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.
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