In Between

In Between - How the Cinematographic Narrative is Adapting to Digital Encoding

(Written by Tom Tykwer, Translated by Robert Blasiak)

Avatar
It was just recently that Gertrud Koch pointed out a very obvious fact to me, namely that AVATAR - the film on everyone's lips these days - is a movie that not only explores the technical possibilities of cinema and its potential for immersing the audience, but at the same time tells a story that is itself centered around our yearning towards immersion and our fascination with being transported away by identifying with those things foreign to us. Somehow I had never noticed that this aspect of the AVATAR plot constitutes a quite unusual variation on a very familiar theme. Usually in the science fiction genre, the stories have the life forms being reconstructed replicants of humans. As soon as these replicants develop an expanded level of consciousness, they suffer from the awareness that while they feel human, they're not - they're merely replicants.
But now in James Cameron's film, the tables are turned: the protagonist is beamed into a synthetic body and sent via a remote control system into the alien world - only to realize that his new synthetic life is far superior to his "real" life. In this regard, the Avatar construct is for all intents and purposes a dream machine, and as an object of our fascination, it is of course right at home in our movie theaters. Cameron uses the basic mechanisms of an elaborate video game which one first has to get used to and then must use to acquire and train a range of abilities before the synthetic life can begin and be enjoyable.

It's Not Me Playing
In terms of accessing information and all other communicative processes, our daily life is guided by user interfaces - the pictures on computers, which are our virtual gateway to the world, inform our imaginations and the arenas of our fantasies. Modern cinema also adapts to these fantasies, whether it wants to or not. AVATAR is a rather obvious example, but even the more idiosyncratic writer/directors such as Park-Chan Wook and Richard Linklater attest to the growing presence of a software visuality (and acoustic tendency) in today's cinematographic vocabulary.
A large portion of modern software, on the other hand, is heavily influenced by the gaming industry: how one navigates programs, how strategic and technical pathways are negotiated - whether in the context of scientific research programs or search machine interfaces - have taken on an increasingly game-like character. We work from level to level; we conquer the knowledge that we had been seeking by taking a game-like voyage through a labyrinth of attractively prepared virtual possibilities.
Our systematic thinking process and the sequences of organized dynamic games have therefore come closer together - our input needs have changed correspondingly. If there is no discernible game concept, then we react suspiciously.
Using my computer, I also have contact with the world without having to run the risk of physical harm. Even more importantly, in most of the forums for interaction, I can create a new identity for myself: using an invented name, a fake photo, an unfamiliar song. I am who I want to be - a motto that is older than any computer even if you just take into account the cinema and the models for identification it offers. It is not "me" who is called into question when I'm online, but rather my verbal, imagined, dreamed-up cyber-avatar.
Thus, we have become accustomed first and foremost to being incognito, and secondly to interacting with the so-called outside world in a gaming-manner. Whatever medium happens to comprehensively cater to these two parameters will raise our curiosity.
The narrative film is still unparalleled by other art forms in offering the most convincing basic structure of this form for enchanting viewers. The extent to which traditional narrative patterns and visual methods have been exhausted and whether they must change more fundamentally than over the past hundred years, will be seen in the next few years. Because in the digital age, there will be an imperceptible, but accelerating redefinition of our sense of perception.

Black Holes
A technical example. One prominent technical characteristic of digital media, which clearly separates it from tradition film (i.e. individual images developed on celluloid) is the fact that since the projected images are just converted codes (and were never images in the first place), there are no longer any black frames in between the images during projection. These black frames were created by the cap of the Maltese cross and made it possible for the audience to avoid the irritation of watching one image bleed into the next. Perhaps this peculiarity of the time-honored projection mechanism is overrated (Alexander Kluge and Christoph Schlingensief have conducted closer analysis of these black frames). But it can still be concluded that the disappearance of these black frames - that we don't exactly see, but nevertheless sense and feel, and not just because they cause the flickering of the projection - points to certain problems, which have developed within the so-called "unlimited possibilities" of digital cinema. The digital narrative, for example, has trouble dealing with interstitial spaces, ellipses, and omissions.
The ellipse as a testament of "old" cinema - it is certainly a product of film editing, for example in overcoming the physical space by linking two sites, but of course at the same time it opens up an associative space by leaving out images that may have existed in between.
Since THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, which for me marked a sea change in film aesthetics, the cinematographic narrative has come under increasing pressure for the simple reason that it has technical opportunities for reducing elliptic potentials. Not only in his "and then..." strategy of following parallel, but exceedingly linear storylines, but also in regard to his handling of geography and characters, Peter Jackson's 10+ hour film struggles beneath the massive burden of completeness. Can't leave anything out! Every path - whether it's topographic, intellectual or metaphysical, had to be comprehensively illustrated. This style smoothes out the seemingly complicated substructure of the project just like mortar on the surface of a rough, uneven stone. Afterwards, it certainly seems perfect, but it runs the risk of potentially seeming lifeless.
Editing in popular cinema has changed dramatically in the 2000s due to the impression that locations should no longer be experienced via montages, but rather by virtual flying connections that should move as quickly as possible. In Peter Jackson's goliath of a film, every character and every location can be observed from all possible perspectives, which leads to a type of overkill in terms of the amount of visual information for each object. While this may leave the audience sated, it may also induce a greater degree of passivity.
I don't intend to generalize here and I also think it's pointless to complain about expensive or hyper-technical films: we love a lot of these movies, a point which actually doesn't even need restating. Nevertheless, however, it's apparent that we take a particular shine to those films that afford a place for the unfinished, the indescribable, and the unshowable. We also like those films that don't presume to be able to do everything or show everything - this doesn't exist, this "everything". Within this presumption is the naïve idea that abstraction is surmountable if one just finds the ultimate, definitive, perfect image for an idea, situation, or feeling. It's naïve, because in order for any narrative image to exist in an artistic fashion, it needs to flow back to the audience from the screen. The individual in the audience then has to fill in the empty spaces, open room and ellipses with the weight of their own fantasy; the individual wants to decide where their thoughts will take them and needs elbow room for this exercise.
There are lots of microscopic areas of cinematic expression like this, which gain a certain type of new texture through the process of digitalization - a restored level, which carries with it newly formulated dimensions that withstand deep new interpretations.

Fragment Films
The question as to whether cinema is actually developing in a productive direction due to these innovations remains largely unanswerable during these quantum leaps forward. It is certain, however, that our longing and passion for immersive narrative modes - the more graphic, the better - has not decreased. Quite the opposite in fact.
At the same time, new rhythmic requirements have emerged due to the daily growth in accessing visual/acoustic fragments (YouTube, Facebook and the deluge of teasers and trailers online). Accordingly, a narrative beehive model is followed in which a multitude of individual narrative honeycombs defend their claims to entitlement within the closed chapter structure. Within these somewhat more piecemeal narrative combinations, it is easier for the recipient to switch on or tune out again - cinema therefore comes closer to the principle of fragmentation in the serialized TV format.
Is the digital revolution therefore threatening to produce a type of film narrative that appears so familiar to us in a medial sense that it somehow doesn't allow for the flights of imagination produced by reading fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm or an epic by Tolstoy?
Of course not. Just like any other innovation, it reshapes our existing views and tests old traditions - but it will not succeed in eliminating them.
It is also by no means the case that we will be in a sense required to choose the new technologies over time-tested medial communication paradigms and narrative principles. Don't expect directors to be hindered by the greatly expanded possibilities of visualization in choosing to let elements of their stories remain vague and incomplete, to dwell on intimations, or to dismiss a spectacular visual effect for a more reserved and plain small-scale effect.
It is also improbable that the audience for this type of narrative will disappear. The people who watched Buñuel's 1927 movie AN ANDALUSIAN DOG or David Lynch's 1987 film BLUE VELVET have always been in the minority, but this is still a countable, visible and relevant minority. Today, the heir's to this legacy watch the movies of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Matthew Barney and Paul Thomas Anderson. Anderson, it can be pointed out, does not shy away from making use of the innovations of the digital age without endangering the open and varied construction of his work.
Nevertheless: consider for a moment the distance between the two preeminent milestones of avant garde filmmaking - Buñuel and Lynch's work is separated by 60 years. Then you can imagine - at least in a quantitative respect - what cinema will look like if we project into the future 60 years after BLUE VELVET was made, namely the year 2047.
Buñuel's film was black and white, silent and just thirty minutes long. Lynch's film is an extremely color-intensive, two and a half hour trip in Dolby Stereo. The key avant garde film of 2047 would have to offer a lot in order to maintain this increasing trend.
If nothing interferes, then in 2047 I will be 82 years old and I may be able to ask my 38 year old son whether he could show me this film, which might be made up of 60 separate 90 second chunks and may be presented in his virtual living space with a 360° soundwave system.