Cinema 3.0: How Digital and Computer Technologies are Changing Cinema pot

From an extrinsic standpoint, I use both popular literature of cinema and technology as well as theorists like Sherry Turkle in exploring how computer and digital technologies have helpe

How Digital and Computer Technologies are Changing Cinema

Kristen M Daly

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for

the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of

Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2008

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Cinema 3.0:

How Digital and Computer Technologies are Changing Cinema

Kristen M Daly

Digital and computer technologies and the networks of Web 2.0 are changing cinema

Cinema is morphing from an industrial art to an electronic art and increasingly a

tele-cultural form in the interstices of art and information This dissertation examines this

break in order to determine what is new about how we create, experience, and

communicate with moving images

I take both an intrinsic and extrinsic method to ask how cinema has become digital

Intrinsically, this dissertation builds on the work of media theorists like Walter Benjamin,

Marshal McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler and Lev Manovich to examine how the automatisms

of both the hardware and software of digital cinema technologies encourage new forms,

contents and participants From an extrinsic standpoint, I use both popular literature of

cinema and technology as well as theorists like Sherry Turkle in exploring how computer

and digital technologies have helped to train new producers and users ready to create and

experience cinema in new ways Also on this tack, I use the work of media historians

like Tom Gunning and Jonathan Crary who have demonstrated the role of the interplay of

technologies in shaping ways of seeing and expectations of cinema

attempt to define a new form of cinema By examining five different aspects of cinema, I

map out some promising potentials I examine the experience of cinema working from

Walter Benjamin's concept of aura; the emerging processes of production, exhibition and

distribution of cinema; the new aesthetics and style afforded by digital cinema

technologies; the potential for new narrative forms enabled by a digitally literate viewer;

and the social aspects of who is making movies and to what purpose

Cinema 3.0 is increasingly mutable, hypertextual and interactive The dissertation

examines how these aspects can be empowering and democratizing, allowing more

people into the rich media conversation, but also how the ubiquity and

decontextualization of digital moving images can be immersive and paralyzing,

encouraging distracted remediation rather than meaningful communication

I Introduction 1

Use of Terms 2 Included Works 4 Methods 6 Why Cinema? 11 Looking Ahead 12

II How Digital Technologies Have Changed the Experience of Cinema:

From a Ritual Art Object, Cinema Takes on a Tele-Cultural Form 15

1 The Original

Nostalgia Variability and the Difficulty in Determining a Definitive Original The Role of the Viewer

Moving Image Literacy, Communication and Exchange

2 How Cinema Takes Place

Cinematic Ritual Multiple Screens Perpendicular Cinema Ubiquity and Art

3 The Dissipating Aura of

the Cinematic Art Object

How Movies Are Produced, Distributed and Exhibited 46

4 Production 47

All Movies are Digital 49 Cost, Mobility, Ease 51

l

Post-Production: Editing Post-Production: Special Effects

5 Distribution

Smaller Scale Distribution DVD Distribution

Online Distribution Download

Niche Marketing Finding Audiences and Subscription Fans Piracy

6 Exhibition

International Adoption Alternative Programming Wireless Delivery, Microcinema, Ideological Exhibition Proliferating Festivals Movies in Every Size and Shape Cinephilia

7 Communities and Cooperation

IV New Mode of Cinema: How Aesthetics and Style are Changing

Under Conditions of Digitality 104

Medium Specificity 108 Shooting Digital for Film 110 Aura of Film: Digital Detractors 113

8 Camera-Stylo 116

Sponteneity, Flexibility,

Unobtrusiveness, Intimacy 116 Hierarchies, Acting and Continuity 120

9 Montage and Mise-En-Scene 124

n

Computer-Camera as Collaborator Web Browser Aesthetic

10 Hybrid Cinema

Cyborg Actors The Virtual Moving Image The Unfilmic: Video Games, Anime, Graphic Novels Virtual Cinema for the Masses Reaction Against: Alternate Indexicality

11 The Snowflake and the Black Box

V Cinema 3.0: The Interactive-Image

Narrative Norms Continuities Fan Mode 161

-12 The Project: Movie as Artifact 165

15 Digital Literacy, Complexity, Causality 186

Digital Literacy: Cause and Effect 190

16 Viewser: Privilege or Punishment 193

VI Radical Potential: Social Aspects of Cinema 3.0

17 Amateur Filmmakers, Rich Media Literacy,

and Power Negotiations 201

DIY Zombie and Shark Movies 201 The Accidental Auteur 204 Rich Media Literacy 208

m

Activism Terrorist Auteur

19 A-Iiteracy, Decontextualization and

the Unmediated Real

Web Video Banality and Feedback Loops Immediacy and Decontextualization Remediations of Violence

20 Revolution or Reality Show?

Anthology Film Archives in Joseph Papp's Theater 35

Times Square, March 28, 2007, 8:30pm 39

Still Doug Aitken's Sleepwalkers, MoMA, New York, February 7, 2007 43

Still The French Democracy (2005) Machinima 57

Still Time Code (2000) 133

New Line Production Photos Gollum 2004 140-1

Still 300 (2006) and panel from Frank Miller's graphic novel 300 148

Production Stills A Scanner Darkly (2006) 149

Still Renaissance (2006) 150

Cinematic Diagram of Scenes in Ten (2002) 156

Page Rank Equation by Larry Page 157

Soduko Example 177

Snatch (2000) Graph by Ayolt de Roos 191

Google Page Rank full equation 195-6

Still Open Water (2004) 203

Stop Snitchin' DVD Cover 205

Still Numa Numa web video 218

Link to http://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=60og9gwKh1o

Still Justin TV 220

Link to http://www.justin.tv/iustin

v

Firstly, I would like to thank Professor James Carey who, for some unknown reason, took

an options trader with a background in theoretical mathematics into a multi-disciplinary

doctoral program The opportunity to have been in classes with Professor Carey is what I

am most thankful for in the entire process His enthusiasm for culture, communications,

technology and especially people and their strange rituals has left me motivation for

interesting research for the rest of my life I miss him terribly and wish he could read this

work, as it was only at the end that I realized how deeply his teachings and ideas were at

the base of this dissertation

Secondly, I would like to thank my advisors Frank Moretti, Robbie McClintock,

and Brian Larkin who rescued me when I was lost and alone with this monolith and were

able, over the past year, to help me turn thirteen seemingly unrelated "chapitos" into a

reasonable dissertation Somehow they were always able to present criticisms

constructively and in a way that never made me cry They would always tell me I was a

"good writer" or had "interesting ideas" to preface when I had not made a clear point I

would also like to thank my outside readers James Schamus and Andie Tucher for being

so kind to read my dissertation and participate in an enlightening defense meeting I feel

so lucky to have been able to discuss my work with such great minds I would also like to

thank Teresa Gonzalez and Evelyn Corchado Getting professors together can be like

catching cats and they qualify as the Gunther Gebel-Williams of professor wrangling and

staying calm in the face of harried and hopeless-feeling graduate students

vi

dissertation and giving feedback and for understanding that it can be hard sometimes

having no schedule or purpose or reason for being I would especially like to thank Gali,

Amy, Melissa, Laura, Petra, John, Pavel, Liel, and Alexandra for discussions and

qualifications and for letting me learn from their work Our doctoral program is one of

the most supportive and creative I can imagine and I have been privileged to spend time

and exchange ideas with this group of students and teachers I would like to thank the

cafes 'Snice, Grounded, Domo and Panino Giusto in the West Village and D'Latte in

Greenport for lax dress codes, good coffee, soy chai, and vegetarian food I would like to

thank my dogs Milhouse, Skeeter and the late Max for the playful study breaks, for

getting me outside into the fresh air no matter the weather, and for sleeping peacefully by

me while I wrote so I wouldn't feel lonely I would like to thank my mom for always

correcting my papers while I was growing up so that I have some sense for argument and

grammar and, along with my dad, for always putting education first And most of all,

thanks to C.C for supporting me when I felt discouraged and for encouraging me in my

interests and for liking me independent of my academic pursuits

vn

Stephane: [Shows 3-D glasses ] You can see real life in 3-D

Stephanie: Isn't life already in 3-D?

Stephane: Yeah but, come on

/ Introduction

Friedrich Kittler bases his book Discourse Networks 1800/1900 on the premise that the media technology emerging around 1900 represents "a decisive historical and discursive caesura that alters the structure, placement and function of cultural production."2

Similarly, digital computer technology has brought us to the next decisive historical and discursive caesura We are in the backslash.3 This dissertation will describe and explore how this new Discourse Network 2000 has altered the structure, placement and function

of, specifically, cinema Kittler explains how in the movement from Discourse Network

1800 to 1900 poetry disintegrated In turn, we will examine and expose how cinema, as

we have known it, is disintegrating

Due to the industrial nature of its production, distribution, exhibition and

objecthood, early film theorists had to argue that cinema, as film, was an art form But this very industrial nature allowed cinema as film to retain a privileged place amongst the arts, in that, until recently, it remained hard to produce, reproduce, manipulate and

distribute One still had to go to cinema Thus it remained a mass cultural ritual Yet,

cinema has escaped these constraints, starting with movies on television and home

1 Science of Sleep (2006)

2 Foreword David E Wellbery, Friedrich A Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford, Calif.:

Stanford University Press, 1990), 284 'These types, denoted by the dates 1800 and 1900, are the discourse networks - the linkages of power, technologies, signifying marks, and bodies - that have orchestrated

European culture for the past two hundred years." Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, xiii "Discourse

Network" as defined by Kittler is "the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data." (369)

Importance of backslash emphasized by anthropologist John Pemberton

movies then increasingly with videotape and cable television But I argue that the

introduction of digital and computer technologies represents a larger shift, which is

taking cinema from an industrial art to an electronic art and increasingly to a tele-cultural

form in the interstices of art and information This dissertation will examine this break

and determine what is new about how we create, experience, and communicate with

moving images Although existing in the backslash can be a disadvantage in that the

potentials have not yet been fulfilled and numerous paths are still possible, the advantage

of being in this liminal zone is that we can see in both directions and the changes remain

strange enough to be identifiable

Use of Terms

Digital technologies are changing the possibilities of cinema Cinema is no longer

sufficiently described by a ninety-minute movie in a theater Digital computer technology

changes the study of any medium infected by it in that data storage and transmission

become part of the story Therefore, when we look at the penetration of digital

technologies into cinema, we must consider an expansive definition of cinema

encompassing production, distribution, and exhibition Gene Youngblood refers to the

phenomenology of the moving image as "cinema."4 In the digital age, he says, one must

separate cinema from its medium, much as music is separated from its instruments

Thus, although taking a more materialist and less phenomenological viewpoint than

Youngblood, as "cinema" I include everything from the traditional feature movie on the

big screen to web video, cell phone shorts, clips in taxi rear view mirrors and

Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel, Future Cinema : The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, Electronic Culture

(Cambridge, Mass London: MIT, 2003), 156

machinima As I will demonstrate, all of these materializations are required to provide a

thorough picture of the emerging form of cinema The very fact that "cinema" is no

longer easily defined bolsters the claim that cinema is changing Some readers will be

annoyed with the catholic nature of the examples used, but the porousness of the

boundaries is characteristic new media

If we consider, following Lev Manovich, new media as being the synthesis of the

two historical trajectories, audiovisual technologies and computing technologies, then

cinema can increasingly be characterized as a new media both in construction and

characteristic.6 Cinema today, as I will demonstrate, is created, stored, distributed, and

viewed primarily with computers and digital technologies and has increasingly taken on

the characteristics of digital creations Cinema in digital form can be radically

reproducible, manipulable, networked, interactive, hybrid, variable, and dispersive, thus

differing greatly from traditional cinema and transforming into a new media

I will primarily use the term "Cinema 3.0" instead of "digital cinema." "Digital

cinema," as a term, can be limiting, implying that the images were created, distributed

and exhibited digitally or at least forcing one to define what percentage of digitalness

makes a movie "digital cinema." Some of the movies that I will classify as examples of

Cinema 3.0 will not be captured or exhibited digitally, or these material characteristics

5 Television is only recently taking part in this new form with crowdsourced channels like Current,

interactivity and hypertextuality in programs like "Lost," and with Tivo and on-demand allowing viewer control Thus the boundaries between moving image media are blurring with Cinema 3.0

"The two separate historical trajectories finally meet Media and computer —Daguerre's daguerreotype and Babbage's Analytical Engine, the Lumiere Cinematographic and Hollerith's tabulator — merge into one All existing media are translated into numerical data accessible for the computer The result: graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, spaces, and texts become computable, that is, simply sets of computer data In short, media become new media This meeting changes the identity of both media and the computer itself No longer just a calculator, control mechanism, or communication device, the computer becomes a

media processor." Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 25

will not be the primary qualification For example, in the fifth chapter, on narrative, I will

discuss the narrative form of particular movies as Cinema 3.0 based on their modular or

database construction, irrespective of their material makeup I will cite movies that may

have been shot and even edited in celluloid and yet are constructed using an aesthetic or

narrative style that I will identify as being characteristic of Cinema 3.0 Thus technology

is neither sufficient nor necessary to Cinema 3.0 The qualifications for Cinema 3.0 are

broad and include such factors as variability and interactivity, the patterns of which I will

establish through the dissertation

Film theorist D.N Rodowick, building from philosopher Stanley Cavell, defines a

medium as "nothing more or less than a set of potentialities from which creative acts may

unfold These potentialities, the powers of the medium as it were, are conditioned by

multiple elements or components that can be material, instrumental, and/or formal." In

order to define Cinema 3.0, it is necessary to build a structure of the parameters of these

potentialities Unfortunately for my reader who may desire an upfront definition, in order

to define this set of potentialities I must get specific with a set of examples By

examining the change in cinema from different perspectives: physical, social, aesthetic,

phenomenological and ontological, I will construct the set of Cinema 3.0

Included Works

There has been much lamenting as well as exultation over the death of cinema This

exaggerates the situation, for the analog film roots have remained primary in the form

and language of cinema For this reason, the major focus of this dissertation will be on

movies less bound by traditional industrial, economic and political paradigms ~ examples

D N Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 85

works in this dissertation will not be well known to most readers

Each work has been chosen as a harbinger, an example of a possible and

promising avenue One need not be an expert or have any special privileges to amass the

list of works included in this dissertation Careful attention through myriad hyperlinked

paths has led me to this canon, yet someone else following similar paths might have

developed a completely disparate list The nature of cinema in a digital age is one of

excess This should not paralyze us in trying to examine the changing mode, but inspire

us with the variable opportunities I admire theorist Sean Cubitt's call to arms when he

says, "The task of theory today is no longer negative The job of media theory is to

enable: to extract from what is and how things are done ideas concerning what remains

undone and new ways of doing it."8

Cinema, like any medium, is experienced in different ways in different places and

by different groups I do not want to assume a homogeneous temporality or time-stamp

this dissertation to say that "on this day everything was different, everything was this

way." That is why I base this dissertation in examples, which I will examine to

demonstrate that cinema has changed in a number of ways and to reveal some promising

pathways Some of these ways will be directly technologically based, while others will be

based in changes of communities, networks and ways of communicating Some examples

will prove to be dead ends and much will remain the same or coexist traditionally along

side the changes I describe I hope through examples to show that these changes have

global reach and are not solely dependent on fast computers, large storage capacity and

Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 11

reliable access to Web 2.0 Aspects of new media, like ease of piracy, penetrate beyond

and sometimes overleap technological limitations

Methods

This work will accommodate a holistic view, taking advantage of certain aspects of

various theoreticians, but focusing primarily on developing a picture of cinema in a

digital world, using a number of different perspectives and tools, rather than engaging in

argument with any one ideology Although I owe much to theorists like Paul Virilio,

Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Baudrillard, I do not address their whole philosophical projects,

but use certain means of expression and views of the interaction of technology, culture

and consciousness that I think are uniquely enlightening for this project Thus, I invoke

Sean Cubitt's metaphorical sortie, where he describes Georges Melies' accidental

discovery of the disappearing truck trick in Place de la Concorde in Paris As he writes,

"Melies' accident at one of the great crossroads of Paris of the Belle Epoque, is like a

Freudian slip, the result of an unconscious overdetermination by new global cultural

flows, by new spectacular forms of commodity, and, not least, by the internal logic of

cinematography."9 I place this dissertation in a similar nexus of technological, stylistic,

software, social, and cultural flows and attempt, through the study of cinema, to explore

the shifts and vicissitudes undergone as the characteristics of digital technologies pervade

more and more aspects of media production, consumption and culture

Lev Manovich frames his book The Language of New Media as two vectors

representing the relationship between cinema and new media The primary vector, the

majority of the book, uses the history and theory of cinema to map out the logic driving

Ibid., 42

the technical and stylistic developments of new media The second vector reverses this,

examining how the logics of new media affect cinema Manovich asks, "How does

computerization affect our very concept of moving images? Does it offer new

possibilities for film language? Has it led to the development of totally new forms of

cinema?"10 These are the questions on which this dissertation is focused Manovich

sketches an outline of this vector, but what I will attempt to do is fill out the focal

features at a moment when the structures and paradigms of this new mode are beginning

to emerge Computerization has changed the nature of cinema giving rise to new

structures of representation, new content and a new role for cinema in society There

are certain expectations that have been made of digital cinema, some of which have come

to fruition, but other changes have been unexpected or have happened in forms that were

not predicted

In examining cinema as a new media, media theory will provide the toolbox for

study to a much larger extent than film theory Incorporating Manovich's call for a move

from media theory, which might be considered a theory of hardware and apparatus, to

software theory, which would work from the bottom up, from protocol and codes and

interfaces, herein I will attempt to apply both.11 I will look both at how the digital

camera, small, mobile and cheap, with different requirements for lighting and recording

material, can bring new methods of production, new modes and new content, but also

how certain functions of the camera/computer software make distinct languages and

functions more easily accessible, and therefore more obvious For example, how the

capacity of digital tape and/or hard drives makes a continuous long-take possible and

10 Manovich, The Language of New Media, 287

Ibid., 19

removes the inherent need for montage, which the relatively short film reel required And

how the prevalence and ease of storage and editing software makes the composite image

increasingly irresistible as an aesthetic form

An intrinsic view, though, is not sufficient to describe how cinema is digital

Cinema is now more than ever a networked medium and partakes in global flows of

information and multi-media A movie is no longer just a movie, but exists in a social

world of interpretation and manipulation from the banality of the fast-forward to the

invasiveness of the remix I will examine how our everyday experience with digital and

computer technologies shapes both our experience of and the very capacity and form of

cinema For example, how cinematic narrative adapts to better represent our navigation

of space and information on the computer In this, I borrow from contemporary media

theorists such as Nicholas Negroponte and Sherry Turkle who have shown how people's

use of computers, or as they might say their life on computers, affects them; effectively

describing the digital subject and his or her way of being They and others, including

popular texts such as Wired magazine, have demonstrated how the computer user

navigates information and how the roles of work and play, producer and consumer,

viewer and user have changed in the information age of computers I do not work in

depth through their arguments in this dissertation because I feel they have already entered

the public forum, but instead assume that the reader is familiar with these notions and

instead I apply them specifically to the emerging form of cinema

To an even greater extent, this extrinsic description, takes much from recent

theorists who have explored proto-cinematic forms and have explicated how film had

historical precedents, developing from preceding visual and spectacular technologies,

which trained audiences and created expectations for the form of cinema I borrow

from this school of thought in exploring how computer and digital technologies have

prepared audiences for what might be called the post-cinematic forms described herein

and have created a new kind of observer or viewer For example how the prevalent use

of video games can prepare viewers for the use of certain digital effects in cinema which

mobilize the gaze in a way antithetical from a film camera gaze but very familiar to a

video game user

My methodology is deeply informed by a two contrasting schools of thought On

the one hand, eschewing a more sociological model, and following in the ideological

footsteps of Friedrich Kittler and Marshall McLuhan, the majority of this dissertation

examines the basic material aspects of digital cinema technologies, the changes that these

technologies induce and the pathways that are then revealed Kittler has argued how the

technological media of modernity, like the gramophone, typewriter and film, constituted

subjectivity Whereas Marshall McLuhan wrote of technology as extending the human

sensory apparatus, Kittler introduces the idea that technology determines "recording

thresholds."13 In other words, what we can record, store and access determines what we

can represent, what we can create and what we can remember Particularly in the

information age of cognitive labor, I believe recording thresholds increasingly structure

the possibilities of culture This dissertation will employ some of Kittler's methods and

12 Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde," in Early

Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, ed Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI Publishing, 1997)., Vanessa R

Schwartz, "Cinematic Spectatorship before the Apparatus: The Public Taste for Reality in Fin-De-Siecle

Paris," in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed Linda Williams, Rutgers Depth of Field Series (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995)., Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception : Attention,

Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999)., Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping : Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)

13 'Technologies and sciences of media transposition do not simply extend human capacities; they

determine recording thresholds." Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, 284

arguments of causation in describing the breakup of the "storage and transmission

monopoly" that is currently happening in the realm of cinema as more and more

communication and culture can be stored and transmitted through audiovisual

technologies

And yet, I can follow Kittler only so far into the intrinsic technological logic as

my interests lie also in the social implications and the cultural productions of Cinema 3.0

and in cinema as a communicative medium As a student of the late James Carey, I need

to explore the social and cultural implications, not leaving the subject completely

post-human as Kittler would like As Carey has said, "to enter given technological worlds is

to enter actual social relations," and therefore, "technologies are cultures."14 Thus, I also

examine how people are experiencing cinema, what they are doing with the new

technology and how they are communicating and forming new social spaces This work

will try to be an archaeology of the present and, as such, is an exploration of a moment of

flux While Kittler argues that a theorist cannot examine a discourse network from

within because he or she is constituted by the discourse network he or she is attempting to

describe, I believe the attempt is valid, in the least as a historical document and at best

creating some cultural understanding of ourselves and our communicative potential

Being in the backslash, in a moment of change, we are not yet quite constituted, we have

some freedom of perspective not permitted to a more entrenched discourse network

subject

James W Carey and Lawrence Grossberg, "Configurations of Culture, History and Politics: James Carey

in Conversation with Lawrence Grossberg, Part 2," in Thinking with James Carey: Essays on

Communications, Transportation, History, ed Jeremy Packer and Craig Robertson, Intersections in Communications and Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 214

Why Cinema?

Why is cinema a good subject to look at Discourse Network 2000? Movies were the prime mover cultural form of the 20th century, not the 21st University of Southern California (USC), which created the first film school in 1929, has recently opened an Interactive Media Division including video game and mobile and immersive media design.15 Would not a more readily digital or popular media like video games be a more apt subject? Cinema, though, provides an interesting subject for the study of this moment because it has resisted becoming digital It is a witness to and reluctant participant in the revolutionary moment Cinema is being trained as a new media along with us

Hannah Arendt intimates in her introduction to Benjamin's Illuminations that he was such a potent and incisive observer of 20th-century technologies because he was in essence a 19th-century man living in the 20th-century.1 Cinema, too, acts as a 20* -century observer of the 21st For this reason cinema, its life or afterlife, can best represent our own transformation from an industrial culture to a digital culture Cinema has resisted its transformation into a new media, remaining hard to produce, reproduce, distribute and exhibit until the conversion to digital technologies and computerization Thus, it is on the cusp of becoming new media and can be analyzed at a moment of rearranging paradigms The study of cinema at a moment of change says a lot about us, who grew up under its spell and are simultaneously being digitized I think this is why so many

philosophers - Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Zizek, Stanley Cavell, Frederic

Jameson - have been entranced by cinema David Rodowick explains this aspect of Deleuze in Gilles Deleuze: Time Machine He writes:

15 In 2006, the name was changed to the School of Cinematic Arts from the School of Film and Television

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 22

Deleuze argues in "Difference and Repetition" that the only aesthetic problem of concern to philosophy is the relation of art to everyday life Because our

contemporary life is immersed in an audiovisual and information culture,

cinema's ways of working through the relations of image concept have become

particularly significant to our strategies for seeing and saying This is not because cinema is the most popular art Television and video games now have arguable a far greater economic and "aesthetic" impact However, cinema's history of

images and signs is nonetheless both the progenitor of audiovisual culture and

perhaps the source of its unfounding as simulacral art.17

Like Deleuze in Cinema 2: the time-image, I will strive to describe a new mode of

cinema emerging at/from a cultural caesura Thus the title "Cinema 3.0" in honor of

Deleuze's inspiring work and with a smile towards the technology that is enabling this

new mode

Looking Ahead

This dissertation examines from five different perspectives how digital technologies are

affecting cinema:

• The first section examines the experience of cinema and how that is morphing as

digital technologies change both our reception of and use for cinema I take

Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction" and examine how cinema is only now, with the infiltration of

digital technologies, fulfilling Benjamin's expectations and even transcending

them This chapter will focus on our experience of cinema as it changes from a

ritual art object to an interactive and variable means of communication

• The second section will examine how cinema is digital - how digital and

computer technologies have penetrated into all aspects of production, distribution

and exhibition This will be a survey of the current landscape of moviemaking,

17 David Norman Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham,

NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 202

systems as new filmmakers access technologies to make and distribute their

works, planting seeds for the examination in later chapters of how the promise of

this access is playing out

The third delves intrinsically into how the characteristics of digital video differ

from film and therefore encourage new aesthetic and stylistic modes, changing the

very nature of mise-en-scene and the language of cinema as it has been defined in

the past Cinema explores new possibilities as the encumbrances of film, which

delimited a certain mode of cinema, are released The technology of digital

cinema makes the natural indexicality of film and the cut simply options amongst

others and permits new forms of visual aesthetics not premised on filmic norms,

but based on other audiovisual forms like video games and computer interface

The camera as a computer has enabled a more cooperative relationship with the

filmmaker

The fourth postulates how the digital viewer is enabling a new narrative form that

is complex, interactive, and intertextual and based on spatial and stochastic

contingencies, mimicking the shocks and economies of the digital everyday

Digital and computer logics have changed the possibilities of how stories are told

in cinema, authorizing new forms of cinema and new imaginings of narrative

based on database, interactivity, algorithms, hypertextuality and search The role

of the viewer changes as he or she must navigate a movie rather than passively

watch a traditional narrative unfold I will describe how cinema becomes

increasingly a cooperative exercise between producer and viewer

• The fifth section will look at social developments in accessibility, the promise of

universal literacy of the moving image, and how this radical potential is playing out This chapter will examine who is making movies, what they are making, and

to what purpose This chapter asks and examines what are the potentials and dangers of universal literacy of the moving image

Through these five perspectives of how digital and computer technologies are changing cinema, I hope to diagram new spectator/spectacle, producer/consumer, work/play, representation/information, and human/machine relations Moving images operate at the intersection of communication and culture, helping to define our imagination of and our way of being in the world For this reason the question of where cinema is going is

relevant to our morphing society as technology threatens to out-develop our institutions

of politics and culture We can take a close look at the changing nature of our

relationship to moving images to foresee a potential emerging social paradigm

// How Digital Technologies Have Changed the

Experience of Cinema: From a Ritual Art Object, Cinema

Takes on a Tele-Cultural Form

For over one hundred years, moving images have been recorded onto frames on

expensive celluloid tape and projected by fairly simple machines This has been a

remarkably reliable way of recording and exhibiting, but also a remarkably static media

technology Films cannot easily be reproduced, delivered or manipulated The film print

costs between two and three thousand dollars and can be over a mile long In many

ways, the film reel had resisted the characteristics attributed to it by Walter Benjamin in

his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Robert Flaherty

dropped a cigarette on his original edited version of Nanook of the North destroying his

only print He had to organize an entire second expedition north to gather footage and

again edit it into the version we know today.1 Film ages and degrades, so it is estimated

that less than ten percent of the earliest films currently exist Only now, with the

introduction of digital and computer technologies, have Benjamin's expectations of

cinema come to fruition In this chapter, I will examine what characteristics Benjamin

prematurely attributed to the reproducible filmic art object and demonstrate how we are

now experiencing a "tremendous shattering of tradition" in how we experience movies as

they morph from ritual art objects to tele-cultural forms with new expectations and

experiences

Benjamin in "The Work of Art" discusses two characteristics of art objects that

change under conditions of reproducibility The first is the reduction of the primacy of

1 Ricciotto Canudo, "Another View of Nanook," in The Documentary Tradition, ed Lewis Jacobs (New

York: W.W Norton, 1927), 21

the original According to Benjamin, before mechanical reproduction, the original was

the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity This authenticity Benjamin describes as

"the essence of all that is transmissible from the beginning, ranging from its substantive

duration to its testimony to the history it has experienced."2 Reproducibility makes the

copy independent, thus reducing the primacy of the original Benjamin terms this lost

essence "aura." I will argue how, increasingly, the ease of digital storage, reproduction,

manipulation, and distribution threatens the concept of an "original" and therefore the

aura of cinematic objects as representational artworks The artwork becomes increasingly

variable and this changes our relationship to cinema in ways that activate the viewer

increasingly as a user Thus, while losing its aura as conceived by Benjamin, the

cinematic object gains a new value in proportion to this active relationship The second

characteristic is the mobility of the copy Mobility allows the copy to be experienced in

different and unanticipated ways modifying the way cinematic artworks "take place."

Digitization takes this mobility to new levels; thus, in the digital age, our exposure to

moving images becomes increasingly ubiquitous We will examine in greater detail how

this ubiquity changes the experience of cinema

THE ORIGINAL

Amos Vogel describes poetically and insightfully the experience and aura of film in his

essay, "On Seeing a Mirage." He describes seeing Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana ten

years after having seen it for the first time He writes, "Having originally been exposed to

2 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed

Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 221

3 Samuel M Weber, Mass Mediauras : Form, Technics, Media, ed Alan Cholodenko (Stanford, Calif.:

Stanford University Press, 1996), 85

the crystal clarity and sharp-edged photography of a first-generation 35mm print

projected on a large screen, I found myself peering uncertainly into the dim, contrastless

recesses of a cheap 16mm print, decorated with striations and scratches The tones - the

gross and subtle details so central to the film - were gone." He laments:

What kind of art is this that depends so heavily on the nature of its presentation, and

to which access in a form close to its 'original' becomes ever more impossible? What

shall we do with the evanescence of film stock? It is as if King Lear were

available only one day per decade in one city per continent, in fiftieth-generation, pirated, Hong Kong copies of which entire pages were missing, individual paragraphs not quite readable, portions of characters obliterated with frustrating intimations of potential greatness; the stuff of Borges, of Kafka, of Marquez.4

For Vogel, who I use as the epitome of the traditional film viewer, there was a specific

form in which this film was supposed to be experienced as a ritual art object Fata

Morgana, for Vogel, is a representation that should have been seen in a certain fashion,

always the same for everyone at every time For him, the first-generation 35mm print is

the "original." He also exposes another aspect of die film experience ~ nostalgia

Nostalgia

Each showing of a film decays it a bit and "hastens [its] demise."5 The specific

*

scratchings and fadings of a film object make it unique, different from other copies of the

same film This returns a sense of originality to each film print, as these traces, different

on every film copy, create unique objects Stephen Prince calls these aspects "filmic

artifacts," and writes nostalgically about them He writes, "Let's celebrate the dirt, the

scratches, the grain, In the clean, crystal-clear, and diamond sharp world of digital

4 Amos Vogel, "On Seeing a Mirage," in The Films of Werner Herzog : Between Mirage and History, ed

Timothy Corrigan (New York: Methuen, 1986), 48

Paolo Cherchi Usai, "The Demise of Digital (Print #1)," Film Quarterly 59, no 3 (2006): 67

video, they are the ghostly traces of our former love, artifacts of the stuff that dreams

once were made of."6

These filmic artifacts were a sign of love, signifying that a print had been passed

around from theater to theater and was much watched For Grindhouse (2007), the

double feature co-creation of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, the more

technically savvy Rodriguez showed Tarantino, who wanted to shoot on aged film, that

these artifacts could be recreated digitally, thus simulating a well-loved grindhouse

feature without the need for love Love as plug-in So Tarantino shot on film, then, in the

digital intermediary [DIJ, the scratches, burns and fades were added, and, only then, was

the movie exported again on film Nostalgia reanimates the cult value of the film, in

Benjamin's terms, thus retaining its aura

Digital prints do not participate in the same sort of aging process In general, a

viewer would not be able to determine if she were watching the first-generation print or

tenth generation, nor would she know if many people had watched this copy before her

Information is not lost with each viewing, nor each copying, although much of the

viewer's ability to infer information about the object is lost Thus, I argue, the digital

cinema object loses some value as an object of ritual, nostalgia or memory In her

documentary Cinevardaphoto (2004), Agnes Varda visits Ydessa Hendeles' collection of

thousands of black and white photos of teddy bears Most of the photos exhibit children

holding teddy bears, sometimes in larger groups of people Agnes Varda narrates,

6 Stephen Prince, "The Emergence of Filmic Artifacts:Cinema and Cinematograhy in the Digital Era," Film Quarterly 57, no 3 (2004): 33

7 In a digital intermediary, DI, a motion picture is digitized in order to manipulate color and image

characteristics to change the look before output for distribution A plug-in is an auxiliary computer

program that works with a host program to provide a very specific function

describing how looking at the aging photos is disturbing because we realize that many of the people posing, even the children, are now dead She says how the most disturbing are the photographs which are fading and blurry, because we fear that even the memory of these people is being erased Thus film was a natural medium for nostalgia as it

remained an ephemeral medium Digital media do not have these same characteristics and therefore lose the emotional attachment or aura, which the ephemeral, aging medium

of film inspires No longer do our movies age with us, living about one hundred years

To paraphrase Dazed and Confused (1993), "We get older and they stay the same age."8

A common worry has been archiving The very non-reproducibility and solidity

of film made it a very reliable archiving medium and film needs no translation; if you hold a film up to a light you can see the pictures requiring no specialized technology In fact film prints have been made from the paper copies of many movies stored in the National Archive in cases where the film original had been lost Digital objects, as code, are unreadable or untranslatable by humans To view digital objects, we require software translators So the threat of the lost or degraded object is replaced by a different set of fears ~ fears of accessibility and filing in an infinitude of stored information

Yet, even the idea of digital format issues and loss is fairly moot as we archive in multiple on increasingly cheap storage space, the software of which is updated with a click As technology journalist Tom Scocca writes, the great fear in the digital age was format obsolescence, that, "People would throw out old-fashioned paper in favor of electronic archives, only to suddenly find that they had all the works of human

8 Matthew McConaughey as David Wooderson, 'That's what I love about these high school girls, man I get older, they stay the same age." Of course this is not completely true, since the digital movie that was made seven years ago on the latest prosumer digital camera looks much less sharp than the one made last year on the latest HD prosumer digital camera, but the old print will never be any less sharp than it is now, only relative to more newly created cinematic objects

knowledge stored on five-and-a-quarter-inch floppies and nobody was making floppy drives anymore." 9 But, as he says, web video allows people to transfer all their

previously "near obsolete" formats, VHS tapes and Super8 home movies, to a digital format which is stored and updated online Thus the digital cinema object loses its aura

of impending loss Our contemporary nostalgia for this aura is demonstrated in a spoof

technology article in parodic newspaper The Onion:

Eastman Kodak released an imaging software package that yellows, fades, and even loses digital photos over time "With the click of a mouse, Fotomatshop will make your digital photographs crease, develop fingerprint spots, and even stick together in their 'virtual shoebox.'"10

Lev Manovich says in describing digital objects on computers that there is no decay, we must go out of our way to delete an object in order to remove it and yet we can probably still recover it He writes, "Thus if in 'meatspace' we have to work to remember, in cyberspace we have to work to forget."11

With the digital cinema print, our relationship to the original is weakened The preciousness and nostalgia that Vogel describes of the film copy is no longer the

experience of cinema We have digital prints readily available to us in various forms, many of which will be sharper than the available film print We can no longer garner information about the original from its physical artifacts, in fact in many cases we cannot even see the object without computer technology The fragility and scarcity of the film copy provided it a measure of aura, which digital cinematic objects do not retain, thus finally fulfilling Benjamin's expectations of the independence of the cinematic copy

9 Tom Scocca, "The Youtube Devolution," New York Observer, July 31, 2006

10 "New Software Yellows Neglected Digital Photos over Time," the ONION, February 13, 2006

Manovich, The Language of New Media, 63

Variability and the Difficulty in Determining a Definitive Original

I maintain that with digital storage, reproduction and distribution the notion of a

cinematic object as a finished art object, tied to an auteur vision and created to be seen in

a certain ritual way, an "original" as Vogel terms it, begins to fray As Lev Manovich has

outlined, digital objects are modular, meaning they are made up of objects put together to

form larger objects, with each piece maintaining its independence Therefore, by nature,

they can be easily taken apart and put together in innumerable different forms This

modularity leads to variability in that as he says, "A new media object is not something

fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite

versions."

Media theorist Peter Lunenfeld argues that media made by computers is always

unfinished He says that "'unfinish' defines the aesthetic of digital media." Viewers

turned users are exploiting the digital nature of movies and reshaping, reforming and

remixing them Thus, a cinematic object becomes a continuing project of reconstruction,

entering a discourse network where different users and viewers can use it to express

unintended ideas When Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999) was released, it

quickly made its way to the Internet where it was modified by numerous fans and could

be found in versions radically different from George Lucas's theatrical version.14 As the

movie art object becomes more accessible, it also becomes subject to revision A January

12 Ibid., 36

13 Peter Lunenfeld, "Unfinished Business," in The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, ed Peter

Lunenfeld (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 7

14 Media theorist Henry Jenkins covers a number of the different versions, mashups, tributes and spoofs in

Henry Jenkins, "Digital Cinema, Media Convergence and Participatory Culture," in Rethinking Media Change: Media in Transition, ed Brad Seawell, Henry Jenkins, and David Thorburn (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003) Also see Chris Gore's "Make Your Own Damn Star Wars Movie!" on his FilmThreat

blog, September 22,2002, http://vvww.filmthreat.com/index.php'?section=gorevdetaiIs&M=214 accessed November 19, 2007

15, 2007 search for "Star Wars" on YouTube brought up 33,251 videos, a database of

variability The relationship between the viewer and the cinematic art object cannot help

but be changed by this modularity and variability One might argue that although there

are thousands of homemade versions of Star Wars to be found on YouTube, this does not

affect the original art object of Star Wars, recognized and revered But I argue that this

variability has seeped into even our expectations of the "original" so that we are not

surprised to find it changed or to not know what constitutes the "original" or if there

needs to be one

An example of this new mode of variability is provided by the experience of the

movie 2046 (2005) directed by Wong Kar Wai 2046 arrived for its premiere at the

Cannes Film Festival in pieces The opening was delayed as the last few reels arrived

Reviewers saw a movie in the midst of the editing process The premise of the movie is a

writer who writes stories about the future, the year 2046 Wong Kar-Wai says that he

came up with the idea when Hong Kong was turned over to the Chinese and they

promised not to change anything for fifty years This absurd idea gave him the

inspiration to create the story of a writer writing about 2046 ~ a time and place you can

visit where nothing ever changes, but no one, except our writer, ever comes back

Innumerable copies of 2046 exist Film critic Nathan Lane refers to it both as an

"epic remix" and a "phenomenon." It came out over the course of a year or more, after

five years in production, and from what reviewers wrote, versions were variable in

different countries and on the published and imported DVDs The movie's subject is

memory and loss and the actual film has itself participated in that story, existing and

being lost in different forms Lane writes, "And it isn't difficult to imagine other

versions surfacing some day: a pure sci-fi, an experimental montage, a wordless

pantomime, a melodrama in Japanese, a half-dozen self-contained romances."15 2046

portends, both in narrative and in the actual movie experience, cinema's change from a representational art producing finished objects to an increasingly tele-cultural form, with social interaction and mutation preventing the formation of an authentic "original." Instead of the nostalgia and sense of loss with each viewing of a film print, as expressed

by Vogel, the viewer in the digital world is left with an untethered relation to the movie which can exist in uncountable forms and formats, none more authentic than the next

Returning to George Lucas and his Star Wars movies, they provide an interesting

study subject of the conflict of variability and authenticity When Lucas brought out the

DVD trilogy of the original three Star Wars episodes, in 2004, they were greatly changed

from the originals as they had shown in the theaters in the 1970's and '80's The special effects had been updated using new digital technologies, creatures had been modified using CGI, the actor who plays Aniken in the newer series, Christian Hayden, was

substituted for the original actor Sebastian Shaw, and even, most drastically to fans, certain plot points were changed.16 Lucas says he released the prequels the way he

intended them to be presented.11

Nathan Lane, "Elusive Objects of Desire: A Stealth Sequel to in the Mood for Love, the Epic Remix That

Is 2046 Is the Summation of the Director's Lyrical Melancholia," Film Comment 41, no 4 (2005): 31

16 Computer-generated imagery (CGI) is the application of the field of computer graphics (or more

specifically 3D computer graphics) to special effects For a list of changes and links to more discussion, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/vviki/List of changes in Star Wars re-releases, accessed November 19,

2007

17 Notably, he decided in 2006 to rerelease the prequels in their original form as they first appeared on the

bigscreen David S Cohen and Diane Garret, "George's Clone Wars," Variety, May 15-21, 2006, 7 Italics

mine

There has been much debate over whether or not Lucas had the right to modify

the original films John Knoll, co-inventor of Photoshop and special effects supervisor at

Industrial Light and Magic, who worked on the re-release says that due to the

deterioration of the film negative, "A lot of the work that went into the Star Wars redos

was just to try to make it look like what people remembered in the first place." But in

justifying the additional changes, he says, "If you made the picture today, it would

certainly be different, because you'd use different technologies, and the sensibilities of

t o

society would be different and you'd have a different tone and feel just based on that."

Thus he expresses the conflict between memory and nostalgia associated with the analog

world of art objects and the radical, irresistible ability of digital objects to be modified

Even a dedicated fan can no longer determine which is the authentic original: the 2004

Special Edition; the "original" Special Edition, which will be released soon and which

may resemble the 1997 VHS version; the 3-D version also planned for release; or the

blackmarket DVDs copied from the laser disc pre-Special Edition release Which version

has the cult value or aura? The television cartoon South Park makes fun of this in an

episode where the boys form a group to save films from their directors, citing Steven

Spielberg, Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola for changing films according to new

technology and new popular tastes and making a film no longer a finished product, but

one that can change over time as the original may be lost to viewers.19

Although Lucas claims to have remade the movies the way he intended them to be

originally, Will Booker, in a detailed examination of the 2004 re-release DVDs points out

18 Erez Reuveni, "John Knoll - Digital Effects," MacDirectory Magazine 2003

http://www.photoshopsupport.eom/articles/john-ls:noll-pirates.htail accessed January 15, 2007

19 Episode 609, "Free Hat," First aired July 10, 2002 h ttp://en. wikipedia.org/wild/Free Hat, accessed January 15, 2007

that a number of scenes that were changed in the 1997 VHS versions have either changed

again or been changed back in the 2004 version, providing evidence that Lucas was

affected in his decisions by popular discourse.20 Some of these changes are visible only

in slow-motion, and therefore were created specifically for those involved in the

discourse Thus the newest "special edition" DVD release becomes just the latest version,

not in any sense the definitive version or a fulfillment of a pure auteur vision

If we imagine ourselves in the place of George Lucas, how much more irresistible

will it be to rework his newest versions? The originals were shot on film and therefore

take some work to manipulate; he did not have the actors digitally captured so they could

not be easily made to do or say new things The original movies were also worshipped as

finished art objects in a world of pre-ubiquitous, pre-manipulable moving image media

His latest three prequels, less revered and created completely digitally, can be reworked

far more easily and frequently Most fans will have already seen different versions on the

Internet and will be very familiar with the "making o f videos included with the DVDs

They have seen behind the curtain and admire the movies partly because of the fantastic

technological feats involved I propose that fans are not as attached to the new characters

and movies in the same way because the media world in which they receive them is

already intertextual, manipulable and interactive They have become accustomed to

movies existing in a number of different forms from television versions, to airplane

versions, to the "uncut" and "director's cut" variations on DVDs, to the more revisionary

20 Will Booker, "Return to Mos Eisley Cantina: The Star Wars Trilogy on Dvd," TheForce.net , September

29, 2004 http://www.theforoe.net/jedicounciiyeditorials/092904.asp accessed October 3, 2007 He refers specifically to the scene where Greedo and Hans Solo shoot each other under the table In the 1977 version, Hans obviously shoots first, in the 1997 version Greedo shoots first Fans complained that this softened Solo's character so that his metamorphosis later in the movie is less effective In the 2004 version they shoot at the same time, a detail that, as Booker points out, is only noticeable in the DVD freeze-frame

web video mashups and remixes The success of these many new versions indicates that

fans are increasingly comfortable with the "unfinished" movie art object

ComicCon 2007 was abuzz with announcements that Blade Runner (1982) would

be coming out in the "definitive version."21 In the original theatrical version, Ridley

Scott was locked out of the editing room by a completion bond and the studio released its

own version with narration and a happy ending Then in 1991 the studio accidentally sent

out Scott's darker "workprint" to a repertory screening and, when word leaked, the public

demanded a recut.22 Warner Bros Studio agreed, but Scott was busy on other projects

and so another editor, with Scott's input, edited a darker 1991 cut But now, twenty-five

years after the original theatrical release, Scott has re-edited, restored and remastered,

with improved special effects, a definitive version A certain scene of a replicant breaking

through panes of glass was originally considered too dangerous for the actress and the use

of the stunt double was very obvious (this is a fan favorite for rewind and freeze frame.)

So Scott had to reshoot the scene with the same actress but digitally "youthen" her face

Thus Blade Runner is participating in the very science fiction that it predicted, where

memories, it turns out, are only as good as the media they are based on/ created through,

and therefore are subject to revision and falsity.23

Director Steven Soderbergh, who has played with the norms of cinema with his

movie Bubble (2006), which came out in theaters, on cable channel HDNet Films, and on

21 This "definitive version" includes five discs: The Final Cut Version (2007); the U.S Version (1981) and International Version (1982); Making Of; Enhanced Content (pre-production, stills, deleted scenes, legacy, etc.); and Ridley Scott's work print

22 Stephen Saito, "'Blade Runner' Gets Final Cut," Variety.com , July 26,2007

23 In Blade Runner, the replicant, Rachel, tries to prove that she is not manufactured, but is real, by

displaying a photos of herself as a girl and sharing her memories of the time when the photos were taken She is told that both the photos and her memories have been programmed and that they "belong to someone else." At this, Rachel is distraught; she has no photographs or memories and therefore no 'real' life She

is, in fact, not 'real.'

DVD simultaneously, says that he would love to come out with different versions of his

movies, maybe have them change every two weeks in digital theaters.24 So, I present

these examples to demonstrate that the concept of a finished cinematic art object is

waning as the ease of digital modulation and distribution has encouraged major auteur

filmmakers to revise their films according to new technological possibilities, but also

according to user input, increasingly interactive.25

I do not want to give the impression that this has been an overnight change

Movies have shown slightly differently in different theaters depending on the technology,

format and age of the prints With the advent of movies on television, they were shown

edited and with advertisements With VCRs and eventually DVDs they could be shown

in different environments with rewind and fast forward and supplemental material But

the changes wrought by web video and digital manipulation are, I hope to have

demonstrated, of another level, where the concept of a solid original begins to unravel If

we were to imagine George Lucas in conversation with Benjamin, I think we would find

Benjamin shocked at the de-aura-fication license that Lucas has taken with his own

"Another thing that really excites me: I'd like to do multiple versions of the same film I often do very radical cuts of my own films just to experiment, shake things up, and see if anything comes of it I think it would be really interesting to have a movie out in release and then, just a few weeks later say, "Here's version 2.0, recut, rescored." The other version is still out there - people can see either or both For

instance, right now I know I could do two very different versions of The Good German." Xeni Jardin,

"Thinking Outside the Box Office," Wired, December 2005

25 Variability can go to the extreme with the newly popular form of live cinema mixing, a development from disc jockey [DJ] culture, director as DJ This fulfills the dream of New Wave director Robert Bresson who said, "I have dreamed of my film making itself as it goes along under my gaze, like a painter's eternal

fresh canvas." Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer (London: Quartet, 1986) The Tribeca Film Festival in spring 2007 premiered a live remixing of D W Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) created by DJ Spooky called Rebirth of a Nation (2007) This piece remixes and distorts scenes from Griffith's film to

create a new less deterministic narrative, variable with every performance In response to criticism over his reworking of a classic artwork, DJ spooky says, 'There's an entire generation growing up with a hack mentality, where kids bend technology to fit their creative urges I'm a really big fan of open-source

cinema the author isn't dead He's just been networked." David Fear, "Rebirth of a Nation," Time Out,

April 19-25, 2007

movies This is an extension and intensification of what Benjamin described and

imagined, going beyond reproduction and dispersion and bringing manipulability and

interactivity into the experience of the cinematic art object and changing the relationship

between author, artwork and public

The Role of the Viewer

The idea of the original is tightly linked to the concept of the auteur Digital technologies

serve to redefine the status and authenticity of the auteur Jean-Luc Godard, whose new

mode of cinema helped solidify the concept of auteur, admits outrage at this state of

events He says, "The cinema, as we knew it and as it no longer exists, helped make

things visible The metaphor of the film negative and the positive print was a moral

metaphor But with digital cameras the negative no longer exists - there's no more

negative!" The unique negative provided a measure of authenticity and auteurity

Going back to Vogel, seeing Fata Morgana in that particular theater at that particular

time was the only reasonable option Thus if as he says, "pages were missing" that was

too bad, that viewing would be, for most of the audience, their only experience of the

movie, unless it happened to show on television, an equally ephemeral and less-than-ideal

experience Today the actual movie exists as one artifact in a database of information

surrounding the movie, from blogs, to websites, to user reviews, to DVD extras.27 Digital

26 Frederic Bonnaud, "Occupational Hazards: Jig at Work, as Told to Frederic Bonnaud," filmcomment 41,

documentary, as well as a multi-angle storyboard, and multiple other features." As he says, the movie is a very small part of the DVD experience Nicholas Rombes, "Professor Dvd," ctheory.net (2002).The

Korean film Oldboy (2005) Tartan DVD package contains: a strip of 35mm film, the 210 page English

translated manga (comic) on which the movie is based, three discs containing: the movie, three separate