Cinema: Artificial Art Meets Artificial Intelligence
As debates over artificial intelligence in cinema shake up Hollywood, will the technology be used to empower human creators or to replace them? Will we use these algorithms to create better reproductions of reality or to make a better world?
The Darkness
It’s just 10 years since digitally shot films became more common than celluloid productions among the top 100 grossing films in Hollywood. To some filmmakers, the crisp realness of the digital image seemed to be at odds with the artistic qualities of the analog medium. In 2016 Vox described Film vs Digital as “the most contentious debate in the film world” and led with the quote “I don’t know, it looks weird. It’s the picture on the TV; it just looks … too real.” In the same article Quentin Tarantino shifts focus from the camera to the projector: “If we’re acquiescing to digital projection, we’ve already ceded too much ground to the barbarians. The fight is lost if all we have is digital… To me, that’s just television in public.” By the end of 2017, 98% of the world’s cinema screens were digital.
Christopher Kenneally’s documentary ‘Side By Side’ (2012) explores the development of cinema and the impact of digital filmmaking. Producer and narrator Keanu Reeves frames the narrative as an incremental innovation: “This isn’t like going from silent to talkies. It’s not like going from black & white to Technicolor; it’s actually more subtle than that. Where the documentary leads to is to talk about the philosophical aspects of film, like when Martin Scorsese says that people don’t believe the image anymore, but then Jim Cameron says, ‘When was it ever real?’”
The change from film to digital was minimal at the level of conscious perception but represented a radical departure from the mechanics of the film-viewing process. The flicker of a film projector used the rapid interplay of light and darkness to create the illusion of motion from still images. Amos Vogel, in ‘Film As A Subversive Art’ (1974) explains that “The essence of cinema is not light, but a secret compact between light and darkness. Half of all the time at the movies is spent by the transfixed victims of this technological art in complete darkness. There is no image on the screen at all. In the course of a single second, forty-eight periods of darkness follow forty-eight periods of light.” On a technical level, digital projection removed the darkness from the screen, replacing it with a continuous stream of light. But maybe this darkness had a purpose, like silence in music, creating a rest interval hidden in the space between notes? Vogel challenges us to delve deeper, to think about what’s happening under the surface: “Could it be precisely during the periods of total darkness — 45 out of every 90 minutes of film we see — that our voracious subconscious, newly nourished by yet another provocative image, ‘absorbs’ the work’s deeper meaning and sets off chains of associations?”
Artificial Art
Cinema is a magic trick, created by humans using machines. Its artificiality is what makes it an artform. The word ‘artificial’ is defined as something produced by humans, made by human skill. It is opposed to anything created naturally but is often an imitation or substitute for something natural. It is a simulation. Artificial and synthetic both mean man-made.
Rudolf Arnheim published ‘Film As Art’ in 1932 to refute the claim that “Film cannot be art, for it does nothing but reproduce reality mechanically.” To Arnheim, the unreality of the medium, the human aspects of it that guided the mechanics, were its essence: “In painting, the way from reality to the picture lies via the artist’s eye and nervous system, his hand and, finally, the brush that puts strokes on canvas.” He observed that the first films in the early music-hall days depicted everyday things in a lifelike fashion and pleasure was derived purely from the subject matter, but then: “A film art developed only gradually when the movie makers began consciously or unconsciously to cultivate the peculiar possibilities of cinematographic technique and to apply them toward the creation of artistic productions.” Arnheim worried that the introduction of sound (and later color) would move the medium in the wrong direction, arguing that: “Mechanical advancement has led to greater realism, and a corresponding loss in artistry.”
Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1935), describes the process by which modern technological reproduction, while removing a work from its authenticity (uniqueness) and its ‘aura’, could also lead to a democratization of art by making it available to the masses and therefore introduce an entirely new and revolutionary change in the experience of the artwork. “With mechanical reproduction, which appears in its most radical forms in film and photography, millions of images of an original are circulated, all of which lack the ‘authentic’ aura of their source. This process both affects and is the effect of changing social conditions in which all previously unique and sacred institutions have become equal.” Benjamin proposed that a copy was of higher social significance than an original and that the act of reproducing art had emancipated the art itself. He opens his essay with a quote from Paul Valery: “We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.”
Arnheim and Benjamin were both German and Jewish. Arnheim’s book was published the year before the Nazis came to power (1933) and Benjamin’s essay was written in exile two years after. While Arnheim understood that humans using machines could make art as a way to help people understand the world, Benjamin saw the potential for art and technology to be used as political instruments that could liberate humanity and help make a better world. In a world of Fascist aestheticization of politics, he argued for the politicization of art: “Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.”
Artificial Intelligence
If ‘artificial’ refers to a human simulation of the natural world, artificial intelligence is defined as the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think and act like humans. ‘Intelligence’ encompasses the ability to learn and to reason, to generalize, and to infer meaning. This is not a small incremental change like going from film to digital but a truly disruptive innovation of epic proportions. The President of Microsoft has compared AI to the invention of the printing press and the CEO of Google claims that it is more important to humanity than fire or electricity.
The disruptive impact of AI-powered processes will be felt across the full spectrum of the Media and Platforms Value Chain — from production and post-production, to marketing, distribution, and exhibition. But will this imminent transformation still be driven by humans when writers can be replaced by chatbots, actors by avatars, and cameras by text prompts?
Hollywood writers are still on strike, directors have just reached a tentative three year agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) including “Confirmation that AI is not a person and that generative AI cannot replace the duties performed by members”, and the actors union SAG-AFTRA is in talks demanding that “The terms and conditions involving rights to digitally simulate a performer to create new performances must be bargained with the union.”
In a 2018 article David Nordfors and Vint Cerf propose that “There is a disconnection between the pace and progress of the technical achievements made by innovators and entrepreneurs and the ways in which those technologies have added to human happiness… We could use our powers for making each other — and thereby ourselves — more valuable, but instead we are fearing to lose our jobs to machines and be considered worthless by the economy.” Nordfors and Cerf ask if the AI revolution is different from previous industrial revolutions, quoting an excerpt of original text from the Communist Manifesto, where Bourgeoisie is replaced with Internet Entrepreneurs, Proletariat with On-Demand Workers, and Revolution with Disruption. “Internet entrepreneurship cannot exist without constant disruption of markets, bringing uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions. Internet entrepreneurship has created the modern working class — the on-demand workers, who must sell themselves in bits and pieces. They have become a commodity, exposed to the whims of the market… The lower middle class will gradually become on-demand workers, partly because their specialized skills are rendered worthless by new methods of production.”
Proponents of AI stress the potential of the technology to radically augment the ability of artists to bring their vision to life and give power back to directors from studios and committees. The CultureDAO collective has just published a manifesto for AI cinema, echoing Dogme 95’s ‘Vow Of Chastity’ written in response to changes in cinema driven by digital filmmaking in 1995. Glenn Marshall, winner of the Jury Award at Cannes Short Film Festival in 2022 with an AI generated film, stated in Indiewire that “A.I. is just another tool to create art. All art is ultimately human.” And Kevin Kelly writing in Wired in November 2022 predicted that “Generative AI will alter how we design just about everything. Oh, and not a single human artist will lose their job because of this new technology. It is no exaggeration to call images generated with the help of AI cocreations.”
Rule 10 of the Dogme 95 manifesto states that “The director must not be credited.” Rule 10 of the CultureDAO manifesto states that “The writer and director must not be credited without crediting Artificial Intelligence as a co-writer and co-director.” When Bebe and Louis Barron created the first entirely electronic score for a film (Forbidden Planet) in 1956, the film was not considered for an Oscar in the soundtrack category. “The original screen credit for the film, which was supposed to read “Electronic Music by Louis and Bebe Barron”, was changed at the last moment by a contract lawyer from the American Federation of Musicians. In order to not upset the union, the association with the word music had to be removed. The Barrons were credited with ‘Electronic Tonalities’.”
As artificial art meets artificial intelligence, when our technology can now keep pace with our imagination, maybe we can cocreate a future with machines that can realize human potential? Studios will try to cut costs and filmmakers will try to push boundaries and in the flicker created from the energy of this push and pull it’s possible that a spark will ignite to help make the world a little bit brighter than it was before.
