formed barely concealed plot lines in high-body-count action
movies (Terminator, Die-Hard), "grown-up" sex movies (Fatal Attraction,
Basic Instinct, Disclosure), and the underground serial killer movie
(The Silence of the Lambs), as well as even the most apparently anodyne
blockbuster (Toy Story). In summary, the cinema's recovery has been
achieved through the economics of the crossover and it has precipitated
a creative decline which is reflected in bleak expressions of the
human condition, which has become tacitly understood as one of normalized
social and psychological dysfunctionality by both the movie buffs
and the non-cinema-going public alike.
Cinema and Old Science
Such
pessimism, however, may be more the consequence of an excessive belief
in economic determinism than a reflection of the virtues of the new
Hollywood product.
The
shared culture of consumption is not the only inescapable space of
contemporary cinema. Science, especially the more abstract sciences
of the mind, also interact with the movies. The economic inevitability
of the crossover between cult films and blockbusters does not wholly
account for the transfer of dark themes from minority auteurs to mainstream
movies. After all, both producers and audiences are not only economic
units but also social beings. Sociocultural explanations of the apparent
twisted minds of contemporary cinema posit a model of the individual
as a semi- autonomous part of a social whole. Acting in response to
particular circumstances, within the limits of agreed conventions,
the individual develops social strategies for self preservation. The
film, it is argued, functions not simply as an aesthetic object but
also as a representation of experience, and a representation that
helps the viewer recognize and make sense of future experience. In
cultural explanations of cinema, themes, individual viewers, and even
auteurs are collapsed into socially coherent entities with limited
space for independent action and interpretation. From this position,
the dark themes of contemporary films are understood as thinly disguised
expressions of deeply felt anxieties about such things as AIDS, the
collapse of capitalism, the end of millennium, all of which are assumed
to contribute to a deeply rooted social alienation caused by unfettered
technological change. While these interpretations of cinema are built
upon generalized theories of behaviour social change, economic and
ethnographic studies of cinema viewing have revealed that the audience
can no longer safely be theorized ahistorically nor as a unified mass
at any given moment.
More
personality-based accounts of these thematics uses psycho-social explanations
regard the individual as a semi-autonomous expression of its own historical
formation. The film, particularly the auteur film, is regarded as
an inevitable reflection of an individual's expressed and concealed
desires. Identification with a distorted world view in childhood,
it is suggested, influences future interpretations of events in way
that can be personally and socially damaging. In an attractive homology,
sick films are the products of sick minds, and the experience of these
films impinges upon the viewer in ways that are not always beneficial.
The process of articulating these atavistic desires, it is argued,
sanctions appetites in "normal" people for more extreme pleasures
by reflecting them as expressible norms.
Evidence
for this is supported by the often noted love affair that Classical
Hollywood of the 'Forties and 'Fifties had with folk explanations
of the mind- the so called Kitchen Freud. As, psychiatrists-turned-film-scholars,
Krin and Glen Gabbard have noted, "If psychiatry had not existed,
the movies would have had to invent it." Both the clinic and the studio,
they suggest, have "as their prime focus human thought, behaviour
and above all motivation." (6) Placing a psychiatrist in a classical
movie, or laying bare Freudian explanations for actions, it has been
suggested, provided shorthand clues to the motivations of two-dimensional
characters. Some commentators opposed to the psychoanalytic textual
analysis of film have suggested that the presence of psychoanalytic
explanations (and even characters who are psychiatrists) in films
functions like the strings in a puppet theater, a self-effacing voice
to drive the action and attribute complexity. Psychiatry, in this
view, becomes a convenient acquisition from science to solve a formal
problem of storytelling.
There
is sufficient evidence from the films themselves to suggest a symptomatic
relationship between psychiatry and the cinema, to give this relationship
a place in modern film theory. The incorporation of this explanatory
model into film studies, however, is not uncontroversial. Freudian
theory was imported into the humanities most enthusiastically during
the 1960s at the very moment when it was a collapsing paradigm in
scientific circles. In Film Studies, as in other disciplines, it was
subject to close critical attention. Moreover, much of the perceived
deficit of Freudian explanations was recovered by Jacques Lacan's
rereading of Freud relative to specific linguistic theories. Lacan's
dependence on Saussure linked it neatly with the existing paradigms
in film theory. It provided a powerful tool to analyse spectatorial
positions through sounds and images. This to happened at the moment
when (according to film scholar David Bordwell) that theory was also
being consigned to the margins by French intellectuals.(7)
Lacanian
theory was thought to be significant, however, since it showed how
the experience of watching narrative film could reflect both socially
agreed and individually constructed perceptions of social hierarchies
and the order of experience. Whereas cultural and Freudian explanations
had been used largely to account for historical change in narrative
form and individual traits and obsessions in auteurs, Lacan provided
the basis of a meta-theory which suggested that mainstream cinema's
signifying system and the stories that it tells might be understood
as a reflection of the deep processes of socially determined human
mentation. Consequently whole films, an auteur's output, and even
the cinema itself might be analyzed as semi-autonomous entities interacting
with psychologically defined groups of viewers.
The
subsequent collapse of this grand theory has paved the way for a new
strand of film studies that critically responds to this model of the
mind and instead focuses on issues of cognitive processes and self
referentiality in the movies. This approach can often convincingly
anthropomorphize film, particularly at the level of mentation. Film
scholar Tim Corrigan, for example, can speak of a number of films
as "sharing a vision of a powerfully altered audience." He posits
a continuity with the body of the viewer in which "audiences replace
the securities and authorities of reading a film with a more assertive
(and some times reckless) disregard for essential meanings or secrets
in the movie, viewers are now performing that film as a kind of cult
object that they can both appropriate and relinquish themselves to."
(8) The weakened differentiation between the film and the viewer,
which Corrigan and others have conjectured, has opened new possibilities
for thinking about films especially in relation to the human body.
One aspect of Corrigan's cinema, which he shares with a number of
other contemporary theorists, is that the movie is always in the viewer's
bodily present.
Corrigan's
approach to the cinema relative to body metaphors and audiences elides
the criticism of ahistoricism leveled at psychoanalytic approaches
by locating subjectivity in what has become known as body history.
As a technological artifact the cinematographe is, arguably, a prosthetic
apparatus. Not only were its principal inventors interested in ideas
of artificial life, organic chemistry, and other prosthetic machines
like the telephone and phonograph, but the principle of the apparatus
is founded in a well-observed disparity between stimulus and experience
in a perceived economy of human perception. Moreover, as a number
of recent studies of the cultural history of the cinema have suggested,
the connection between science and the cinema was more complex than
can be explained by the rampant eclecticism of aggressive entrepreneurs
and the appetites of a mass audience.
As
some historians are now beginning to suggest, 19th century experimental
practice was posited on a quite specific concept of an observer. In
the last decades in particular, a number of optical devices that had
hitherto been little more than philosophical diversions found practical
application. The stereoscope, for example, proved that it was not
just individual subjectivity that made scientific observation problematic,
but the very apparatus of the eye itself which could not be trusted
as a reliable source of scientific knowledge. This finding not only
did not reinforce instruments like the camera but for some scientists
made it all the more suspect. During the last years of the 19th century
the pioneering French pysiologist Jules-Etienne Marey, for example,
was skeptical that the photographic image could be of use to him in
his research into the movement of humans and animals. For much of
his work he preferred to use pneumatic switches and smoked drums to
record sequential stages of human and animal movement rather than
a camera. It was necessary for him to understand the various versions
of chronophotographic apparatus as an extension of the human body,
which both amplified perception and reduced subjectivity, before he
would incorporate it in his experiments. Not unnaturally, any attempt
to reconstitute movement (as proposed by his assistant Georges Demeny
for example) was dismissed. From a study of the written archives,
historian Marta Braun has concluded that, for all the practical applications
of his work at the Physiological Station in Paris,
Marey's primary object in his chronophotographic studies was to redefine
the observer by challenging the human senses and the language that
we use to describe them. (9) Marey's use of complex instruments to
verify theory was consistent with a widespread cultural delimitation
of scientific research to exclude the untutored observer from the
discourse. His chronophotographic machines provided insights into
movement that were subsequently applied to many industrial processes,
but, perhaps more importantly, they demonstrated the fallibility of
the human observer. Nonetheless, almost against his will, the apparatus
that he devise formed one of the technological foundations of the
movies. The reinterpretation of scientific instruments as machines
for pleasure and entertainment purposes is not simply financial opportunism
but is also indicative of the tensions in the struggle for control
of scientific enquiry between the layman and the professional. (10)
Cinema and New Science
The
cinematic apparatus has remained relatively unchanged for a century,
and the human observer has continued to be discredited as a reliable
scientific witness. High science and its dominant assumptions and
practices, however, still appear to have some effect on the changing
uses of the cinematographe. As film production became more focused
around Hollywood, for example, scientific principles of task management,
derived principally from Frederick Taylor, shaped film form. The studio
system divided what had previously been a relatively seamless production
process undertaken by hierarchical teams into discrete defined functions.
According to an historical analysis of classical Hollywood film Bordwell,
Thompson and Staiger, suggest that this is evident in changes in film
style. (11) The influential technology of the continuity script, which
organized the individual contributions to the production process,
also shaped the dynamics of the narratives and their visualization.
This device favored screenplays that could be written according to
defined organizing principles of film production. The scientific management
of these tasks, they argue, is reflected in the structure of Hollywood
narratives. The particular analysis of work processes in the film
industry produced a method with which to simulate aspects of human
thought, behavior and motivation that could be codified in screenwriting
manuals. (12)
At
the same time as Hollywood industrialized a complex creative activity
such as film-making, some aspects of human mentation were similarly
thought in scientific circles, to be expressible as the cumulative
progression of complex algorithms. Work in this direction was greatly
advanced during the Second World War as electronic computational devices
were developed with the intention of decoding ciphers and calculating
the complex mathematical equations that were used in gunnery. These
objectives were not realized until 1946, when the ENIAC computer was
completed and publicly displayed. This presentation was necessary
in order to secure funding from a public to whom such machines were
unfamiliar, and for whom arithmetic had a limited attraction. In the
demonstration, the trajectory of a shell was calculated in less time
than the missile took to reach the target. The flashing lights installed
especially for the occasion showed in Hollywood fashion that computers
could replicate some human mental processes. At a stroke, experimental
work into artificial intelligence (AI) changed direction from a philosophical
inquiry into the mind, to technological projects which showed that
mechanical models built on the principle of recurring numerical series
could manifest intelligence. Further research into the replication
of organic behavior by computational means was stimulated both by
the prevailing beliefs about human thought, behavior and motivation
and by the apparently infinite capacity computers had for serial calculation.
The
rapid development of computer technology masked two serious objections:
the first that computers did not have an infinite power, and second,
that scientific research cannot proceed without an agreed system of
representation. Representing human thought as a capacity to manipulate
numbers overlooked the obvious tautology that mathematics is an elegant
and complex human construct. This has become more evident in recent
work in the history of science which shows that the extent to which
satisfactory explanations achieve professional currency is dependent
on the acceptance of agreed metaphors.(13) The paradigmatic example
often cited is Frederick Kekule, who claimed to have visualized the
structure of Benzene in a dream. Kekule's model prevailed for more
than a century even though it was recognised to be flawed. Since it
explained some puzzling aspects of organic chemistry in a stereoscopic
model, however, it persisted and coincidentally prepared the way for
the double helix metaphor that is currently used to explain the structure
of DNA. Similarly, the development of research into artificial intelligence
in America has also been traced by Daniel Dennet as a story of changing
metaphors. (14) Initially, the dominant representation of human intelligence
in scientific circles was a series of algorithmic progressions that
lead to specific outcomes. Memory was understood as a massive store
of discrete data accessed through a complex and uniquely human cataloguing
system that might be replicated. Changes in direction, however, require
the collapse of prevailing metaphors. According to a number of accounts
of artificial intelligence research, this was brought about in the
1980s partly by the failure of existing projects to deliver but more
significantly by an emerging computer culture driven by the independent
freewheeling West Coast sensibility which dominated the developers
of Silicon Valley. Intelligence began to be envisaged as a network
of small electrical impulses whose meaning was their habitual pathways
and intersections. Memory in a neural network was understood as an
intrinsic tendency to make familiar connections in response to certain
stimuli rather than a catalogue of fixed information. The crucial
feature of these new models is that the network becomes both the delivery
system and the store. Using the so called wetware of the brain as
the metaphor, artificial intelligence researchers overcame the hardware
limitations of computational AI and could conduct their inquiries
with relatively modest hardware as independent producers free from
corporate structures.
A
different rhetoric of funding and independent research programs have
stimulated new metaphors of the mind in response to particular failures
of wetware models. Since, it is argued, that every new network program,
however brilliant, was a human construct, it followed that synthetic
artificial intelligence was a logical impossibility. Increasingly
it became clear that technological complexity merely masked the human
determination that would always be at the heart of whatever humans
invented. In something of a conflation with research in artificial
life, artificial intelligence programs have begun to decenter the
human brain and, under the rubric of behavioral AI, model themselves
on insect life. (15) In these projects simple-minded machines designed
to respond to low-level algorithmic instructions interact with each
other to produce what is known as swarm intelligence. A simple instruction
prohibiting collision, for example, will quickly produce wall-following
behavior in computer-controlled devices placed in a confined space.
Although the machines do not exhibit human intelligence, extrapolating
from these experiments suggests that mentation involves processing
data while simultaneously processing responses to the results. From
this it is concluded that the mind works contingently with the environment
and to this extent is understood as coextensive with all nature.
Cinema Science and
Popular Culture
There
is no reason to suppose that these current models of the mind are
any more or less correct than earlier ones. However, in the rhetoric
of funding, support for these lines of inquiry is forthcoming because
of a certain compatibility with other social and scientific preoccupations
posited on a particular understanding of nature as an ecological system.
Earlier research programs, based on serial computation, (which required
ever greater computer power) may have been appropriate when the gap
between scientific enquiry and popular culture was comparatively large.
But, in recent years, things have changed. The cultivated professional
distance of the scientist has collapsed insofar as major projects,
like space exploration, now require an entertainment component in
order to proceed. NASA recognized that live television coverage of
their missions was an essential component of their research strategy
if they were to attract sufficient public money. Whether live launch
coverage, or glamourized fictions such as Apollo 13, or Star Wars,
the interface between science and entertainment is thinner than white-coated
professionals like to think. As in artificial intelligence research,
metaphors intended to garner support are more effective if they are
in tune with the cultural imagination. In these as in other projects,
the popular and scientific imaginaries overlap.
Since
Hollywood invades many aspects of our intellectual and cultural life,
regardless of our consent, it would be remarkable if the diffusion
of the boundary between science and entertainment did not influence
or affect popular film. On the one hand, the interrelationship between
the cinema and the science of mind and body are long-standing, while
on the other, movies are increasingly a component in extensive commercial
strategies that embrace scientific projects. The collapse of the studio
system of production opened the way for new topics and more visible
textual strategies. Where, for example in films from the so-called
"Golden Age of Hollywood" (more precisely the classical period which
extended from the late 'teens to the 1960s) the underlying arithmetical
framework is concealed so as not to bare the artifice of the film
and stall it, in many contemporary movies the textual strategy has
become an element in the pleasurable processes of fully understanding
what is going on. Tim Corrigan sees this as the essential differentiating
feature of contemporary films.
As
he puts it:
Until
recently, moreover, most films have willingly accommodated and encouraged
[a hermeneutic] forms of reception and have addressed their various
audiences along a path whose reading (in one way or another) promises
decipherment. How and where this circuit of reading has been disrupted
in recent years is the most broad based distinction of contemporary
viewing. If many contemporary viewers have an increasingly distracted
relationship with the images that they appropriate in one way or another,
today that relationship and those images seem more and more structured
to resist legibility.(16)
He
proposes that the hermeneutical operations which films once invited
have been wilfully transformed into ones in which the text can remain
illegible provided it is substituted by a transparent textual strategy.
In scientific circles this has a partial equivalent in the concept
of swarm intelligence, in which the operation of the system becomes
its significant meaning.
Small,
high earning 'sleepers' and cult pictures, especially the chic noire
and nouvelle violence movies of the '90s, have valorized low-IQ petty
crooks and serial killers who are divested of deep psychological motivation
and programmed to perform reactive to the environment at the same
time as they process it. Narrative progression is no longer achieved
through the 'realistic' depiction of human thought, behaviour and
motivation identification. Grey suited psychiatrists, who once conveniently
appeared to provide psychological explanations for motivation, are
not quite the frequent habitué of narrative film that they used to
be. Instead brilliant serial killers, some with a taste for their
victims, are placed in the same space as an ambitious cops, compulsive
perverts, and psychopathic doctors (to choose a few at random) and
simply told to survive. Closure in The Silence of the Lambs, for example,
does not depend on plausible explanations of thought, behavior, or
motivation, but, like many films of the past decades, on the best
case scenario for survival within given parameters.
It
seems impossible to take seriously the idea that screen writers are
AI specialists, or that the denizens of the Media Lab and Stanford
are closet movie directors. But without it, how else can we explain
this parallel? The temptation may be to regard a generalized heightened
awareness of systems and their foregrounding in mainstream film as
the spirit of the times. And since many contemporary movies teeter
at the brink of urban dystopia and/or technological apocalypse, the
twisted minds can be analyzed with sociological and psychoanalytic
paradigms as symptomatic of our age and as cautions against the excess
and perversion of civilization and especially the evil of autonomous
technology. In which case the movies, conveniently become, once more,
a talking cure, a return to the dark space in which deep anxieties
are cured when they can be expressed as symptoms. For some commentators
with little faith in psychocultural explanations, these zeitgeist
theories are at best merely satisfactory descriptions masquerading
as explanations.
A
more symbiotic explanation might show how the gap between science
and entertainment is much smaller than imagined. Moreover, the interaction
and exchange might occur not only in shared technologies, but in the
very imagination that seems necessary to negotiate our consciousness
of the world as complex and ultimately unknowable. Science in narrative
cinema and the cinema in scientific research do seem to function reciprocally
to help account for difficult things, providing images, metaphors,
and useful descriptions for each other. As Braun suggests, Marey's
research in the closing decades of the nineteenth century at the Physiological
Station, for all its practical applications for the military, industry,
and manufacture, was philosophical in that it primarily addressed
what he saw as a discrepancy between the experience of the body and
language. This rather abstract project, however, formed the basis
of a spectacular popular exposition known as early cinema, the enthusiasm
for which outstripped all informed expectations. In a rather different
scientific culture, films like True Romance with their high body count,
meaningless oaths, convoluted plots, and three-way shootouts are perhaps
more reflective of the twisting systems of explanation that we use
in science today to account for human thought, behavior and motivation,
than they are symptomatic of any particular social or intrinsic psychological
condition.
This
possibility, however appealing, has one important deficit. If the
current obsession in the cinema with virtual worlds, technological
dystopias and collapsing time and space are connected with the popular
appetite for science, especially science that can explain the quotidian
aspects of life, there are some particularly puzzling questions. How
did the cinema ever become implicated in the metaphors of science
in the first place? How does contemporary cinema continue to stay
in touch with the more remote projects of science? And why has the
cinema continued to incorporate science's various systems of explanation
in its textual strategies when, with the exception of their pioneering
stages, both radio and television have abandoned them ? The answers
to these questions may well have bearing on another troublesome issue
that the advent of digital media poses -- if we are now witnessing
the end of television, as some media gurus propose, why is it that
popular cinema shows so little sign of collapse and on the contrary
promises, even greater cultural significance in the coming decades?
New modes of entertainment delivery inevitable in the convergence
of the television and computer networks will make ever greater demands
on studio back-libraries. Digital media will increase further levels
of cine-literacy and cultivate an appetite for new movies as well
as obliging us to reconsider the importance of our film history.
Notes and references.
1.
For an account of the reception of electricity in America see David
E. Nye, Electrifying America; Social Meanings of a New Technology
(Cambridge:MIT, 1991), also Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night:
The Industrialisation of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989).
2.For
an overview of new approaches to early cinema history, see the introductory
section of Thomas Elsasser, Space Frame Narrative (London:BFI, 1990).
3.
For an early example of a link between the mind and the screen play
see Hugo Munsterberg, The photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York:
Appleton, 1916; reprinted New York: Dover, 1972).
4.
See David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the
Interpretation of Cinema, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
5.
See Thomas Schatz, "The New Hollywood" in Film Theory Goes to the
Movies, J.Collins, et al, eds. (London:Routledge, 1993)8--36.Thomas
Schatz's account of New Hollywood follows the dismantling of the studio
system under economic and legislative pressure and Hollywood's revival
and subsequent ascendancy need not necessarily have followed the trajectory
that it has. But Schatz, who with some justification sees the turning
point as Steven Spielberg's Jaws, in retrospect can claim that "Jaws
was a social, industrial, and economic phenomenon of the first order,
a cinematic idea and cultural commodity whose time had come. In many
ways, the film simply confirmed or consolidated various existing industry
trends and practices." These trends were learned from both high investment
films (many of which failed financially) and some unusual movies which,
according to Schatz saved the whole movie industry from oblivion,
films like The Godfather, American Graffiti, The Sting, The Exorcist,
and Rosemary's Baby some of which were presold and others mere sleepers.
6.
Krin Gabbard, and Glen Gabbard, Psychiatry and the Cinema (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987) p.xi.
7.
David Bordwell, and Noel Carroll, Post Theory; Reconstructing Film
Studies, (Wisconsin:University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).
8.
Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After
Vietnam (London: Routledge, 1991) p. 3.
9.
For a study of the Marey archives see Marta Braun, Picturing Time:
The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) (Chicago:Chicago University
Press, 1992).For discussions of vision and the body in the nineteenth
century see also Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge:
MIT, 1990), and Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
10.
For an extended discussion of the emergence of science as entertainment
see Michael Punt, " "Well, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?":
A Problem of Digital Photography," The Velvet Light Trap 36, 3--30
(Fall 1995).
11.
For an authoritative account of classical film style see David Bordwell,
Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema:
Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1985).
12.
A film such as Sunset Boulevard (1950) is a paradigmatic example form
the studio period of a movie that makes an impossibly complex plot
structure comprehensible through an arithmetical serial structure.
The story charts the rise and fall of an aspiring screenwriter and
the tragic decline of an old film star. The plot, however manages
the complexities of a voiceover narration by the writer who witnesses
his own murder and is dead before the titles roll. From the opening
Paramount trademark the film gathers its resources in a linear and
systematic way. Text, music, graphics, sound, and photographic image
are marshaled sequentially in a few minutes and located in the dead
body of the omniscient narrator. The conceptual acrobatics necessary
to understand the film as realistic are facilitated by an orthodox
act structure of 1:2:1. Approximately 25 minutes are spent on the
setup (act I), 58 minutes on the development (act II), and 23 on the
final act and closure. The whole film is divided precisely in two
with the first half depicting the writing of the film and the second
its production. Neat framing devices at either end of the movie mark
the moment of the writer's entry into this process and the moment
of his expulsion. Both of these are eight minutes long. Close analysis
with a stop watch shows many more elegant arithmetical correspondences.
A popular film like Sunset Boulevard convincingly depicts a 1950s
version of human thought, behavior, and above all motivation in a
narrative structure that can be expressed as an algorithm. As such,
it is entirely in keeping with high-level scientific abstractions
of intelligence.
13.
See Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar, eds. Representation in Scientific
Practice (Cambridge: MIT, 1990), especially Bruno Latour "Drawing
Things Together".
14.
The issue of representation and scientific practice is developed particularly
in relation to AI by Daniel Dennett "Computer Models and the Mind
-- a view from the East Pole, " Times Literary Supplement 1453--1454
(December 1984)
15.
For an overview see Manuel De Landa "Virtual Environments and the
Emergence of Synthetic Reasoning" South Atlantic Quarterly 92, 793--816
(Fall 1993).
16.
Corrigan [8] p.52.
Film References
Ghost
Jerry Zucker, 1990. UIP/Paramount.
House
Sitter Frank Oz Image Films
Pretty
Woman Gary Marshall, 1990. Buena Vista/Touchstone.
Terminator
James Cameron, 1984. Orion/Hemdale/Pacific
Western.
Die
Hard John McTiernan, 1988. Fox/Gordon Company/Silver Pictures.
Fatal
Attraction Adrian Lyne, 1987. Paramount.
Basic
Instinct
Disclosure
The
Silence of the Lambs Johnathan Demme, 1900. Rank/Orion
Star
Wars George Lucas, 1977. TCF/Lucasfilm.
True
Romance
Sunset
Boulevard Billy Wilder, 1950. Paramount.
