Phantom of the Future: Cinema in a Digital World

The Syrian Bride (an Israel-France-Germany co-production directed by Eran Riklis) won the Prix du Public at the Locarno Film Festival in 2004. That same year it picked up four more awards at the Montreal Film Festival - the Grand Prix des Amériques, the Ecumenical Jury Prize, the FIPRESCI Prize (international film critics) and the Air Canada People’s Choice Award.

Even if I have described the prognosis industry rather simplistically, I myself maintain a sceptical attitude towards forecasts about the future. The history of the Enlightenment gives good reason for this. The cinema itself is full of images of the future. At any rate, films do not conceal the fact that they play on our fantasies.

One of the most recent examples is Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow, a vehement plea to the American government to sign the Kyoto Protocol. In Emmerich’s film, global warming leads to a reversal of the Gulf Stream, and by doing so brings about not a sneaking change in the weather, but a sudden climatic subversion, an Ice Age in the northern hemisphere. A Gutenberg Bible is one of the few cultural goods spared by the heroes searching for heating material in their struggle for survival in temperatures adequate to humans.

Emmerich’s film is one of those that the cinema quickly consumes. More interesting are future scenarios of the second order, as I would like to call them – films that, in their stories, draw consequences from our imagination and expose them to aesthetic (thus to ethical and political) reflection.

With his ‘noir’ science-fiction films A.I. and Minority Report Steven Spielberg, one of the most important film auteurs of contemporary cinema, has achieved this model. In A.I. a second anthropogenesis takes place: the technical production of a creature which not only possesses human skills, but also feelings and a soul, and which is sensitive to love, longing, pain and the fear of death. Using this creature as a mirror (like Pinocchio it wants to become a ‘real boy’), the director shows us the failure of human beings who react to the Other with racist reflexes.

Even more gloomily Minority Report tells of a world that believes the future is at its disposal. The interaction of prophetic gifts and the most advanced visualization techniques is supposed to make it possible to foresee crimes and, therefore, to prevent and simultaneously pass judgement on them. The lure of being able to abolish evil produces an insane control and manipulation system, a technological fascism. In both cases, technical solutions are put forward to which our morals are unaccustomed. The fairy-tale ending of both films provides little consolation for such a prospect.

Digital image processing

Emmerich’s and Spielberg’s films, like many others, emerged by making use of the latest cinematic technology, in particular, the possibilities of digital editing methods in post-production. In this phase of film production, the fusion of traditional, analogue and new digital techniques has already taken place. Digital image processing possibilities have furthered this process, especially since the transformation of analogue, photo-chemical film shots into a digital master without quality loss is no longer a problem today. Currently being discussed is whether in the future the photo-mechanical movie camera, which has been used with its basic technical components for one hundred years, will be replaced by digital cameras. Thus, analogue film production based on optical, mechanical, and chemical processes would be completely changed.

Most experts agree, however, that the day when digital technology can achieve the qualities of traditional 35mm-film standards is still far away. They consider that a hybrid technology, a combination of analogue and digital elements of film production, will be the most probable variant for a long time. This applies to the cinematic feature film and the particular qualities the audience expects regarding the cinema experience.

For artistic creators of film, for directors and cameramen, easy-to-manage digital cameras already represent an alternative to classic recording technology today. Smaller crews and shortened production times permit shooting with smaller budgets and open up new opportunities for young film directors and a better chance to realise riskier projects. Auteur films, which are able to make do without expensive stars and the suggestiveness of complex effects, benefit from the new technology, at least at the moment. The idea of being able to use the camera as a personal means of expression like a pen – the caméra stylo that the French director Alexandre Astruc once dreamed about – seems, today more than ever, within close reach.

Wim Wenders, who has always experimented with new techniques, recently completed such a film with Land of Plenty. In a deliberately reduced, narrow format, Wenders’ narration comments on the new poverty, religious fundamentalism, and political paranoia in George Bush’s America. Technical progress is often identified with growth and increase. This is also true of cinema with more effective pictures, more unimpeded enjoyment, more options, higher ranges and rates, etc. Films like Wenders’, on the contrary, demonstrate the freedoms that come from limitation.

Future of cinema

Most considerations of the future of the cinema revolve around the integration of the analogue ‘island’ of 35mm-films into the mega-trend of digitalisation that is prevalent throughout the entire range of communication technologies, especially entertainment. They concentrate less on the field of film production than on the screening of films. Above all, the economic interests of the distributors – who hope for cost savings in the reproduction and transportation of copies – and those of the IT-industry – which hopes for market development, convergence effects and prestige gains – drive this development.

In the future, cinemas, instead of obtaining expensive single copies through a complex dispatch system, are supposed to call up films from central servers and to project them either on-line or over a buffer system. By comparison with the quality losses and damages incurred through the processing and projection of analogue copies, loss-free data communication is considered to be a technical advantage.

Even so, a set of obstacles prevents the implementation of this conversion process which, in part, has already been given concrete deadlines. These obstacles once again throw light on the advantages that made the motion-picture a leading cultural medium against which other audiovisual media must be measured.

A circumstance that, in retrospect, seems amazing should not be underestimated: already in the early period of cinema a uniform standard for the underlying technology, specifically 35mm-film, won out. The cinema had thereby a global format that made its universal dissemination possible. Already before the First World War, it formed a global communication network, although with a few blind spots, above all in Africa. With subtitles and dubbing the cinema developed solutions to the linguistic obstacles that resulted from sound film.

In the end, this first global communication medium proved so flexible that it was able for more than a hundred years of cinema history to come to terms with all the technical innovations that emerged. The electronic medium television never succeeded with such standardisation, and the same applies to digital formats. The quantum leaps in the development of information technology lead us to expect platforms that will continue to change and compete with one another. The hitherto existing global range of films will be limited by digitalisation if compatibility between the different formats cannot be achieved. Economic competition makes such a solution more difficult and, presumably, a cartel of global players will form to secure their own interests.

Seen from a cultural-political perspective, the global standard of cinema did not cause, but it did support the dominance of Hollywood film in many regions of the world. At least no technical barriers stood in its way. Conversely, the same conditions made it possible for smaller cinema nations to win the attention and interest of the public beyond their own borders. Japanese cinema, long time an insular phenomenon, suddenly became a leading power in film art in the 1950s. The Iranian cinema miracle of the last one-and-a-half decades – with directors such as Abbas Kiarostami, or those from the Makhmalbaf clan – has conquered the silver screen and shown the world a picture of a country beyond the rule of the Mullahs.

New Asiatic cinematographies like that of South Korea – with Kim Ki-Duk – or Taiwan – with names like Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Edward Yang or Tsai Ming-Liang – are gifts. Without these creative innovations, the flourishing film-festival circus would be inconceivable. In spite of the mainstream orientation, cinema has always held the doors open to cultural expansion and ‘outsiders’. Who would have thought that countries like Finland, through Aki Kaurismäki, or Greece, through Theo Angelopoulos, would become beacons on the cinema map? But because digital cinema technically favours the control of distribution by the strongest economic powers, this open exchange is endangered. In addition, the dominant market forces will not come from the film industry itself, but from the IT industry.

Audiences and theatres

The needs and desires of the audience will play a crucial role in the future of cinema. However, cinema’s least worries are the interests of the consumer. The multiplication of different means of communication (for example, cable and satellite channels on television), developments in home cinema through the success of DVD, as well as new markets, particularly in China, have broadened the use of films and will continue to increase the need for new productions. In any case, cinema has not had to fear the replacement of its own specific perceptual sphere that lets us sink into an imaginary world.

Only there, in the cinema, does a public take shape that further develops possibilities of utilisation. Until now, it has been only cinematic apocalypses like Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days or Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall that have dreamed of a more effective and comprehensive deception of the senses, of a more dangerous drug than cinema itself – all the more dangerous because the detoxification of the addict no longer seems to be guaranteed.

The largest obstacle to the introduction of digital cinema are the theatres themselves. They are confronted with an investment expense that they cannot shift onto the spectators. The replacement of conventional, analogue projection by digital equipment costs many times more than the capital spent so far. In addition, the service life of digital technology is substantially shorter due to innovation cycles. The cost of replacing equipment lost through wear and tear is difficult to calculate, whereas a conventional film projector with orderly maintenance is guaranteed to be useful for many decades.

In addition, digitalisation does not necessarily promise an increase in use value. At best, it guarantees an equivalent to the accustomed standard measured under optimal conditions involving fresh copies and trouble-free projection (with regard to image quality and definition, purity of optics). After all, the performance reliability of digital projection techniques in view of the data quantities to be processed is hardly proven. Whoever deals with computer problems on a daily basis will most likely distrust the promises of the specialists.

As the introduction of sound films showed in an exemplary way, the key to winning general acceptance for new technology lies with the producers. The coexistence of silent movies and sound films could only be maintained for a few years. Charlie Chaplin was the last great figure of the silent movie to submit himself, in the famous singing scene of Modern Times, to the new demands. A similar time limit for the establishment of digital cinema can be foreseen as well.

New business models that make provision for the participation of cinema operators in the profits of manufacturers and users are supposed to eliminate, or at least reduce, resistance of front-line film marketers to the audience. Nevertheless, producers still shrink from a crucial hurdle. The crisis of the pop music industry stands as a warning sign. In contrast to an approximately two-and-a-half-to-three kilometre long copy of a film, the reproduction and dissemination of a digital file, no matter how extensive it may be, cannot in principal be checked.

Even codings offer only limited protection against abuse – what is coded can and will be decoded, provided that interest is strong enough. Legal sanctions are effective only in a limited sense on the world market. Thus the flow of film utilisation back to the studios and, as a consequence, their production capacity, is called into question. The introduction of digital cinema thus depends on the economic risk producers, primarily the American major studios, are prepared to take.

A transitory creature

What does the digitalisation of film mean for our global culture? To answer this question, one must clarify the fundamental difference between analogue and digital images. Analogue film is a ‘write-once’ medium. A classical film image inevitably includes a concrete, unrepeatable space-time moment. No reproduction or handling changes anything of the uniqueness of the film image. The temporal art, film, therefore corresponds to our self-perception as a transitory creature subjected to time – it corresponds to our memory, our openness to the future, our consciousness of the volatility of each present moment.

Luchino Visconti, the director of Rocco and His Brothers and Death in Venice, therefore spoke of an ‘anthropomorphic cinema’. Only a single film genre that can be almost endlessly manipulated has freed itself so far from these conditions: animated film. It is the most entertaining Hell that art has acquainted us with. Digital technology achieves this unleashing borrowed from comics even more radically. Digitalisation dismantles the film image into discrete data points without dimension. In data space, about which we can speak only metaphorically, there are no longer any space-time moments, but only exchangeable, in principle computable, information units. Where such data points can be located at any time is completely unimportant. Of course, this dismantling takes place beyond our perception.

In digital cinema, we will also believe that we are watching the development of a story with a beginning and an end, with moments of happiness and misfortune. We will still see laughter and tears. But we will no longer encounter ourselves, only our phantoms. The cinema of the future has a consolation for this loss: we will not notice it at all.

Translated by Dr. James Slawney.

Karsten Visarius chairs the Film-Cultural Centre of the Protestant Church in the Gemeinschaftswerk der Evangelischen Publizistik (GEP), Frankfurt/Main, and is Managing Director of the international church film organisation Interfilm. He wishes to acknowledge substantial inspiration and information from the publication Digital Film - Digital Cinema, edited by Peter C. Slansky (Konstanz, 2004).