D. N. Rodowick,
The Virtual Life of Film.
Cambridge, Harvard UP, 2007.
ISBN 13:978-0-674-02698-8
US$24.95 (pb)
193pp
(Review copy supplied by Harvard University Press)
Because the digital arts are without substance and therefore not easily identified as objects, no medium-specific ontology can fix them in place. The digital arts render all expressions as identical since they are all ultimately reducible to the same computational notation. The basis of all representation is virtuality: mathematical abstractions that render all signs as equivalent regardless of their output medium. (p. 10)
Therein we can attribute the title of D. N. Rodowick’s Virtual Life of Film, and a subtle foretelling of the optimism that runs throughout this book. Optimism for who? For classical film scholars, of course. Rodowick is in no denial about the coming of the digital age, even in regard to cinema, but he believes that in its death, which he rightly acknowledges happened many years ago, it will find a new virtual life.
This book engages several questions which are hot topics in well known, more recent works by theorists such as Mark B. N. Hansen and Lev Manovich; questions common in the fields of ‘new media’ and ‘digital art’, such as ‘What is a medium?’ and ‘What is virtuality?’ However, because Rodowick’s book focuses on something much more specific, namely film and digital cinema, I believe it is able to tackle these questions more successfully.
As a scholarly work, this book stands out for being particularly reasoned, and a good indication of this is Rodowick’s careful evaluation that we do not live in a ‘post-photographic age’, but in an age where “photography and cinema have rapidly become both more than themselves and something else entirely” (p. 143). And indeed, it is an ontological study of photography and cinema, both in analogical and digital formats, which dominates this book with the aim of explaining this ‘more’ and ‘else’. He begins with the argument that “it is useless to want to define the specificity of any medium according to criteria of ontological self-identification or substantial self-similarity” (p. 19). For instance, “cinematographic specificity rests on the analysis and definition of a code or codes immanent to the set of all films”, yet any instance of film “is itself a conceptual virtuality” whose objects “var[y] unceasingly” and that the practice of extracting codes from it would be an “interminable” process (p. 19). The underlying position from here, for Rodowick, is that the virtuality that digital technology donates to previous mediums can be traced in a genealogy stemming from time-based spatial media like photography and film. And as he makes subsequently clear, it is because they are time based.
Tempering his argument though, Rodowick waits, making the case that film is a “hybrid medium” with “no single leading component” and is not even reducible to a single “essence” (p. 36). By page 37 Rodowick concludes that “all media evolve, then, but not toward a predetermined essence”. Searching for an ontological definition that is complimentary to his case, Rodowick draws largely and strongly from Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed: Reflections on the ontology of film (1971). Cavell’s notion of a medium asserts that every medium is comprised of a set of “automatisms”. Rodowick believes that Cavell’s notion of ontology in no way assumes an essentialism or teleology (p. 42). He quotes Cavell writing that “the notion of automatism codes the experience of [a] work of art as ‘happening of itself’” (p. 44). Automatisms doubtlessly provide opportunity for artists, but also reveal, themselves, further new automatisms to the artist. But this proliferation is always instigated by the artist. Automatisms are created by a mixture of need, luck and our foresight, all within circumstantial limits – predominantly provided by prior automatisms.
Having established this ontological qualification as a framework, Rodowick moves his focus on to photography. He stipulates that photographs, despite appearances, are not ‘representations’. In fact, he ponders, “the more we think about photographs, the more difficult it is to place them ontologically and to understand how they bridge the world and our perception” (p. 55). If we agree that in a painting we do not see a “representation of a physical world referent”, but instead “a complex history of hand-directed actions”, what is it we see in a photograph? (p. 57) Strangely enough, not a physical world referent. For as Rodowick rightly points out, in a photograph, thanks to its causal automatisms, we “see” a “common duration wherein the camera and [an] event were commonly held” (p. 61). “If mimesis there be in photography, it is not spatial. Rather it is the confounding perception that things absent in time can be present in space.” (p. 64). What an obscure truism, because photography and film are most active on the level that they not so much show things but that they areof things, and that is what we ultimately recognize in them. With these two analogical mediums, we know that the content of what we see is something before we know what it is, and that something is the past. The basis of our recognition, in this case, is not spatial but temporal. Photos don’t look at space, though we try to do that through them; in truth, they feel time.
What does this mean? For Cavell it means two things: photography, because it shows us the past, allows us to view the world while holding our real perception of it at a distance (a photo is not our perception); consequently, film represents a moving image of skepticism (pp. 67-8). The image of skepticism can be understood in the sense that we may doubt our perception, what we see, but in viewing something unseen to us, something elsewhen, we are unburdened of our anxiety – we aren’t driving, the photo is. Thus, in their analogical method, photographs do not so much represent, but instead transcribe.
Early on in his book Rodowick states that “photographic realism remains the holy grail of digital imaging” (p. 11). And it is on this premise that he progresses his established argument into issues regarding the digital image, writing that “to consider a photograph or a digital image as perceptually real involves an assumption that such images are representational. Moreover, representation is defined as spatial correspondence” (p. 102). The point being that to “wish to render the digital image identical with photography, it already imagines the photograph as if it were a digital image” (p. 104). Thus, he believes, if we are to insist that analogical images, such as photos, contain “information” which can be quantified in discrete units (via digital media), we find ourselves in the quandary of quantifying something that doesn’t exist – a representation. Instead, we should only say that it “would take 12 million pixels to make an electronic image perceptually similar to a 35mm photographic image” (italics in original) (p. 119). The “effects of perceptual realism produced in digital to analog conversion are not qualitatively equivalent to analog presentation”, because on the one hand we have similarity, and on the other analogy (p. 121). Rodowick categorizes these two not as spatial equivalents, but temporally causative methods of conversion and transcription respectively.
Rodowick makes it clear that the necessary condition of analogical transcription is that inputs and outputs are continuous, whereas digital information requires analog translation (conversion), and consequently means a separation of inputs from outputs (p. 113). In time, as a result of this, we can fail to realise that as similarity replaces analogy, the “outputs” with which we are very familiar may have no direct causal relationship to the events we believe are related to us by these media (p. 123). Rodowick then equates the making of a digital image to something like “a very detailed painting from the information given in a very precise description” (p. 123).
Is a computer a medium? What are its automatisms? Our use of computers for media conversion by digital information requires the input/output separation already explained, and this inevitably severs the physical world from this valuable ‘information’ both through the discontinuity in time and discontinuity in space – a continuity which was the valued essence of transcription. And so, “computers can and will produce ever more convincing homologons, or simulacra of physical world processes, but never analogons, or representations” (p. 129). Moreover, as Rodowick points out, “the ontology of information is…agnostic…to outputs”, and is “insensitive to the qualities of things and thoughts” (p. 130).
Referring as evidence to an artwork of John Whitney’s, Rodowick contends that the “beginnings of electronic and computer art fully acknowledge that the basic automatism of electronic imaging was not taking a picture but modulating a signal” (p. 132). This means that “as a time-based medium, the electronic arts derive their powers from the ability to vary parameters that yield new outputs from given inputs” (p. 132). So in initiating a response to questions of how to define mediums, Rodowick gives us more satisfying answers.
To further qualify his categorization of digital images as time-based, Rodowick locates their most natural existence in the “physical” electronic image (current screening devices). Because of this, he logically argues that digital images “are never fully present to us and are always incomplete in space and in time”, due to the momentary, temporally continuous, and constantly “live” manner in which electronic screens technically render images before our eyes (p. 134) [refer to your computer monitor manual]. Being never complete in space or time, this image is “a time-based image”, meaning “even a photograph displayed on an electronic screen is not a still image” (p. 138).
Before moving on to a direct address of the current ontological state of cinema, some people may ask “what is the fate of film?” Rodowick describes its status as akin to “a precious metal…installed in galleries and museums, where they are meant to be viewed in unique situations as autonomous artworks…regaining a sense of aura”; finally, “film is becoming art” (p. 158).
Near the end, Rodowick eventually reveals the nature of the cinematic metaphor, where cinema, or the idea of cinema, persists – the virtual life. Sans film, cinema in this fluid and developmental guise can survive for much longer, it is argued. But there are some catches. Rodowick turns to the “digital event”, a phrase he came across in the DVD extras of the film Russian Ark (2002). The digital event is “any discrete alteration of image or sound data at whatever scale internal to the image” (p. 167). In light of this, we may still speak of “takes”, but not “shots”, “with respect to a visual image, space has changed meaning here. Space no longer has continuity and duration, rather, any definable quality of defined space is discrete and variable” (pp. 166-9). In the virtual space of virtual film, the term “editing” becomes somewhat inaccurate; there are no “cuts” in virtual space (p. 171). In a world of infinite spatial discreteness, a filmic cut is redundant. In digital cinema, the cuts we see are symptomatic of the cinematic metaphor; it’s the virtual life where cinema survives.
Returning once more to Cavell, Rodowick ponders whether the perceptual immersion we find in virtual spaces may be a certain kind of skepticism. A space which provides a “present” that is entirely our own (pp. 171-2). Indeed, Rodowick wonders whether the cultural dominance by digital technology indicates a “philosophical retreat from the problem of skepticism to an acceptance of skepticism”, whereby “a power expressed as coexistence in time…a state of simultaneity…characterize[s] our new strategies for overcoming isolation…through the medium of computers” (italics added) (pp. 175, 180).
Ultimately, Rodowick believes that photography and film should be included under the banner “new media” on genealogical grounds, as they are “figural”, to use his term, and stand as points of departure from which more typically defined “new media” develop, and in which the formers subsist. Because of this, Rodowick asserts that there is much work to do and fruitful bounty to be found in returning to classical film scholarship, for it is there, he thinks, that we may find more of the productivity he believes he found for his book. If there are great inroads to be made by a return to classical film scholarship, it is not exactly clear in this work where to start, even with the strong use of theory by Cavell and Siegfried Kracauer. However, a second book by Rodowick An Elegy of Film is promised, which, at least in terms of post 1970s film theory, may well provide for this deficiency.
Charles Tutton.
Monash University, Australia.