Introduction

We are at an important juncture in cinematic history. As digital processes are replacing traditional analogue methods of film production, post-production and exhibition, the spectacular nature of special effects cinema is taking over at the box-office. The cinematic spectator, now highly adept in the digital realm, is faced with a highly mutable cinematic experience, where DVDs and computerized viewings offer narrative interruption and temporal mastery. With digital technologies advancing at light speeds, the digital takeover of cinema is inevitable, just as it was with photography, communication and the workplace. Is this conquest of cinema though, changing the spectator’s experience? This is the question posed by this research project, a kind of snapshot of spectatorship which is evolving at rapid speeds, a work towards developing a semiotic and psychoanalytical framework for the contemporary-digital cinematic experience

In order to understand the experience of digital cinema, the development of a theoretical stand point is needed. This is the subject of the first chapter, Reality and Regression. The chapter will establish the theoretical and psychoanalytical discourses from which I hope to draw my conclusions, namely semiology and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The key text of this chapter is Film Language by Christian Metz, which helps to reveal the complex interrelationship between reality and the moving image. Also drawing briefly on photographic theory, here I will develop a brief explanation of the traditional cinematic experience. Here I will also iterate the importance of speed and movement in the very survival of cinema, that it is movement which gives life to images, alluding to notions of unreality and surreality.

In From Grain to Pixel I will analyze the physical aesthetic of the digital and film image, and discuss the nature of the authenticity aesthetic applied to filmmakers in order to better represent reality. The following chapter, Stop Start, addresses the threat poised to cinematic narrative by its mutability in the digital world, and the strikingly complex spatial-temporal awareness developed by the contemporary spectator in the face of advancing technologies.

The following chapters will focus on the rise of the ‘digital event film’, a spectacular demonstration of the powers of digital illusion, subjectivity and power, and films that are usually disregarded by critics as shallow escapism for the masses. Elastic Hyperreality will apply Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality to the filmic experience and signify the newly rejuvenated disaster narrative as embodiment of spectator’s repressed desires to reject it. Next I will analyze the subject in the digital event movie. The Digital Pantheon will draw on Tobey Crockett’s Camera as Camera, and provide insight into the contradictory experience of power and powerlessness afforded by the digital. Finally The Digital Flâneur will liken the experience of the cinema to that of the 18^th Century character and his place within contemporary world and the contemporary movie theatre.

By applying fundamental theory based on the experience of traditional analogue cinema, to newly emerging digital processes, this study provides insight into the contemporary cinematic experience, one which exists more and more within these digital realities. Also drawing on more recent works, such as Sean Cubitt’s The Cinema Effect and the writings of Paul Virilio, this study is not a contrast of two opposing aesthetics nor is it a list of the benefits and downfalls of the practical application of digital processes. What I hope this argument posits is that cinema has always been in some way a representation of reality, and in a digital realm of spectacle and interruption, this continues to be the case, revealing unanticipated insight into our experience of the modern condition.

Reality and Regression

The spectator’s experience of the moving image is heavily based on its complex relationship with reality, a bond that spawns from the still photograph and a theoretical understanding of which is essential to understanding the cinematic experience. Susan Sontag approaches this question in her work On Photography, where she notes that when a photograph is taken, the very essence of reality is immediately transferred to the image itself, ‘such images are indeed able to usurp reality because first of all a photograph is not only an image, an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real’ (Sontag 1978).  The effecting nature of the photograph spawns from their place as documentary, a subject’s trust in science and mechanics to record a moment in time that ‘really was’, a trust seeded in a time when the camera ‘could not lie’. What develops from this transference is a certain reliance on the still image for the subject, ‘as if only by looking at reality in the form of an object- through the fix of a photograph- is it really real, that is surreal’ (Sontag 1978.80).

Roland Barthes’ contemplation of these issues in his article on the rhetoric of the image talks of photography evoking a sense of ‘has been there’, a reality that once existed, yet is present for the viewer of any photograph. ‘We therefore have a new category of space-time: place present but time past- so that in still photography there is an illogical conjunction of here and then’ (Barthes 1964.47). This gives rise to the photograph’s existence, not only in the realm of the surreal but that it evokes a sense of ‘unreality’, for we know that what the photograph shows is not really here, yet its slice of reality did exist in an earlier temporal position, then. Metz writes that this unreality is produced by the ‘”deliberation of time” (things that have been thus but no longer are), and also by our awareness of what is “here”’ (Metz1974.5) Unreality though, is not a reproduction of reality experienced; it is merely historical, with its primary effect on its viewer being that of ‘purely spectatorial awareness, an attitude of externalized contemplation, rather than an awareness of magical or fictional possibilities’ (Metz 1974.6).

Using Barthes as a base from which to depart, Christian Metz provides an insight into the experience of the cinematic image, where the ‘the movie spectator is absorbed, not by a “has been there” but a sense of “there it is”’ (Metz 1974.6). The great difference between photographic image and cinema for Metz is its considerable projective power along with its possibilities for fiction and formulation of narrative, notions that lie in their most obvious of the medium’s differences, movement. From Plato to Derrida, the visual experience is heralded as the subject’s primary sense of reality, and with the invention of cinema, the dead unrealities of the still image were granted the life of movement. If photography is a moment of past reality, then one would expect cinema (simply animated photography) to be experienced in a similar manner of an extended moment of past reality. Yet this is not the case as ‘the spectator always sees movement as being present’ (Metz 1974.8). Metz continues to note that Barthes’ unreal presence of the photograph, no longer stands in the presence of motion. Movement in cinema is not just an artifact of previous reality, as is the photograph, it is present and it seems real now. ‘Movement is never material but is always visual, to reproduce its appearance is to duplicate its reality’ (Metz 1974.9). Whilst this explains the viewer’s temporal relationship to reality in film, what also must be addressed is its strange ability to suspend our disbelief, to invest us emotionally and disconnect us from the ‘real world’.

Movement also plays a large part of our narrative and spatial interactions with the cinematic image. Metz also discusses this point with reference to Jean Leirens:

‘the impression of reality we get from a film does not depend at all on the strong presence of an actor[1] but, rather, on the low degree of existence possessed by these ghostly creatures on screen, and they are, therefore, unable to resist our constant impulse to invest them with the “reality” of fiction (the concept of diegesis), a reality that comes only from within us, from the projections and identifications that are mixed in with our perception of the film. The film spectacle produces a strong impression of reality because it corresponds to a “vacuum, which dreams readily fill”’ (Metz 1974.10).

Leirens rightly assumes an active viewer, who must transcend into the reality proposed by the film by accessing his/her own imagination, like that which fills our own dreams. In order to ‘transcend’ and become ‘disconnected’ from ‘the real world’, the active viewer must bring with him/her a sense of their own reality to fill the vacuum, an experience which can only be induced by a spectacle that resembles those of reality proper, if only slightly. Cinema can be seen as a realization (through movement and transference) of the unreal (that which was then but is here), evoking reality’s sense of it is here, it is now. Film walks the fine line between reality and unreality, a line inaccessible for photography and live performance. Metz summates, ‘to inject the reality of motion into the unreality of the image and thus to render the world of the imagination more real than it had ever been- this is only part of the “secret” of motion pictures’ (Metz 1974.15).

The cinematic image, as realized unreality alone, is an insufficient explanation to our fascination with film. In order to amply understand the changing experiences of a cinematic audience in the digital age, we must first establish a psychoanalytic model from which to work. Turning increasingly to Freudian thought, film theorists such as Baudry, Kaplan and even Metz have stated that that in its captivation, film simulates the experience of a dream, and with it all the elements required to simulate the identifications and misrecognitions of psychological regression. Baudry writes, ‘the arrangement of the different elements- projector, darkened hall, screen… [reproduces]in a striking way the mise-en-scène of Plato’s cave (prototypical set for all transcendence and topological model of idealism) reconstructs the situation necessary to the release of the ‘mirror stage’ discovered by Lacan’ (Baudry 1970.45).

Like the young child, the audience member ‘suffers from limited corporeal mobility and becomes dependent on hypertrophied visual experience, which produces a superreal sense of reality that cannot be tested’ (Jay 1993.475). As a result, the movie-goer experiences the simulated processes of the ‘mirror stage’, where the subject, though, cannot identify with his own image and so must search for other elements which to recognize and re-formulate a temporary ego, ‘the mirror suddenly becomes clear glass’ (Metz 1983.45). On a lesser level the viewer will of course identify with the character of the fiction, figures in which to invest emotionally and to help develop narrative drive. The strongest identification made however, is that with the camera, the spectator identifies himself as look itself. Here Baudry notes, ‘thus the spectator identifies less with what is represented, the spectacle itself, than with what stages the spectacle, makes it seen, obliging him to see what it sees’ (Baudry 1970.44). In identifying with the look of the camera, the spectator-subject assumes ‘an all powerful position which is that of God himself, or more broadly of some ultimate signified’ (Metz 1983.49). This insight that likens the filmic experience to that of a perceived, omniscient power over a realized unreality comes before the advent of the digital in film, which will prove to have a great effect on this power-subject relationship in the cinematic experience.

From this basis then, we can conclude that the closer a film’s fiction is to the experience of reality, the stronger the illusion. Processes of transference and realization should come all the easier when the fictional reality more resembles that which the spectator can bring with him/her into the movie theatre. From its birth, cinema has been divided between representing reality and dazzling spectacle. From the Lumiére’s actualities and Méliès’ early trickery, to the great contrast of the Nouvelle Vague directors, Godard and Truffaut, this dichotomy has characterized cinema throughout its history. The aesthetics of a realist cinema (most notably that of the Italian neo-realists), is seen by many important critics as the pinnacle of cinematic style. Bazin asks, ‘was it not from the outset their search for realism that characterized the Russian films of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovjenko as revolutionary both in art and politics, in contrast to the expressionist aestheticism of the German films and Hollywood mawkish star worship?’ (Bazin 1972.16). The aesthetics of reality, for Bazin, should not be viewed as a degenerate version of art and cinematography (a kind of simplification) but an evolution, requiring the greatest technicians and directors to successfully create it. So then any step away from realism can be seen as a step backwards. Bazin’s views on the authentic aesthetic became widely accepted and his views adopted throughout a number of important cinematic movements, namely the French and American New Waves of the 1960s and 70s. However by the end of that decade, realism’s place in mainstream film was doomed to lurk in outskirts of cinema with the rise of the blockbuster and later the digital blockbuster. Thomas Elsaessar cites a Jean Douchet lecture from Le cinema: vers son deuxième siècle in 1995:

‘Filmmakers deserved to be called ‘great’ precisely because of their near obsessive focus on capturing reality and respecting it, respectfully embarking on the way of knowledge. [Today on the other hand], cinema has given up on the purpose and the thinking behind individual shots, in favour of images- rootless, textureless images- designed to violently impress by constantly inflating their spectacular qualities’ (Elsaessar 1998.45).

This suggests a bleak outlook on contemporary film. The film spectator experiences digital cinema no longer as realized unreality, no longer does he/she participate in the viewing experience, Lacan’s mirror-screen replaced with a fierce enjoyment of the spectacles of technology; reality is left outside the movie theatre. Baudry and his followers, writing mainly of the dominant form of realist film in the 1970s, had hoped for an alternative, modernist cinema that would ‘bare the device, wake the spectator from his or her regressive dream, and break the spell of illusion’ (Jay 1993.476). Digital film does not ‘bare the device’, (in fact it works extremely hard to hide it) yet Baudry’s reality ‘spell’ must certainly be broken as reality seems absent in contemporary effects cinema.

From Grain to Pixel

The traditional authentic filmic image can be described as the black and white, heavily grainy image of the Italian neo-realist films, an aesthetic that draws on the newsreels that preceded feature films in theatres in the first half of the 20^th Century until its role was replaced by television in the 1950s. Contemporary filmmakers searching for an ‘authentic’ aesthetic to their films have often turned to black and white. Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) employs the black and white image, ‘constituting a more “realistic” approach to the subject, making the film “closer to [a] documentary”’ (Shandler 1997.156). Obviously tied to representations of documentary and the extent of technological advancement at a given point in history, an image that can be described as authentic will change with over time. Reality in World War II was not black and white and nor was it ‘desaturated’, as is its representation in the trend in contemporary war films such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), yet these are elements employed by cinematographers to grant the authentic ‘look’ to historical film.

If there is a ‘look’ for contemporary authenticity, then it is that of the shaky handheld, digital video camcorder. Digital video now permeates our entire culture, where any individual at any moment can present a video recording device, whether it is a digital camera, a mobile phone or a watch, to capture whatever they like. Pixilated digital images saturate our news media, our online realities and our visual communications, whilst sightseeing tourists enjoy the awesome spectacle of  the grand canyon through the tiny LCD screens of their flip out digital cameras, scenes which could be of anything and seen anywhere. This is the image generation of YouTube and surveillance cameras. This aesthetic has since been used in cinema to help films obtain this sense of ‘authenticity’, where the fiction is often viewed through the lens of a camera being operated by characters themselves. Cloverfield (2008) andParanormal Activity (2007) are two examples of the digital hand-held camera genre or ‘mockumentary’ that uses the low quality, pixilated image to grant the fictional elements of the narrative an increased sense of realism, and therefore the emotional investment the audience has in them. Critics often mourn the loss of authenticity in modern cinema, as its replication becomes a tool of shallow, violent spectacle.

The notion of authenticity in film though, is itself a fabrication. ‘Today, we must doubt even the assumption of lost authenticity: the authentic itself has become a special effect, a connotation of a specific type of brushstroke in painting, a specific vocal style in music, of handheld cameras in Dogme movies’ (Cubitt 2004.271). The Dogme 95 movement that Sean Cubitt refers to here is an avant gardecinematic movement which ran from 1995-2005, that became famous for its minimalist manifesto which rejected the highly manipulative filmmaking processes employed by Hollywood and achieved a low-end image aesthetic, mostly shot on video and digital video cameras; An apparent step towards Bazin’s reality aesthetic. Yet, this remains a simple aesthetic choice which alters the way an audience will experience the fictional world of the film, whether it be a rejection or a celebration of Hollywood styles, it is still a special effect. Talking in contrast of the Lumiére’s actualities Virilio talks of early cinematic illusionist Georges Méliès:

‘the great producers of the [trick photography] epoch realised that by wresting cinema from the realism of “outdoor subjects” that would quickly have bored audiences, Méliès actually made it possible for films to remain realistic… What he shows of reality is what reacts continually to the absences of reality which has passed’ (Virilio 2004.62).

Digital technologies have changed the fictional realm of cinema forever, we can now transcend into worlds limited only by perception and imagination. Filmmaker and theorist Edgar Reitz noted in 1998, ‘suddenly every form of forgery is possible… Our perception of what is real will change fundamentally. Reality and image will have less and less in common. Hardly any image will be able to lay claim to reality. Only medium itself will still be real’ (Reitz 1998.69). Digital media and entertainment are increasingly taking the place of social reality, rather than trying to mimic it.

Let us consider for a moment the corporeal differences between the film and digital image. The traditional filmic image, shot on analogue film, consists of an irregular pattern of silver halide crystals in that are coated onto a translucent film base. These crystals react when exposed to differing levels of light through the shutter of a camera, giving film its characteristic grain structure. Originally viewed as undesirable, visible film grain and its aesthetic now signify much more than just revealing its scientific processes. Assuming Sontag’s theory, of a reliance on the object to solidify reality for the subject, we have invested in film and all its imperfections throughout a century of cinema with being a reflection of the reality in which we live.  Much more than this though, the black and white grain of the Italian neo-realists, for example, seems closer to truth than the actual experience reality in contemporary society. The world is not black and white, nor is it grainy, yet history has imbued this kind of film with the mystical power of truth.

Cue the rise of the digital within film, which, with its roots in special effects, has always fostered suspicion in audiences of not being of reality. Even when not wowing its audience with spectacle or duping them with special effects, the aesthetics of the pixel offer a strange prospect for the spectator. Digital film itself is made up of a regular grid of discrete pixels, invisible to the human eye in the resolutions used in cinema, images that can now rival the level of detail obtained from film stock used in major motion-picture production. The standard frame rate of cinema, usually 24 frames per second (enough to recreate the illusion of movement without a noticeable gap in between images), is also being undermined by digital techniques, as projectors and readers can now simulate images in between frames, making the film seem to run smoother, more ‘life-like’. The outcome of this effect, commonly referred to as the ‘soap opera effect’[2], is that the image can seem ‘too real’, where the image aesthetic is likened to that of video, which runs at 60 frames per second. These processes of ‘motion interpolation’ or ‘motion blur’ actually display for us an image which never existed, a moment in time, computer generated from the moment just before and just after. Our suspicions of the digital have been confirmed, as it lies to us even in its unrelenting search for a crisper, clearer reality; truth in HD. This is a convergence of the real, the simulated and the representation of both as reality, yet another mechanism of Baudrillard’s ‘hyperreality’ or a ‘simulation of something which never really existed’ (Baudrillard 1994).

Progress proposes that reality is imaged upon regulated grids of infinitely malleable pixels, and intercut with false images rendered by computers. Having been conditioned for over a Century to ‘stencil the real’ onto the grain and flaws of cinematic film, much of the digital process in film production has been about recreating those imperfections, merging ‘too real’ digital techniques with ‘genuine’ analogue processes. The onset of the hyperreal is inevitable within cinema as it already it holds power over the effects driven blockbusters, yet for now, reality is still embedded within film and grain, and the digital must adhere to its rules of representation until our perception of reality can catch up. Reality is still 24 frames per second.

Stop Start

It is movement then, which grants cinema its power over the spectator, injecting our visual perception of life into the dead, still image. Yet, movement doesn’t only give life to the ‘ghostly creatures’ we see on screen, it is this notion of constantly moving forward that is fundamental to cinema’s survival. Our perception of the film is based on the sequential projection of still images which create the illusion of movement, ‘the stopping of the moving sequence would be the end of cinema’ (Reitz 1998.64). Reitz continues to note that beyond this obvious relationship, speed also permeates storytelling in cinema, the sex/crime/action that cannot cease, bearing a ‘mechanical principal of always having to flow on and on’ (Reitz 1998.64). So if, as Reitz posits, speed is the mother of cinema, then it must also be the mother of modernity. Having been invented at the turn of the 19^th Century, cinema takes its place next to other mechanisms of speed such as the telephone, the radio, and the automobile, all significant inventions that determined a century of acceleration, Virilio’s ‘century of the speed of light’ (Virilio 1991.141).

Nothing threatens the survival of the moving image more than the freeze-frame, a function made all the more accessible in digital spectatorship. Sontag noted the sense of loss and death that haunts all still photographic images of people, as historic objects that insight mourning for what was, for dead relatives, lost youth and good times past (Sontag 1978.70). Working from this, Laura Mulvey describes the process of freezing cinematic film, ‘as stillness intrudes into movement, the image freezes into the ‘stop of death’ (Mulvey 2006.32). In freezing the traditional cinematic image we are sentencing the life of cinema to the death of the still image, de-realizing the unreal, drawing attention not only to the loss inherent in still photography but to the filmmaking process itself. However, the digital film freeze-frame is almost never still, Dungan notes that, ‘in fact in the digital medium, one can never isolate a “still” image: the image seen is always “in the making” or always incomplete- partially present and partially absent’ (Trinh 2005.4).

The blurring of movement (that which is animate, alive) with the still image (inanimate, dead) is to suspend the figures in the realm of the undead, or insight the Freudian notion of the Uncanny (Freud 1919). Mulvey notes that it is new technologies which are bringing the uncanny ‘back to the cinema’ through its increased mutability and potential for devices such as freeze-framing and slow-motion:

‘It is here, with the blurring of these boundaries, that the uncanny nature of the cinematic image returns most forcefully and, with it, the conceptual space of uncertainty: that is, the difficulty of understanding time and the presence of death in life’ (Mulvey 2006.53).

The digital film however, as Cubitt proposes, is no longer tied to the mortality which permeates analogue, photographic film and instead, ‘time is tied to the cycles of consumption… When the digital addresses death at all, other than to fantasize an afterlife, it turns nostalgic, as if mourning a moment when it was still possible to die’ (Cubitt 2004.271). The digital stream cannot be broken, and the digital image cannot be frozen, no longer tied to human mortality, within this virtual realm, death itself becomes part of the fantasy.

The contemporary filmic experience, now largely viewed through DVDs and computer interfaces, presents us with a predicament, where the constant movement and progression, apparently necessary for cinema’s very survival, is so easily interrupted through digital means. Chapter skip, time bars, still capture, slow-motion, download, remix and reinterpret; the viewer no longer has to retire themselves to a filmmaker’s intentions, they have become a much more active audience, breaking and manipulating cinema’s once inevitable progression. For Reitz, the basis of the film aesthetic relied on the uninterruptability of the moving picture sequence, yet he notes:

‘this uninterruptabilty can no longer be the basis in the digital age since current data streams can be interrupted at any time. They do not have any gravity or inertia. Data are so freely available that every event can be linked with the previous event at any moment, the continuous sequence and the chronology of the story will vanish’ (Reitz 1998.70).

It was the arrival of video in the late 1970s, that first offered an opportunity to interrupt the speed of cinema, but now with digital spectatorship, ‘[this] also affects the internal pattern of the narrative: sequences can be easily skipped or repeated, overturning hierarchies of privilege and setting up unexpected links that displace the chain of meaning invested in cause and effect’ (Mulvey 2006.27). Traditional narrative patterns are under threat in the contemporary viewing experience, where the digital image is now characterized by its mutability. This is not to say that audiences still do not still view their films from beginning to end, sat in a theatre or otherwise, and by no means is an entirely recent phenomenon, having already embraced home-video culture. Speed is still the mother of cinema, yet what differentiates the digital image in a computerized world is its rejection of temporal and spatial measurement, where a spectator can experience any space at any moment in time or all at once. In Elizabeth Dungan’s interview with filmmaker and academic Trinh T. Minh-ha, she states, ‘in today’s electronic space of computerized realities, the sage’s words would fare quite well, for one can hear them all at once: the practical voice of ancient wisdom, the dissenting voice of post-coloniality and the visionary voice of technology’ (Trinh 2005.3).

In the digital realm, there is a deterioration of physical and even analogue representations of space, resulting in a blending of the actual and the simulated. This is the paradox of the digital image, the summation of contrasting notions of being and non-being, absence and presence, existing and non-existing. Cinema has always walked the thin line between the real and the unreal, blazing a trail for technological society’s entire digital relationship with time and space. Speed has left the movie-theatre and permeated the digitized world, along with its inherent crisis of actual, substantive space. Noting Virilio’s Lost Dimension, Trinh states that today’s ‘primal dimension is the dimension of speed time, which defies both temporal and physical measurements’ (Trinh 2005.10).

Nowhere is this mutability more apparent than within the contemporary editing suite, a part of the filmic experience which has become very influential in the spectatorial experience. With the rise in popularity of video editing technologies in the home, first with video and now through digital software, the modern movie-goer has become very well informed on the processes of the edit. The explosion of home-video editing, fuelled by internet sharing sites such as YouTube and the ease at which one can capture and distribute their own content, has laid bare a practice once held exclusively by professionals and previously hidden in the workings of camera and projector.

During the development of a universal film language, the history of cinema has turned the two-dimensional rectangle of the cinema screen into a recreation of depth and space, where one can create meaning and emotion through editing alone. The cinematic audience, once challenged by such things is now well versed in the language of filmmaking, where space and time are condensed to images and numbers in boxes, ready to be dragged and dropped into digital timelines. Now, not only are contemporary viewers able to grasp time, space and emotion in two dimensions, but they are able to condense all these elements into images and numbers to rearrange and manipulate them as they please. There is a further dimension of awareness inherent in the digital spectator as they can now understand the linear two dimensional construction of a film in terms of the infinite manipulation available through the digital interface. D. W. Griffith, in his thoughtful development of editing techniques that would later become the ‘classical Hollywood’ style, could never have imagined an audience unchallenged by the prospect of dissecting a film into its separate visual and audio elements and rearranging them in a virtual plane of numbers and thumbnails. Unfazed now by the prospect of special effects in 3D, the contemporary spectator has become so adept at orientating themselves spatially and temporally within the digital image that its elements can be broken down, compressed and exploded out onto the virtual and infinite realm of the digital interface

Elastic Hyperreality

‘Digital technologies promise to elevate fantasy worlds above the troublesome everyday world. Beauty there will be more intense, emotions more powerful, the adrenalin indistinguishable from the real rush’ (Cubitt 2004.247).

The uncanny in contemporary cinema is further accelerated by the computer generated images which now litter the screens of the multiplex, a ‘technological uncanny’ as sense of ‘uncertainty and disorientation which has always accompanied a new technology that is not yet fully understood’ (Mulvey 2006.27). Computer generated imagery is the birth place of digital film, and is now a mainstay of the modern cinematic experience. Computerized special effect ‘event movies’ are now a recognizable genre of their own, one that has quickly taken hold of both audiences and box-office. Trinh T. Minh-ha states that with the rise of new technologies in digital film and special effects, filmic ‘reality has become elastic’ (Trinh 2005.6). Now primarily concerned with, if we are to agree with Elsaessar, violently impressing audiences with spectacle, cinema no longer seeks to reflect the reality of the real world, and is more concerned with trickery and illusion (Elsaessar 1998.45).

Effects driven cinema can come in many forms, from the epic fantastical worlds of The Lord of the Rings (2001-3) trilogy or Avatar(2009), to the disaster pornography of Cloverfield or The Day after Tomorrow (2004), to the action showcases of The Matrix (1999) or Iron Man (2008). The effects based movie has never claimed truth, it has always existed in the realm of magic, and now with effects technologies advancing faster than they ever have, the illusion is just becoming more extravagant. In Adorno’s AestheticTheory, he states that ‘magic itself, free of any claims to be real, is a facet of enlightenment: its illusion disenchants the enchanted world’ (Adorno 1984.86). In not claiming to be true, the magical moment helps us better understand the aesthetics of illusion and therefore the aesthetics of truth. Whether or not witnessing the poorly rendered CGI wolves of The Day After Tomorrow trying to eat the film’s protagonist insights a higher understanding of the nature of truth directly is unlikely, but the question is an important one to ask at least. Like the audience who enters the magician’s theatre though, the contemporary spectator is more than aware of the illusion they are about to encounter. Sean Cubitt writes that a ‘triple consciousness informs the digital viewer, alert to the mechanism of illusion, delighted by their effectivity and entranced by their developments’ (Cubitt 2004.4). Along with their expectations for digital illusion, the spectator must also be ready to sever his connections with fundamental laws of physics and nature, yet for the illusion to be truly successful, despite views of critics like Elsaessar, the films still need a presence of reality to complete ‘transcendence’.  Also the audience must fulfill their side of the bargain and bring with them, their own sense of reality with which to fill Leiren’s vacuum. No matter how far from reality the spectacle of a film may be, Metz writes, that it ‘carries enough elements of reality- the literal translation of graphic contours and mainly, the real presence of movement- to furnish us with rich and varied information about the diegetic sphere’ (Metz 1974.14).

What then of this reality beyond the movie theatre’s walls? As reality and digitized reality merge, the borders of what is real and what is virtual are becoming blurred. Globalized society adds to this crisis of authenticity, a shrewd construct which permeates almost every level of our reality experience. Baudrillard famously wrote of America, that:

‘Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation’ (Baudrillard 1994.12).

Paul Virilio also writes of Los Angeles:

‘So much more than Venturi’s Las Vegas, it is Hollywood that was the first Cinecittà, the city of living cinema where stage-sets and reality, tax-plans and scripts, the living and the living dead, mix and merge deliriously. Here more than anywhere else advanced technologies combined to form a synthetic space-time’ (Virilio 1991.26).

These descriptions of synthesized reality in Los Angeles, after almost two more decades into the inevitable spread of globalization, can easily be applied to all Western nations. Our reality then is not real, but a construction a hyperreality which shrouds us from the hostility of ‘the desert of the real’ (Baudrillard 1994.1). The phantasmagoria of the special effects event movie can stand as one of these simulacra, a representation of the imaginary whose sparse claims to reality are drawn from a simulation itself, so therefore bares no relation to the real whatsoever. They exist to make our reality seem more ‘real’, by the creation of increasingly violent and extravagant fantasy worlds against which to contrast our hyperreal lives. This though, does not wholly explain our experience of the films themselves.

Transcendence into the digital film spectacle seems all too familiar, as the hyperreality outside the theatre is as much about spectacle as those ghostly digital creatures that populate our screens. Skyscrapers, billboards and chain stores scatter the streets of every westernized city. Disneyland is even sprouting from the ‘desert’, as Middle Eastern destinations like Dubai construct larger and more extravagant spectacles of architecture to attract high western money and the ‘Desert Louvre’ of Abu Dhabi struggles to fill its huge halls with art loaned from overseas. Even the digitized world offers the spectacles of interface advertisement and of new technologies, whose future aesthetics often emulate those of cinematic science fiction. The projections and identifications inherent in the spectator’s experience of the film then, are spawned from this hyperreality of spectacle and simulation, aiding their disconnection and fuelling escapism. The illusions of digital cinema, of escapism, of simulacra though, may signify something of truth; they may indeed, disenchant the enchanted world.

The digital film image is also an image of violence or catastrophe. The huge scale battle scenes of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the destruction of America at the hands of Martians in War of the Worlds (2005) and tidal wave ripping through the streets of New York in The Day After Tomorrow all project violence as the ultimate in spectacle. The popularity of violence within film is by no means a recent phenomenon, but the increase in scale and precision which the digital affords can signify an audience’s repressions all the more effectively. Echoing Klein’s notion of ‘fundamentalist capitalism’, America’s ‘war on terror’ and Judith Butler’s conception of the violent ‘derealization’ of those who exist outside its systems, violence is surely inherent in the very nature of globalization (Klein 2007 & Butler 2004). However, from within its hyperreal construct, violence is confined within the walls of the prison or the news bulletin, it obtains the uncanny notion of being absent and yet constantly present.

Of these filmic depictions of violence, it is those of the disaster narrative which are most striking, images of self destruction that encapsulate and enthrall audiences. Destruction of the world’s largest cities in films such as Cloverfield, War of the Worlds and The Day After Tomorrow, carry an added layer of signification as it is the skyscrapers, the billboards and the chain stores that are left in ruins, not some fantasy land or some possible future-city, the spectacle of self destruction is happening now (the now of the moving image) to us. What we are witnessing in these scenarios is the Western world’s self destruction fantasy, a repressed desire to tear down the constructs of hyperreality, in an attempt to glimpse the real. Baudrillard writes that we have all fantasized about these destructive events, ‘because no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of any power that has become hegenomonic to this degree’ (Baudrillard 2004.4). This desire and open violence remains unacceptable to Western ideologies and is repressed by their performers, but as Robin Wood states, ‘what is repressed must always strive to return’ (Wood 1985.205). Violence then, returns in society’s consumptions, in the classic disaster narrative of the digital age, images which never quite deliver what we crave as its destruction of hyperreality is clouded by spectacle and special effects, the very elements employed by globalization itself.

The Digital Pantheon

Through the clear glass of Freud’s screen, the spectator becomes look itself in their identification with the cinematic camera, a powerful form of subjectivity for any viewer. Technological advances in digital film now means that subjectivity is no longer limited to the physical presence of a camera, a development that leads to new (or no) limitations in the presence of power and identification that permeates the entire cinematic experience. It was Christopher Isherwood who first gave voice to the connection between camera and subjectivity, ‘I am a camera’ (Isherwood 1963). Once a word constrained to the presence of a physical and overtly mechanical instrument, the ‘camera’ has come to mean something more in the digital sphere, which presents a realm in which subjectivity is not limited by the space or indeed the laws of nature. ‘The mechanical camera now dead, the virtual camera rewrites both cinema and the world around us’ (Crockett 2008.118).

For Bazin, the photograph is not an exercise in human agency, a critical sense that the camera itself obtains a certain agency, even at this early date (Bazin 1972). Yet, with the development of entirely computerized, three dimensional worlds, the physical presence a camera is no longer necessary.  The pixel takes on new importance in these digital realities, as now every point in space can act as a camera. Tobey Crockett develops this argument, ‘in short, each pixel is a subject, rendering an entire volume of pixels as a complex multiplicity of cameras, with far reaching implications’ (Crockett 2008.119).These digital realities allow for virtual ‘cameras’ to defy our spatial and physical preconceptions. In The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), one such virtual camera takes us from a swooping wide shot of a fantasy landscape, and plunges us directly down into the mines of Isengard, slowing its decent and finally ending in a close up of a physically present actor in makeup. Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void (2009), uses digital processes to push subjectivity further, and take on the ‘point of view’ of a dead protagonist’s soul as it flies through walls, inside bodies and even through time. Metz’s description of the process of identification with cinematic look as assuming a powerful position of ‘God himself’, now seems to have reached fruition in their experiences of digital film. The freedom of camera placement and movement, as demonstrated in Enter the Void, is already capable of emulating the supernatural, the omniscient, where every point in space, even those inside the body, are accessible to our look.

In granting every point in space, virtual or otherwise, its own potential for agency and even authorship, we are giving rise to what Crockett calls, a ‘post-human subjectivity’ (Crockett 2008.135). He continues:

‘These virtual entities, complete with agency and voice are only authorized to express information useful to us, information which is all about us, revealing more of the human condition. And all the while we completely disavow their post-human condition about which we know nothing. This is a very one sided conversation, a colonial presumption which should not go forward unexamined and unchallenged’ (Crockett 2008.136).

These ‘virtual entities’ can be expanded to include the countless computerized characters which populate the screens of the digital film. The computer software, Massive (Multiple Agent Simulation System in Virtual Environment) is one such tool for occupying the huge scale digital worlds of contemporary blockbusters (such as Lord of the Rings and Avatar) with thousands of digital extras, each with the ability to react individually to their surroundings. Without the process of motion capture, or the actual direction of an animator, these computerized agents will respond individually to their surroundings through the use of what is called ‘fuzzy logic’.  ‘Each Agent’s brain is made up of a network of rules programmed by the Massive technical director… Agents can win and live, or lose and die, can find, identify and engage enemies, and can see, hear, and even touch within their digital environment’ (Thompson 2006.294). With this knowledge in mind, Crockett’s words of warning suddenly seem apt. After being given a set of rules set by their ‘creator’, these digital characters, each with their own personality and skills, will live out its own virtual destiny, all for our amusement. What we can witness on the screens of our megaplexes today is no longer only the product of human authors, but also partly through the artificial ‘choices’ made by computerized actors, none of which though can escape the boundaries of their digital laws set by a creator.

The accident, so integral to technology and reality for Virilio, does not exist in these cinematic digital realities. Cubitt compares the chaos of the battle scene in Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963) to the digital panorama of Egypt in The Mummy (1999), ‘the chaos of the one and the order of the other, you can see the difference between a world which, if not freedom, then at least chance can persist and one in which there is no randomness’ (Cubitt 2004.251). Often, it is the occurrence of the unexpected which can make a shot seem real, the accident which Bazin admired so much in Italian neo-realist cinema, but now the ‘accidence’ is disappearing into a wholly ordered world. Even with developments of artificial intelligence software like Massive, true accidents will remain unattainable in digital realities and in our search for control, also undesirable. Virilio writes:

‘[The digital realizes] the will to see all, to know all, at every moment, everywhere, the will to universalized illumination; a scientific permutation on the eye of God, which would forever rule out the surprise, the accident, the irruption of the unforeseen’ (Virilio 1994.70).

In humanity’s unrelenting search for power, people have turned increasingly to technology in order to master the forces of nature, space and time. But, as Virilio proposes, the invention of any new technology comes with the possibility for accident, for example the invention of the train also saw the invention of derailment. In the physical world then, the realm of mechanics, the accident cannot be completely erased and space and time are still limited. As Foucault proposed throughout his career, absolute power over the real world is unattainable and so, humanity has turned their ambitions of domination to the digital realm. ‘The digital only succeeds because it provides mastery over a world subject to a gaze of one who is becoming a god’ (Cubitt 2004.252). We are approaching the level of the omniscient in our perceived control over information (to know all), images (to see all) and media (hear all), with all spatial and temporal measurements rendered useless, we exist in speed-time.

As each individual now obtains perceived absolute, god-like power over this new realm in which they ‘exist’, this can only intensify Gidden’s modern condition of ‘Personal meaninglessness- the feeling that life has nothing worthwhile to offer’, separating us further from the moral resources we require to live a full and satisfying life (Giddens 1991.9). This perception of power though, is the true special effect of the digital realm, as huge organizations still wield arbitrary powers over us, a contradiction which certainly adds to a loss of ‘meaningfulness’, as the individual becomes more and more powerless. The result is an overwhelming sense of self-absorption felt by the individual, ‘this quasi-scientific expropriation of the divine prerogative also indicates the cataclysmic narcissism of the digital subject’ (Cubitt 2004.252). These powerless yet omniscient creatures file into Plato’s cave, a cinematic recreation of Lacan’s mirror, in order to reestablish their egos as powerful. The digital pantheon needs entertaining, and in their narcissism, they have created a world of violent spectacle over which they have omniscient sight and control. These worlds are then populated with digital agents recreated in our own image, doomed to act out their destinies within a strict array of unbreakable rules, no accidents, only power.

The Digital Flâneur

Since its birth, cinema has largely been viewed as simple distraction or escapism, a leisure commodity to be sold to the masses of modernity. The Lumiére’s first screening had ‘attracted a crowd of flâneurs from the Boulevards… The cinematograph instantly took its place as a distraction for the passing crowds’ (Cubitt 2004.15). It was through an aesthetic of wonder that cinema’s first spectators experienced it, without the need for Méliès’ special effects. Clément Maurice recalled one of the Lumiére’s first screenings, ‘those who took the plunge and entered soon reappeared looking astonished. They’d come back quickly with a few friends they’d managed to find on the boulevard’ (Lumiére and Lumiére 1995.94). This is the incident that digital event movies are trying to recreate, to amaze spectators that will return with friends. The curious tale of the death of the flâneur can also coincide with the rise of cinema, one of modernity’s speed inventions which forced that milling, lingering creature apparently out of existence, if not out of existence then banished to Starbucks. The experience of digital spectatorship, though, can be seen as a contemporary, if somewhat warped, form offlânerie.

‘To be in control, Foucault told us, is to see without being seen. This is precisely what the flâneur does’ (Bauman 1994.141). This is also precisely what the cinematic spectator does, as he/she has infinite sight of a fictional world of characters which cannot look back at them, hidden in the anonymity of the crowd. Yet, control for the cinematic spectator, for the flâneur:

‘..,is imagined. Its beauty, unclouded beauty, its beauty unspoiled by guilty conscience or fear of shame is its inconsequentiality… This control, unlike that other, gruesome and sinister one which it playfully emulates, reproduces contingency of life instead of confining or stifling it’ (ibid.).

Finally we arrive at a positive understanding in the experience of power. Bauman’s playful notion of control in flânerie can certainly be applied to that experienced by the digital spectator, narcissism intact. The flâneur, though, no longer exists as Benjamin knew him. No longer can the bourgeois slowly pace the arcades of Paris tortoise on leach, instead he is thrust through consumer cathedrals of shopping malls, express lunches and theme park queues. Suddenly the prospect of sitting in a darkened room, switching off your mobile and being assaulted with overwhelming spectacular images that challenge your spatial-temporal awareness, your senses of reality and self, seems refreshing in comparison. For the flâneur life was play, ‘to flâner means to play the game of playing’ (Bauman 1994.146). Yet modernity, which gave birth to this figure, now makes an entire life of play impossible. Flânerie has moved inside the movie theatre, where the power of hidden spectatorship once again becomes the play. ‘If reality is oozy, ubiquitous, straggly, all over the place- play is securely protected behind its temporal and spatial walls. Play has its beginning and its end, both well marked… Now I play, now I do not. I can detach myself if I wish from the play’ (Bauman.1994.144).

Detaching one’s self from the play of cinema is not always easy, as Barthes talks of his relief at escaping the hypnosis of a film inLeaving the Movie Theatre, an experience he very much distrusted (Barthes 1990). For some spectators, the narcissistic subjectivity of the movie theatre can only heighten the sense of meaninglessness outside of a film’s boundaries of play. The most spectacular of these recent digital film events, and also the highest grossing movie of all time is James Cameron’s science fiction epic, Avatar. The power and spectacle of its diegetic world lead to a shared experience of depression for audiences when they returned to the real world, one which goes far beyond simple fandom. Baudry’s spell remains very much intact. One spectator commented:

‘when I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed… gray. It was like my whole life, everything I’ve done and worked for, lost its meaning. It just seems so… meaningless. I still don’t really see any reason to keep… doing things at all. I live in a dying world’ (Piazza 2010).

Digital event cinema represents the utmost in escapism for the contemporary spectator, a spectacle which does not transport us to the fantasy worlds represented on screen, but addresses their psychological needs fostered by the digitized modern condition. Cubitt writes that, ‘cinema events have become spectacle, addressing atomized audiences intrapersonally, turning their gaze as the supposed triumph of consumerism decays into poverty, injustice, and ecological catastrophe’ (Cubitt 2004.247). Subjectivity becomes fragmented in a world of digital and hyperreality, where we are gods of one and powerless in the other. The contemporary cinematic spectator, ‘fragmented, schizoid, structured in dominance and by the lack of being,’ yearns for wholeness and assimilation (Cubitt 2004.247). Now, digital cinema can offer them just that, even if it is confined in the walls and frames of play. Elsaessar’s ‘great filmmakers’ of reality cinema cannot exist to the same degree as they once did, as reality cannot offer the spectator a sense of ‘being’ strong enough to bring with them into Plato’s cave. ‘If the sense of presence belongs most to those who are at home in their world, the artificial worlds of the neobaroque offer us a stronger sense of being than we experience outside, among the wreckage of modernity, betrayed by the reality of the world, deprived truth or justice’ (Cubitt 2004.247).

Reality is no longer oozy or straggly, as Bauman perceived it, of which the randomness inherent in the medium of photographic film and grain is a perfect one for its representation. Instead reality has become highly regulated, infinitely malleable, almost ‘too real’, of which the electronic putty of digital cinema is the most accurate representation.

Conclusion

This theoretical model for explaining the cinematic image can briefly be described as follows. The power of cinema has always derived from its representation of some form of reality, something in which the spectator recognizes and invests. By injecting the life of movement into the unreal photographic image, the spectator is faced with the ambiguous experience of viewing what was as if it was occurring now. The peculiar temporal experience induced by this contradiction is what causes Baudry’s hypnotic spell to overcome the cinematic audience, as they become ‘disconnected’ from their own realities and plunge into the diegesis of a fictional narrative. This ‘transcendence, though cannot take place without some presence of recognizable reality within the fiction, with which the spectator can connect his own senses of reality and being. In recreating the elements necessary for regression, the experience replicates for the viewer that of Lacan’s mirror-stage, where the viewer identifies primarily with the look of the camera, with look itself, a powerful and narcissistic prospect at its very least.

For the contemporary film spectator, the primary experience of cinema exists within the realm of the digital, where even the aesthetics of authenticity are themselves a tool of special effects. The audience, throughout a century of acceleration, have been conditioned to a certain cinematic aesthetic, one that is now challenged by digital processes, an image aesthetic that seems ‘too real’, inducing the suspicion that has always accompanied new technologies. The spectator has also become extremely adept in the digital age, a rise of a new unconscious, where spatial and temporal awareness now exists on a digital plane, not only accessible through the interfaces which now litter our everyday lives, but is comprehensible through their minds alone. Along with this increased awareness comes the ability to manipulate the moving image like never before, able to experience any moment of a narrative, able to interrupt the movement which realizes the unreal, a sphere where death becomes but a fantasy.

The primary effect of the digital in cinema though is sourced in its roots, as special effects, as spectacle. Cinema has always been a spectacle commodity and special effects are not unique to digital cinema, but it is the control which we now have over these fictional worlds, of infinite pixels each with the potential for agency and authorship that is revolutionary to the medium. The fantastic worlds of an increasingly popular digital event cinema continue to reflect the widening sense of disconnection between the individual and his sense of reality. Cinema will always seek to reflect the true nature of reality, to make ‘the unseen visible’, and this is still the case with digital effect films (Virilio 2004.63). As hyperreality becomes more and more about spectacle, clouding us with the special effects of globalization, so to must the story worlds of cinema, in order that we may still transcend into its fiction. The disaster narrative returns in contemporary film with a vengeance, exorcising our repressed self-destructive desires to witness the constructs of our reality torn down. Cinema has inevitably become a realization of the hyperreal.

This analysis also makes perceptible another crisis of reality in the contemporary spectator, that of the blurred boundaries between hyperreality, of which we have no power, and that of digital reality, over which we have complete perceived power. An audience can now enjoy the temporary reidentification with an omniscient cinematic look, presenting an infinite world of digital servants and infinitely mutable, three dimensional pixels over which we have complete control. The accident cannot exist within these digital realities, and we are no longer limited by laws of nature. A modern descendant of the flâneur, the movie-goer enters the walls of play only to find that play has become power, an object of desire inherent in our very nature, yet that which is denied us by the reality in which we live.

In The Myth of Total Cinema, Bazin describes the birth of cinema as being intimately entwined with the notion that art can produce a complete illusion of life, and on that basis, he states that cinema has not yet been invented (Bazin 1967). Digital processes have not altered the fundamental way in which the spectator experiences cinema, but it has broken the boundaries of the possible. The digital realities of contemporary film are moving further away from producing a recognizable illusion of any kind of reality, and are instead turning to violent spectacle and illusion. However, the magic of digital film may yet disenchant an enchanted world, making visible the true, spectacular, violent and debilitating nature of hyperreality. The flâneur returns in a digital realm, the spectators of the movie theatre who disconnect into the play of being gods and whose hypnosis is deeper than ever before. Perhaps then, we are approaching the invention of cinema.

Writings

Adorno, T.W. (1984) Aesthetic Theory, trans. C.Lenhardt, eds. Adorno, G. & Tiedemann R., London: Routledge & Kegan Paul

Barthes, Roland (1964) “Rhétorique de l´image” in Communications, no.4, special issue: “Recherches sémiologiques” pp.40-51

Barthes, Roland (1990) “Upon Leaving the Movie Theater” in The Rustle of Language, New York: Hill and Wang

Baudrillard, Jean (1994) Simulacra and simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, Ann Arbor Mich: University of Michigan Press

Baudrillard, J. (2002) The Spirit of Terrorism, (trans.) Chris Turner, London: Verso

Baudry, Jean-Louis (1970) “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” in Film Quarterly, 27: 2 (Winter 1974-1975) pp. 39-47

Bauman, Zygmunt (1994) “Desert Spectacular” in The Flâneur, ed. Keith Tester, London: Routledge

Bazin, Andre (1967) What is cinema? Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray, Berkeley: University of California Press

Bazin, Andre (1972) What is Cinema? Vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray, Berkeley: University of California Press

Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life, London: Verso

Crockett, Tobey (2008) “Camera as Camera”, in Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Pt. 1: Film, Pleasure and Digital Culture, Wallflower Press

Cubitt, Sean (2004) The Cinema Effect, London: MIT Press

Elsaessar, T. (1998) “Louis Lumiere: The cinema’s First Virtualist” in Cinema futures: Cain, Abel or Cable, Amsterdam University Press

Freud, S. (1919) Lecture notes on The Uncanny, available at:

http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.html, accessed 15/07/2010

Giddens, Anthony (1991) Modernity and Self – Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press

Isherwood, Christopher (1963) “A Berlin Diary” (autumn 1930), in Berlin Stories, New York: New Dimensions Publishing

Jay, Martin (1993)  Downcast Eyes, London: University of California Press

Kaplan, E. Ann, (1990) “Introduction: From Plato’s Cave to Freud’s Screen” in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, London: Routledge, pp1-23

Klein, N. (2007) The Shock Doctrine, Allen Lane

Lumière, Auguste, and Louis Lumière (1995) Letters: Inventing the Cinema, trans. Pierre Hodgson, London: Faber

Piazza, Jo (2010) CNN, available at: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/Movies/01/11/avatar.movie.blues/index.html, accessed 18/07/2010

Metz, Christian (1974) Film language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor, Oxford University Press

Metz, Christian (1983) Psychoanalysis and cinema: The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Celia Britton et al, London: Macmillan

Mulvey, Laura (2006) Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, Reaktion Books

Reitz, Edgar (1998) “Speed is the Mother of Cinema” in Cinema futures: Cain, Abel or Cable, Amsterdam University Press

Shandler, Jeffrey (1997) “Schindler’s Discourse: America discusses the Holocaust and its Mediation, from NBC’s miniseries to Spielberg’s Film” in Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, ed. Yosefa Loshitzky, Indiana University Press, pp153-170

Sontag, Susan (1978) On Photography, London: Allen Lane

Thompson, Kirsten Moana (2006) “Scale, Spectacle and Movement: Massive Software and Digital Special Effects in Lord of the Rings” in From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essay’s on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, eds. Ernest Mathijs and Murray Pomerance, New York: Rodopi

Trinh, T. Minh-ha (2005) The Digital Film Event, London: Routledge

Virilio, Paul (1991) Lost Dimension, New York: Semiotext(e)

Virilio, Paul (1994) The Vision Machine, Bloomington: Indiana University Press

Virilio, Paul (2004) “The Aesthetics of Disappearance” in The Paul Virilio Reader, ed. Steve Redhead, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

Wood, R. (1985) “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” in Movies and Methods, Vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols, University Of California Press

Films

Avatar (2009) dir. James Cameron

Cloverfield (2008) dir. Matt Reeves

Enter the Void (2009) dir. Gaspar Noe

Iron Man (2008) dir. John Favreau

Paranormal Activity (2007) dir. Oren Peli

Saving Private Ryan (1998) dir. Steven Spielberg

Schindler’s List (1993) dir. Steven Spielberg

The Day after Tomorrow (2004) dir. Roland Emmerich

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001-3) dir. Peter Jackson

The Matrix (1999) dirs. Andy Wachowski & Lana Wachowski

War of the Worlds (2005) dir. Steven Spielberg

Noé commences his apparent assault on the audience immediately, with loud thumping electronic dance music and brash, flashing lettering that stand as the opening credits. The filmmaker begins with a set of rules for his camera as Noé places it through the eyes of our protagonist, Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) as he wakes up in his small Tokyo apartment, achieving a seemingly unedited Point of View shot that echoes the 1946 noir, Lady in the Lake. The first 45 minutes or so are shot in this way, a form that is rarely used as it draws so much attention to the filmmaking process itself, so we can be sure almost immediately that Noé is not trying to hide his camera in his shot choices. In fact, Noé will eventually run amuck with them, but at least for the first section of the film the laws of Point of View gives the narrative some structure as we are plugged immediately into Oscar’s world of neon and darkness. We witness an argument between Oscar and his sister (Paz de la Heurta), and just before the viewer has settled, Noé disrupts us again by taking us on a seven minute hallucination along with Oscar as he lights up an unsaid narcotic in the apartment. Along with disconcerting electronic bass, the screen fills with vibrantly coloured organic roots that morph and beat, engrossing the viewer in its graphic wizardry. When watching this hallucination, Noé almost makes you feel like you are looking inside yourself, at the inner workings of your own organs, with his menacing organic tentacles creating awe as well as disgust.

                After awakening from his trip, Oscar reveals his own image to us as he looks in the mirror, and we cannot help but be surprised by how young and innocent he looks. After meeting with a friend, Oscar proceeds to head down to the local acid house, The Void, to deal some drugs. The pair chatter inanely and unconvincingly about how attractive Linda is, a Tibetan book of the dead and what happens to your soul after you die, both with over the top, almost comedic American and French accents. In Enter the Void, it seems that script and character are simplistic vehicles for which to show off the beauty of Benoit Debie’s cinematography and production’s over all aesthetic. Nevertheless we remain with Oscar as his drug deal goes fatally wrong, an outcome that is easily predicted after his robotic chats about death, (a moment that is also shown in the trailer). After his violent death at the hands of the Tokyo police, Noé continues his attack on the audience’s senses with bright flashing lights that fill the entire screen, reminiscent of those used in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now dead, Oscar’s soul floats above his corpse and proceeds to fly around the streets of Tokyo witnessing the aftermath of his own death, intercut with flashbacks of his past that hopes to give some tattered flesh to this bare bones story. We begin to learn more about the events that led up to Oscar’s death, with images of his childhood and the violent car crash that ends the life of him and Linda’s parents. There is no moment that comes close to Noé’s nine minute rape scene in Irreversible in terms of shock value, but the relentless lingering on a blood stained child screaming for her dead parents is not exactly easy viewing. These moments of agony are portrayed well by the child actors who simply out class their adult counterparts.

With the death of our protagonist, Noé’s camera is liberated. Whilst staying with Oscar’s “soul”, the frame takes us from high above psychedelic Tokyo, through walls of passing buildings and even inside of people’s bodies. The absolute freedom that Noé and his team grant his camera is surely the strongest, most exhilarating element of this film, but it may also be its downfall. After about an hour and a half, the narrative once again reaches Oscar’s death, with all our active questions answered, our emotions spin-dried and our suspended disbelief appropriately battered. Here is where the audience assault ends, and the film continues to run for another hour or so, with overused formulas of “soul-camera” floating that reveals very little of narrative interest about the secondary characters that must inhabit psyche-Tokyo after Oscar’s death. This entire third of the film is unnecessary, not clever enough to be avant garde and too shallow to interest its audience, Noé’s most recent attack on his audience just fizzles out. Only superfluous sex scenes and further child-screaming close-ups interrupt the boredom until the final scenes, when Noé’s camera really does go somewhere that no other filmmaker has before, a moment of hilarity at the climax of an otherwise dark and depressing narrative.

Noé has clearly constructed a film for the filmmakers, where style and aesthetic have triumphantly prevailed, yet story and character have suffered greatly. Narratively, the film is not mature enough to pull off its shallow approach to a wide range of difficult themes such as drugs, loss, debasement, incest, cultural differences, religion, homosexuality, friendship and adultery. Stepping into the void, though, ensures you one hell of a trip for at least two thirds of the film. The unrivalled beauty of the cinematography and production design is enough to make any audience look past the narrative and performance lacks; you don’t have to be a filmmaker to experience the exhilarating liberation that Noé’s camera affords his viewers. However this liberation comes at a cost; prepare to feel battered and bruised when leaving the theatre, especially if the film does not return to the editing room before you see it.

The government passes the Digital Economy Bill on June th12th of this year. The bill will see harsher penalties for those caught downloading music illegally- this is the record companies final attempt to regain control of the shifting hegemony of the music sector. Is music piracy really killing the music industry or just changing it?

According to the BPI, the British music industry lost approximately £200 million in 2009 due to online music piracy. The music industry has been at war with peer-to-peer (p2p) pirates for over a decade as their blatant disregard of music copyright denies creators a fair share in the music they make. A recent DEMOS survey found that one in three adults admits to illegally downloading music, a huge number of people that are outlawed by current online copyright law. The worldwide overall music market has fallen by almost a third since 2004, and it is these losses which the music industry is blaming on music piracy. Unable to adapt to the contemporary climate, the record bosses have turned to the government for help. Late 2009 saw the completion of the Digital Economy Bill which, if passed by parliament, will see stricter regulations against those who download illegally, a penalty of which may see people disconnected from the internet. This law is the record industry’s last stubborn attempt at clinging to old business models which are redundant in the digital age, supporting a law that is repressive, economically invalid, creatively stifling and ultimately unsustainable. A closer look at the piracy debate requires a more innovative and progressive solution.

Contrary to what the BPI and major record labels would have us believe, the UK ‘music industry’ is not dying. Information released by the BPI in October 2009 revealed that single sales in the UK had reached record highs, with 10 weeks still left to trade in the year (including the Christmas sales spike).

Retail sales of singles by format

                                Physical               Digital                   Total Sales

2002                       43.9m                   -                              43.9m

2003                       30.8m                   -                              30.8m

2004                       26.5m                   5.7m                      32.2m

2005                       21.4m                   26.4m                    47.8m

2006                       13.9m                   53.0m                    66.9m

2007                       8.6m                     77.9m                    86.5m

2008                       4.9m                     110.2m                 115.1m

2009 YTD              1.6m                      116.0m                 117.6m

 (BPI (a).2009)

This table shows the steadily increasing sales of singles over the previous decade, where legal online music services have rejuvenated the market for the single, elevating sales to well beyond £118 million in 2009, and this trend looks to continue. Album sales are also very solid: ‘Overall in 2008, a total of 133.6 million albums were sold compared to 121.5 million a decade earlier’. Despite the problems of piracy and global recession, the UK’s album sales dropped a mere 3.2% in 2008, despite early predictions that the fall would have been in double figures. The UK music industry has ‘weathered the storm’ better than any other country and still remains the world’s third largest music market, accounting for 10% of global sales (BPI (b). 2010).

These figures show us a very different story. In a world where a third of adults use illegal p2p file sharing sites to access whatever music they like, the public are still consuming 22.1 million more albums than they did in 1998. This though, may simply be down to the fall in album prices as they have fallen 27% between 2000 and 2008 (BPI (b).2010). An unprecedented increase in choice may also be responsible, with what was less than 50 licensed music services offering an approximate catalogue of 1 million albums in 2003, has risen to 400+ services offering over 11 million, plus single tracks in 2009 (IFPI.2010).  With lowering cost and increasing choice, and despite rocketing single sales and album sales up on last decade, the revenue generated within the UK from recorded performance is declining, and it is this revenue loss, which the music industry is blaming on the pirates.

The illegal downloader is usually also an avid music fan and the industry should not underestimate this fandom or the intelligence of their consumers. It is in the best interests of the fans to buy their favourite artist’s recorded music, in order to ensure that they can continue to make it, and they do. A recent DEMOS survey has found that an adult living in the UK who illegally downloads music spends an average of £77 per year on licensed music services, whilst those who only acquire music legitimately, spend an average of only £44 (DEMOS.2009). Record companies estimated that, in the UK, ‘online copyright infringement will cost £200m in 2009, with some 7.3 million people file sharing’ (BPI(c).2010). How can the record companies blame these losses on a sharing economy, when its participators still account for 64% of generated music revenue, despite having apparent access to any of it, online, for free? Perhaps these music fans would be spending more if they didn’t file share, but let’s remember though that they are still fans, and no one wants to see the music industry die out less than them. The DEMOS survey’s findings seem to point to the fact that illegal downloading is not replacing the consuming habits of those who use it, but that it is simply running alongside them. People still have a certain amount of disposable income to spend on music, and it is the criminalised file sharers that are still spending more. An excellent example of why fandom should not be underestimated was demonstrated in the much celebrated launch of Radiohead’s album In Rainbows, where the record was released online and fans could pay whatever they wanted for it. Only a third of those who obtained the album online did so for free, with the average voluntary payment coming to approximately £4 (Sherwin.2007).

Whoever is to blame though, worldwide, the total music market has shot down 30% since 2004 and it is artists that will bear the brunt of these losses according to the record labels (IFPI.2010). The BPI states that, ‘it’s the new artists that are looking for record contracts that will suffer most, not established artists’ (BPI (c). 2010). When a record company invests in new talent, they must first recoup on their investment before moving onto new music. This argument against piracy rightly puts the artist, and new music first, two factors which are necessary for innovation and excellence to flourish within the sector. On a closer inspection though, it may not be the artists who are suffering most.
The Times blog released this graph in December 2009, which paints a very different picture of artist revenue, proclaiming it, ‘the graph the record industry doesn’t want you to see’:

(The Times. 2009)

The graph shows the falling revenue of recorded music to labels and artists, a figure that will fall more greatly for the record labels as they will take a much higher share of an artist’s sales. However, what is striking about it is the steady increase of both PRS (Performing Rights Society) and live performance revenue, income that is predominately collected by the artists themselves. The PRS is collecting more royalties on behalf of artists (when their music is played in public) as the decade progresses, and the steep increase in revenue generated in live performance is close to overtaking that which is made by the record companies in declining music sales.[1] So the record company’s argument that the current (piracy ridden) climate of the music industry is hurting the artists most may not be true, and that artist’s revenues are now simply generated from different sources, live performance and PRS collections, which prove much more lucrative for the artists themselves.

The proposed threat to emerging artists is also yet to see fruition. Any fervent music blogger will tell you that there is no lack of new artists, but the business model for their emergence has certainly changed. The rise of the digital has severely lowered the price of production and distribution of new music, so new talent no longer needs to rely on the huge investments of established record labels, investments which most artists spend most of their careers trying to repay. They can now, record and distribute music themselves. In fact, many new artists rely on the ‘illegal’ reproducing of their music as it is reposted on blogs and social networking sites in order to build a fan-base in the first place.

So it seems, the biggest losers in today’s music industry, are the record labels, who have yet failed to adapt their business models to account for p2p and blog’s sharing economies (Lessig. 2008); some of whom some have the political weight to influence, then rely on governmental intervention and legislation to criminalise and censor the very people who provide them with most of their income. John Tatlock comments in his article:

‘Sure, this is a bummer for anyone whose business is selling records, but no doubt the Victorian candle-making industry were pretty pissed off with Thomas Edison and his bloody light-bulb. Eventually, you just have to get with the programme and adapt’ (Tatlock. 2009).

This does not mean the death of the record labels entirely, just that they need to adapt to new markets, perhaps by refocusing more on live performance or better utilising online sharing economies that are already in place, maybe even working with p2p services.

What is lost within this debate though, are the startling opportunities and benefits of the online music sharing economies. Firstly, it means more music for everyone, regardless of disposable income and musical taste, improving access to all kinds of music for fans and granting artists with the ability to distribute their own work quickly and cheaply to as many people as they want. This encourages creativity, forming a rich cultural base from which new artists can develop work that remains innovative and relevant. The online community is also much faster than record labels and music stores are at reacting to new changes or releases, making the impossible job of keeping up with the times all the easier. Thirdly, online sharing economies have reconfigured the power structures of the music industry, giving fans more authority on what is considered worth listening to. Amateurs who run blogs and share music can have a huge effect on the rising popularity of new artists, without the need for consent or investment from the record companies. As live performance increases in popularity, artists are keeping a higher percentage of their earnings, giving them more control over what they produce. Fans and artists are now placed, more and more, in the driving seat of an evolving industry.

Despite all these benefits the government has intervened by putting together the Digital Economy Bill which is designed to reduce copyright infringement online. If successful, the Bill requires that ISPs (Internet Service Providers) provide information to the copyright holders when their work is shared illegally. After a series of written warnings (popularly known as a “three strokes rule”), persistent infringers will be liable to lawsuits and even being cut off from the internet. The Bill is a result of the Digital Britain Final Report, which finds p2p filesharing to be ‘unacceptable’ and a ‘serious offence’ (DCMS 2009). This bill has come shortly after news that stricter penalties in South Korea and Sweden have lead to an increase in recorded music sales. Similar legislation passed in July 2009 in South Korea required the main p2p servers to block any copyrighted files from their databases and stricter penalties those who continue to download, with music sales increasing 18%. In Sweden, a series of high profile lawsuits against the world’s largest illegal BitTorrent tracker, The Pirate Bay, helped see music sales increase in 2009 by 10.2%. April 2009 saw Sweden’s IPRED law also come into effect, which gives copyright holders the right to obtain the name and address of copyright infringers from ISPs and take legal action against them (IFPI 2010.26-27). Spurred on by short term successes such as these, the government hopes to rejuvenate recorded music revenue by cracking down on the pirates here in the UK, but first we must realise the ethical and practical implications to enforcing such a Bill.

The Bill’s controversial plans give the Secretary of State the powers to require disconnection of anyone from the internet, no matter what the reason. The Bill comes at a time when the debate for ‘internet connection as a human right’ is extremely prevalent. Already considered an official human right in Finland and Estonia, a recent BBC World Service poll found that four in five adults (79%) across 26 countries agreed that access is a fundamental right. Increasingly important to our social, financial and working lives, disconnection to the internet for any reason is assumed, by majority, to be morally wrong. The Open Rights Group’s first critical look at the Bill found that, ‘not only is there no requirement for such disconnections to relate to a number of “strikes” there is no need for disconnection to be linked to infringement of copyright’ (Open Rights Group.2010). The Bill’s adornment of such powers, the use of which requires no parliamentary or evidence based oversight, means that they have the power to cut you off from the internet at any time for any reason.

To adequately enforce this law would require the setting up of a dedicated governmental body as well as the development of technologies that would track downloaded files and the frequency at which they are downloaded. This will inevitably lead to an increase in price for broadband users, the government estimates that subscription cost will rise by approximately £2.40 per year. However, British Telecom estimates that prices could increase by as much as £25, to fully cover the costs of letter writing, monitoring and enforcing any technical measures, with p2p blocking software costing around £30 for each subscriber (BBC.2010). These mounting costs will deter those are unconnected from using the internet and even hinder the government in their goals to extend broadband access throughout the country. The complicated job of policing the complex web of ISPs and subscribers, not to mention with the vast grey area in between: internet cafes, wi-fi providers, workplace networks and large family computers, will undoubtedly cause huge collateral damage of innocent subscribers. Unable to prove or disprove their online activity, victims of hackers and curious children will be disconnected, with their complicated appeals method only increasing costs.

Enforcing stricter copyright laws on internet sharing has happened before. The explosion and shutting down of Napster at the turn of the century proved successful in the short term prevention of music piracy, but the ability of internet users to adapt and find new software has once again led to a resurgence in p2p usage. The passing of the Digital Economy Bill will, undoubtedly, prove successful in seeing a small spike in recorded music sales, as many users of p2p software will stop but these are simply short term scare tactics. The digital and its online community are extremely fast to adapt to changes, contrasting greatly with the cumbersome process of passing legislation. Software already exists that can hide your IP address and so do p2p sites that offer complete anonymity. The enforcement of such laws in the face of such an adept online community is practically impossible and its sales benefits unsustainable. The recovery speed of online pirates is clearly demonstrated in Sweden’s case, where piracy levels are once again increasing, despite the rise in music sales in 2009 (IFPI 2010.27). The government’s Digital Economy Bill is simply a short term response to pressures from an increasingly less important record industry; the criminalisation and disconnection it threatens are ethically wrong and economically unsustainable. The record industry views sharing online communities as a threat, and its users as criminals and pirates. These attitudes are flawed in their approach to changes within the contemporary market, what is needed is a rethinking of copyright laws which embraces the opportunities that technology grants us, rather than working against them. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) whitepaper describes the current climate extremely pertinently:

‘Every day the collateral damage mounts—privacy at risk, innovation stymied, economic growth suppressed, and random unlucky individuals singled out for lawsuits by the recording industry. In the meantime, the lawsuits against music fans have not put a penny into the pockets of artists. We need a better way forward’ (EFF. 2008).

The first step in changing the ways we think about copyright law and the internet is to decriminalise file sharing and have copyright holders work with existing sharing economies. Lawrence Lessig writes, ‘the reason [for legalising file sharing] flows from a simple reality check: a decade of fighting p2p file sharing has neither stopped illegal sharing nor found a way to make sure artists are compensated’ (Lessig 2008.271). The question then becomes, how do we make sure that people are still paid for the work they produce? The EFF proposes one, extremely beneficial answer: voluntary collective leasing. Very similar to how broadcast radio settled claims of piracy and compensation, the music industry would form several ‘collecting societies’ which would give file sharers the opportunity to continue their activity, but for a nominal monthly fee (EFF 2008). The DEMOS Digital Music Survey calculates that revenue in such a scheme would be maximised at around £5 per month and found that 72% of those who downloaded illegally would be interested in such a service. Using existing technologies, exactly what was being downloaded could be monitored, and without invading people’s privacy, the revenue generated by the subscription would be divided up amongst copyright holders and artists. The benefits of such a scheme are vast and resemble many which are already in operation in advertising and radio. The creation of this kind of service would generate huge amounts of revenue for the recording industry, increase access to fans, ensure appropriate compensation for artists, limit government involvement and boost internet growth and opportunity. There will still even be a place for the record labels in this system as many artists will need promotional and developmental help. With more choice available to artists, the deals offered by record companies will be much more balanced, rather than the ‘one sided deals that are offered to artists today’ (EFF.2008).

                The music industry is not failing, it is simply changing, it is reorganising the hegemonic order of label- artist- fan. Rather than embracing online sharing economies, with the introduction of the Digital Economy Bill the industry wishes to continue with its losing formula of ‘criminalise and suppress’, unable to let go of old business models that are redundant in the digital age. There is of course a place for copyright in the future and we must ensure that those who create can still get paid for their work, but to be sustainable and innovative in the today’s climate, we must rethink copyright and current business models entirely. Online sharing communities present us with an opportunity for both artists and fans to partake in a much more accessible and rewarding experience of music

BBC (2010) File Sharing Laws Could See Downloaders Disconnected, http://news.bbc.co.uk/panorama/hi/front_page/newsid_8567000/8567640.stm (accessed 25/03/2010).

BPI (a) (2009) 2009 is Record Year for UK Singles Sales, http://www.bpi.co.uk/press-area/news-amp3b-press-release/article/2009-is-record-year-for-uk-singles-sales.aspx (accessed 02/04/2010)

BPI (b) (2010) The Market, http://www.bpi.co.uk/music-business/article/the-market.aspx (accessed 02/04/2010)

BPI (c) (2010) File Sharing FAQs, http://www.bpi.co.uk/digital-music/article/online-faqs.aspx (accessed 02/04/2010)

DCMS (2009) Digital Britain Final Report, June 2009, London, http://www.culture.gov.uk/images/publications/digitalbritain-finalreport-jun09.pdf (accessed 03/04/2010)

Demers, Joanna (2006) Steal This Music, University of Georgia Press: Athens

DEMOS (2009) Digital Music Survey, London, www.demos.co.uk/files/DemosMusicsurvey.ppt (accessed 23/03/2010)

EFF (2008) A Better Way Forward: Voluntary Collective Licensing for Music File Sharing, http://www.eff.org/wp/better-way-forward-voluntary-collective-licensing-music-file-sharing (accessed 25/03/2010)

IFPI (2010) Digital Music Report 2010, http://www.ifpi.org/content/library/dmr2009.pdf (accessed 04/04/2010)

Lessig, Lawrence (2008) Remix, Bloomsbury: London

Open Rights Group (2009) The Digital Economy Bill- A First Critical Look, prepared by Francis Davey http://www.openrightsgroup.org/ourwork/reports/deb-first-look (accessed 04/04/2010)

Sherwin, Adam (2007) How much is Radiohead’s online album worth?, London: The Times, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article2633798.ece. (accessed 02/04/2010)

Tatlock, John (2009) A Decade In Music: Myths of the Digital, Post-Napster Age,   http://thequietus.com/articles/03352-a-decade-in-music-filesharing-post-napster-myths-of-the-digital-age (accessed 25/03/2010)

The Times (2009) Do Music Artists Fare Better in a World with Illegal File Sharing?, Blog Entry http://labs.timesonline.co.uk/blog/2009/11/12/do-music-artists-do-better-in-a-world-with-illegal-file-sharing/ (accessed 25/03/2010)

Harun Farocki has been called “Germany’s best-known unknown filmmaker”. Working since the sixties, Farocki attracted the attention of the Cahiers du Cinema and won over film students with his ‘essay films’ that dissect the form as brilliantly as Jean-Luc Godard’s late work. Seen as an extremely important filmmaker by those who know his work, Farocki moved away from features in the 1980s and 90s as funding moved to the art galleries, a space which he adopted and quickly mastered. After a season of his films at the Tate and now Farocki’s Against What? Against Whom? show at Raven Row gallery in Spitalfields, he is no longer the unknown filmmaker, and instead finds himself opened up to a curious general public, whom he is going down just as well with. Raven Row has displayed a selection of Farocki’s most powerful and successful installations from the new millenium, giving a broad view of the director’s key obsessions, including technology, warfare and the very nature of film itself.

Whilst many artists may falsely claim it, Farocki’s work truly is analytical and self aware in its approach. For most of his Raven Row installations, Farocki has decided to show on multiple screens. In 1995 he adopted this mode of displaying his work on two screens simultaneously when the Museum of Modern Art in Lille asked him to make a film ‘about his work’. The outcome is the piece Interface, displaying his editing process in which he works with two separate screens. The edit is where the filmmaker’s power lies for Farocki, and in displaying his work on two or more screens, this not only recreates the aesthetic of the all important editing room, but helps makes visible much of the forms that filmmakers have spent so long making invisible. As the masses are more and more desensitised to the flashing advertisements and brief shot montage editing that makes up every area of its consumptions, that we should even ponder for a minute how a simple edit can create and warp spaces and emotions beyond the limits of the screen may seem prehistoric. Farocki’s visual essay On Construction of Griffith’s Films, though, dissects the formulation of the most simple of edits, and through two screens reveals the magic of how a filmmaker creates meaning simply through form, inspiring a naive sense of realisation for any film buff.

Farocki takes this a step further with Feasting or Flying, a study of male suicide throughout cinema. Across five screens, the tragic male hero of cinema is displayed, fragmented and interrupted. Here Farocki has stripped the dense elements of single screen film to the bone and displayed it for the audience to see. In doing so though, the piece teases the viewer with the satisfaction of the familiar and through a creation of the very narrative suspense that Farocki is critiquing. There is more broken film spotter satisfaction to come in his 2006 piece Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades. Here he pays homage to the Lumière brothers and the creation of the first ever moving picture. Through twelve monitors Farocki recreates this moment in cinema throughout the decades, the moment when cinema at its birth denied the image of the single movie star who today may be even more important than films themselves.

The other theme which the show brings out from Farocki’s work is predominately that of technology. He has a great interest in the images that are recorded and created by man that are made only for technicians or not for the human eye at all. His screening of Eye Machine III is the last of a series of three films which displays these otherwise unseen images for the viewer. The chilling computer image of a cruise missile’s path and target, when put on the context of the gallery helps to unmask the nature of warfare and the power which technology gives its owner, as well as creating aesthetic from the science never meant even to be seen by man. I Thought I was Seeing Convicts uses the countless hours of CCTV footage filmed in prisons to make up its images, video that would normally be deleted, had it not captured a man being shot by a guard after starting a fight. Immersion experiments with actors in a workshop which shows how virtual reality can be used to treat post-traumatic stress in war veterans from Iraq. The virtual worlds on display parody those of the computer game world where violence is seen as the ultimate entertainment. Immersion uses the two screen mode to full effect once again as the virtual reality allows Farocki to show both subject and point of view simultaneously, affording the audience full ‘immersion’. Comparison via a Third, again through two screens, compares the ancient brick-making techniques of traditional, newly industrialising societies with those utilised by the most technologically advanced in the world. This piece is enthralling, but it assumes a much more passive audience, and sits out of place in this show due the apparent invisibility of Farocki’s hand as editor and analytical author.

The show works brilliantly within the space of the Raven Row gallery, with its layout that posits a journey through the artists work, rather than an aimless ambling through a desert of individual pieces without direction. The smaller, private rooms also lend itself well to the gallery film form, and although Farocki would rather you sit and watch his films from beginning to end, their very goal of interrupting narrative and form lends itself well to an audience who may start a viewing at any point throughout its running time. The entire show, with a full running time of over four hours, delivers Farocki’s key themes precisely and broadly. It is the director’s explorations of film’s ‘constructed-ness’ itself though which packs the most punch, the dissected corpse of looking, form and power laid bare and brought to life through Farocki’s multiple screen analyses.

www.farocki-film.de

LeDoux’s work makes me happy.

http://www.ledouxville.com/site/index.php

Doesn’t happen much, but now I’m a little excited about this.

http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/examinedlife/

Sonar is marketed as Barcelona’s international festival of advanced music and multimedia art, making it much more than just a rave in sunny spain, (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Its positioned right in Barcelona and has world class dance and electronic music playing all day and all night, which will have you crawling back to your hostel room at 7 in the morning. You can trust Sonar to pull in some of the best names in music with appearances by Orbital, Late of the Pier, SebastiaN and a huge Ed Banger set already confirmed. Only problem is the euro/pound thing, meaning it will be pretty expensive.

http://2009.sonar.es/en/noticies.php?id=7

Lounge on the Farm presents a very different festival experience, limited to around 5000 places, and giving you an eclectic mix of music. Being in Canterbury for the past three years I have always over looked the festival, but upon hearing three of there confirmed lineup, Mr Scruff, DJ Format and the tremendous, wonderful Wild Beasts, I now feel I need to be there. Less than a week before my graduation, I can’t wait to lounge around in Kentish sun, all for a much less dearer cost than the prospect of Sonar.

http://www.loungeonthefarm.co.uk/

All this reminds me that you must check out this Wild Beasts band, their album Limbo, Panto is another big hit of last summer. Their music stands as gospel to the British twenty something, fumbling into adulthood with lyrics like ‘brave bulging bouyant clairvoyants’ and ‘warwhoopfully have wept’.

http://www.wild-beasts.co.uk/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLzJqEg_WEQ

A change of musical tact from my previous posts, but the amazing weather this morning had me missing the music of the beautiful and talented English solo artist Charlene Soraia. Her Daffodils and Other Idylls and Postcards from iO EPs made my summer last year and she starts off 2009 with another cracking collection, One of the Sun. Amazing voice and a extremely talented guitar player, it’s easy to fall in love with her soft, summery sound. My favourite tracks are still Daffodils and Bike, so start there and then buy all her music off iTunes.

 http://www.myspace.com/charlenesoraiajones

“The seven dwarves went to the Vatican and when the Pope answered the door, Dopey stepped forward:
” Your excellency,” he said. “ I wonder if you could tell me if there are any dwarf nuns in Rome?”
“No Dopey, there aren’t” the pope replied.
Behind Dopey, the six dwarves started to titter.
“well are there any dwarf nuns in Italy?” Dopey persisted.
“no none in Italy,” the pope answered a little more sternly.
A few of the dwarves now began to laugh more openly.
“Well, are there any dwarf nuns in Europe?”
This time the pope was much more firm.
“Dopey, there are no dwarf nuns in Europe.”
By this point all the dwarves were lughing aloud and rolling on the ground.
“pope,” Dopey demanded. ” Are there any dwarf nuns in the whole world?”
“No Dopey,” the pope snapped. ” There are no dwarf nuns anywhere in the world.”
Whereupon the six dwarves started jumping up and down and chanting, “Dopey fucked a penguin! Dopey fucked a penguin!”

The gem of Boston rap in the late 80s/early 90s, Top Choice Clique very nearly disappeared forever. Until a box of warped 12″ singles was discovered by rapper Esoteric who carefully placed the vinyl in an oven and baked it into playable condition (375 degrees, 4 minutes). And now late in 2008, Top Choice Clique have finally released their anthology, 15 years late, Reel Chemistry. This record has me wishing I was the 16 year old hip hop head once more, bopping along in my baggy jeans. The multi-racial rap group consisting of Jawn P, MC Force and Gemini are required listening for all hip hop fans, refreshing, intelligent battle raps with a definite old school flavour. Get it off iTunes or elsewhere.

Check out the video for Push it Past Red which isn’t on the anthology, but hang around for the second verse and watch MC Force show you how.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEOI8mX1In0