Contemporary media practices do not spring forth in isolation. They exist relationally, always connected to what has come before them and where they will eventually head. We are endowed with a perceptual tool in the idea of the neo-baroque, which enables us to assess the ways in which new media forms are ultimately shaped by what precedes. In viewing the products of contemporary media through the lens of the neo-baroque, we can come to an understanding of the ways in which technology, economy and industry influence new media forms; how the neo-baroque reiterates the conventions of classical film; and how some media is formed in resistance to its logic — each a significant and ontological dilemma, which serve to complicate our understanding of what is new.
The term ‘baroque’ has a fraught history, one invariably loaded with connotation. Ndalianis (2004) reminds us that this lexis often carries ‘denigratory associations’ — and historically, the baroque has brought with it an intimation of vulgarity and excess. But baroque, and indeed the neo-baroque, has meanings manifold. It is important that we look to its power as a ‘transhistorical state’ (Ndalianis 2004, 5), persisting well beyond the “temporal confines of the seventeenth century” (2004, 9) to our modern media landscape. The case for the neo-baroque is perhaps best made in cinema, where we can see all of the baroque’s formal properties — a primacy of aesthetic, a tendency towards excess — evident in the kind of “contemporary entertainment extravaganzas” (2004, 39) being produced today. The use of special effects and the expansion of narrative universes to encourage viewer immersion is something that finds its roots in the baroque tradition and we can see this being re-articulated in modern media.
As early as 1945, André Bazin theorised in his seminal work, The Ontology of the Photographic Image, that film is fundamentally baroque in nature. He suggests that the ‘plastic arts’ — like sculpture and painting — had an “obsession with likeness” and that the invention of photography and film ultimately “achieved the baroque aim” of freeing them from this preoccupation (7).
By establishing a balance between the symbolic and mechanical reproduction, photography was effectively invoking the baroque. We therefore might suggest that all products of photography and cinema, not just contemporary entertainment, are imbued with an inherent baroque essentialism.
Also central to Bazin’s theory is the notion that the representational tools of photography and film are an expression of a human need to transgress mortality and reality. We can certainly see this sentiment evident in the kinds of cinema we would characterise as neo-baroque today, films that are increasingly more fantastical and otherworldly; progressively diverging further away from realism the more advanced our technological capacities get. One must only consider the surge of investment in comic book adaptations and superhero franchises in recent years to attest to this — overtly transgressing nature in both style and diegesis, and mediated by the the latest digital technology and visual effects.
Advances in digitisation and computer technology are undeniably driving forces in the development of new media forms. It is tempting, then, to view today’s blockbuster or spectacle film as a singularity, a manifestation of economic imperatives from film studios and a natural result of sophisticated production. Ndalianis confirms that “the neo-baroque has logically emerged” from “the rise of conglomeration, multi-media interests and new digital technology” (2011, 39) — and it is evident that visual effects-based films often translate into box office success. However, while we can certainly view these changes through the dual lenses of economic and technological determinism, it might be reductionist to do so.
Elsaesser suggests that the history of cinema has seen “technological innovations all along, but they have always been absorbed and accommodated” (2016, 254) and while digitisation may have made it easier to create and circulate images, it has “yet to transform the way people use these images” (256). We must only look to the meticulously staged special effects of cinema’s past to understand this point. Buster Keaton’s famous house-falling stunt in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), though decidedly analogue, lives on in the public imagination as one of the all-time great spectacles of cinema. It is clear, then, that the neo-baroque predilection for extravaganza has always existed: what has merely changed is how it is achieved.
While we may reject the sweeping notion that digital technology and studio pressures are the sole genesis of the neo-baroque sensibility dominant across contemporary entertainment media, we shouldn’t dismiss their effects entirely. Indeed, one notable consequence of an economically-prioritised model of media production is a reliance on visual effects and spectacle to sell a film, arguably to the detriment of diegetic elements like narrative and characterisation.
A pessimistic account would suggest that “cinema has given up on the purpose and the thinking behind individual shots, in favour of images […] designed to violently impress by constantly inflating their spectacular qualities” (Douchet 2016, 253). Indeed, we often do consider these impressive visual effects to come at the detriment of a film’s content, often relying on rehashed, uninspired narrative tropes or wanting in characterisation.
Interestingly, we can see how this mirrors critical perceptions of baroque art in the seventeenth century, which was, Ndalianis notes, associated with the “degeneration or decline of the classical”, seen as lacking in reason and discipline (2004, 7). This rings true of the kind of criticisms often levelled at today’s blockbuster films. But rather than characterising contemporary entertainment media “as the product of an era steeped in sterile repetition and unoriginality”, Ndalianis urges us to understand this as the expression of a uniquely neo-baroque ‘aesthetic of repetition’ instead (2004, 33).
Following this logic, if we conceive of today’s spectacle film as reliant on established diegetic conventions — regardless of whether form or function takes precedence — it becomes even more difficult to characterise most contemporary entertainment as ‘new’. While Bolter posits that “Hollywood has incorporated computer graphics at least in part in an attempt to hold off the threat that digital media might pose for the traditional linear film” (2000, 68), we might instead be better served by assessing the ways in which new media forms actually reinforce and reiterate these traditions. The neo-baroque film, in particular, is heavily dependent on classical narrative structure and tropes. Ndalianis suggests that it has simply placed these within new contexts (2004, 4) and that the spectacle film typically does not challenge cinematic convention. It is disputable, then, whether we can frame most new media as hugely radical or innovative, even if they are constructed with cutting-edge technology and effects. Classical narrative is, as Elsaesser puts it, “alive and well in the digital age” (2016, 254).
This ontological dilemma — a reliance on the established, to underpin the primacy of form — is arguably the basis for much of the criticism of modern Hollywood blockbusters and spectacle films.
This idea is perhaps best exemplified by a film like James Cameron’s 2009 hit, Avatar. While the film’s “enormous success confirmed that a technological and viewing-experience gimmick had become an industry norm” (Ndalianis 2011, 37), its diegetic elements were arguably derivative and its plot comparable to other films. Many viewers would be hard pressed to recall a memorable quote from Avatar — but the film derived value instead from its visual effects, and this paid dividends at the box office.
Not all contemporary media is created with spectacle in mind, however, and not all new media forms are imbued by a neo-baroque logic — in fact, there is a visible trend of entertainment being created in resistance to what is now, arguably, the dominant aesthetic. What emerges instead is a litany of films, television and games that are deliberately analogue or lo-fi, struggling against the inevitabilities of digitisation.
Kunze (2017) recognises a “tendency among recent films to romanticise film’s technological and aesthetic past,” and recent films like Super 8 (2011) and Hugo (2011) are emblematic of this desire. They attempt to reproduce the visual hallmarks of celluloid and are imbued with a profound nostalgia for what came before.
This is apparent amongst other media forms, too, with Sloan suggesting “a commodification of video game nostalgia was inevitable” (2015, 3) — and indeed, games like Super Meat Boy (2010) and Braid (2008), which deliberately invoke the 8-bit aesthetic of the 1980s, are testament to this.
However, this further complicates our notion of what is ‘new’, because even these rejections of the neo-baroque are ultimately re-articulations of the past, conspicuously remediating older media forms in their attempt to diverge from modern aesthetics. Rather than any one form being uniquely new, what we find, instead, is media’s present and future always enmeshed with the past, unable to escape the spectre of what has preceded it.
With all of this considered, we can see that our media landscape is at a critical point of flux, constantly oscillating between the past and the present in an effort to define itself.
Sperb suggests that “contemporary media will not be purely digital, despite utopic claims to the contrary, but rather will awkwardly negotiate the technological and aesthetic tensions between itself and its analogue predecessors” (2016, 6). The neo-baroque illuminates that juncture.
There will perpetually be new forms and ideas that emerge from this tension, the neo-baroque just one of them. We can only guess to how these will further complicate and define our notions of what is new, what is not, and where cinema will go from here.
Works cited:
Bazin, Andre and Gray, Hugh (1960) “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” Film Quarterly, 13 (4), 4–9.
Bolter, Jay David (2000). “Remediation and the Desire for Immediacy.” Convergence 6: 162–171.
Elsaesser, Thomas (2016). “Digital Cinema and the Apparatus: Archaeologies, Epistemologies, Ontologies.” Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema. The Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 253–266.
Gilbert, Andrew (2016). “The Death of Film and the Hollywood Response.” Senses of Cinema 62, available at <http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/the-death-of-film-and-the-hollywood-response/
Kunze, Peter C (2017). “Review: Flickers of Film: Nostalgia in the Time of Digital Cinema.” The Velvet Trap, no. 79: 131–132.
Murray, Timothy (2008). Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Nardelli, Matilde (2009). “Moving Pictures: Cinema and Its Obsolescence in Contemporary Art.” Journal of Visual Culture 8 (3), 243–64.
Ndalianis, Angela (2004) “Introduction: The Baroque and the Neo-Baroque.” Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1–29.
Ndalianis, Angela (2004) “Polycentrism and Seriality: (Neo-)Baroque Narrative Formations.” Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 31–34.
Ndalianis, Angela (2011). “Caravaggio Reloaded and The Matrix: the Neo-Baroque and Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Experiences. Washington, DC: New Academic Publishing, 37–40.
Ndalianis, Angela (2004). “Virtuosity, special-effects spectacles and architectures of the senses.” Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 151–207.
Sloan, Robin J. S (2015). “Videogames as Remediated Memories.” Games and Culture 10 (6): 525–50.
Sperb, Jason (2016). Flickers of Film: Nostalgia in the Time of Digital Cinema. Rutgers University Press, 1–6.
Films cited:
- Avatar, directed by James Cameron (Lightstorm Entertainment, 2009), DVD.
- Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese (Paramount Pictures, 2011), DVD.
- Steamboat Bill Jr., directed by Charles Reisner (United Artists, 1928), online source.
- Super 8, directed by J.J. Abrams (Paramount Pictures, 2011), DVD.
Games cited:
- Super Meat Boy. Team Meat, 2010.
- Braid. Number None. Microsoft Game Studios, 2008.
