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 | PROTHESIS notes on technocratic metaphysics by Luca Bandirali | ||||||||||
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The Matrix directed by the Wachowski Brothers - 1999 | |||||||||||
Man must somewhat be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?" Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra I. "doigts électriques" - The technological body of the film industry Nowadays' movies are a form of hybrid language insofar as the broadest meaning of this term is currently intended. Resorting to archaeology is by all means superfluous and there is no point in tracing back to the film origins and to so many derivations from historicised art languages which were the basis for the elaboration of the first film codes. It is instead worth debating briefly and again about the film industry peculiar character that according to some lies in the ability to represent the world reality with exceptional proximity by calling into play a certain number of features (the photographic image precision, the depth of motion, sound etcÉ) whose action as a whole produces something that gives in return an undeniable impression of reality. Some others (the historic vanguards of 1900 for instance) have shown their rebellion to a film industry restricted as such to a mimetic relation with the world; they have underlined how it cannot concurrently be denied that movies have the peculiarity of creating well-defined new worlds of perfect completion representing an alternative to a description of what already exists. Since its primeval simple standards the grammar of movies has renewed itself alongside with the growth of the film industry, through the works of the so-called authors and most of all owing to the contribution given by technological innovations. According to the most accurate analysts (1) the latter convey to the development of the aforesaid medium two opposite and incompatible directions, namely total reality and total fiction. We are obviously dealing with two extreme ideals, for you cannot provide absolute reality through representation, nor can anyone renounce completely to films that owe somewhat their existence to a world that does not pertain to language. You cannot neglect the extent to which language itself, the way it is run within a movie, resolves its likelihood. But we are dealing here with the exact reverse shot: the contribution of technological protheses, their interaction with the inventors and the operators of the creative process, the way the medium is one body with technology. Gianni Canova, dean of the meta-critics (2), invites us to distinguish between daily protheses (with a mostly optimising function) and protheses of the bionic body (with a project function).(3) We can make use for our own good needs of these two categories in order to trace a general view and profile renewed by the technological supports of film shooting, by post production and film projections. Nowadays' movies hold within a problematic co-existence between a photographic and a non-photographic object. A connection between object and context (virtual, photographic, etcÉ) is also problematic. What's new is the spread of so many instruments of digital manipulation of the image that both low cost and average cost productions can afford by now. Blue screen (4) and steadicam (5), which were once prototypes of advanced research, have become common elements at the disposal of any film troupe, and besides representing an economical solution to particular types of shooting they modify language perceptibly. Such an extraordinary means as is Motion Control (6), which is at present a costly and rare object, has a substantial optimising function. It acts on shooting techniques with criteria of mathematical precision. One of its extreme uses allows to film with no operator and with computer-driven motions by executing a pre-set dynamic program as to the initial and final positions. We must then take into great account all the inventions involving sound pictures since they were first introduced (starting from 1928). They too have diversified functions, i.e. the widening out of real effects, the improvement of standards, the transformed impact sound effects have on a movie. There where the inventions by engineer Dolby could solve listening problems (background noises, stereophony, sound quality), the introduction of digital sounds was a revolution and an upheaval of the traditional way of making movies (7). Digital sound makes the integrated action between the sequence of images and soundtrack easier, but most of all it increases creativity as far as the intervention on sound materials is concerned.
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