The Virtual Life of Film (review)

The divide between film theory and film history is often lamented at both sides of the barricade. Or, is it? Each party blames the other with the usual, well-worn arguments: the impatience towards the burden of empirical proof on one side, the reluctance to engage with philosophyand abstraction on the other. Both communities have their fundamentalist fringes (the cultists of factual anecdote, the priests of speculative thought) and, fortunately, some advocates of a dialogue between the two cultures (Tom Gunning, André Gaudreault, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, to name a few). By and large, however, film historians tend not to be assiduous readers of film theory, and vice versa.

David Rodowick's The Virtual Life of Film is one of the "film theory" books whose reading should be made mandatory in film history classes, as it addresses the very issues which one would have expected to hear from film historians: the disappearance of film, its replacement by the digital image, its historical and aesthetic implications. Does it matter to us? Yes, it should. Is it being discussed outside "film theory"? Not enough. It seems, instead, that the phenomenon is being taken as a fait accompli to be either accepted (with different degrees of conviction) or actively endorsed. Once upon a time there was the analog image; now it's digital. The cinema of the early twentieth century was made and seen on film; now it is becoming available in different forms. As long as it looks good, that's fine for us.

"When reproduced on an electronic or digital screen", writes Rodowick, "35mm original may never fully realize the phenomenological density of time, pastness and causality of the projected film experience". "I have recently come to realize", he says, "… that during the past twenty years we have all lost in some degree the capacity to involve ourselves deeply and sensually in the 35mm image". When invited to witness a digital projection test at a Texas Instruments laboratory in Los Angeles, he recognized that "while often it seemed to rival 35mm resolution overall, by any number of criteria it also seemed 'colder', less involving, and less pleasurable to watch". It should be noted that Rodowick refuses to be entangled in a discussion on whether the digital image looks "better" or "worse" than film, nor is he driven by nostalgia; he is simply but forcefully arguing that something has changed in his (digital) perception of the (analog) moving image, and wants to understand what this is all about.

Veteran specialists of the caliber of David Robinson and Kevin Brownlow have expressed a greater degree of optimism on this technological change. Brownlow, a champion of the distinctive beauty of nitrate film projection, has publicly expressed his enthusiasm for the most recent digital reincarnations of film classics; his viewpoint is shared by Robinson, for whom the pleasure of the audience in front of a crystal-clear image digitized from a 35mm film element is his primary objective: "I am a showman", he justly admitted in a recent newscast for an Italian television network; his priority is to ensure that the public enjoys what's on the screen. What Brownlow and Robinson have in common is the unquestioned belief that an appropriate digital reproduction of a 35mm print is better than a scratched and jumpy photochemical print (one should assume that, conversely, a 35mm print in good condition is preferable to a low-resolution digital transfer). It is surprising, thus, that the caution one could expect from them is actually expressed by a film "theorist". This apparent contradiction cannot be easily dismissed.

Two concurrent lines of thought in Rodowick's assessment of the transition from analog to digital are significant enough to make his book one of the most important contributions to film studies in this decade. The first is of a technological nature, and stems from the observation that it is a mistake to "measure" the quality of an analog (photochemical) image with non-analog (digital) tools. "The chemical contents of a 35mm frame...