Digital cinema and aesthetics

Leo Carax' film is a journey through cinematic history but also an awesome outlook on the future of film, where André Bazins dream of total cinema might finally come true, for the conventional way of filmmaking (i.e. the use of a camera obscura with a photosensitive film reel and real actors) slowly ceases to exist and is replaced by CGI. The protagonist, a Monsieur Oscar, seems trapped in an invisible machinery of filmmaking, in an endless struggle between the "old" new media and the current new media of the digital age. In one scene, one of his many assignments, with each one making up a segment of the film, M. Oscar futilely tries to keep up in a motion capture suit with the (non-shown) scenes of a CGI-film he's part of.

Not neccessarily a hyperrealistic or extraordinarily digital film, yet one of the few exceptional adaptations of a video game, "Silent Hill" uses camera angles and recreates scenes from the source material in a modern paragone of arts.

A new direction in CGI cinema seems to be finally able to create real life-looking computer animated "actors" (fantastic creatures like Gollum and Ceasar from "Planet of the Apes" aside) or as in this case making one of the actors look younger. Jeff Bridges plays a double-part as programmer Kevin Flynn (the main character of the films predecessor) and CLU, a rogue program created by Flynn in the 1980s and who has since then kept his young appearance (because programs don't age). Still those effects are far from perfect, making Bridge's face sometimes appear sort of rubbery and unnatural. Still it makes sense in the context of a film that uses a fantastic setting (the world inside of computers, where programs are represented as "people") and where The Grid (Flynns utopic creation inside the Computer) is shown stylized with de-saturated colours and lots of light-effects.

Clearly a game changer for Digital Cinema, doing what even what even the "Star Wars"-Prequels couldn't accomplish, making most cinemas in the U.S. (and in other countries, too) switch from analog to digital projectors. Still haven's seen it, though...

One cannot watch this film and not think of a video game: after being killed in action during the battle against an alien invasion, a soldier suddenly wakes up in the morning before the counter-offensive in nothern France. Having somehow gained the aliens' ability to reset the day of a battle, he dies many times, each time memorizing more details of the battle. The Plot sounds like "Groundhog Day" meets "Aliens", but it also reminds me of video games like "Halo" or "Gears of War" where dying has no consequences (safe for the annoyance).
Also, it seems that even with the near-perfect special effects, which are most spectacular in the scene the humans' air support is under enemy fire, the copy & paste nature of these CGI choppers makes it more obvious that, even if this is a science-fiction film, real war is also part bureaucracy, part logistics, part numbers and also lots of casualties.

Save for Ferarras "New Rose Hotel" this is the only adaptation of any material by William Gibson, which itself was a short story set in the same universe as the "Neuromancer"-trilogy. While a somewhat entertaining high concept film it unfortunately falls short of the possibilities it had a chance to offer. The stylized "hacking" sequences are still an interesting visualisation of how Gibson describes the Cyberspace in his novels, not as a two-dimensional screen on a computer but as a consensual hallucination.

The main character's journey in his sound-proofed hi-tech sedan shows the outside world through its shaded windows, making the "real world", where violence and protest occurs, appear as a far place, perfectly divided by the metal and glass barrier of this self contained environment. When one of the protesters immolates himself (in reference to the self-immolation of Buddhist monks in Vietnam in the 1960s), Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) seems completely unaffacted by this and calling it "unreal".

Like "Holy Motors" this one uses genre-specific settings presented in a film within a film format where the borders between fiction and intra-fiction blurr. "Sucker Punch" introduces the setting as a theater play, presumably inside the main protagonists head, who has fallen victim to a crime but is falsely accused for it and sent to a mental institution. Unable to cope with reality she tries to find a way to escape by stealing objects she needs for her plan. Every theft is portrayed as a fantasy-sequence (in an already heavily stylized film) resembling boss fights and other kinds of action-standarts from video games.

The first feature film shot in HFR (high frame rate, meaning double as many frames per second) and in 3D the film left a bad taste in some critcs' mouths who complained about the too realistic film, making it obvious that we are not in Middle Earth but on a very detailed set, not unlike a ride or an attraction in a theme park. Will future generations, who are more used to high resolution pictures and computer imagery think the same or is it due to the unsharp quality of "old films" that enables the audience to immerse into film with 24 fps with more ease?

If you know the short story by Stephen King you might be suprised how little the so-called film adaptation (that is until the producers were forced to remove any references to the author's name) has to do with it. Instead of a bizarre horror story about a maniac who kills his victims with a lawnmower this film mixes horror with science-fiction and adds some computer generated imagery set in the virtual reality going with the theme of the protagonist's goal of becoming one with the machine.

While not his best film "Public Enemies" is a bold piece of directing even for someone like Michael Mann. The high definition-look of his earlier films never seemed inappropriate because films like "Heat" and "The Insider" took place in contemporary times. "Public Enemies" is still rich in detail and shows Mann's near-obsessive effort for realism and accuracy, though some viewers might be left with a feeling of artificiality because of the very same hyperrealism the look of the film offers.

Adapted from the graphic novel of the same name, "Scott Pilgrim" is on one hand a postmodern comedy for a generation of video gamers and on the other hand a sensory overload of pixel art and CGI imagery that blends in with the Mise-en-scène but on the other hand looks otherwordly and out of place. Is the film's box office failure an indicator that younger audiences are not yet ready for this kind of aesthetics or is it due to the marketing being too much of a challenge?

"André Bazin and Roland Barthes both theorize a cinematic realism based on the indexical ability of the photographic image (the ability of the image to indicate an original object). How are their arguments affected by the advent of digital, nonindexical cinematic technologies?"

Steven Shaviro: "Emotion Capture: Affect in Digital Film" (abstract)