Realism and Realistic Representation in the Digital Age

Today, when realism in film commingles so frequently with digital technology and is often diluted by the extended use of editing, there is a certain urgency to revisit its established formal practices.

The ample potential for image control and manipulation provided by digital technology has stirred a great interest in postproduction, particularly in the areas of digital compositing and digital editing. For one thing, the easy handling in making a cut and the maneuverability in handling rather complicated editing options have fostered that interest (Murch 107-18). Another contributing factor is that editing is no longer a horizontal manipulative sequential process but is vertical too. The inclusion of digital special-effects software (e.g., the Inferno compositing tool) allows the editor to manipulate backgrounds and other small visual details in the frame simultaneously (130). A good example is David Fincher's film Zodiac (2007). Looking for realism and authenticity, Fincher ends with outstanding digital effects, recreating with historical accuracy parts of San Francisco in 1969 and 1970 when the real events, the Zodiac murders, took place (Robertson).

The present fascination with visual manipulation not only has brought realism into question but also has brought into focus a new breed of film director whose creative sensibility is manifested in the way he or she perceives reality. Namely, reality is seen not as something to be captured in the purest way possible by the camera lens but rather as something to be constructed. As Phillip Rosen points out, this new director has essentially splintered from the old established production practice that "involves dependence on some minimum of the presence of the real objects they represent" (Change Mummified 301). "The fact that a digital image is composed through the manipulation of numbers and not physical substances" (306) means that this new director, if he or she chooses, is no longer bound to the "existential connection between a specific referent and the signifier, [where] the latter will always provide the subject with irrefutable testimony as to the real existence of the referent" (Rosen, "History of Image" 13).

Stephen Prince sees this radical shift from the old production practice as surmountable if we overlook the image's indexical referent requirement and adopt a "correspondence-based model of cinematic representation" (399). That is, in spite of the image's lack of referential root, and in spite of the indexical (the photographic) and the non-indexical (the digital—CGI) often commingling, either embedded within the frame or coexisting side by side within a sequence, the viewer is able to connect and accept the image as if it were a true photographic image of the portrayed realism. The film image, whether it has an indexical referent or not, does not detract from the viewer's acceptance of its realism. In other words, for Prince the viewer's interest is no longer in how the film expresses its realism, whether it is highly stylized through the usage of technology or not, but "about the kinds of linkages that connect the represented fictionalized reality of a given film to the visual and social coordinates of our own three-dimensional world [visual credibility]. Such focus need not reinstate indexicality as the ground of realism" (400).

Photo 1.

San Francisco circa 1969/1970 in Zodiac (2007). Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

Aesthetically speaking, this commingling of the digital with the photographic image poses some interesting questions: (1) if both the digital and the photographic image are artificial representations of reality, which of the two is more veridically "true" to reality? Or are both at the same level? If not, what are the differences? (2) In what ways does this technological "new director" differ from those André Bazin recognized as having put their faith in reality rather than in the image? ("Evolution" 24). (3) Is this "new director" truly concerned with reality? These are some of the questions this article wrestles with in order to grasp some of the aesthetic changes brought by the digital technology in today's film realism.

To that end, the first part of this article looks...