DIGITAL CINEMA AND ECSTATIC TECHNOLOGY

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between technology and aesthetics in contemporary Hollywood, using experiments with frame rates and shutter speeds to show how deep, systemic changes in cinematic technologies can alter our relation to the image’s referential functions. For eighty years, cinema’s registration of movement relied upon a standardized frame rate and shutter speed, meaning that cinema’s sense of motion was constant. With the proliferation of ever more powerful digital capture systems, however, these formerly inflexible options are made variable and put into question. By changing the registration of movement, the high frame rate (HFR) experiments in The Hobbit and the open-shutter cinematography of Miami Vice offer an estranged relation to cinema’s presentation of worldly motion. I argue here that this altered sense of the image’s referentiality is well suited to depictions of our contemporary reality, which, being profoundly bound up in digital technologies, seems similarly disorienting, estranging, and aesthetic. In the first section of the article, I trace out the origins of this style of movement in the logics of the corporate tech industry, which rolls out continual upgrades in audio-visual technologies in order to justify new product lines. According to industry rhetoric, these upgrades ostensibly lead to a heightened sense of realism, but viewer response has been torn over whether this new sense of motion is realistic or unrealistic. In the second section, I closely analyze The Hobbit and the recent work of Michael Mann to show how established film form shifts in relation to this problem in digital cinema’s representation of worldly movement. In The Hobbit’s case, film form is altered in order to assimilate the HFR’s unfamiliar sense of motion, but the cinematography in Miami Vice embraces a productive aesthetic estrangement which is both realistic and hyperaestheticized, leaving the divide between immanent experience and technologized disorientation an open question.

Keywords:

• digital cinema
• film realism
• high frame rate
• Michael Mann
• Peter Jackson
• optimization
• apparatus theory

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The assignation of indexicality to digital images is a complex problem, but for the purposes of this article I will just say here that I tend to side with both Tom Gunning and with Mary Ann Doane in thinking the index less as the physical guarantor of the fingerprint and instead in the more inclusive way in which Peirce used the term (which also famously included shifters like “I” and “You”). Seen this way, the “pointing” function of digital capture systems can still be understood as indexical, despite the imposition of code between the image’s registration and its reproduction.

2 According to a recent audience research study (Quesnel et al. 8–9), the HFR framework works most seamlessly with longer takes.

3 It’s worth emphasizing here that this is a uniquely digital effect. Film cameras generally max at a 180-degree shutter due to the amount of time it takes to actually run the film through the camera. Miami Vice cinematographer Dion Beebe points this out to explain why he and Mann opted to develop the project on HDV rather than on 35 mm (Holben 53).

4 In one of his many interactions with non-professionals online (Cinematography 11 July 2006), cinematographer David Mullen (Jennifer’s Body, Akeelah and the Bee) has noted that the increased shutter angle produces an effect that visually resembles 60i (or 60 fps interlaced), forming an aesthetic that “[amplifies] its electronic origin,” rather than masking it in an imitation of film.