Digital Cinema and postmodernism

“the culture of the simulacrum comes to life in a society where exchange-value has been generalized to the point at which the memory of use-value is effaced”—Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

My current project, Haunted Nerves / Time, Labor, Digital Cinema, explores the productivity of time and affect in the age of digital cinema. Employing a historiographic approach to the tension and transitions between film and digital media, I draw in particular from Steven Shaviro’s notion of “post-cinematic affect” as it relates to the production and reception of digital sounds and images in an era of late capitalism. I argue that a sense of time and temporality—while never fixed—is generated by digital texts which otherwise have no ontological sense of duration, let alone indexicality. The impact of the digital image’s affect shifts over time, and within that space opens up a renewed commitment to the kind of older questions regarding history and labor which have been otherwise repressed in the technological rush to “newness.” Thus, following the work of Sean Cubitt, Fredric Jameson and others, the project will explore the material implications of digital cinema and 21st Century capitalism as they continue earlier historical discussions rooted in modernity and postmodernity.

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Digital visual images have a strange, contradictory power. They evoke a sense of time, even while they bear no necessary relationship to time itself (or anything else). Reproducing duration is an impossibility. Digital cinema has finally fulfilled film’s goal—since the early days of montage experiments—to be free of all other existing media (including, ironically, film itself). Digital media also have a strange, contradictory history. They uproot themselves from the material world, offering the promise of pure fantasy and the limitless (immaterial) boundaries of imagination. But, in their very immateriality seem to further impact the material world.

Its been passé for a decade now to dismiss Jameson’s Postmodernism and the larger arguments about the simulacrum’s role in late capitalist culture. Critics largely reduce Jameson’s argument to an aesthetic one, while highlighting the real political struggles which nonetheless remain outside the purview of an all-consuming image which purports to be uprooted from any direct relationship to the material world. Since postmodern visual culture has been criticized for embracing the loss of reality in a world that often seems overrun by its harshest truths, such arguments are often seen as untenable, even insulting. And yet, there is a quiet resilience to Postmodernism’s argument about the cultural logic of late capitalism, particularly as we find ourselves fully immersed in a digital age where images are further privileged, to the point of invisibility, and labor becomes further marginalized, to the point of spectacle (i.e., Madison). Computers, Jameson wrote then, are machines of reproduction, rather than production. One might say that Jameson’s reading of the economic and aesthetic logic of an emergent global digital (“electronic”) media culture in Postmodernism did not get it wrong so much as he got it right too soon. While detractors endlessly rethought Andy Warhol paintings and Bonaventure hotels, or droned on about the definition of "affect," global capitalism was quietly building an immense digital landscape whose resiliency was in direct proportion to its immaterial existence.

But while postmodernism was fading, the emergent dominance of digital media over the course of the last decade of the 20th Century further troubled any remaining confidence in the always tenuous relationship between representation and reality. In film production practices, for example, the shift to digital intermediates, digital sound, digital visual effects and eventually full-blown, feature-length digital cinematography, brought about the expected theoretical anxieties regarding the indexicality of movies themselves. While the luxury of such technological advances were initially limited to the most fully resourced Hollywood studios, they became increasingly affordable and useful over the last two decades to low-budget and no-budget productions (everything from independent and quasi-independent narrative films, to documentarians and emergent global filmmakers). But such accessibility, paradoxically, comes at a cost.

Digital cinema is—in a very material sense—a simulacrum. Digital images are not a link back to a pre-existing referential origin, but a magic trick generated by the recombination of binary code. Of course, film projection was always an effect, an illusion of time and movement created in, through and beyond the persistence of isolated, individual frames. Yet digital technologies offer a new literalness to this dynamic. We no longer need actors performing in space and time to create the illusion of a performance; we no longer need people to see people.

Films still need people “behind the camera,” of course. But that’s a red herring. I put “behind the camera” in quotes because, strictly speaking, there is often no camera—only a computer’s approximation of a virtual camera’s perspective in a digitally generated space—let alone any ability to establish a physical relationship to it. Nevertheless, the use of specialized technicians is essential to creating virtual worlds and virtual performances.

However, the history of technological innovation—especially within the digital age—cautions us against arrogantly assuming that the same number of people will always be needed to fulfill the same functions. As a parallel, one might think back to the introduction of the CAPS (Computer Animation Production System) program to traditional hand-drawn animation in 1990. Ink-and-painters and in-betweeners were a thing of the past. At the dawn of computer-aided animation, a fraction of the workforce was now required to do what took so long to perform in the 1930s. CAPS, appropriately, was created by Pixar, the makers of Wall-E (2007). The same people who replaced humans with computers would one day turn around and sell paying audiences—in classic Hollywood fashion—on the idea that computers will still one day bother to come back and rescue us from ourselves.

The shift to digital technologies may offer increased accessibility and affordability, but it also runs the risk of further marginalizing the need for human labor, particularly as it shuts down the flow of capital. One is reminded of the grotesque theme park display in Roger and Me (1989), where an audio-animatronic auto worker sings in unison with the machine that would replace him on the assembly line—the real Michigan auto worker has been thus doubly replaced. As less labor is required to perform material tasks, fewer people can maintain the income levels necessary for a sustainable life. Thus, more money flows to fewer and fewer people. This may not be a profound revelation to some in the age of post-industrial, global capitalism, but what remains slightly disquieting is the extent to which filmmakers seem to accept—even celebrate at the level of spectacle, or “access”—such disturbing economic trends. This becomes especially vivid with Hollywood event films and their devoted fanbase, which is so enamored with the allure of the “new.”

Take, for example, recent trends in “virtual performance”—everything from early digital paranoia films, such as Michael Crichton’s Looker (1981), to recent CGI performances of dead and/or absent stars in Sky Captain (2004), Superman Returns (2006) and Terminator: Salvation (2009). These performances signaled the latest in a long line of attempts by films, television shows and ad agencies to use repurposed older footage of celebrities—dead and alive—as the raw material with which to digitally create an entirely “new” performance. Along with digitally-created crowds and “multitudes,” this is one part of a larger trend which increasingly replaces real humans in movies with partially or fully computer-generated ones.

Although it remains cost-prohibitive to replace real actors with digital ones, examples of virtual characters and performances serve as a useful platform to discuss larger questions regarding posthuman labor, stardom, and history, in an age where digital technologies now affect every stage of the filmmaking process. As the US economy becomes increasingly decimated by both globalization and technological innovation, there is cause to consider how post-Fordist Hollywood’s industrial and aesthetic models are also reflecting a post-industrial age where the importance of physical labor has given way to a smaller, more specialized workforce. Moreover, this trend becomes internalized in films whose aesthetic often celebrates the post-human image as a spectacle. Heavily CGI Hollywood blockbusters—as typical narratives of American individualism—both deny and celebrate the increasing insignificance of humans in a post-industrial, digital cinema.