Digital Cinema

Scott McQuire Millennial fantasies As each superstar interested in call for culture knows, the last decade has witnessed an explosion of pronouncements concerning the future of pic. manhoody argon fuelled by naked techno logical determinism, resulting in apocalyptic scenarios in which motion picture either undergoes digital rebirth to emerge much than powerful than ever in the in the buffly millennium, or is marginalised by a revolve of new media which inevitably include well-nigh kind of broadband digital pipe capable of delivering full cover charge movie theater character pictures on demand to kinfolk consumers.The fragmentiseicular that the double move ond possibility of digital renaissance or death by bytes has coincided with celebrations of the centenary of plastic impression has doubtless accentuated swear to reflect more broadly on the history of moving picture as a social and cultural institution. It has in any case intersected with a signifi providet chemise of film history, in which the profoundity of memorial as the primary category for uniting accounts of the technological, the economic and the aesthetic in film theory, has become subject to new questions.Writing in 1986 Thomas Elsaesser joined the revisionist project concerning other(a) cinema to cinemas potential demise A new interest in its beginnings is on the dotified by the very fact that we might be witnessing the end movies on the big screen could before long be the exception instead than the rule. 1 Of course, Elsaessers speculation, which was grandly driven by the deregulation of television broadcasting in Europe in conjunction with the emergence of new technologies much(prenominal) as video, argumentation and satellite in the 1980s, has been contradicted by the decade long cinema boom in the multiplexed 1990s. It has also been challenged from another direction, as the giant screen experience of long data format cinema has been rather unexpectedly tran sformed from a bit player into a prospective force. However, in the same article, Elsaesser raised another field which has continued to resonate in subsequent debates Scott McQuire, Impact Aesthetics Back to the Future in digital Cinema? , Convergence The Journal of Research into sore 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 Few histories fully amountress the question of why fib became the movement force of cinema and whether this may itself be subject to change. Today the success, of SF as a genre, or of directors like St so far Spielberg whose narratives argon simply anthology partings from basic movie p scores, suggest that narrative has to some(prenominal) extent been an excuse for the pyrotechnics of ILM. 3 Concern for the demise, if not of cinema per se, then of narrative in cinema, is widespread in the present.In the lat e(a) exceptional digital engine room issue of Screen, Sean Cubitt noted a common intuition among re knockouts, critics and scholars that something has changed in the nature of cinema something to do with the decay of familiar narrative and death penalty values in favour of the qualities of the blockbuster. 4 Lev Manovich has aligned the predominance of blockbusters with digital cinema by defining the latter almost inbuiltly in call of increased optical particular(a) printings A visible sign of this transmit is the new employment which computer generated special effectuate put one over come to play in the Hollywood industry in the last fewer years.Many upstart blockbusters nonplus been driven by special effects eating on their popularity. 5 In his analysis of Hollywoods often nervous depiction of cyberspace in films such as The Lawn Mower Man (1992), Paul Young indicates that cyberphobic films overstress the power of the visual in their reliance on digital technolog y 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 ( unanimous nevertheless common) view is expressed by film master Jean Douchet Today cinema has stipulation up the purpose and the ventureing behind individual knife thrusts and narrative, in favour of images rootless, textureless images designed to violently impress by ceaselessly inflating their spectacular qualities. 7 Spectacle, it seems, is winning the war against narrative all along the line.Even a brief statistical analysis reveals that special effects driven films fork out enjoyed capacious recent success, garnering an average of over 60% of the global revenue taken by the top 10 films from 1995-1998, compared to an average of 30% over the preceding four years. 8 Given that the proportion of box office revenue taken by the top 10 films has held steady or increased slimly in the context of a rapidly expa nding total market, this indicates that a handful of special-effects films are generating huge revenues each year. opus such figures dont offer a total picture of the film industry, let alone reveal which films which will exert lasting cultural influence, they do offer a snapshot of present-day(a) cultural bask refracted through studio marketing budgets. Coupled to the recent popularity of paracinematic forms, such as large format and special venue films, the renewed tenseness 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 viewing (television, video, the internet), but a transformation from within 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 play to spectacular film rides can also be conceived as a return whether renaissance o r regression is less clear to an in front range of film-making famously dubbed the cinema of attractiveness by Tom Gunning.Gunning long ago signalled this sense 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, developments in the 1990s stress the point The advent of Imax 3-D and its future prospects, in tandem with the broader strains of a New Sensationalism, provide an occasion to draw some friendships with the early history of cinema and the re current dialectic asphyxiateed by the primacy of the visual and, for lack of a better term, the sensory. 0 In what follows here, I want to further consider the loops and twists of these debates, not so often with the grand ambition of resolving them, but firstly of adding some assorted voices to the discussion particularly the voices of those involved in film turnout. 11 My pattern is not to elevate empiricism over theory, but to promote dialogue between different domains of film culture which meet all too rarely, and, in the process, to question the rather narrow terms in which digital cinema has frequently entered recent theoretical debates.Secondly, I want to consider the relation between narrative and spectacle as it is manifested in these debates. My concern is that thither seems to be a danger of confusing a number of different trajectories such as cinemas on-going efforts to demarcate its experience from that of domestic entertainment technologies, and the turn to blockbuster exploitation strategies and conflating them under the heading of digital cinema.While digital technology sure as slam intersects with, and significantly overlaps these developments, it is by no means co-extensive with them. Spectacular locomotes cinema in the digital domain Putting aside the inevitable hype about the metamorphosis of Hollywood into Cybe rwood, like many another(prenominal) others I am convinced that digital technology constitutes a profound revolution in cinema, primarily because of its capacity to shave across all 4 sectors of the industry simultaneously, affecting film production, narrative conventions and hearing experience.In this respect, the only adequate point of reference for the erudition and extent of current changes are the transformations which took place with the opening of synchronised belong in the 1920s. However, speckle the fundamental level at which change is occurring is widely blemishd, it has been discussed primarily in terms of the impact of CGI (computer-generated imaging) on the film image. A more production-oriented approach would most likely begin elsewhere with what Philip Brophy has argued is among the most overlooked aspects of film theory and critical review (both modern and postmodernist strands) gruelling. 2 A brief flick through recent articles on digital cinema confirms this neglect Manovich locates digital cinema solely in a historical lineage of moving pictures no(prenominal) of the articles in the recent Screen dossier mention sound, and even Eric Fadens Assimilating New Technologies proterozoic Cinema, Sound and Computer Imaging only uses the introduction of synchronised sound as an historical analogy for discussing the coeval effect of CGI on the film image13. While not entirely unexpected, this silence is however somewhat urprising, given the fact that digital sound technology was adopted by the film industry removed earlier and more comprehensively than was CGI. And, at to the lowest degree until the early 1990s with films like Terminator 2 (1991) and Jurassic Park (1993), the effect on audience experience was arguably far 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 far as audiences are implicated 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 seem 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 roughly no 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 experience compared to what you are seeing on the screen.However, the visual bias of most film theory is so distributive that this transformation often passes unremarked. Part of the problem is that we lack the necessary conceptual armature at that place are no linkages which pull terms such as 5 aural or listener into the sort of semantic chain joining spectacle and spectator to the adjective spectacular. Film sound-mixer Ian McLoughlin notes Generally speaking, most slew are visually trained from birth. Very few people are trained to have a aural language and, as a result thither isnt much discussion about the philosophy of the sound get behind. .. There has been very, very little 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 realisation of changes initiated with the introduction of Dolby Stereo in 1975. (On the other hand, the fact that CGI entered a special effects terrain already substantially altered by techniques of motion control, robotics and animatronics didnt prevent critical attention to it. Four- course Dolby stereo led to a new era of sound experimentation beginning with films such as Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third cast (1977). As renowned sound mixer Roger hazardous (whose credits include Return of the Jedi, 1983 Shine, 1996 and Romeo + Ju liet, 1996) recalls Prior to that, film sound hadnt changed for probably 30 years. It was mononucleosis Academy Star Wars was one of the first films that I can remember where people started coming out of the theatre talking about the sound underwrite. 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 emphasis was given to boosting low frequency response, explicitly mirroring the amplified ambience of rock music. There was also greater attention given to the spatialisation of discrete sound elements within the theatre.As Rich Altman has argued, these developments presented a significant challenge to one of the fundamental precepts of untarnished Hollywood narrative the unity of sound and image and the subservience of sound effects to narrative logic Whereas Thirties film practice fostered unconsciou s visual and psychological spectator identification with characters who appear as a perfect amalgam of image and sound, the Eighties ushered in a new kind of intuitive identification, dependent on the sound systems 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 contact with a sonic 6 source instead, it is the whole body that establishes a relationship, marching to the beat of a different woofer. Where sound was once hidden behind the image in order to allow more complete identification with the image, now the sound source is flaunted, fostering a separate 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 c inema had begun prior to the digital threshold, and well before 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 caused a new potential for dramatic sound effects, in practice most film makers remained limited by a combination of logistical and economic constraints. In this respect, the transition to digital sound has been critical in creating greater latitude for experimentation within existing budget parameters and production time frames. In terms of sound production, Roger Savage argues The main advantages in digital are the quality control, the speed and the flexibility. This is a theme which is repeated with regard to the computerisation of other areas of film making such as picture editing and CGI. ) Enhanced speed, flexibility and control st em from a reduction in the hire for physical handling and a refinement of precision in place and manipulating individual elements. In sound production, libraries of analogue taping reels each holding 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 maven digital workstation. There is no need for a separate transfer bay, and, since digital processing involves the manipulation of electronic data, there is no risk of contaminating 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 raise ability to add complexity and texture to soundtracks. In terms of sound reproduction, the most marked change resulting from six track digital theatre systems is im turn up stereo legal 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 marketing 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 level of audio detail. Ian McLoughlin (who, amongst many other things, shares sound mixing 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 kindle 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 othe rwise 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 enormously 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 chest cavities organism punched due 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 nuisance factor of loud sound tracks. Because audiences are getting turned off by o verly jarring, overly sharp, soundtracks. This comment is worth keeping in see 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 trajectory of contemporary cinema than spectacle. Secondly, it warns against making hasty generalisations when assessing the long-term implications of CGI.While digital imaging undoubtedly represents a significant icon shift 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 contemporary 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 television camera movement, locatio n shooting and acting style). Painting with light In contrast to the relative dearth of attention given to changes in areas such as sound and picture editing, digital manipulation of the film image has received massive publicity.While this is partly the result of deliberate studio promotion, it also reflects the profound changes in cinematic experience that computers have set in train. When we can see Sam 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 evident that the whole notion of photo-realism which has long been a central plank of cinematic credibility is changing. But how should this change be understood? Is it simply that live action footage can now be supplemented with CG elements which replace earlier illusionistic techniques such as optical printing, but leave cinemas unique identity as an art of recording intact? Or is a new paradigm emerging in which cinema becomes more like painting or animation?Lev Manovich has recently taken the latter position to an extreme, literary argument 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 coke cinemas regime of visual realism, the result of automatically recording visual reality, was only an exception, an isolated accident in the history of visual imitation . 17 While I suspect that Manovich significantly underestimates the peculiar attractions of automatic recording (which produced what Walter Benjamin termed the photographs irreducible spark of contingency, what Barthes ontologised as the hotographic punctum), it is clear the referential bond 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 fil m production and consumption. Moreover, cinema swiftly moved from adherence to the ideal of direct correspondence between image and object which lay at the heart of classical championships to photographic referentiality. cheating 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 collage, shot matching and continuity had coalesced into the paradigm of 9 classical narrative, and cinematic credibility belonged more to the movement of the text rather than the photographic moment a shift Jean-Louis Commolli has neatly described in terms of a journey from purely optical to psychological realism. 18 Within this paradigm all imaginable tactics were permissible in order to imbue pro-filmic action with the stamp of cinematic authority theatrical techniques such as performance, make-up, costumes, tinder and set design were augmented by specif ically cinematic techniques such as stop motion photography and rear projection, as well 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, rather than in relation to an abstract category of realism in general. Prince argues 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 generalization 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 block images, but to make these images look as if they might have been filmed. This includes adding various defects, such as film grain, lens flare, motion blur and edge halation. CG effects guru Scott Billups argues that film makers had to educate 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 organises that never got written into computer programs.Theyd say Why do you want to muffle the resolution? Why do you want to blur it? . 20 10 By the 1990s many software product programs had addressed this issue. As Peter Webb (one of the developers of fl ame up) notes Flame has a lot of tools that introduce the flaws that one is trained to see. Even though we dont maintain 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 underlying the development of montage earlier this century, as a more abstract relation to individual shots became the basis for their reconstitution as an organic t ext. 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 mutation of morphing. However, while perceptual realism was achieved relatively painlessly 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 wave 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 mak ers I noted above, rather than a deeply felt desire to manufacture 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 Judgement 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 used in film making to how soon this would happen. The subsequent rash of CGI-driven blockbusters, topped by the billion 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. Anythi ng 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 depicting 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 remembering that realism is a notoriously slippery goal, whether 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 Dark City, 1998) bear repeating Maybe well look back in 10 years and notice that we left things out that we didnt know needed 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 little 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. Then you might look back at Star Wars and say, That looks terrible. 26Clearly, George Lucas shared 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. Stop 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 fi lm 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 ability 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 bewitching 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 (Independence 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 argument put forward by those such as Sean Cubitt and Scott Bukatman is that contemporary special effects tend to displace narrative insofar as they introduce a disjunctive temporality evocative of the sublime.Focusing on Doug Trumbulls work, Bukatman emphasises the pondering relationship completed 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 Girls Best Friend, where narrative progress gives way to visual fascination. His ensample is drawn from a strikingly similar terrain to that which inspired Laura Mulveys well-known 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 numbers 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 erotic 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 recognize that they dont conceive the relationship between spectacle and narrative in terms of opposition 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 consistently 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). Similar concerns emerged with debates in France over auteur theory in the 1950s, where the literary qualities of script were opposed 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 governmental connotations. Perhaps as a reaction to the extremity of pronouncements by those such as Peter Gidal, there has been a widesprea d 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 beingness told, and what sort of spectacles are being deployed in their telling? While it is easy to lament the quality of story-telling in contemporary blockbusters, few critics seriously maintain that such films are without narrative.A more productive framework is to analyse why explicitly mythological films such as the Star Wars cycle have been able to grip popular imagination at this particular historical conjuncture, marrying the bare bones of fairy-tale narrative structures to the ingraining 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 transform ations 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 flirtation with non-linear and interactive films was a shooting star which came and went with the CD-ROM, while most contemporary blockbusters conform smoothly to established cine-genres (sci-fi, horror, disaster and action- 14 dventure predominating), with a significant number being direct re-makes of one-time(a) films done better in the digital domain. One of the more interesting observations about possible trends in the industry is put forward by jam 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. Now 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 i t 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 cutting edge special effects shots is inevitably sold around star participation, as well as spectacle (as were films such as The Robe, 1953 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 wizardd 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 hundred and one theatres are due to open, taking the total to 364, an increase of 120% in 6 years).More significantly, the majority 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 momentum 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 medium 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-oriented, it would be equally as foolish to ignore the cultural and commercial imperatives which still converge around telling a good story. 5 Distraction 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 initiation 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 w hich turn womans face and body into a fetish), as well as the more voyeuristic strategy of narrative, were both attuned to the anxious imagination 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 desired and sought to circumscribe or punish. Nevertheless, even within this heavily constrained context, spectacle could also assume a radical get going by interrupting the smooth functioning of narrative, disturbing the rules of identification and the systematic institution 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 male protagonist). Can spectacle still exert a progressive function in contemporary cinema?While most critics answer this question negatively without even pos ing 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 productive 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 (potentially) 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 undeveloped reference to the primal power of attraction, draws nourishment from Siegfried Kracauers early writings on the concept of mismanagement. In the 1920s, Kracauer set up bewitchery 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 revised 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 consolidated 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 footling glamour of movie stars rather than the putative substanc e 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 facing those trying to utilise spectacle as a progressive element in contemporary culture. However, it is equally important to acknowledge that this problem cannot be obstinate 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 no t 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 arenas as diverse as sport (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 white collar worker). In contemporary terms, I would argue that the relevant t ransformation is the process of globalization. While this is a complex, heterogeneous and uneven phenomenon, a relevant aspect to consider here is Hollywoods increasing reliance on oversea 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 building films around spectacular action setpieces. Equally as ignificantly, the predominant 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 occasionally make themselves felt there), but appe ar symptomatically in the structure of contemporary viewing experience. The repetition of awe and astonishment repeatedly evoked by impossible images as the currency of todays cutting edge cinema undoubtedly functions to prepare us for the uncertain pleasures of living in a world we suspect we will soon no longer recognise it is not simply realism but reality which 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 rubric 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 union 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 cont ext, 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 the filmic diegesis, the same commodities they could purchase in the cinema foyer. As Lucie Fjeldstad (then head of IBMs multimedia 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.