Digital Media in Cinema Journal, 1995–2008

Lifts her cup of black unsweetened coffee. Mouse-clicks. How many times has she done this? How long since she gave herself to the dream? Maurice's expression for the essence of being a footagehead. Damien's Studio Display fills with darkness absolute. It is as if she participates in the very birth of cinema, that Lumière moment, the steam locomotive about to emerge from the screen, sending the audience fleeing, out into the Parisian night.

William Gibson.¹

William Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition, his first departure from the influential cyberpunk science fiction genre that he originated, imagines the rebirth of cinema engendered by digital media. Gibson's novel pictures a post-YouTube media culture in which networked fans or "footageheads" obsessively view, share, and discuss an untitled piece of video called simply "the footage" composed of "one hundred and thirty-four previously discovered fragments."

Importantly, this piece of avant-garde art circulates on the Internet just as Henry Jenkins predicts video will in a Hollywood gatekeeper-less environment. He stakes a claim for the Internet's positive effects upon aesthetic diversity and quality. Similar to Gibson, Jenkins envisions an Internet that permits producers to circumvent the "cultural gatekeepers who have narrowed the potential diversity of network television or Hollywood cinema."²

This scenario is not an especially challenging one for film scholars. If a culturally important or extremely popular piece of serialized video with interesting aesthetic qualities, a filmic mise-en-scène, and human actors were to come to prominence on the Internet, it would not be difficult to write about it in the context of existing film scholarship. That has not yet happened, though I (like William Gibson) believe that it is only a matter of time until it does. Such "footage," digital video that resembles older avant-garde film to such an extent that it is called footage in defiance of its existing as a digital signal rather than celluloid, would encourage scholars to employ the methods of textual analysis, industrial and historical research, and ethnographic audience studies and other reception studies that have characterized film and television studies until now.

But even if it doesn't—even if born-digital video fails to produce a work of art and a cultural product comparable in scope and importance to cinema proper—we still need to study it in the meantime. The challenge that faces cinema and media scholars today is to learn some of the new visual languages that arise from popular digital moving image practices. Video games and Web sites are more forms of practice than they are texts, but they are rich, visual, moving-image artifacts and fecund sites of extramediation—though they may work directly to spin off television programs or webisodes in the way that Felicia Day's Internet-native World of Warcraft series (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004–present) The Guild (2007–present) has done, they also provide the raw materials that artists, videographers, and amateurs are using to create moving image media.³ Video games, in particular, are finding wide usage as production tools for video and filmmakers. The resulting machinima (a neologism combining "machine" with "cinema") videos employ the games as engines to produce narratives with sound, dialogue, story, mise-en-scène, seriality, and audiences: all the features we use to talk about film and television. As Michael Nitsche writes in the sidebar to his blog FreePixel, "FreePixel looks at video games as part of the moving image culture. Games are not movies. But games use moving image tradition in their presentation. That is why FreePixel offers a critical look at games and their expressive qualities that grow from the use of the moving image."⁴

I am not advocating that film and media scholars drop everything and weld their hands to an Xbox 360 controller or become one of the eleven million players of the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game World of Warcraft, most of whom spend twenty hours or more a week killing monsters and rolling for epic gear with their friends in this virtual world.⁵ But those who do, even...