Framed time
by Tom Ruffles
[ bookreviews ]
Film as a medium is dying, and digital is replacing it. Garrett Stewart focuses on the period since 1995, when this change has become seemingly ineluctable. It is something the general viewer barely thinks about, apart perhaps from discussions of the use of special effects in big-budget spectaculars, yet digitisation is having far-reaching effects on the way in which we consume the moving image, and the ways in which, according to Stewart, filmmakers handle, or mishandle, narrative.
He provides definitions of the two types of cinema. "Filmic cinema: temporal change indexed by segments, then remobilized frame by frame. Digital cinema: time seeming to stand still for internal mutation." (This head-scratching sense of vagueness is quite typical of his style.) Framed Time charts the implications of the changeover and shows how the end of the photochemical century has impacted on methods of 'filming', post-production, editing, reproducing and exhibiting films. The result is a profound effect on the narrative structures of the finished product, resulting in what he terms "the postrealist narrative." Frame time, the individual frames which pass serially in quick succession, yields to framed time, which is: "the sense here by way of a postfilmic narratography, that time, captured within a single pictorial field, can then - via certain aberrant plot devices - be morphed [doubtless utilising Christian Metz's notion of trucage which gets a lot of air time] like a freestanding image rather than undergone like a real duration."
This I think does convey the sense that digital is more manipulable, down to the pixel level, than celluloid, and the sense of experimentation with the image that digital allows more readily than film. But while these are legitimate concerns, Stewart's focus is primarily on how digitisation has coincided with a number of films, European and American, which exhibit fractured narrative structures, in the case of The Lake House downright incoherence. What he does not give sufficient attention to is the way in which digital non-linear editing has affected pace, enabling much faster cutting, to the extent that some movies look like extended MTV videos, requiring an ability on the part of the viewer to absorb information faster but at the expense of depth of meaning.
In order to demonstrate his thesis that "time's pace gives way to timespace", Stewart discusses a number of films, but these are all carefully selected and are not typical of the bulk of production in either Europe or the US. So films such as Memento, Insomnia, Run Lola Run, The Matrix, Dark City, The Sixth Sense, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and so on, are all interesting in their various ways but for every film that plays self-consciously with temporality or melds reality and the fantastic, there is another where digital is chosen simply because it is cheaper and easier to use, and its narratological effects are invisible to the viewer; in other words, it might as well have been shot on film as far as structure is concerned. By focusing on "the aberrant" he has given a skewed analysis, rather as the media obsessing about hoodies exaggerates the incidence of crime. But it has to be said that he is a sympathetic critic, and examines a wide range of films with care, particularly contributing to the worthwhile project of rehabilitating the career of Robin Williams.
The impact of the digital revolution is an important issue, but this long book makes exploring it heavy going, larded as it is with neologisms - for example, temportation (which gets an entire chapter), narratography and various cognate terms, irereal, medial etc; high-level conceptual connections; and a generous helping of theory. If you shy away from the likes of Metz, Lyotard and especially the oft-cited Deleuze as pretentious obscurantism, sadly you may find yourself out of sympathy with Stewart's presentation. Calling an essay by Thomas Elsaesser 'cryptic', as he does, is rather kettles and pots.
On reaching the end of the book one may well ask: does this paradigm shift matter? If clunky old film goes the way of analogue telephone exchanges and the magic lantern, will we miss it? Perhaps an opening up of narrative structure is a creative advance and will make cinema going a more rewarding experience. And on one level, watching a film like Memento or Irreversible proceed backwards is an interesting aesthetic experiment, whatever one might think of the content. However, judging by the illustrations in this book, I think we might miss certain advantages of film, at least for a while. Stewart notes that what we still tend to call "frame enlargements" in books on 'film' - it's a tough habit to break, but as he points out, it is going to be difficult to find a new name - is really now invariably a misnomer because it is so easy to lift images from DVDs on the computer and the result is actually a frame reduction of the on-screen image (well, I suppose film-based frame enlargements are actually reductions of the on-screen image as well, but I know what he means). More rightly called screen grabs or captures, he says "they are now electronically seized on the run - usually with the aid of a pause button - from a given configuration of the digital array on the monitor."
And that I think is a problem. Stewart provides a large number of grabs captured on the run that, while being taken from the film under discussion, have an arbitrary feel, and the quality of reproduction is generally awful. Sniffy he may be about David Bordwell, ironically dismissing him as a formalist, but compare, for example, the stills in the highly readable The Classical Hollywood Cinema, which Bordwell co-wrote with Staiger and Thompson, as a good example of a book that relies on its illustrations to make concise educational points. These were not 'grabbed' but were chosen with care, and generally look beautiful on the page, whereas those lifted from a DVD are murky in comparison, and when printed in black and white show a marked loss of contrast. Perhaps this will change and the quality improve, but in this transitional phase, I feel we have lost something in gaining the convenience - for authors at any rate - of the computer over the Steenbeck.
And it is not just the presentation of stills in books that has suffered. Cinemas are gradually increasing the numbers of digital projectors, not least in Britain, because the Film Council's Digital Screen Network subsidies their installation. But proponents, in their reasonable concern for the economics of distribution, tend to ignore the loss of clarity compared to a good crisp 35mm print. I was very disappointed when I went to see a cinema screening of a digital copy of Brief Encounter (a cinema experience I could compare to seeing the same title on film), because the luminosity of the original had gone, making it an inferior, definitely a different, experience to watching a film copy.
Digital may be the bright shiny future, the electrograph taking over from "the fading hegemony of the cinematograph", and once the technology has advanced a bit more and brought under narrative control we may see further aesthetic benefits, but progress to date has a downside. In time, we may see entirely what Stewart calls the institution's "eclipse as an indexical cinema", what is seen on the screen being identical with what is in front of the camera (though that indexicality was never unproblematic), the real actor giving way to the synthespian in a computer-generated mise en scène. At that point we really will be in an entirely post-film age. Not to worry: what we end up with might be as good, just different, as long as we continue to explore the human condition and not a shiny facsimile of it.
