Cyberdrama and Cinema: Reshaping Cinema for the Digital World
How will cinema be affected when the digital takes over the physical? I’ve talked about this briefly in my previous post about cyberspace, and I think it’s relevant enough to talk about again.
The digital world is one that is rapidly evolving. New technology is constantly coming out, and with each new invention, the old is being pushed further and further into disuse. In cinema, the biggest debate is the use of physical film stock versus digital technology. While film stock may still have qualities that the digital is not able to replicate, the digital is quickly catching up.
It’s strange that advancements in digital technology have always been towards trying to replicate film. Film has its own unique qualities (grainy textures, muted colors), so why wouldn’t the digital embrace its own unique qualities? This will be the next step in cinema.
In class, we talked a lot about story and how it will evolve as we enter the digital age. We asked questions like, “Will the original three act structure be foregone?” We said it may, depending on what the medium calls for. Naturally, narrative will test the boundaries of its new medium and see where they land.
Cinema will do the same thing, both formally and narratively. Digital technology has opened up new possibilities for what cinema can do. The obvious example is the improvement with CGI. Films like The Avengers and Transformers seem to be at the forefront when it comes to CGI technology. These films both push the boundaries of digital technology to find their limits. Films such as Naishuller’s Hardcore Henry and Inarritu’s Birdman are also using digital technology to push forward the digital aspects of a film in a more formal sense rather than technological. Hardcore Henry is a film that attempts to replicate the first-person shooter aspect of video games. It uses digital technology to create special effects and help enhance the overall feel of the film. Birdman is a film that has only 9 cuts. This pushes digital technology in two ways: (1) it pushes the strength of the digital camera to do extremely long takes (sometimes more than 20 minutes long), and (2) it uses digital effects to mask a few cuts so that it is seamless.
Cinema should also strive to experiment with narrative form in the digital age. Just as Godard and Truffaut experimented with narrative in the 60s, filmmakers should attempt to experiment with digital narrative. How can we use the qualities of digital technology to our advantage to tell a unique story?
This is the question we should keep in the back of our minds when we make movies or watch movies. There are talks of cinema moving into virtual reality, which would certainly take advantage of the digital and call for a change in narrative. There are also other platforms like Vine and Snapchat that may influence the way we think about visual story-sharing. Cinema will continue to grow and evolve into the digital age, but as I said in another blog post, it will never become interactive — that would ultimately destroy the art of cinema.
