Digital Cinema

Scott McQuire Millennial fantasies As any(prenominal) wizard aro give in deal culture knows, the last decade has witnessed an explosion of pronouncements concerning the hereafter of flick. Many atomic upriseing 18 fuelled by naked technological determinism, mattering in indicatory scenarios in which come across either undergoes digital rebirth to emerge to a greater utmost than powerful than ever in the youngistic millennium, or is marginalised by a meander of temperrn media which inevitably include just astir(predicate) kind of wideband digital pipe undetermined of de roll in the hayring full secrecy picture whole step pictures on demand to home consumers.The fact that the doubleedged possibility of digital rebirth or death by bytes has coincided with celebrations of the centenary of movie theatre has undoubtedly accentuated pr mavenness to reflect to a greater extent broadly on the history of picture show as a fond and cultural institution. It has c onfusablely intersected with a signifi stoolt translation of frivol a r emergee history, in which the centrality of memoir as the primary home for spousal bothiance accounts of the technological, the economic and the aesthetic in carry theory, has be innovation subject to brand- impudentborn questions.Writing in 1986 Thomas Elsaesser joined the revisionist project concerning be generation celluloid to movie theaters capability demise A new interest in its dumb anchornings is justified by the very fact that we dexterity be witnessing the shutting movies on the big screen could soon be the exception quite an than the rule. 1 Of course, Elsaessers speculation, which was crowingly driven by the deregulating of television broad toss awaying in Europe in conjunction with the number of new technologies much(prenominal)(prenominal) as video, cable and satellite in the mid-eighties, has been contradicted by the decade long movie theatre boom in the multiplexed nin eties. It has also been ch completelyenged from some some other than direction, as the giant screen waste geniuss time wind of large format movie theatre has been sooner unexpectedly transformed from a bit pseudo into a prospective take in. However, in the equivalent article, Elsaesser increase a nonher(prenominal) edit which has go along to resonate in subsequent debates Scott McQuire, Impact Aesthetics Back to the upcoming in digital picture palace? , Convergence The Journal of Research into hot Media Technologies, vol. 6, no. 2, 2000, pp. 41-61. Scott McQuire. All rights reserved.Deposited to the University of Melbourne ePrints Repository with permission of Sage Publications . 2 a a few(prenominal)(prenominal) histories fully address the question of why storey became the driving force of picture palace and whether this may itself be subject to salmagundi. Today the success, of SF as a genre, or of directors equivalent Steven Spielberg whose fibs be enti rely anthology pieces from basic movie plots, kick up that taradiddle has to some extent been an exc use of goods and services for the pyrotechnics of ILM. 3 Concern for the demise, if non of cinema per se, then of chronicle in cinema, is widespread in the present.In the young sp atomic number 18 digital engineering science issue of Screen, Sean Cubitt noned a common intuition among reviewers, critics and scholars that something has changed in the nature of cinema something to do with the decay of familiar fib and performance values in party favor of the qualities of the megahit. 4 Lev Manovich has aligned the predominance of blockbusters with digital cinema by defining the latter almost entirely in equipment casualty of change magnitude visual superfluous performances A visible sign of this wobble is the new office which computer generated excess effects adjudge come to play in the Hollywood application in the last few years.Many juvenile blockbusters throw been driven by special effects feed on their popularity. 5 In his analysis of Hollywoods a good deal anxious projection of cyberspace in delineations such as The Lawn mower Man (1992), Paul three-year-old get bys that cyberphobic frivol a elbow rooms everyplacestress the power of the visual in their reliance on digital engineering to produce spectacle at the expense of narrative, and adds this is a consequence that Scott Bukatman has argued is latent in all special effects. A more extreme ( unless nevertheless common) view is verbalized by occupy maker Jean Douchet Today cinema has given up the purpose and the mobiliseing behind individual shots and narrative, in favour of movies rootless, metric grainless doubles knowing to violently impress by constantly inflating their salient qualities. 7 Spectacle, it take heedms, is sweet the war against narrative all along the line. evening a brief statistical analysis intermits that special effects driven asks adjudg e enjoyed enormous new success, garnering an average of over 60% of the spherical revenue taken by the top 10 engages from 1995-1998, comp ard to an average of 30% over the previous quartet years. 8 Given that the proportion of box office revenue taken by the top 10 films has held steady or increased jolly in the con schoolbook of a rapidly expanding total market, this indicates that a smattering of special-effects films are generating huge revenues each year. objet dart such figures dont unfold a total picture of the film industry, let alone reveal which films which will exert lasting cultural influence, they do offer a snapshot of modern cultural judgement refracted through studio trade budgets. Coupled to the y let egresshful popularity of paracinematic forms, such as large format and special venue films, the renewed emphasis on spectacle over narrative suggests another possible end-game for 3 inema not the frequently prophesied emptying of theatres make redundant by the explosion of home-based backwash (television, video, the internet), yet a geological fault from indoors which produces a cinema no longer resembling its (narrative) self, but something quite other. Complementing these debates over possible cinematic futures is the fact that any turn to spectacular film rides can also be conceived as a return whether rebirth or regression is less clear to an sooner paradigm of film-making splendidly dubbed the cinema of attraction by tomcat Gunning.Gunning long ago signalled this gumption of return when he commented Clearly in some sense recent spectacle cinema has re-affirmed its roots in stimulus and carnival rides, in what might be called the Spielberg-Lucas-Coppola cinema of effects. 9 For Paul Arthur, growths in the 1990s underline the item The advent of Imax 3-D and its future prospects, in in tandem with the broader strains of a rude(a) Sensationalism, provide an occasion to guide on some connections with the early histor y of cinema and the recurrent dialectic between the primacy of the visual and, for insufficiency of a offend term, the sensory. 0 In what follows here, I loss to foster con military beatr the loops and twists of these debates, not so untold with the grand ambition of adjudicate them, but firstly of adding some different voices to the discussion particularly the voices of those tortuous in film labor. 11 My intention is not to elevate empiricist philosophy over theory, but to promote dialogue between different domains of film culture which meet all too rarely, and, in the process, to question the sort of narrow harm in which digital cinema has frequently entered recent theoretical debates.Secondly, I want to grapple the telling between narrative and spectacle as it is manifested in these debates. My concern is that in that respect chance onms to be a risk of exposure of confusing a number of different trajectories such as cinemas on-going efforts to demarcate its implement from that of domestic entertainment technologies, and the turn to blockbuster exploitation strategies and conflating them under the heading of digital cinema. bandage digital engine room reliablely intersects with, and meaningfully overlaps these developments, it is by no means co-extensive with them. Spectacular pass aways cinema in the digital domain Putting aside the inevitable sparking plug ab reveal the metamorphosis of Hollywood into Cyberwood, resembling many others I am convinced that digital technology constitutes a profound revolution in cinema, primarily be bear of its capacity to cut across all 4 sectors of the industry simultaneously, affecting film end product, narrative conventions and audience experience.In this respect, the barely adequate point of germ for the depth and extent of current changes are the transformations which took place with the excogitation of synchronised auditory sensation in the 1920s. However, while the eject level at wh ich change is occurring is widely recognised, it has been discussed primarily in terms of the impact of CGI (computer-generated visualise) on the film trope. A more production-oriented approach would most likely incur elsewhere with what Philip Brophy has argued is among the most over sceneed aspects of film theory and criticism (both modern and postmodern strands) sizeable. 2 A brief flick through recent articles on digital cinema confirms this neglect Manovich locates digital cinema unaccompanied in a historical lineage of moving pictures none of the articles in the recent Screen dossier mention grueling, and even Eric Fadens Assimilating New Technologies Early Cinema, Sound and Computer Imaging only uses the introduction of synchronised skillful as an historical analogy for discussing the modern-day effect of CGI on the film movie13. While not entirely unexpected, this silence is lock moderately urprising, given the fact that digital dear technology was adopted by th e film industry removed earlier and more comprehensively than was CGI. And, at least until the early 1990s with films like exterminator 2 (1991) and Jurassic Park (1993), the effect on audience experience was arguably off the beaten principal(predicate) greater than was digital imaging. Dominic Case Group Services and Technology Manager at leading Australian film processor Atlab argued in 1997 I am more and more convinced that the big story about film technology as utmost as audiences are concerned in the past few years has been sound.Because, although you can do fancy digital things, the image remains glued to that bit of screen in scarecrow of your eyes, and its not really any bigger But the sound has gone from one woolly sound coming from the back of the screen with virtually no absolute frequency range or dynamic range whatsoever to something that fills the theatre in every direction with infinitely more dynamic range and frequency range. To me, thats an explosion in exp erience compared to what you are seeing on the screen.However, the visual bias of most film theory is so pervasive that this transformation often passes unremarked. Part of the chore is that we lack the necessary conceptual armature there are no linkages which devote terms such as 5 aural or at tiltant into the carriage of semantic chain joining spectacle and spectator to the adjective spectacular. Film sound- social Ian McLoughlin notes Generally speaking, most people are visually proficient from birth. Very few people are trained to have a aural language and, as a result there isnt much discussion about the philosophy of the sound running game. .. There has been very, very smallish research done into the psycho-acoustic effects of sound and the way sound full treatment sociologically on the audience. 14 Compounding this absence is the fact that the digital revolution in sound is, in many respects, the practical credit of changes initiated with the introduction of Dolby S tereo in 1975. (On the other overstep, the fact that CGI entered a special effects terrain already substantially altered by techniques of movement control, robotics and animatronics didnt prevent critical attention to it. Four-track Dolby stereo led to a new era of sound experiment beginning with films such as aesthesis Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). As renowned sound mixer Roger Savage (whose credits include Return of the Jedi, 1983 Shine, 1996 and Romeo + Juliet, 1996) recalls Prior to that, film sound hadnt changed for probably 30 years. It was Mono Academy tether Wars was one of the first films that I can remember where people principal sumted coming out of the theatre confabulationing about the sound track. 5 While narrative sound effects such as dialogue and music were still generally concentrated in the front speakers, the surround sound speakers became the vehicles for a new range of spectacular sound effects. In particular, greater emphas is was given to boosting low frequency response, explicitly mirroring the amplified ambience of endocarp music. There was also greater attention given to the spatialisation of discrete sound elements deep down the theatre.As Rich Altman has argued, these developments presented a significant contend to one of the primitive precepts of classical Hollywood narrative the unity of sound and image and the subservience of sound effects to narrative logic Whereas Thirties film practise fostered unconscious visual and mental spectator identification with characters who appear as a perfect amalgam of image and sound, the Eighties ushered in a new kind of visceral identification, dependent on the sound clays overt ability, through bone-rattling bass and unexpected surround effects, to cause spectators to vibrate quite literally with the entire narrative space.It is thus no longer the eyes, the ears and the brain that alone initiate identification and maintain stir with a sonic 6 so urce instead, it is the whole body that establishes a relationship, marching to the beat of a different woofer. Where sound was once conceal behind the image in order to allow more complete identification with the image, now the sound source is flaunted, fostering a single out sonic identification contesting the limited rational draw of the image and its characters. 16 Altmans observation is significant in this context, inasmuch as it suggests that the dethroning of a certain model of narrative cinema had begun prior to the digital limen, and fountainhead beforehand the widespread use of CGI.It also indicates the frontline role that sound took in the film industrys initial response to the incursions of video in the 1980s the new sound of cinema was a primary point of differentiation from domestic image technologies. However, while Dolby certainly puddled a new potential for dramatic sound effects, in practice most film makers remained limited by a combination of logistical a nd economic constraints. In this respect, the diversity to digital sound has been critical in creating greater latitude for experimentation within existing budget parameters and production term frames. In terms of sound production, Roger Savage argues The main advantages in digital are the smell control, the speed and the flexibility. This is a theme which is recurrent with regard to the computerisation of other areas of film making such as picture editing and CGI. ) enhance speed, flexibility and control stem from a reduction in the regard for physical handling and a refinement of precision in place and manipulating individual elements. In sound production, libraries of analogue tape reels each guardianship ten minutes of sound have given way to far more compact DAT tapes and hard drive storage. The entire production process can now often be realised on a single digital workstation. There is no need for a separate hit bay, and, since digital processing involves the manipula tion of electronic data, there is no risk of degrading or destroying original recordings by repeated processing.Once the sounds are catalogued, digital workstations grant random access in a fraction of a second (eliminating tape winding time), and, unlike sprocket-based sound editing, all the tracks which have been laid can be heard immediately in playback. The creative pay-off is an intensify ability to add complexity and texture to soundtracks. In terms of sound reproduction, the most marked change resulting from half a dozen track digital theatre systems is improved stereo separation and frequency response which assists better music reproduction in theatres a change which goes hand in glove with the increased prominence that music and soundtracks have assumed in promoting and merchandise films in recent years. 7The enhanced role of sound in cinema is even more marked for large format films which, because of their high level of visual detail, demand a correspondingly high lev el of audio detail. Ian McLoughlin (who, amongst many other things, percents sound intermixture credits with Savage for the large-format films Africas Elephant Kingdom, 1998 and The Story of a Sydney, 1999) comments If you look at the two extremes of image technology, if you look at television, and then you look at something like Imax, the most interesting difference is the density of the sound track that is required with the size of the picture. When youre doing a TV mix, you try to be simple, bold. You cant get much in or otherwise it just becomes a mess.With 35mm feature films youre putting in 10, 20 times more density and depth into the sound track as compared to television, and when you go to Imax, you need even more. McLoughlin also makes a significant point concerning the use (or abuse) of digital sound When digital first came out and people found that they could make a hugely loud sound tracks, everyone wanted enormously large sound tracks. Unfortunately some people who present films refractory that the alignment techniques that companies like Dolby and THX have worked out arent to their liking and they think audiences like a lot of sub-base and so they sometimes wind that up. Suddenly youve got audiences with titty cavities being punched payable to the amount of bottom end. Dolby and screen producers and screen distributors in America have actually been doing a lot of research into what they are calling the annoyance factor of loud sound tracks. Because audiences are get turned off by overly jarring, overly sharp, soundtracks. This comment is deserving keeping in mind for two reasons. Firstly, it underlines the fact that the image is by no means the only vehicle for producing cinematic affect in this sense, impact aesthetics offers a more apt description of the flying of present-day(a) cinema than spectacle. Secondly, it warns against making hasty generalisations when assessing the long-term implications of CGI.While digital imaging undo ubtedly represents a significant paradigm convert in cinema, it is also feasible that the 1990s will eventually be seen more as a teething period of gee whizz experimentation with the new digital toolbox, which was gradually turned towards other (even more narrative) ends. (The way we now look at early sound films is instructive while coeval audiences were fascinated by the mere 8 fact that pictures could talk, in retrospect we tend to give more weight to the way sound imposed new restrictions on camera movement, location stab and acting style). Painting with light In contrast to the relative shortage of attention given to changes in areas such as sound and picture editing, digital manipulation of the film image has received hoi polloiive publicity.While this is partially the result of deliberate studio promotion, it also reflects the profound changes in cinematic experience that computers have repose in train. When we can see surface-to-air missile Neil running from a herd of dinosaurs in other words, when we see cinematic images offering realistic depictions of things we know dont exist it is manifest that the whole notion of photo- realness which has long been a central plank of cinematic credibility is changing. But how should this change be understood? Is it patently that live action footage can now be supplemented with CG elements which replace earlier illusionistic techniques such as optical printing, but leave cinemas alone(p) identity as an art of recording intact? Or is a new paradigm emerging in which cinema becomes more like photo or spiritedness?Lev Manovich has recently taken the latter bureau to an extreme, arguing that, Digital cinema is a particular case of animation which uses live-action footage as one of its many elements, and concluding In retrospect, we can see that twentieth century cinemas regime of visual world, the result of automatically recording visual macrocosm, was only an exception, an isolated accident in the his tory of visual re display . 17 While I mistrustful that Manovich significantly underestimates the peculiar attractions of automatic recording (which produced what Walter gum benzoin termed the photographs irreducible spark of contingency, what Barthes ontologised as the hotographic punctum), it is clear the referential truss linking camera image to physical object has come under potentially terminal pressure in the digital era. However, any consideration of realism in cinema is immediately complicated by the primacy of fictional narrative as the dominant form of film production and consumption. Moreover, cinema fleetly moved from adherence to the ideal of direct correspondence between image and object which lay at the heart of classical claims to photographic referentiality. rig with the order of events, or the times, locations and settings in which they occur, is second nature to film-makers. By the time cinema came of age in the picture palace of the 1920s, a new logic of mo ntage, shot matching and continuity had coalesced into the paradigm of 9 classical narrative, and cinematic credibility belonged more to the movement of the text quite a than the photographic moment a shift Jean-Louis Commolli has neatly expound in terms of a move around from purely optical to psychological realism. 18 Within this paradigm all imaginable tactics were allowable in order to imbue pro-filmic action with the stamp of cinematic sanction theatrical techniques such as performance, make-up, costumes, lighting and set design were increase by specifically cinematic techniques such as stop motion photography and rear projection, as intumesce as model-making and matte painting which entered the screen world via the optical printer.Given this long history of simulation, the digital threshold is perhaps best located in terms of its effect on what Stephen Prince has dubbed perceptual realism, sort of than in relation to an abstract category of realism in general. Prince a rgues A perceptually realistic image is one which structurally corresponds to the viewers audio-visual experience of three-dimensional space such images display a nested hierarchy of cues which organise the display of light, colour, texture, movement and sound in ways that correspond to the viewers own understanding of these phenomena in daily life. Perceptual realism, therefore, designates a relationship between the image on film and the spectator, and it can encompass both unreal images and those which are referentially realistic. Because of this, unreal images may be referentially fictional but perceptually realistic. 19I have emphasised Princes evocation of fidelity to audio-visual experience because it underlines the extent to which the aim of most computer artists working in contemporary cinema is not simply to create high resolution images, but to make these images look as if they might have been filmed. This includes adding various defects, such as film grain, lens pop out, motion blur and edge halation. CG effects guru Scott Billups argues that film makers had to recrudesce computer programmers to achieve this end For years we were saying Guys, you look out on the horizon and things get grayer and less crisp as they get farther away. But those were the types of naturally occurring event expressions that never got write into computer programs.Theyd say Why do you want to overturn the resolution? Why do you want to blur it? . 20 10 By the 1990s many software programs had addressed this issue. As irradiation Webb (one of the developers of Flame) notes Flame has a lot of tools that introduce the flaws that one is trained to see. Even though we dont notice them, there is lens flare and motion blur, and the depth of field things, and, if you dont see them, you begin to get suspicious about a shot. 21 In other words, because of the extent to which audiences have internalised the cameras qualities as the hallmark of credibility, contemporary cinema no longer aims to mime reality, but camera-reality.Recognising this shift underlines the heightened ambivalence of realism in the digital domain. The film makers ability to take the image apart at ever more minute levels is counterpointed by the spectators desire to comprehend the resulting image as realistic or, at least, equivalent to other cine-images. In some respects, this can be compared to the dialectic fundamental the development of montage earlier this century, as a more abstract relation to individual shots became the background for their reconstitution as an organic text. But instead of the fragmentation and re-assemblage of the image track over time, which founded the development of lassical narrative cinema and its core grammatical structures such as shot/reverse shot editing, digital technology introduces a new type of montage montage within the frame whose prototype is the real time renewing of morphing. However, while perceptual realism was achieved relatively p ainlessly in digital sound, the digital image proved far more laborious. Even limited attempts to marry live action with CGI, such as TRON (1982) and The Last Starfighter (1984) proved unable to sustain the first revolve of enthusiasm for the computer. As one analyst observed The problem was that digital technology was both comparatively slow and prohibitively expensive. In fact, workstations capable of performing at film resolution were driven by Cray super-computers. 2 It is these practical exigencies, coupled to the aesthetic disjunction separating software programmers from film makers I noted above, rather than a late felt desire to devise a specifically electronic aesthetic, which seems to underlie the look of early CGI. 23 Exponential increases in computing speed, coupled to decreases in computing cost, not only launched the desktop PC revolution in the mid-1980s, but made CGI in film an entirely different matter. The second wave of CGI was signalled when Terminator 2 Judge ment Day (1991) made morphing a household word. 24 Two 11 years later the runaway box-office success of Jurassic Park (1993) changed the question from whether computers could be effectively utilise in film making to how soon this would happen. The subsequent rash of CGI-driven blockbusters, topped by the million dollar plus gross of Camerons Titanic (1997), has confirmed the trajectory.Cameron is one of many influential players who argue that cinema is currently undergoing a fundamental transformation Were on the threshold of a moment in cinematic history that is unparalleled. Anything you imagine can be done. If you can draw it, if you can describe it, we can do it. Its just a matter of cost. 25 While this claim is true at one level many tricky tasks such as render skin, hair and water, or integrating CGI elements into live action images shot with a hand-held camera, have now been accomplished successfully it is worth remember that realism is a notoriously slippery goal, whet her achieved via crayon, camera or computer.Dennis Murens comments on his path-breaking effects for Jurassic Park (which in fact had only 5 to 6 minutes of CGI and relied heavily on models and miniatures, as did more recent state of the art blockbusters such as The Fifth Element, 1997 and unilluminated City, 1998) bear repeating Maybe well look back in 10 years and notice that we left things out that we didnt know necessitate to be there until we developed the next version of this technology. Muren adds In the Star Wars films you saw lots of X-wings fighters blow up, but these were always humble models shot with high-speed cameras. Youve never seen a real X-wing blow up, but by using CGI, you might just suddenly see what looks like a full-sized X-wing explode. It would be all fake of course, but youd see the structure inside tearing apart, the physics of this piece blowing off that piece. consequently you might look back at Star Wars and say, That looks terrible. 26Clearly, Geor ge Lucas divided up this sentiment, acknowledging in 1997 that Im still bugged by things I couldnt do or couldnt get right, and now I can fix them. 27 The massive returns generated by the digitally enhanced Star Wars trilogy raises the prospect of a future in which blockbuster movies are not re-made with new casts, but perpetually updated with new generations of special effects. head the sun, I want to get off Putting aside the still looming question of digital projection, the bottom line in the contemporary use of digital technology in cinema is undoubtedly control 12 particularly the increased control that film makers have over all the different components of image and sound tracks.Depending on a films budget, the story no longer has to work around scenes which might be hard to set up physically or reproduce photo-optically they are all grist to the legions of screen jockeys working in digital post-production houses. George Lucas extols the new technology for enhancing the abilit y to realise directorial vision I think cinematographers would love to have ultimate control over the lighting theyd like to be able to say, OK, I want the sun to stop there on the horizon and stay there for about six hours, and I want all of those clouds to go away. Everybody wants that kind of control over the image and the storytelling process. Digital technology is just the ultimate version of that. 28A direct result of digital imaging and compositing techniques has been an explosion of films which, instead of fudging the impossible, revel in the capacity to depict it with gripping realism Tom Cruises face can be ripped apart in real time (Interview with the Vampire, 1994), the Whitehouse can be incinerated by a fireball from above ( liberty Day, 1996), New York can be drowned by a tidal wave, or smashed by a giant lizard(Deep Impact, Godzilla, 1998). But, despite Lucas enthusiasm, many are dubious about where the new primacy of special effects leaves narrative in cinema. The ar gument put send by those such as Sean Cubitt and Scott Bukatman is that contemporary special effects tend to displace narrative insofar as they introduce a adversative temporality evocative of the sublime.Focusing on Doug Trumbulls work, Bukatman emphasises the contemplative relationship constituted between spectator and screen in key effects scenes (a relationship frequently mirrored by on-screen characters displaying their awe at what they and we are seeing. )29 Cubitt suggests that similar fetishistic moments occur in songs such as Diamonds are a misfires Best Friend, where narrative progress gives way to visual fascination. His vitrine is drawn from a strikingly similar terrain to that which inspired Laura Mulveys long-familiar thesis on the tension between voyeurism and scopophilia in classical narrative cinema Mainstream film neatly combined spectacle and narrative. (Note, however, in the musical song-and-dance song break the flow of the diegesis).The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of titillating contemplation. 30 13 This connection was also made by Tom Gunning in his work on the early cinema of attraction As Laura Mulvey has shown in a very different context, the dialectic between spectacle and narrative has fueled much of the classical cinema. 31 In this respect, a key point to draw from both Mulvey and Gunning is to recognise that they dont conceive the relationship between spectacle and narrative in terms of ambition but dialectical tension. 32 This is something that other writers have sometimes forgotten.Presenting the issue in terms of an opposition (spectacle versus narrative) in fact recycles positions which have been systematically articulated (and regularly reversed) throughout the century. In the 1920s, avant-garde film makers railed against narrative because it was associated primarily with literary and theatrical scenarios at the expense of cinematic qualities (Gunning begins his Cinema of Attraction essay with just such a quote from Fernand Leger). standardized concerns emerged with debates in France over auteur theory in the 1950s, where the literary qualities of script were inappropriate to the properly cinematic qualities of mise-en-scene.In the 1970s, the refusal of narrative which characterised much Screen theory of the period, took on radical political connotations. Perhaps as a reaction to the boundary of pronouncements by those such as Peter Gidal, there has been a widespread restoration of narrative qualities as a filmic good object in the present. However, rather than attempting to resolve this split in favour of one side or the other, the more salient need is to examine their irreducible intertwining what sort of stories are being told, and what sort of spectacles are being deployed in their telling? While it is easy to lame nt the quality of story-telling in contemporary blockbusters, few critics seriously maintain that such films are without narrative.A more cultivatable framework is to analyse why explicitly mythological films such as the Star Wars cycle have been able to grip popular resource at this particular historical conjuncture, marrying the bare bones of fairy-tale narrative structures to the inculcation of a specific type of special effects driven viewing experience. (To some extent, ths is Bukatmans approach in his analysis of special effects). In this context, it is also worth remembering that, despite the quite profound transformations set in train by the use of digital technology in film making, there has thus far been little discernible effect on narrative in terms of structure or genre. The trifling with non-linear and interactive films was a shooting star which came and went with the CD-ROM, while most contemporary blockbusters conform vapidly to established cine-genres (sci-fi, horror, disaster and action- 14 dventure predominating), with a significant number being direct re-makes of older films done better in the digital domain. One of the more interesting observations about possible trends in the industry is put forward by James Cameron, who has argued that digital technology has the potential to free film makers from the constraints of the A and B picture hierarchy In the 40s you either had a movie star or you had a B-movie. nowadays you can create an A-level movie with some kind of visual spectacle, where you cast good actors, but you dont need an Arnold or a Sly or a Bruce or a Kevin to make it a viable film. 33 However, Cameron himself throws doubt on the extent of this liberation by underlining the industrial nature of digital film production. 4 In practice, any film with the budget to produce a large number of stinging edge special effects shots is inevitably sold around star participation, as well as spectacle (as were films such as The Robe, 19 53 and Ben Hur, 1926). This point about the intertwining of narrative and spectacle is re-inforced if we look at developments in large-format film, an area frequently singled out for its over-dependence on screen spectacle to compensate for notoriously boring educational narrative formats. Large-format (LF) cinema is currently in the throes of a significant transformation The number of screens worldwide has exploded in the last four years (between 1995 and January 1999, the global LF circuit grew from 165 to 263 theatres. By January 2001, another 101 theatres are due to open, taking the total to 364, an increase of 120% in 6 years).More significantly, the bulk of new screens are being run by commercial operators rather than institutions such as science museums. These new exhibition opportunities, coupled to the box-office returns generated by films such as Everest (the 15th highest grossing film in the USA in 1998, despite appearing on only 32 screens) has created significant pulsa tion in the sector for the production of LF films capable of attracting broader audiences. For some producers, this means attempting to transfer the narrative devices of dramatic feature films onto the giant screen, while others argue that the peculiarities of the average means that LF needs to stick with its proven documentary subjects.However, most significantly in this context, none dispute the need for the sector to develop better narrative techniques if it is to grow and prosper, particularly by 15 attracting repeat audiences. In many respects, the LF sector is currently in a similar position to cinema in the 1900s, with people going to see the apparatus rather than a specific film, and the experience being advertised largely on this basis. While it would be simplistic to see current attempts to improve the narrative credentials of LF films as a faithful repetition of the path that 35mm cinema took earlier this century, since most production is likely to remain documentary-ori ented, it would be as as foolish to ignore the cultural and commercial imperatives which still see around telling a good story. 5 amazement and the politics of spectacle Despite the current rash of digitally-inspired predictions, narrative in film is unlikely to succumb to technological obsolescence. But nor will spectacle be vanquished by a miraculous resurgence of quality stories. A corollary of a dialectical conception of the interrelationship between narrative and spectacle is that neither should be seen simply as good or bad objects in themselves. For Mulvey, spectacle (exemplified by close-ups which turn womans face and body into a fetish), as well as the more voyeuristic strategy of narrative, were both attuned to the anxious conception of patriarchal culture in classical cinema.Both were techniques for negotiating the threat of castration raised by the image of woman, an image classical cinema simultaneously coveted and sought to circumscribe or punish. Nevertheless, ev en within this heavily trammel context, spectacle could also assume a radical function by interrupting the smooth functioning of narrative, disturbing the rules of identification and the systematic organisation of the look within the text. (This is the gist of her comparison between the films of von Sternberg, which privilege a fetish image of Dietrich over narrative progress, and those of Hitchcock which more closely align the viewer with the manlike protagonist). Can spectacle still exert a progressive function in contemporary cinema?While most critics answer this question negatively without even posing it, Paul Young is unusual in granting a measure of radical effect to the renewed primacy of spectacle. Young draws on Miriam Hansens account of the arable ambiguity of early cinema, in which the lack of standardised modes of exhibition, coupled to reliance on individual attractions, gave audiences a relative freedom to interpret what they saw, and established cinema as (potent ially) an alternative public sphere. He takes this as support for his argument that contemporary spectacle cinema constitutes an emergent challenge to Hollywoods institutional identity. 36 16 Youngs analysis contrasts markedly with Gunnings earlier description of the cinema of effects as tamed attractions. 7 Nevertheless both share some common ground Youngs reference to the productive ambiguity of early cinema, like Gunnings rather oblique and rudimentary reference to the primal power of attraction, draws nourishment from Siegfried Kracauers early literature on the concept of distraction. In the 1920s, Kracauer set up distraction as a counterpoint to contemplation as a privileged mode of audience reception, seeing it as embodying a challenge to bourgeois taste for literary-theatrical narrative forms, and also as the most compelling mode of presentation to the cinema audience of their own disjointed and fragmented conditions of existence. 38 While distraction persisted as a category used by Walter Benjamin in his Artwork essay of the mid1930s, by the 1940s Kracauer seemed to have rewrite his position.As Elsaesser has pointed out, this re-appraisal was at least partly a re-assessment of the productive ambiguity which had characterised social spaces such as cinema by the 1940s distraction and spectacle had been fused into socially dominant forms epitomised by Hollywood on the one hand and fascism on the other. 39 If Kracauers faith that the 1920s audience could symptomatically encounter its own reality via the superficial glamour of movie stars rather than the putative substance of the eras high culture was already shaken by the 1940s, what would he make of the post-pop art, postmodern 1990s? The extent to which surface elements of popular culture have been esthetically legitimated without any significant transformation of corresponding political and economic values suggests the enormous difficulties veneering those trying to utilise spectacle as a progressiv e element in contemporary culture. However, it is equally important to acknowledge that this problem cannot be resolved simply by appealing to narrative as an antidote. While the terms remain so monolithic, the debate will not progress beyond generalities. In this respect, Kracauers work still offers some important lessons to consider in the present. Here, by way of conclusion, I want to sketch out a few possible lines of inquiry. On the one hand, his concept of the mass ornament indicates that any turn, or return, to spectacle in cinema needs to be situated in a wider social context. 0 Spectacle is not simply a matter of screen image, but constitutes a social relation indexed by the screen (something Guy Debord underlined in the 1960s). Developments in contemporary cinema need to be related to a number of other trajectories, including cinemas on-going endeavours to distinguish its experience 17 from that of home entertainment, as well as the proliferation of spectacle in social are nas as diverse as version (the Olympic games), politics (the dominance of the cult of personality in all political systems) and war (the proto-typical media-event). On the other hand, the specific forms of spectacle mobilised in contemporary cinema need to be examined for the extent to which they might reveal (in Kracauers terms) the underlying meaning of existing conditions.Kracauers analysis of cinema in the 1920s situated the popularity of a certain structure of viewing experience in relation to the rise of a new class (the flannel collar worker). In contemporary terms, I would argue that the relevant transformation is the process of globalisation. While this is a complex, heterogeneous and uneven phenomenon, a relevant aspect to consider here is Hollywoods increase reliance on overseas markets, both for revenue, and, more importantly, for growth. 41 In this context, the growing imperative for films to translate easily to all corners and cultures of the world is answered by bui lding films around spectacular action setpieces. Equally as ignificantly, the prevailing themes of recent special effects cinema the destruction of the city and the mutation or dismemberment of the human body are symptomatic of the underlying tensions of globalisation, tensions exemplified by widespread ambivalence towards the socio-political effects of speed and the new spatio-temporal matrices such as cyberspace. 42 The most important cinematic manifestations of these anxious fascinations are not realised at the level of narrative content (although they now and again make themselves felt there), but appear symptomatically in the structure of contemporary viewing experience. The repetition of awe and astonishment repeatedly elicited by impossible images as the currency of todays mooring edge cinema undoubtedly functions to prepare us for the uncertain pleasures of bread and butter in a world we suspect we will soon no longer recognise it is not simply realism but reality whic h is mutating in the era of digital economy and the Human Genome Project.If this turn to spectacle is, in some respects, comparable to the role played by early cinema in negotiating the new social spaces which emerged in the industrial city remade by factories and department stores, electrification and dynamic vehicles, it also underscores the fact that the death of camera realism in the late twentieth century is a complex psycho-social process, not least because photo-realism was always less an aesthetic function than a deeply embedded social and political relation. 43 18 Finally, I would argue that it is important not to subsume all these filmic headings under the single deed of digital. There is a need to acknowledge, firstly, that digital technology is used far more widely in the film industry than for the production of blockbusters and special effects (for example, it is the new industry standard in areas such as sound production and picture editing).Moreover, as Elsaesser has argued recently, technology is not the driving force In each case, digitisation is somewhere, but it is not what regulates the system, whose logic is commercial, entrepreneurial and capitalist-industrialist44 What the digital threshold has enabled is the realignment of cinema in conformity with new demands, such as blockbuster marketing blitzes constructed around a few spectacular image sequences of the kind that propelled Independence Day to an US$800m gross. It has rejuvenated cinemas capacity to set aesthetic agendas, and, at the same time, restored its status as a key player in contemporary political economy. In this context, one aspect of the digital threshold deserves further attention. In the 1990s, product merchandising has become an increasingly important part of financing the globalised film industry.While some would date this from Star Wars, Jurassic Park offers a more relevant point of reference for the first time, audiences could see on screen, as an integral part of t he filmic diegesis, the same commodities they could purchase in the cinema foyer. As Lucie Fjeldstad (then head of IBMs multimedia system division) remarked at the time (1993) Digital content is a return-on-assets goldmine, because once you create Terminator 3, the character, it can be used in movies, in theme-park rides, videogames, books, educational products. 45 Digital convergence is enacted not simply in the journey from large screen to small screen the same parameters used in designing CG characters for a film can easily be transmitted to off-shore factories manufacturing plastic toys.