Monday, July 29, 2013

TED'S DIGITAL JUNGLE - DIGITAL NEWSREEL #6


II.9 The Motion Picture Industry:

For the American motion picture industry, digital technology has been a mixed blessing. While production techniques have been streamlined and made more efficient, production costs for commercial features have actually increased as producers aim for bigger blockbuster, hoping to cash in on ancillary markets and spin-offs when the blockbuster becomes a hit.

This strategy necessitates determining the lowest commercial common denominator to reach the mass market, which means minimizing variables like creative expression. In his essay “Conglomerate Aesthetics- Notes on the Disintegration of Film Language”, American film critic David Denby describes the aesthetic results:” Constant and incoherent movement: rushed editing strategies; feeble characterization; pastiche and hapless collage – these are the elements of conglomerate aesthetics and there’s something more going on here than bad filmmaking in such a collection of attention-getting swindles…What we have now is not just a raft of routine bad pictures but the first massively successful nihilistic cinema.”[1]

Denby is cautiously optimistic about the impact of digital technology on production, noting that cheaper production costs might well result in the birth of new cinema movements around the world, though he cannot name one.

Meanwhile, the clock would seem to be running out on the analog motion picture industry. In January, 2012, Nick James wrote in the British cinema periodical Sight and Sound that: “ January 2012 will apparently mark the point at which there will be more digital screens in the world industry than analog, and by the end of 2012 it is estimated that 35mm production’s share of the global market will decline to 37 per cent. What’s more, mainstream usage of 35mm will have vanished from the USA by the end of 2013, with Western Europe set to be all digital in the mainstream one year later.”[2]

 As was the case with the American music industry, the American motion picture industry has made the war on file sharing a top priority, and has embarked upon international crusades to shut down file sharing sites such as Limewire, Megaupload, Demonoid and Pirate Bay. Owners of these websites have been tracked down and arrested under international warrants in countries like New Zealand and Cambodia.
Meanwhile, ISP providers in Europe have begun to police the downloading habits of their customers, punishing those who download from file sharing sites with fines and removal of access to internet.[3] Nonetheless, sales of DVDs are still falling every year, and soon the video store will be as obsolete as the music store, not to mention the bookstore.

 Meanwhile, cinema attendance figures continue to decline around the world, as the increased availability of increasingly inexpensive widescreen HD digital televisions make staying at home to watch movies with family and friends a more convenient and, in the long run, a more economical option than going to the movie theatre.

The decline of the international motion picture industry began over two decades ago, according to the late American intellectual and film critic Susan Sontag , who wrote in 1995 :”Cinema’s 100 years seem to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline.. Cinema, once heralded as the art of the 20th century, seems now, as the century closes numerically, to be a decadent art. Perhaps it is not cinema that has ended but only cinephilia – the name of the very specific kind of love that cinema inspired…” [4]

Like Denby, Sontag attributed the decline of the medium primarily to the astronomical rise in production costs of Hollywood productions and the concurrent reliance on the huge blockbuster loaded with special effects and stars. She concludes her essay on a pessimistic note:” … if cinephilia is dead, then movies are dead too..”[5]

Nonetheless, today, a bit over a decade and a half later, cinema is still very much with us, albeit permeated by a digital technology which is changing the medium profoundly and dramatically. Among other things, digital effects have created the potential for entirely new dimensions of artifice of a kind the early French cinema pioneer George Melies could have only dreamt of. Indeed, some critics have gone so far as to predict that:“ all movies will be animated or computer-generated within fifteen years.”[6]


In addition, the entire viewing experience has been radically transformed from a group endeavor in a movie theatre to a very private one -  on a cellphone or a laptop. Some, like the legendary French cineaste Jean-Luc Godard, also see a profound difference between the rhythmic flicker of analog film 24 frames per second, and the unbroken stream of digital light even when moving digital images are projected on a screen.

Regardless, there appears to be a general consensus that, although Hollywood studios are still finding inventive ways to make money, the Twentieth Century art form known as cinema no longer exists. [7]In the words of James Monaco,” After ninety years of dominating the way we view our world – a long, tempestuous and rewarding life- cinema has quietly passed on.”[8]


[1] David Denby (Do the Movies Have a Future?) Simon and Schuster, 2012, p.32
[2] Nick James ( Editorial in Sight and Sound, January, 2012) as quoted in David Thompson’s THE BIG SCREEN, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. P. 509
[3] The many copyright issues raised by the Digital Revolution will be dealt with in greater details in Chapter VIII, Fair Use and Copyright Conflict
[4] Susan Sontag  (Frankfurter Rundschau, 1995) southerncrossreview.org/43/sontag-cinema.htm
[5] Susan Sontag ( ibid)
[6] Bruce Goldstein(“Flashback; The Year in Movies”)   Village Voice, December 28, 1999
[7] Even in 1987, the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman was quoted by Lasse Svanberg as saying that he did not think the film medium would survive.( ibid)p.74
[8] Monaco ( ibid) p. 421

No comments: