iron man and digital cinema 2–the reality effect
Posted: August 6th, 2008 | Author: grant wythoff | Filed under: cinema, media aesthetics | Tags: barthes, bazin, digital cinema, iron man, panofsky | 2 Comments »In the introduction to Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Miriam Bratu Hansen writes, “Digital technologies such as computer enhancement, imaging, and editing have shifted the balance increasingly toward the postproduction phase, thus further diminishing the traces of photographic, indexical contingency in the final product” (vii). A powerful trend in post-war film criticism was the argument for the literal quality of the cinematic image, what Hansen here refers to as “indexical contingency.” As Erwin Panofsky described it in a 19** essay “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” “the medium of the movies is physical reality as such. Cinema is committed to communicate only by way of what is real.” André Bazin similarly argued that the cinematic image “redeemed from sin” the false perspectivalism of Western painting. A film theorist deeply influenced by his Catholicism, Bazin writes, “The cinema is objectivity in time.”
While of course this unproblematic collapse of the signifier into the signified has since been tempered, as Hansen’s comment suggests, the mutability of digital images resurrects the discourse (rightly or otherwise) of our fundamentally intuitive understanding of cinema’s direct referentiality, if only as a “trace.” Roland Barthes’s diagnosis of the “reality effect” comes to mind, which posits “a break between the ancient mode of verisimilitude and modern realism,” a discourse “which accepts ‘speech-acts’ justified by their referent alone.” The “reality effect” is constituted by a language whose signified is the very absence of a signifier; it is a language whose aim is to simulate immediate presence. Now that the “indexical contingency” of the cinematic image is no longer a given, one would assume that the mutability of the digital would render the representational apparatus visible. In other words, whatever “traces” were left of the reality effect after theoretical attacks by poststructuralism now flare up because of their (ostensibly) final destruction by the technological attacks of digital code.
Digital cinema therefore, could be assumed to hold a productive relationship with the reality effect, in that it pushes the condition of the image as a signifier to the fore. Bazin’s faith in physical reality becomes skepticism in its digital reproducibility.
But this line of reasoning ignores several key facts about the specificity of this language, or rather the lack thereof. Digital cinema forces us to grapple with the fact that its smallest constituent level exists as the pure difference between 0’s and 1’s, a language that does not consist of linguistic codes or shared systems of meaning. Unlike the grooves of a phonograph record, for example, whose shapes have a direct correlation to the sounds they represent, digital code contains no semiotic specificity. It is a language that need not refer to moving images at all, that could exist as an instruction manual, an x-ray of a tooth, or a scan of a manuscript. The smallest constituent level of digital cinema is simply a neutral delivery system, what Georg Tholen calls “transmissibility as such.”
As Tholen articulates it, “Once ‘0’ and ‘1’ no longer represent something, but become markers of a system within which something appears, it makes possible not only the alternating oscillation of presence and absence but also ‘the universal medium of the electric current’ as a carrier that stays neutral to its message” (SAQ 101:3, 667).
We are faced with a significant problem then: while digital cinema provokes an awareness of the image as a representational language, it is only as a delivery system “neutral to its message” that the digital makes any sense. Nothing of this language remains to be seen, and the critique of the digital is itself rendered binary, a yes/no decision as to whether or not a represented action or object actually happened, was actually there. The problem is that this comes to resemble, once again, the “reality effect” wherein mimesis becomes invisible.
As we stare directly at the (cinematic) apparatus as it constructs a (CGI) biomechanical suit around the body of Tony Stark, what exactly do we see? Not, I think, a representational technique that gives the lie to the super hero genre’s realist aesthetic lifted from Moore/Miller’s 80s graphic novels (the desire to pull every SF element of the super hero genre down to the realm of the possible in the present day). The computer graphics are actually foregrounded here, but to what effect?
“Digital cinema forces us to grapple with the fact that its smallest constituent level exists as the pure difference between 0’s and 1’s, a language that does not consist of linguistic codes or shared systems of meaning.”
Don’t structuralist theories of language suggest that linguistic codes work by creating meaning out of pure difference? Isn’t this fundamentally the case with digital cinema, too?
I would think the 1′s and 0′s layer in digital cinema would be analogous to the smallest physical differences in speech–a p is not a d–or the pure difference between dark ink and light paper. The codes and systems are layered on top.
But I assume I’m misunderstanding.
I may answer this question a bit in the third Iron Man post on motion capture and material traces–in that celluloid, unlike digital cinema, bears a trace indexically related to its object.
But I would also quote from N. Katherine Hayles’s book My Mother Was A Computer, which contrasts the systems of speech, writing, and code. Hayles asks the question of both writing and code, out of the difference between letters (P is not D) or between digits (1′s and 0′s), “Where does the complexity reside?”
She cites Derrida, who argues that with writing, complexity is invested in the trace (out of the faith of some transcendental signified behind the signifier) and tracking the slippages and movements of the trace thought it “can never be found as a thing-in-itself.” (I may have fudged that but bear with me…)
She writes, “For code, complexity inheres neither in the origin nor in the operation of difference as such but in the labor of computation that again and again calculates differences to create complexity as an emergent property of computation.”
I think what I was trying to get at w/ the example of digital cinema was something similar to this, the pure functionality of code. Maybe ‘pure functionality’ would have been better than ‘pure difference’ of 1′s and 0′s?
The key difference between writing and code for Hayles is that with code, signification becomes a quantifiable, knowable process: “The advantages of the computational view is that emergence can be studied as a knowable and quantifiable phenomena, freed both from the mysteries of the Logos and the complexities of discursive explanations dense with ambiguities.”