Death and Digital Cinema
The Antiseptic Inferno
Ricky Gervais made a joke at the Golden Globes about the length of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and the youthfulness of Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriends, who tended to be under 25. Gervais says that when DiCaprio attended the premiere, his date was too old for him by the end of the film. It is a good joke, but it also hints at the various ways film is a temporal experience, and not only in the process of its viewing. DiCaprio is an actor not just famous, but also for being famously young, an actor who was a teen star and only twenty-three when he made Titanic. He hasn’t just grown older on screen, but grown up on it as well, the inevitable consequence of starting as a youth and sustaining that appeal. The joke makes us aware that film is indeed a temporal medium, one in which actors don’t only age just a little when watching their film at a premiere, but also more so over the course of making the film — which can take up more than a year in an actor’s life, as with Apocalypse Now, Eyes Wide Shut, and Hard to Be a God. These have usually been extended projects due to production difficulties. Other films have deliberately taken years to make, with Richard Linklater’s Boyhood filmed over more than a decade as we watch well-known actors Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette age significantly over the course of one film. Their children also age, but this might seem closer to Michael Apted’s series of television documentaries 7 Up, 14 Up and so on as we follow people’s lives every seven years, more than DiCaprio’s rise as a burgeoning star, or Hawke and Arquette’s ageing in front of our eyes.
Apted’s subjects and the children in Boyhood are unknowns made known by their very specific place in a work that focuses on how time works on them, without the viewer especially being concerned with this question a priori. In other words, we have no prior knowledge of them as figures in the public imaginary as we do of stars. It is the raison d’etre of their screen presence. With Hawke, Arquette and DiCaprio, it is a fascinating byproduct. They are actors who age; not quite put on the screen to age. This can be explained by the relatively small transformations evident in Hawke and Arquette on screen, and the radical shift from young boy to grown man of the main actor Ellar Coltrane, the boy of the title in Linklater’s film. The title is boyhood rather than adulthood, as though watching Hawke and Arquette age would be too imperceptible to pass for narrative purpose. It is often what actors bank on when having longer careers; a transformation too great might undermine their box-office. If an actor is well-known for their recognisability, then becoming unrecognisable makes it harder to retain their brand status. Actors may be deemed vain for looking after themselves but, from a certain perspective, they are doing no more than protecting what we could call their perpetual visibility: that they remain coherently who they are in the public eye.
We can think of this in the context of franchises, like Bond films, or the Indiana Jones movies. In literature, a character can pass from one book to another with no need of ageing, but in film, clearly Sean Connery is a lot younger in Dr No than in Never Say Never Again, and Harrison Ford by the time of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is, inevitably, a much more tired version of his young self. How could he not be: twenty-seven years have passed since the original?
What is all this telling us about cinema? It says what we all know and many might wish not to confront: that cinema, as Cocteau so astutely pronounced, is death at work. When we look at a film we watched twenty years earlier, and note how young some of the actors appear, no matter how well-preserved they may have remained, are we comparing them to their present selves, or also the changes that have taken place in us as we look at the screen? Literature insists on no such existential terrors. Nor would a cinema so reliant on computer-generated imagery, where, in a variation of no animals have been harmed in the making of this film, the movie can claim no actor has aged in the process of its production. But that is not quite where we are, and doesn’t at all reflect the history of an art form where animation has only ever played a subsidiary role. The main event has always been watching people on screen getting older. It might even be central to its ontological basis and not just a byproduct of it. Andre Bazin says “…photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from a proper corruption.” (‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’) Film, too, embalms, leaving it a constantly dating process that should perhaps generate more fear in us than it does. People rarely watch old films not because they will become aware of their own mortality, but because they feel that the films are too slow or the techniques less developed. A look on chat forums like Reddit or Quora frequently show people making such claims, but what if unconsciously the posters wish to escape age and dying? When we look at the hundred-and-thirty-year history of film, there aren’t only many, many thousands of films; there are also millions of people ageing or dead in them. Cinema is an enormous crypt, and only the ghoulish one might think would care to visit.
However, if Bazin believed that “by the power of photography, the natural image of a world that we neither know nor can see, nature at last does more than imitate art; she imitates the artist” (‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image'), we can add that it offers a twofold recuperation no other can match. It creates temporal stories within the diegesis, and a further temporality in the reality it films. Theatre is an art that has both character and actor, yet it doesn’t, in its very form, insist that while the character remains the same age, the actor, separating him or herself from the character they play, as they return to life, will age at one remove from the character they have performed. Marlon Brando on stage in A Streetcar Named Desire was an historical moment; he was only ever as old as the character; he couldn’t return to the stage and play the young Stanley Kowalski thirty years later. But the viewer can return to the film after decades have passed and have no problem accepting Brando as Kowalski, even if they cannot ignore, either, that this most famous of actors is no longer young. (Perhaps even dead.) Theatre fans could only see Brando and Kowalski as temporally welded together; film fans can see the separation that accumulates while time passes. It is as if film contains a ghostly aspect that theatre doesn’t possess. This will partly be about the shadows on walls, the actor removed from the density of their bodily mass during filming, and made weightless by refracting light. It will also rest, though, the more well-known the actor happens to be, on gathering existence, while the character remains fixed in their world. Painting obviously doesn’t have this actor/character distinction theatre possesses, and film enormously complicates, even if many a painting works from a model. But the model remains an object of painterly purpose rather than a momentary existential embodiment, no matter the numerous portraits of people through the ages. Yet such portraits didn’t fix time but immortalised the subject; the purpose was to create an abstraction that could represent the person as a figure of power, beauty, wealth. As John Berger notes: “…the painted public portrait must insist upon a formal distance. It is this — and not the technical inability on the part of the painter — which makes the average portrait of the tradition appear stiff and rigid.” (Ways of Seeing)
Yet it’s also partly why semiotics distinguishes between the icon and the index, between a likeness and an imprint. Yes, photographs can be touched up, and yes, paintings can be hyperrealistic, and maybe we are close to the point where the index and icon are collapsing into each other as the photograph becomes so digitally enhanced it might not even pass for a likeness at all. Many photographs of celebrities on a site like BoredPanda don’t make the actors look better or worse, but few would disagree that it makes them look more artificial, closer to painting than to photography, or closer to the icon than to the index. They begin to resemble themselves, a term applicable to painting where we assume the skill of the artist has successfully offered a fair likeness, but where in photography it may lead us to think that the celebrities don’t much like themselves. They prefer a digitally enhanced version even if it looks as though they have entered a sort of digital Hades, an underworld post-humanity.
Somehow, death is no longer quite at work, as if in the process of being transformed by ones and zeroes, someone needdn’t age because they have entered a post-human realm. If under the chemical process, an actor would still be deemed to look good for their age, now we might be more inclined to admire the nature of the technology. This may be the essence of the technological victory: that instead of admiring someone’s capacity for physical self-preservation, all we can do is wonder at the developments available in the technologically transformed. Obviously, plastic surgery is not the same thing as Photoshop, but they both come together in the context of enhancement procedures. If a puppy isn’t just for Christmas, we might say the same of surgery. While Photoshop need be no more than a casual flirtation with one’s image, like henna body art, plastic surgery can seem more like the further reaches of an ink tattoo you can’t wash off. The digitally enhanced becomes the plastically upholstered and, in the very microfacial limitations subsequent to the surgery, it leaves an actor devoid of many of the expressive qualities that should allow the thespian a modulated range greater than the man or woman on the street. When we look at performances by any number of actors in the past — from Brando to De Niro, Julianne Moore to Bette Davis — they often work with what amounts to microexpressions, the smallest of facial gestures that “is a very brief, involuntary facial expression humans make when experiencing an emotion. They usually last 0.5–4.0 seconds and cannot be faked.” (Science of People) If that is true, then we might wonder how an actor is likely to offer one and muse over whether a return to Method acting would be some sort of answer: the actor finds a real feeling from a past experience and conjures it up for the moment in the film. But that would be for another debate. What does interest us is how the face must surely possess the range needed for expression, and how limited those expressions become when a plastic surgeon smooths out the wrinkles but removes the expressive possibilities. Bonnie Hammer says, “From directors and producers, I kept hearing the same three complaints. Younger actresses were looking more and more alike; older actresses were expressing less and less with their faces; and finding anyone to play an ordinary, ‘everyday’ character had become extraordinarily difficult.” (Vogue)
The problem becomes at least twofold. The actor can only play characters who fit into their plastically generated universe: fitness trainers, cosmeticians, budding actors, TV news presenters, YouTube influencers and so on. But if they are playing cleaners, working-class mums, teachers, professors, and writers, we might wonder why they look enhanced. (No matter if cleaners, teachers etc are also getting plastic surgery.) It doesn’t appear to be part of the character, but can’t quite be ignored either. Hollywood has usually been very resistant to the manifestation of anomaly without explanation. When someone turns up with a scar on their face, a burn mark on their leg, or happens to be leaning on a walking stick, we can usually expect a reason offered. The fine scene in Jaws where Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss discuss their various scars is a joke on this type of reveal, but won’t it seem unusual to be watching films with actors who look like they belong in one of the professions we initially proposed, playing someone in one of the latter professions? Or will teachers, cleaners and working-class mums as characters no longer appear on screen because viewers won’t find their looks plausible in the context of their daily lives? Instead we will have an ever narrower range of human activity available or viewers forced to ignore the anomalies where Hollywood has trained us to expect an explanation.
This doesn’t mean there aren’t teachers who have plastic surgery, as we have parenthetically noted, and perhaps we have to accept that this is increasingly what people do; like going on a diet plan. A CBS article reports that one woman wished to get a bit of work done in between term time, but a doctor says she is far from unusual in this. “Dr. Marotta said he sees 10 to 12 teachers a month during the summer. It's a trend, he says, which may be due in part to critiques they hear in the hall. ‘I hear from older teachers that they feel maybe patronized by younger teachers, and so they feel that in order to keep their jobs and stay young and fresh, they need to refresh their look,’ the surgeon said. Even if the range of professions remains broad on screen, we are still left wondering whether, in such an approach, we will arrive at what could be called ontological animation. When Lev Manovich wondered if most cinema would soon enough be a sub-genre of painting, he also recognised that digital photography contained a paradox: “The logic of the digital photograph is one of historical continuity and discontinuity. The digital image tears apart the net of semiotic codes, modes of display, and patterns of spectatorship in modern visual culture - and, at the same time, weaves this net even stronger. The digital image annihilates photography while solidifying, glorifying and immortalizing the photographic.” (‘The Paradoxes of Digital Photography’)
We still call such photographs photography, but they are no longer created as photographs once were. They carry the perception of the photographic but not the creation of the photograph. If we provocatively extend this to the self, then the individual might be perceived as a person, but it is as though the claims we make about them are misplaced. While before we may have abstracted someone’s beauty enough to regard them as products of good genes (hence creation), now they might have a youthful appearance courtesy of a good surgeon (augmentation). At the moment, the human is still a product of procreation. But just as the plastic surgeon has increasingly been instrumental (so to speak) in a person’s youthfulness, who is to say in the future the procreative act, augmented through a person’s life, might seem unnecessary? Why renovate a house when you can bulldoze the foundations? Why make a few necessary changes later in life when you can start the work before the person is born, if we assume we have a person and a birth, rather than genetic material and a lab?
These are potentially pessimistic thoughts, and cinema’s problem will be the least of ours. But let us hold on to some of these ideas and think for a moment of an interview Robert Downey Jr gave to Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy. Downey Jr walked out: he was there to promote an Iron Man film and not talk about his personal life. Guru-Murthy mentioned Downey Jr’s past problems with drugs, and the actor asked, exasperated: “Are we promoting a movie?” Fair enough, some might say, but as Joshua Glick reckons, “our knowledge of who these people are, their personalities, what they’re like, what their families might be like, their background, what they’ve been like on set swirl around a production,” is not insignificant. “They give the production of a film or TV show a sense of allure and intrigue and a part of what we might call the media culture today.” (Guardian) Downey Jr doesn’t feel he ought to be exposing his past while promoting his present work. We can see his point, but we might not wish to agree with it. If cinema is death at work, it is also life at work, and Dave Carr, in a piece on the original Iron Man, reckoned: “after a life of squandered promise spreading mayhem everywhere, our hero has a near-death experience and finds within himself the angel of his better nature. Ring any bells?” “There are things we know about just from reading the newspaper,” said co-star Jeff Bridges… “he (Downey Jr) doesn’t have to do anything to make it happen. The audience brings that darker part of the story into the theater.” (New York Times) Bridges sees that Downey Jr was right for the role because the audience wouldn’t be oblivious to his past misdemeanours and mistakes. Perhaps Downey Jr would now be inclined to say that, while at the beginning of the series, he was playing a character and drawing from his own life, by 2015, in the interview with Guru-Murthy, he is the vital element of a franchise. Maybe nobody cares anymore about his personal life and what he initially brought to the role. But someone else could claim that if it is all about the franchise, and nothing really to do with Downey Jr, perhaps they don’t need him involved at all. This raises several interesting questions. The first is that Downey Jr is recognisably Iron Man, and another actor playing the part could damage the franchise, even though, since cinema, like life, is death at work, he has aged in the part and has indeed retired from now playing Tony Stark. There has been talk of resurrecting the part with a younger actor and looking at Stark’s life from another, more youthful angle, but soon enough they might choose not to cast anyone at all, pay Downey Jr as a thespian property, and make a series of films based on his image at a particular moment in time — perhaps when he made the first Iron Man.
Much has been made recently of Bruce Willis reputedly having sold his image rights to a digital company. The story proved false but had a small amount of truth to it. A spokesman for Deepfake said, “Our engineers processed a dataset composed of 34,000 images of Bruce Willis and made his ‘digital twin’ for the series of MegaFon ads.” (Variety) Newspapers exaggerated the story, but the principle holds: soon enough, surely, actors will be selling their prime selves and going into personal retirement. Variety says, “Willis added at the time in the release. ‘[The advertisement is] a mini-movie in my usual action-comedy genre. For me, it is a great opportunity to go back in time.’” He may only have given his image to an advert, but might Willis and others soon enough be handing over more than a mere 34,000 of them to allow for a feature length work?” Already in green screen films, we have digitised scenes that would have been done by actors or body doubles. Now “a copy of a character is made completely out of pixels, and inserted into a sequence – often to complete a superhuman feat that an actor, or even a well-trained stunt performer, simply couldn’t do.” (Backstage) But it needn’t only be for stunt scenes. “Put simply, it's entirely possible that Iron Man suit and that Spider-Man costume never existed, and some scenes they’re in were never shot on a camera – and this is far from the only time these sort of substitutions have happened, with Infinity War co-director Joe Russo revealing that in his earlier film Captain America: Civil War the suit worn by Black Panther was also entirely computer-generated.” (Radio Times)
This is no longer the actor so encased in make-up that they have to find the performance in gesture and voice, but where they needn’t turn up on set at all. There would be no set to appear on; only a computer to appear in. And while Hollywood stars have the sort of access many couldn’t begin to hope to possess (from last-minute seats in expensive restaurants to post-Oscar parties), even the biggest of names won’t be able to insert themselves into a computer. Many professions are in danger of becoming obsolete, or at least working with far fewer personnel: “Millions of people have lost their jobs due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and now the machines will take away even more jobs from workers, according to the WEF. The organization cites that automation will supplant about 85 million jobs by 2025.” (Forbes)
If people are happy having their accounts done by computer, their news produced by machines and their shopping tallied up by a digital checkout without any human input but their own, then perhaps they won’t care very much whether Iron Man happens to be Robert Downey Jr as a presently living fifty-eight-year-old, or a digitised earlier incarnation based on when he was around forty. After all, audiences often identify with a character on screen; they needn’t necessarily concern themselves with the person playing the part. It might even help explain why animated films have generally been for children; that kids are happier than adults in removing themselves from real-life coordinates and staying more deeply within the fiction generated. But it isn’t only children now who are having this relationship. Simon Pegg says, “I’m very much a self-confessed fan of science-fiction and genre cinema. But part of me looks at society as it is now and thinks we’ve been infantilized by our own taste. We’re essentially all consuming very childish things – comic books, superheroes.” “Adults are watching this stuff, and taking it seriously!” he told Radio Times, noting the shift from “substantive dramas of the ’70s that were popular box office hits to what we have today.” If that immersion in a fantastic world to the detriment of a real one is so important, we could see actors as a hindrance rather than an augmentation. When Linklater cast Hawke and Arquette in Boyhood, he wanted them to age on screen, however inconspicuously next to the kids: it was central to the diegesis, as they played parents over a dozen years watching their children grow.
Franchise films don’t work like that: they remain in a perpetual present because the characters rarely develop temporally through a series but remain obstacle-oriented, with each film creating a set of problems that are resolved within each. The more fantastic the series, the less the film will wish to play up the aspect of ageing. In the more ‘realistic’ Bourne films especially, and John Wick films, there is enough reality left in them for us to watch actors getting older on screen and the films to absorb just a little of them in the story. When Bourne comes back after a few years out, Matt Damon isn’t the thirty-one-year-old who appeared in the first, but a man now in his mid-forties. This isn’t a huge age-gap but big enough for the filmmakers to make it part of the story. “Look, if we open the film and in the first frame of Jason Bourne we see your face and you look like you’ve lived well these past 10 years [director Paul Greengrass says to Matt Damon], we do not have a movie. You have to look like you’ve suffered. And the only way to do that is to suffer.” (Guardian)
Downey Jr might think he is above talking about the personal and feels that his life and work can be distinguished. But we might wonder not so much whether Downey Jr is a hypocrite when he then goes on to make a film (Sr) about the father he refuses to talk about in the interview, but more whether he is a realist. If an actor insists that they only want to talk about the character, we might wonder whether they need to be interviewed at all. In most cases, actors don’t create characters; writers do (at least until ChatGPT creates them), and the reason the actor is being interviewed rests on their embodying a character within their perceived life and persona. Understandably, an interviewer would be interested in other Downey Jr roles and aspects of his life that fed into them. Downey Jr’s first big part was as a cocaine addict in Less than Zero, in 1987, and he turned up on Oprah in 2004, after serving twelve months in prison, speaking openly about that most closed of environments. He also made that documentary on his father, Robert Downey Sr, released in 2022, where he asks his father various personal questions, including about drugs. But let’s not see hypocrisy but inevitability: Downey Jr is a living being who goes through life playing characters who are fictional creations. The tension between the character and the actor is partly what makes film the art form it is, and what distinguishes it from animation. Sure, we may find various interviewers clumsy and opportunistic, caring little for an actor’s feelings and determined to get a nugget of biographical gold that can become currency in the marketplace of their own careers. Nevertheless, the actors are cast in films because they are living beings, and it seems viewers do oftenwant from actors the fictional and the real.
Yet what they may soon be getting is a ‘necrothespian’, the living dead as the next stage of cinematic stardom. Tom Hanks notes that “AI [is] so advanced I could star in new films after I'm dead.” (Telegraph) It can perhaps be viewed as on odd combination of the synthespian and ‘necrocinephilia’, with the viewer resistant to actors who are computer-generated anonymities, when they can continue to have a relationship with stars even if they are no longer alive. It may be ironic, or apt, that Bruce Willis was once in a film famous for the line “I see Dead People” (The Sixth Sense), when he might be one of the first to be allowing us to do so. If he continues to let the dataset get ever bigger in its computational ambition, he could well become the first proper example of feature-film digital reincarnation. When Fitzgerald said there were no second acts in American life, he couldn’t have even begun to countenance that not only will there be second acts: there will be second, digital, lives. Perhaps Willis can appear in a host of better films, leaving in his will a demand that he’ll only appear in the first Die Hard, Pulp Fiction, In Country, The Player, and Twelve Monkeys. There are no mortgages to worry about when you have become ones and zeroes. He can devote himself to a career in independent films.
Yet if Hanks, Willis and others end up digitally reincarnated, would the type of independent works that seem so reliant on the human be made at all? Even some of Willis’s better films could seem to lend themselves more to the digital than others. A computerised version of Twelve Monkeys, Moonrise Kingdom, and Die Hard wouldn’t be too hard to imagine. Science fiction films and action films were using digital effects as a given in the 90s onwards. As Michele Pierson says: “science-fiction films were popular with audiences in the early-to-mid 1990s because they offered viewers the opportunity to participate in a popular cultural event that put the display of the digital artefact—or computer-generated image—at the centre of the entertainment experience.” (‘CGI effects in Hollywood Science-fiction Cinema 1989-95: The Wonder Years’) Wes Anderson’s work has usually possessed an aspect of artificiality that could without difficulty become digitally animated, and he has already made The Fantastic Mr Fox and Isle of Dogs. But what about Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman or Jack Nicholson during the 70s in films like Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter and Raging Bull, Straw Dogs, Lenny, and Straight Time, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? It is as though certain actors from a certain period would be digitally resistant, while others are more digitally compliant. Actors like Schwarzenegger and Stallone, Tom Cruise and Keanu Reeves could all fit into this algorithmic universe more smoothly than Nicholson, Hoffman and De Niro during the latter’s greatest period as actors.
Paul Virilio says: “By virtue of this loss of ‘behavioural freedom’, all criticism of technology has just about disappeared and we have slid unconsciously from pure technology to technoculture and, lastly, to the dogmatism of a totalitarian techno-cult in which everyone is caught in the trap not of a society and its moral, social or cultural laws and prohibition, but of what these centuries have made us and of our own bodies.” (The Information Bomb) Virilio also quotes Kafka saying: “the masses are rushing, running, charging through the age. They think they are advancing, but they are simply running on the spot and falling into the void, that is all.” Taking both remarks into account, we might wonder whether we have achieved much progress if the better actor in a necrosthespian world would be Schwarzenegger rather than De Niro. Whether it happens to be plastic surgery that leaves someone without wrinkles, but also without much facial expression, or a digitised self that continues long after one is dead, we can see a twofold ontological enervation: the sense in which the self becomes reduced by technological advancement as it loses a broader sense of being.
Fergus Daly looks at a claim made by Jean-Michel Frodon when the latter talked about the Program. “…the dominant state of representation as it becomes more and more unified and powerful…The word “program” seemed appropriate as it refers simultaneously to television, computers, and politics. It’s meant to designate how, through narrative-based spectacular shows, the interests of the dominant and multinational economical order are combining in synthesized artifacts elements originally provided by propaganda, advertising, showbiz, and how it reshapes previous forms (painting, novel, theatre, cinema).” Frodon adds, “the other name of “the program” is Hollywood, if it’s admitted that this word designates an aesthetic form, which intends to become the only mode of representation and narration worldwide. This form can be worked out anywhere, and is meant for everywhere.” (‘From Method Acting to Method Viewing’) If film continues as an art form, as an escape from what is now called content, where all images are part of a streaming culture that needs constantly to be fed, then all we have are pragmatic images that become ever more so as algorithms refine and perhaps consequently define our tastes. As Martin Scorsese says in a recent essay on Fellini: “content became a business term for all moving images: a David Lean movie, a cat video, a Super Bowl commercial, a superhero sequel, a series episode. It was linked, of course, not to the theatrical experience but to home viewing, on the streaming platforms that have come to overtake the moviegoing experience, just as Amazon overtook physical stores. On the one hand, this has been good for filmmakers, myself included.” (Harper’s) Yet on the other, Scorsese sees that “…it has created a situation in which everything is presented to the viewer on a level playing field, which sounds democratic but isn’t. If further viewing is ‘suggeste’” by algorithms based on what you’ve already seen, and the suggestions are based only on subject matter or genre, then what does that do to the art of cinema?” (Harper’s) The pragmatic viewer takes what they think they want because the algorithm has told them so, and what could be more self-orienting than a recommendation based on one’s own taste? Critics, after all, base it on theirs, and the viewer is expected to choose from a variety of critical sources to find out what best suits their inclinations. But what if one’s taste isn’t quite taste but a mood, a default acceptance of exhaustion on a couple of occasions, and the algorithm, now assuming this is what you like, keeps feeding you similar experiences that you are too tired to counter?
This is a worst-case scenario and an exaggeration, but few will deny this is the direction of travel. A 2105 Vice article headline asked: “Is This Algorithm a Better Movie Critic than Roger Ebert?” as it looked at whether the mathematical was more useful than the critical in understanding which films will last. It is the ultimate in quantitative criticism, a claim that has no interest in human subjectivity. Yet as Scorsese proposes, cinema is qualitative: “In essence, these artists were constantly grappling with the question ‘What is cinema?’ and then throwing it back for the next film to answer. No one was operating in a vacuum, and everybody seemed to be responding to and feeding off everybody else. Godard and Bertolucci and Antonioni and Bergman and Imamura and Ray and Cassavetes and Kubrick and Varda and Warhol were reinventing cinema with each new camera movement and each new cut, and more established filmmakers such as Welles and Bresson and Huston and Visconti were reenergized by the surge in creativity around them.” (Harper’s)
Scorsese describes a human kineticism over an algorithmic passivity, with the latter a sort of technological version perhaps of what Mark Fisher noticed was already in place in the ‘90s. Speaking of British students in that decade compared to those in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the lecturer and writer insisted this wasn’t just apathy — it was what he calls ‘reflexive impotence’. This “…amounts to an unstated worldview amongst the British young, and it has its correlates in widespread pathologies. Many of the teenagers I worked with had mental health problems or learning difficulties. Depression is endemic.” (Capitalist Realism) If students in the 90s didn’t feel they could make political choices, what happens when one allows computers to make choices for us when it comes to what we will watch? Scorsese says that not only were these ‘60s and ‘70s films being made, they were also being viewed in large numbers, as they played at cinemas throughout New York. Almost as much love and subjectivity went into the screening as was going into the filmmaking. As Scorsese says: “Curating isn’t undemocratic or ‘elitist,’ a term that is now used so often that it’s become meaningless. It’s an act of generosity—you’re sharing what you love and what has inspired you.” (Harper’s) Scorsese describes a hyper-human world, a vivid account of individuality that needn’t be selfish but wouldn’t be conformist either. But imagine one where dead actors are resurrected as numbers, with a script written by ChatGPT, and where an algorithm recommends the finished film. We seem very far from Scorsese’s frenetic enthusiasm. We have arrived at the antiseptic inferno.
Thus to speak of death in film is really to speak of life, to say that cinema as an art form needn’t be argued about from the perspective of its technological specificity. It even more needs to be discussed from an ontological base; from a living reality. This may seem naive, especially when so many arguments in the last thirty years have focused on either specificity theses or technological development. As Francesco Casetti (and Daniel Leisawitz) says in the context of the latter: “the advent of the digital image changes cinema's relationship with physical reality. No longer, the story goes, are we dealing with an image based (as with photography on film) exclusively on a direct record of objects placed in the camera, the essential link between the world and its representation thus established. The digital image has the ability to offer us a representation without ever having need of things themselves, thanks simply to the elaboration of an algorithm.” (‘Sutured Reality: Film, from Photographic to Digital Author’) Casetti says this shift needn’t mean film loses its relationship with the real, since film realism always consisted of far more than its relationship with indexicality, with its chemical origins only a dimension of it. The writer talks of stylistic choices, discursive practises, and how the viewer is contained by the viewing experience in a way that makes us feel its relationship with reality. One of the key elements “…at play in generating effects of the real is the confidence of filmgoers in what they see. This confidence is stronger than the ‘intentional suspension of disbelief’ at work in narrative: it is a positive reliability, the certitude that filmic images "record" and "witness" reality.” (‘Sutured Reality: Film, from Photographic to Digital Author’) That Casetti focuses almost exclusively on neo-realist cinema doesn’t invalidate the argument — he shows how much of the movement was based on stylistic procedures and relative narrative abeyances. Digital cinema can create realism with a similar set of procedures, even if the technology itself has changed.
Noel Carroll makes much of the problem of specificity in art, arguing against critics like Clement Greenberg, who saw that paint was the medium-specific aspect of painting, and Barthes, who Carroll sees as a photographic realist: “Barthes argues that photographic representation is essentially different from representation based on analogy or copying, i.e., the kind of representation found in painting.” (’The Specificity of Media in the Arts’) By this reckoning, painting that plays up representation and photography, emphasising artificiality, wouldn’t be the ideal uses of their medium. Carroll disagrees with what he insists they are claiming. It is not for us to get into such debates concerning technological aspects that define the form, nor the ideal use of a given art, even if we may be arguing for the best use of cinema based on an underlying principle. Film is no longer film because it has moved from chemistry to maths. It is that, moving from one to the other, it can now remove what we have seen as underpinning cinema: death. When Scorsese names Fellini, Welles, Cassavetes, Antonioni, Bertolucci, Godard, Varda, Imamura and Warhol, what they all have in common is that they are dead. Most of the actors in their films are dead too, and perhaps some would like to see them all digitally resurrected, with a new film by Fellini (based on data processing all the shots in his films) with Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg and Giulietta Masina (data capturing their film images). Yet Scorsese isn’t saying this is what we should do; he knows they are masterpieces of the past, and that is where they should remain, no matter if we might wish to resurrect them curatorially. The person who curates these films in the present is showing love not just for cinema, but for death as well — making clear that just because people are no longer alive, this is no reason to see them as worthy of no more than a cemetery visit. Scorsese is interested in the vitality that came out of that past cinematic moment, and wonders if viewing everything as content makes it almost impossible to generate such moments again. Scorsese wants interactive subjectivity, not mathematical objectivity: “algorithms, by definition, are based on calculations that treat the viewer as a consumer and nothing else.” (Harper’s)
Both the specificity argument and the celluloid/digital argument are formally and technologically focused, but ours is organic, based on the organs of the flesh that will decay over time. During its history, film has used technology to capture this process and couched it in stories that people wanted to watch. But if a script manual insists that what we need are universal stories, and a technically preoccupied filmmaker insists we need ever better technology, what if more than anything we need to accept cinema’s organic contingency, that many films wouldn’t be any better if the script were tighter or the errors removed? Let’s take a Scorsese film as an example: Taxi Driver. Screen Rant notes numerous errors: flowers that are burnt and yet reappear; a burger that mysteriously finds itself on the table though Bickle hasn’t ordered one; the haircut that changes length based clearly in shooting out of continuity. Many of these mistakes could now be digitally corrected: the errant burger removed would be easy; Robert de Niro’s hair more work, but not impossible. This would give a whole new meaning to digital remastering, and another of Scorsese’s generation has admitted one must be very careful when tampering with one’s earlier work. Steven Spielberg digitally edited the guns out of ET in 2002 and replaced them with Walkie-Talkies. He admitted recently that this “was a mistake” during a master class at the Time 100 Summit. “I never should have done that. ET is a product of its era. No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily, or being forced to peer through.” (Independent) Obviously, the guns in ET weren’t errors, as the hamburger in Taxi Driver happens to be. Scorsese would only be changing the content of a mistake; Spielberg was altering the message. Yet the principle holds: the ease with which a filmmaker can return to an older image and use the present technology to make changes.
Sure, many will note it isn’t only digital developments that allow filmmakers to change their work. As we know from all the Director’s Cuts, from Pat Garrett to Billy the Kid to Blade Runner; Apocalypse Now: Redux to Heaven’s Gate. Some benefit from another version (Heaven’s Gate); others are perfect as they are (Apocalypse Now). We wouldn’t wish to claim that there aren’t reasons to return to a work and improve it: if we only had Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid in the studio cut, it would have been just another western with some great scenes; not the masterful account of time working on a man of compromise. But digital potentially makes changing films from the past much easier, and this is why an ethical and aesthetic underpinning is required no matter the technological advances. There was a time in the eighties and early nineties when it looked like numerous classics were going to be colourised, and indeed many were. But it was more a fad than a development, and the same might be said for 3D, no matter its threefold attempt to embed itself, from the 50s, to the 80s, to the 2000s.
We can propose that if 3D is faddish, colorisation a novelty, and digitally returning to your work to fiddle around with its details an irrelevance, or a bastardisation, maybe the necrothespian will prove equally of little long-term importance. Just because the technology is available that doesn’t mean the ontological conditions match them. For whatever reason, sound and colour became increasingly absorbed into film, even if sound was almost instant, and colour a gradual process. They seemed to fit the underlying conditions of the art form, without reducing it to a gimmick. This makes clear that just because something is possible, that doesn’t mean it is inevitable. Just as we have possibilities in an art, so we also have impossibilities, or better, resistances, that leave certain elements as exceptions, ones that never quite become rules. This can work both ways: it can leave older assumptions of the form exceptional; and modern developments occasional. There are still plenty of films made in monochrome: Roma, Cold War, Mank, and Malcolm and Maria as recent examples. You can even have a film that is both black and white and silent: The Artist. But if The Artist feels far more of a gimmick than Roma and co, it might rest on the incremental move to colour and the almost instant adoption of sound. Monochrome still seems a valid aesthetic choice, even if it is not common, while silence is usually reserved for films invoking the silent era (The Artist; Dr Plonk) or experimental works insisting on the properties of film (Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes; Hotel Monterey; Les Hautes solitude) and its limitations. It is as if, at a given moment in time, that might stretch long enough to pass for the given components to become normalised, an art form defines itself.
If Carroll’s argument against medium specificity appears wrong-headed, it isn’t because he is especially incorrect; it is more that his stance is arid. He sees films not as examples, but as arguments. Carroll wants them to serve his thesis rather than modify it or transform his claim. When he says “…it is not an easy task to identify the basic materials of a medium, let alone to move from a simple enumeration of a medium's physical elements to the effects the art form embodied in the medium should be committed to explore”, nobody would be inclined to say it is. “Imagine”, he says, “a silent film drama in which we see a gun pointed at X, followed by an intertitle reading "Bang!," followed by an image of a prostrate, dead X. One explanation of what has gone wrong here is that the filmmaker has failed to execute the scene in terms of what the medium does best- viz., showing things.” (‘The Specificity of Media in the Arts’) But as Carroll notes, if the film is interested in distanciation, we may read it differently, seeing the example he gives as a great instance of Brechtian filmmaking. However, we could see that this is an exceptional use of the medium, just as a silent film will be in the sound era or, to a lesser degree, the use of monochrome. What Carroll wants to do is set up a straw man he can counter without difficulty, and he gives too few examples of a position he wishes to rebut. Creating an exaggerated version of medium specificity means Carroll wins the argument, but doesn’t do much for the art form. He ends up offering an even more reductive position than those he attacks. He may be right to question Clement Greenberg’s claim that painting has properties it must respect for its fullest use, but better, perhaps, to see Greenberg’s claims as useful at a given moment in time: to see how an art arrives at various points in its evolution.
We aren’t quite saying that necessarily the best use of film is to put living human beings in one and watch them age just a little during the production, and age far more over their career. Yet it’s what most films have been doing since its invention. Animation has usually been the exception, and there is no intrinsic reason why living actors should be replaced by synthespians and necrothespians just because the tech makes it possible. As we have found, 3D has been available for half of cinema’s history — yet it remains occasionally used. We aren’t suggesting our own specificity thesis, one based on saying that the actor is a necessary property of film: after all, where would that leave animation, since it doesn’t use actors? We could nevertheless push this thesis by claiming that most animated films do use actors’ voices, but we would still be left with the odd anomaly like Norman McLaren’s work, for example, or non-animated experimental works like The Flicker by Tony Conrad. Our argument isn’t logical but pragmatic, just as we are saying that technological advancement needn’t dictate where the art form will go. In this sense, some changes become almost instantly absorbed (sound), some more slowly (colour), and some consistently resisted (3D). The actor may be the closest we can find to a principle that covers most films, as sound does not, colour less so still, and 3D hardly at all. But to say that the actor is the essence of cinema, while incorrect, would have many thousands of examples to draw from. It is not that there is an essential set of elements or practises that make a film a film, but there are elements or practices common to most of them. The actor might be the commonest of denominators, even if much of film theory has been far more preoccupied with shot choices, editing and mise en scene. There have been film theorists like Balazs and Bazin who did pay attention to the actor on screen. Balazs could say that “humanity is already learning the rich and colourful language of gesture, movement and facial expression. This is not a language of signs as a substitute for words, like the sign language of the deaf-and-dumb — it is the visual means of communication, without intermediary of souls clothed in flesh. Man has again become visible.” (Film: A Montage of Theories). Bazin spoke of amalgamation, as professional and amateur actors could act together, even if it wouldn’t always work “…Even if an actor has sense enough to avoid being confined to a single role, it is still a fact that his face and some recurring mannerisms in his acting having become familiar will prevent the amalgam with nonprofessionals from taking place.” (‘An Aesthetic of Reality’)
If we are more sympathetic to Casetti’s position than to Carroll’s regarding the absence of medium specificity, it rests on Casetti’s interest in the codes that help us understand realism, over Carroll’s insistence that there can be no such thing as specific givens of the medium. Carroll argues against something; Casetti is arguing for something. As Casetti says, “from this perspective, realism in film is inextricably tied to indexicality. Nevertheless, an image is a full index not when it is merely ‘caused by’ and ‘close to’ empirical reality but when it displays this "cause" and this "closeness." In other words, a sign is experienced as ‘ontologically’ linked to its referent when, reflexively, it highlights this link. This means that the satisfaction of the basic claim for the real that cinema expresses is never fulfilled by a single element.” (‘Sutured Reality: Film, from Photographic to Digital’) The indexical is merely an aspect of the realism a film can offer, and digital provides other aspects consistent with the codes of realism practised using celluloid, ones that needn’t eradicate cinema’s relationship with the real.
Yet what might do so is an erosion of reality as a broader claim, one that sees reality as far more malleable and artificial than we have hitherto perceived it to be. Imagine a world in which the question isn’t one of analogue versus digital, as a technological shift, but as an ontological reappraisal. Casetti sees this threat when he speaks of “…the level of social trust: because of the wide utilization of applications such as Photoshop, we ‘know’ that a digital image is not what we pretend it to be.” Casetti was writing in 2011; now we have the term ‘deepfake’, coined in 2017. We can imagine a world where plastic surgery becomes so common, and technology so advanced, that it will be all but impossible to distinguish between the real and the artificial, and perhaps people will have no wish to do so. Whether the film happens to be one an actor actually made, made when he or she was so surgically enhanced that it is impossible to say what is digital and what is surgical, or as a necrothespian after their death, and with their image data-mined, what matters is the story they are in no matter what broader reality they might or might not occupy. In such an instance there potentially really won’t be anything outside the text, and thus the broader context of a work will be seen as of no significance. Whether an actor is alive or dead, surgically or digitally enhanced, needn’t be of any interest and all we have is synthespians and necrothespians occupying our screens, while we as viewers hurtle through time possessing no affinity with the beings that once so closely resembled us.
Much may have been made during cinema history of the beauty and glamour of the film star. But whatever the gap between those up there on the silver screen and the viewer in the cinema seat gazing at them, there has always been a fundamental egalitarianism at work. They, like us, were mortals. In Stars, Richard Dyer looks at the various ways theorists have approached stardom (no matter if, as we have noted, it has too often been a relatively ignored arena of film theory). Violette Morin, for example, would see film superstars as “different in kind from other people. She sees this stemming from the way stars are treated as superlatives. Stars are always the most something-or-other in the world — the most beautiful, the most expensive, the most sexy.” Yet the superlative is still a comparative. It isn’t a transcendent claim. But what if we can no longer compare ourselves to actors, however unfavourably, because they really do exist in another realm? So many questions no longer become relevant; so many films are deemed irrelevant. Instead of modified colourisation, we might have instead radical digitisation. Classic films like Some Like It Hot and Gaslight may be seen as frighteningly realistic, too beholden to the indexical and the mortal, crypts of the long dead, when instead they could be remade with the undead. In such a world, films like Boyhood would have lost much of their meaning, as would the efforts involved in making films with real people in difficult production circumstances, films like Apocalypse Now, Fitzcarraldo, and Sorcerer. It is a world where anything resembling the real and the dying, the location and the process of ageing, would be excised. Instead, films would exist in a suffocatingly self-contained universe, and we humans, seeking solace in the image, would be left instead in the wilderness of our own solitary decay. But this isn’t a technological inevitability; only an ontological possibility that one must surely find ways to resist. Cinema might seem a minor aspect of a much bigger problem, but it may be a useful measure in understanding where we might be going.
© Tony McKibbin