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About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 16, 1999)
A change of scenery Replacement of cinematography eminent with technological progressions Editor’s note: Each Tuesday this semester, the Daily Nebraskan will print an opinion column from a guest columnist. Each works at the University of Nebraska or is involved with an issue that effects our campus or our students. The following is an excerptfrom Dixon & forthcoming book, The New Century of Cinema: Looking Forward, Looking Back, State University of New York Press. WHEELER WINSTON DIXON is an English profes sor and chairman of the film studies program. As we approach the 21st century, the filmic medium itself is about to undergo a complete transformation. Video imagery is becoming cheap er and more pervasive, increasing the ease of both production and exhibition. At the same time, the portability and flexibility of low-cost video production gives new voice to those ignored by the mainstream cinema, yet, paradoxically, the increased costs of distribution make it ever more difficult for alterna tive cinema/video works to reach an international audience. 16mm film is dead as a production medium; 35 mm may well follow, within the next 10 to 15 years, signaling a significant shift in the production and reception process of that which we call the cinema. Editing of film is no longer done on film itself; that vanished in the 1970s. For ease, for cost, for its multiple capa bilities, the AVID system, among oth ers, has become die new standard for film editing. Indeed, many new films are being shot entirely on digital video, such as Thomas Vmterbeig’s brilliant film “Celebration” and Bennett Miller’s “ The Cruise” (both 1998), and then blown up to 35mm for theatrical distribution. Soon 35mm projection may well become obsolete, leading to an entire new digital video era of image production and exhibition, almost pre cisely 100 years after the birth of cine ma. In the early years of the 21st centu ry, we will finally do away with film altogether, replacing it with a high-def inition matrix of dots and pixels laser projected onto a conventional theater screen, and audiences will overwhelm ingly accept this transformation with out comment The cinematograph, after all, is essentially an extension of die Magic Lantern apparatus - light thrown on a screen - and it has had dominion over the entire 20th century. Now, in die new millennium, dif ferent systems of image storage and retrieval will replace the allure of film as surely as magnetic tape replaced optical soundtracks as a vehicle of cin ema production. We will be witnessing a silent revolution of images, in which the digital creations of a new breed of “directors” will be as real and substan tial to us as Humphrey Bogart, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bela Lugosi and Jean Harlow are to 20dl-century audi ences and archivists. the tuture of the cinematograph itself is not in doubt, although what form the cinematographic apparatus itself will take in the coming century is another matter altogether. There already exist a number of video-imag ing systems where resolution and image quality genuinely rival that of 35mn^ilm, and with the general intro duction of video imaging instead of photographic image capture, the motion picture industry will be taking a giant leap forward into the future. Since nearly all films are now subject ed to a digital “clean-up” process on their route to final distribution, in which the original photographic images are transformed into a series of dots and pixels, manipulated in a vari ety of methods, and then re-transferred onto 35mm, the total digitization of the moving image cannot be that far off, nor will it be an apocalyptic event that utterly changes the face of image stor age and reproduction in a noticeable fashion. Rather, as video imaging increases in ease, portability and image quality, the already blurred line between cine ma and video will vanish altogether, just as digital compositing has replaced traditional “mattes” in motion picture special effects. With more films, videos, television programs and Internet films being produced now than ever before, and with international image boundaries crumbling thanks to the pervasive influence of the World Wide Web (a technology still in its infancy), we will see in the coming years an explosion of voices from around the globe, in a new and more democratic process which allows a voice to even the most marginalized I factions of society. As the cinema ends its first century of active development and gestation, we can see that it has always been in a process of becoming something new, changing and adapting with each new circumstance and shift in society. From silent flickering images thrown on a screen, die cinema formed a voice through the efforts of Alice Guy, Thomas Edison, Lee de Forest, Vitaphone and other allied processes that have brought us into the Dolby stereo age of digital sound and image processing. From black and white paper nega tives, the cinema has moved swiftly through silver nitrate film, safety film, 3-strip Technicolor, Eastman monopack color film, moveable mattes, split-screen “doubling,” until it now stands on the threshold of the final video transformation, where the film camera ceases to exist and is replaced by an entirely digital imaging system that will soon replace conventional 35mm production and exhibition orocesses. ‘ The moving image, while still con trolled as a commercial medium by a few conglomerate organizations, has become with the use of inexpensive Camcorders and the like a truly demo cratic medium, as has been proven by the Rodney King tape, footage of the events at Tiananmen Square, and other documentary videotapes that have altered the public perception of the formerly illimitable dominion of authoritarian regimes. It is impossible to hold back the flood of images created by these new technologies, and in the coming century, these images will both inform and enlighten our social discourse. The surveillance cameras now used in New York night chibs to provide low-cost enter tainment for Web browsers can only pro liferate; there is no surcease from the domain of images which shape and transform our lives. While the big-screen spectacle will continue to flourish, a plethora of new image constructs now compete for our attention, often with a significant measure of success. The monopoly of the television networks is a thing of the past; who is to say that theatrical distribution as we know it will not also collapse, to be replaced by a different sort of experi ence altogether? IMAX films and other large-for mat image storage and retrieval sys tems mimic reality, but in the future, holographic laser displays, in which seemingly three-dimensional charac ters hold forth from a phantom staging area, may well become the preferred medium of presentation, signaling a return to the proscenium arch, but in this case, a staging space with infinite possibilities for transformation. Powered by high-intensity lasers, this technology could present perfor mances by artists who would no longer have to physically tour to present their faces and voices to the public. The future of the moving image is both infinite and paradoxical, remov ing us further and further from our cor poreal reality, even as it becomes ever more tangible and seductive. The films, videotapes and production sys tems discussed here represent only a small fraction of contemporary moving image practice, but they point the direction to work that will be accomplished in the next century. Far from dying, the cinema is constantly being MattHaney/DN reborn, in new configurations, capture system, and modes of display. While the need to be entertained, enlightened and/or lulled into momentary escape will always remain a human constant, the cinema as we know it today will continue to undergo unceasing growth and change. Always the same, yet constantly revising itself, the moving image in die 21st century promises to fulfill both our most deeply held dreams, while simultaneously submitting us to a zone of hypersurveillance that will make monitoring devices of the present-day seem naive and remote. Yet no matter what new genres may arise as a result of these new technologies, and no mat ter what audiences the moving images of the next century address, we will continue to be enthralled by the mes meric embrace of the phantom zone of absent signification, in which the copy increasingly approaches the verisimili tude of the original. Although Hollywood will seek to retain its dominance over the global presentation of fictive entertainment constructs, a new vision of interna tional access, a democ racy of images, will finally inform the future structure of cinematographic camera in die 21st century. Many of the stories told will remain familiar, genres are most com fortable when they are repeated with minor variations. But as die production and exhibition of the moving image moves resolutely into the digital age, audiences will have even greater access to a plethora of visual constructs from every comer of the earth. We are now in die digital age where we w ere one hundred years ago in the era of the cin ematograph; at the beginning. What happens next will be wondrous to see. The Film Studies Program office is located in Andrews Hall, Room 105. Office hours for spring 1999 are Mondays through Fridays, 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. The Him Studies major takes effect in the fall of1999. Students are urgal to drop by during office hours to obtain the necessary forms to reg ister for the new major. For more information, contact 472-6594 or film@unlinfo.unl.edu. f