Lev Manovich Essays : What is Digital Cinema?

super-genre

Summary

• Interactive media do not just add interactivity to the narrative of cinema; they go much further
• Defining constructs of cinema are just the defaults of digital cinema
• With computers, cinema has become more like painting, in that it consists of a series of constructed (rather than simply recorded) images
• Computers free us from sequential narrative, instead allowing us to use spatial narratives. In other words, we can use a cubist approach and show many perpsctives at the same time. "The privileged role played by the manual construction of images in digital cinema is one example of a larger trend: the return of pre-cinematic moving images techniques (CR: such as the loop. painting frames,...). Marginalized by the twentieth century institution of live action narrative cinema which relegated them to the realms of animation and special effects, these techniques reemerge as the foundation of digital filmmaking. What was supplemental to cinema becomes its norm; what was at its boundaries comes into the center. Digital media returns to us the repressed of the cinema."

History

• cinema was defined by motion
• cinema moved from animation (graphics-based) tp true cinema (photographics based)
• concerned with replicating reality, pretending the camera, blue screen and other ceceiving tech was not there
• "Born from animation, cinema pushed animation to its boundary, only to become one particular case of animation in the end."
• now manual construction of images (special effects, 3d modeling, painting, etc) has come to replace automated: history eats its own tail

The end of narrative

"Beginning in the 1980s, new cinematic forms have emerged which are not linear narratives, which are exhibited on a television or a computer screen"

• Music Video

The Loop and Spatial Montage

• "Can the loop be a new narrative form appropriate for the computer age?"
• "Ford's assembly line relied on the separation of the production process into a set of repetitive, sequential, and simple activities. The same principle made computer programming possible: a computer program breaks a tasks into a series of elemental operations to be executed one at a time. Cinema followed this principle as well: it replaced all other modes of narration with a sequential narrative"
• "Rather than being a surface which passively accepts projected images of reality recorded by a camera, computer screen becomes an active generator of moving image events. It already contains numerous images and numerous narrative paths; all that remains is to reveal some of them." but this is still just narrative: where does it go beyond narrative? And how is non-narrative beyond narrative?

Lev Manovich, Cinema and Digital Media

Summary:

Cinema prepared us for digital media by introducing us to:

• data storage
• sampling
• random access/ remixing time
• simulation

So, cinema is seen as merely preparding us for digital media. "Having played this role well, cinema exits the stage. Enters the computer."

1. Cinema Gives Birth to a Computer

• both computer and camera record data (big fucking deal Lev! So does text, song, tattoos)
• both are controlled by external programs (as are games, and pretty much everything else, Lev!)

1.1. Jacquard Loom

• Jacquard Loom was the first computer, and it produced images!

2.1. Zuse's Film

• Konrad Zuse built a computer in Berlin and used old film as the punch-tape: "One of these surviving pieces of film shows the abstract program

codes punched over the original frames of some interior shot. The iconic code of cinema is discarded in favor of the more efficient binary one."

2.2 Digital Media

"The translation, which is taking place today, of all existing media into numerical data accessible for the computers. The result: digital media -- graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, spaces and text which become computable, i.e. simply another set of computer data. "

2. Cinema Prepares Digital Media

"Gradually, cinema taught us to accept the manipulation of time and space, the arbitrary coding of the visible, the mechanization of vision, and the reduction of reality to a moving image as a given. As a result, today the conceptual shock of the digital revolution is not experienced as a real shock -- because we were ready for it for a long time."

2.1 Sampling

• cinema introduced us toi the concept of sampling, so that the concept is not as shocking in Digital Media as it could be (Lev, you're pushing it here; the experience of sampling is entirely different in cinema to digital media)

2.2. Random Access

cinema prepared us for the remixing of time

3. Simulation

"For what is faked, of course, is not reality but photographic reality, reality as seen by the camera lens."

"Cinema, which was the key method to represent the world throughout the twentieth century, is destined to be replaced by digital media: the numeric, the computable, the simulated. This was the historical role played by cinema: to prepare us to live comfortably in the world of two-dimensional moving simulations. Having played this role well, cinema exits the stage. Enters the computer."

Presentations

Jim Campbell by Elliott Brennan

a presentation of Jim Campbell's custom hardware

• FPGA: Field Programmable Gate Array
• Xilinix

Sarak Renshaw on Moving Image

Trajan's Column as first moving image, because peopole animated a static image into a storyboard by walking around the column and reading

Zoetrope was one of the first methods used to create a moving image

Linear Zoetrope / Bill Brand (1980)

More readings

Future Cinema

"it is Hollywood that has come to define its dominant forms of production and distribution, its technological apparatus and its narrative forms. But the current hegemony of the Hollywood model of movie making is about to be questioned by the more radically new potentialities of the digital media technologies, which is why the rise of the video, computer game and location based entertainment industries is such a significant phenomena. These new digital contexts are setting an appropriate platform for the further evolution of the traditions of independent, experimental and expanded avantgarde cinema."

" the cinema has yearned to construe its fictions in a space of equivalence with the real" but wioth networked forms like the www "The intention is not a totalitarian spectacle that overwhelms and belittles the viewer, rather it is an inspiring manifestation that affirms each viewer?s unique position and critical relationship to the representation."

"The biggest challenge for the digitally extended cinema is the conception and design of new narrative techniques that allow the interactive and emergent features of that medium to be fulfillingly embodied. Going beyond the triteness of branching plot options and video game mazes, one approach is to develop modular structures of narrative content which permit an indeterminate yet meaningful numbers of permutations. Another approach involves the algorithmic design of content characterizations that would permit the automatic generation of narrative sequences that could be modulated by the user. And perhaps the consummate venture is the notion of a digitally extended cinema that is actually inhabited by its audience who then becomes agents of and protagonists in its narrative development."

"The Future of Cinema can be delineated from two sources. One way is the expansion of e-xisting cinematographic methods and codes into new areas. The other way is the convergence of cinema, TV and net. "

In class discussions

Jim Campbell

see DmJimCampbell

Trigger-response works

• "this stuff where you wave your hand and it reacts belongs in the lobby of Toys R Us." (Scott Snibbe, Camille Utterbach)
• how can I bring DmInfoBreath beyond this -CR

Non-linearity

• non-linear film is much less sucessfull than non-linear hypertext

Toni Dove's artifical changelings is a film controlled by sensors. There is a common theme, consumer societies producing criminals, but the time and place changes based on where you step. Futurist goth imagery

Luc Courchesne The visitor, living by numbers

Eddo Stern

Vietnam Romance is a new form of cinema/game (see also DmGameMods)

Natalie Bookchin

code-controlled video of daily events (if ... then)

Database + film:

Jennifer & Kevin Mccoy

• Every shot, every episode (see also DmUserActuated) shows its title from Starsky and Hutch
• Every Anvil does the same with cartoons
• How I learned
• Soft Rains creates miniature sets for a database -based film

Thompson and Craig Short Films about flying create on the fly films from a webcame at Logan airport