Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age by William Brown

Author:William Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857459503
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Digital spectacles

Speed does feature digital imagery, but the discussion of spectacular cinema has so far not been centred around the digital. However, we can perhaps now bring the digital back into the discussion for a number of reasons, particularly in light of Martin-Jones’s work discussed above. Firstly, Martin-Jones’s argument for the breakdown of the inside/outside binarism in the spaghetti western recalls the way in which digital cinema can (and at times does) pass through solid as well as ‘empty’ space, thereby negating the distinction between them. Secondly, and more importantly, the digital spectacles that we see often do not correspond to the noncontinuous times that Martin-Jones attributes to the ‘attraction-image’, but instead to something slightly different. In discussing this difference, we will be able to shift the argument from the temporality of films (spectacle has a different tempo to narrative), to temporalities within films.

If for Martin-Jones, the Méliès ‘attraction-image’ foregrounds the cut, and by extension filmmaking technology itself, then something different can (and often does) happen in digital cinema. Digital cinema often eschews the cut at moments when analogue cinema would have had to cut. King Kong (Ernest B. Shoedsack and Merian C. Cooper, USA, 1933), for example, relies upon the revelation of the monster either in parts (a foot, a hand, a head), or through long shots and miniatures (the monster climbing the Empire State building). The montage involved in showing the creature can be described as the temporal depiction of a body/space – one image after another of different fragments that we use to create the whole. With digital technology, however, there is a reversal: Jurassic Park and other films show the whole of the beast at once, in a photorealistic manner, and in a space that also contains humans, with whom they are seamlessly integrated. The remake of King Kong (Peter Jackson, New Zealand/USA/Germany, 2005) makes clear this logic: in one scene, film director Carl Denham (Jack Black) stumbles across a herd of feeding brontosaurs with leading actor Bruce Baxter (Kyle Chandler). Denham urges Baxter to stand in shot with the dinosaurs as he films them. Baxter refuses, prompting Denham to tell him that if he does not stand in shot with the creatures, then no one will believe that they are real. In other words, the new King Kong film is conscious of showing its protagonists interacting with photorealistic monsters in a manner that suggests an equal/shared ontology.

This logic of rejecting the cut to show the shared continuous space of humans and dinosaurs extends into the shared and continuous times of humans and other creatures – something that we can make clear by comparing two teleportation scenes, one from an analogue and one from a digital film. In La belle et la bête/Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, France, 1946), Belle (Josette Day) dons a glove that enables her to teleport from the beast’s (Jean Marais) castle to her family home. We see her disappear from her bed in the beast’s castle. The film cuts to what appears to be a wall, from which emerges Belle.

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