Cinema in the Digital Age by Nicholas Rombes

Author:Nicholas Rombes
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Columbia University Press

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REAL TIME

Ann Arbor, Koji Suzuki, Lars von Trier

According to Paul Virilio, the digital era is marked with the closing of the gap between real time and represented time:

With paradoxical logic, what gets decisively resolved is the reality of the object’s realtime presence. In the previous age of dialectical logic, it was only delayed-time presence, the presence of the past, that lastingly impressed plate and film. The paradoxical image thus acquires a status something like that of surprise, or more precisely, of an “accidental transfer.” (1994, 64; emphasis in original)

As Daniel Frampton has noted, “The film experience is not strictly analogous to real-world audio-visual experience” (2006, 151). It is not that distinctions between the “real world” and the “filmic” world are passé but rather that they are increasingly irrelevant. Gene Youngblood has written that “today cinema represents reality; tomorrow it will be reality” (2003, 161; emphasis in original).

But it already was. “Hundreds Now ‘Shoot’ Movies of Their Own,” proclaimed a headline from the Washington Post in 1926, where readers learned that “hundreds of persons are ‘shooting’ their own motion pictures, many as a pastime but others for utilitarian reasons” (Anon., 1926). An editorial in the Christian Science Monitor in 1927 noted that—in something that sounds like a prevideo sharing system—“other signs of the times in the direction of amateur effort are the film exchanges where professional films of all manner of subjects can be bought for individual home libraries. News reels, natural history series, scenic features, golf lessons, travel films, comedies, and even new releases of well-known photoplays are now to be had from the various exchanges” (Anon. 1927). And, writing from London, Godfrey Lias noted in 1933 an early form not of garage rock but what might be called “garage cinema”: “Some of the richer [amateur cinema] clubs have real studios. Most of them haven’t. Garages, however, make efficient substitutes” (1933, 5).

This presents a paradox, for if part of our understanding is that reality is that which happens and art is that which represents, then what to make of a movie that is happening in front of us? Even the most fantastical subject matter (a movie about trees turning into flesh-eating lizards that defy gravity) is real in the sense that we are watching something happening; when we are watching, we are in the presence of the reality of the film unfolding. This is of course not a new question, and it is not unique to film. But cinema, perhaps because of its approximation of real-time storytelling made ever more possible by extensive long takes that aren’t dependent on film stock, pushes us ever closer to a recognition that, as Youngblood suggests, cinema is reality itself. In Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Lunar Park, the narrator opens an email attachment that contains a video of his father’s last night on earth: “The camera then crossed the hallway and stopped again. It had a vague and maddening patience” (2005, 179). The camera—with no hint of who is holding it or who is

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