In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

49 Part Two Perception of Simulated Human Motion BY THE END of the twentieth century, the film-theory establishment had lost its faith in realism. In the waning decades, film theorists became increasingly entrenched in their belief that reality itself is a construct of language and culture. The digital technologies of the 1990s that made possible the synthetic construction of images seemed to render obsolete any notions of a photographable reality. In the end, neither reality nor motion picture realism could be countenanced, and the party oprichniks set out to purge the field of film studies of ideas from writers such as André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, who in the middle of the century had advanced well-articulated theories of motionpicture realism based upon the processes of photography (Bazin, English trans., 1971; Kracauer, 1960). In the academy, both Bazin and Kracauer, and especially Bazin, were ritually ridiculed. Bazin fully appreciated the psychological power of the photographic image, which as he noted is etched on the film by rays of light directly connected to objects in the world. Indeed, the very process of photography results in an inescapable realism. The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. . . . Only a photographic lens can give us the kind of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it something more than a mere approximation , a kind of decal or transfer. . . . [F]or photography does not create eternity , as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption . (1971, p. 14) The basis for Kracauer’s theory was less direct, relying more on appearance and function of the image, but he, too, looked to the affinities of the photographic medium for the recording of reality. “Film, in other words, is uniquely equipped to record and reveal physical reality and, hence, gravitates toward it” (1960, p. 32). Ironically, it was Christian Metz who wrote perhaps the most eloquent homage to the role of motion in creating the impression of reality. It is movement (one of the greatest differences, doubtless the greatest, between still photography and the movies) that produces the strong impression of reality. . . . Because movement is never material but is always visual, to reproduce its appearance is to duplicate its reality. (1974, pp. 7, 9) Ironic, because it was also Metz who with Film Language introduced into film theory a linguistic approach that would lead film studies first into semiotics and then into psychoanalysis and Marxism and beyond, leaving concerns with realism far behind. 50 / PART TWO By the time digital manipulation of the image became commercially feasible in the 1990s, the relevance of realism to motion pictures was judged by most film scholars to be minimal. This dismissal was defended on both ideological and technical grounds. One writer summed up the first position rather succinctly by offering that rather than reality, “[w]hat the camera in fact grasps is the ‘natural’ world of the dominant ideology ” (Nichols, 1991, p. 214). The second argument was that because realist theories had been based on photography, they were invalid for digital images. Thus, the digitization of moving images seemingly left the classical realists with no place to stand. The entire issue of realism might have been put to rest right there had it not been brought to the fore again by the practical requirements of everyday moviemaking. In the 1990s, it became more efficient to create certain film scenes by means of computer animation than by the older photographic techniques. Effects such as the absence of Lieutenant Dan’s legs in Forrest Gump (1994), the presence of a tornado in Twister (1996), the running dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993), Tom Cruise being hurled from a helicopter in a tunnel to land on the rear of a passenger train in Mission Impossible (1996), or all those people scrambling for footing on the deck of a ship that sank eighty-someodd years ago in Titanic (1997) are but some of the first of the many movies to benefit greatly from computer animation. As these movies illustrate, and as Metz himself observed, “The feeling of credibility, which is so direct, operates on us in films of the unusual and of the marvelous, as well as in those that are ‘realistic.’ Fantastic art is fantastic only as it convinces (otherwise it is merely ridiculous)” (1974, p. 5). Few major filmmakers are creating composited or computer -generated...

Share