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Videodrome directed by David Cronenberg - 1982

Digital assembly is first of all an optimising prothesis and a necessary completion to the new technologies made by Lucas which entail that traditional films will be shortly put aside. At the same time (project instances) it favours the vertiginous speed of today's movies which are dominated by the accumulation of images. Have a look at Michael Bay's works (<The Rock>, <Armageddon>) and how he makes use of video-clip aesthetics (though this is by no means something new), but more than that at how he has a tendency for overlapping images owing to technological devices. All films by Stanley Kubrick can be seen in terms of an equation occurring between the evolution of means and the evolution of language. <Shining> is like a handbook for steadicam, <Barry Lyndon> owes its pretentious conception of inside shootings to Zeiss lens, <Eyes Wide Shut> was almost entirely filmed with Motion Control. Cutting off the Cameronian mechanistic rapture (8), the FX' s poet Robert Zemeckis has achieved extraordinary results with movies pervaded by a conscious attraction towards effect manipulations. Whereas his loose actresses in <Death Becomes Her> are a picture of the new soft barriers of corporeity, the consistent theme of narrative time (<Back To The Future>, <Forrest Gump>) requests technology to visualise a hallucinating voyage in flowing history. George Lucas, a director prototype with a bionic body, has undertaken a global reform ranging from the elimination of optic projectors to the quality control (THX) imposed on the planet viewing cinemas. The new episode of the <Star Wars> saga is a general test for micro-wonders of the near future.

II. The "what" and "how" of cyber-movies

The movie apparatus influences language. The functional relationship between man and the apparatus, between a strong identity and a docile one as they appear in the early season of science-fiction movies (<The Day The Earth Stood Still> by Robert Wise where a human-like alien directs his own service robot by means of remote luminous impulses), turns into a symbiotic relation (<Robocop> by Paul Verhoeven; in actual facts a steadicam) to register then a human factor succumbing to the technological device. The computer (see Motion Control) takes decisions, an ether-prone film artist's fears are the leitmotiv of a mature science-fiction: Hal9000 (9) ordains the end of the story-line Space Odyssey with a deliberate act of strength under no conditions. The spaceship captain's on-board computer (10) is called MOTHER and prepares linguistic traps for a crew of men who should be given answers and solutions. The confrontation between the impersonal productive machine and the Author is never on a par and the interaction is a nightmare with no awakening. Cronenberg's idea is to this avail enlightening - there is no hybridisation that generates no pain, the passage to some new flesh is dangerous as is immediate in its first degree and because it is subsequently unforeseeable in its partial and final results (11). Cinema is a body that by undergoing recent mutations kicks back with life spasms you can hardly interpret. To tell the truth, let aside Cameron, Scott (Ridley), Gilliam and a few others, cyber-movies are rarely made to work on the significant. If we give a glance over the movie titles of the last few years we shall come out with Sci-Fi films that are pervaded by the most recent advances as to effects and animations without being seriously affected by narrative ways through images. <Matrix>, one of the latest intriguing adventures winding through a virtual near-future, is an ambitious movie as to its contents ant it is programmatically full of over-the-top quotations - well-known sequences are robbed from <Terminator 2: Judgement Day>, references to the amphetamine-like Kung fu by Hong Kong movie-makers are abundant, and it even recalls dear old westerns - At such extent movies are really a raw material moulded by authors with magic protheses into a hyper-text owing remarkably to a come back aesthetics as is that of video-games (12).

Four main kinds of communicative approaches are to be seen in the cinema theory: the objective one, that of unreal objectives, the summoning one and that of the subjective. It is now clear that contemporary movies have alternative outlooks that certainly originate from the viewing habituation to the technological system. We refer to dense objective as a frame reproducing an image that has already been "treated", an artificial one, an image out of an image as happens when you go to the movies and you see a monitor or a Tv set the character does not look at (13) (this would be the case of a subjective). Another produce of prothesic hybridisation is what we call an empty subjective, i.e. a frame that suggests apparently a character's look which is non-existent. That is the virtuous movement of a camera with impossible trajectory and whose value is in itself as it shows cinema as a working mechanism. The way contemporary movies communicate is largely built on "impersonal and flowing motions with no body that are made so through new technologies" (14). The two <Terminator> duly show this parable. The first act is a clash between cinema at present and its mutant future yet to be identified, the second presents a conflict affecting cameras only, the well tested cyborg T-800 and the advanced prototype T-1000. From T-800, a steadicam with synthetic operator sustaining the traditional way of filming (the real subjective profilmic), we go on to T-1000 (empty subjective and virtual profilmic).

In order to substantiate the idea of cinema to the antipodes, Kevin Costner had in mind a neo-medievalist representation. The future after machines, <Waterworld>, a refulgent example of colossal freak, shows a man who reinvented ordinary tools, who adapted his body to the liquid element so as to create the utmost degree of mutual influence with the environment which is the uttermost at survival. Subsequently, in <The Postman>, the path followed is more language prone and in the opposite direction of the story chronology; the projection of a movie onto a film as archaeological achievement (cinema of memories) is symbolic of the entire structure of a text according to which the western epic (and therefore that of the film maker body and soul) can be repeated everywhere a narrative disposition is present.

Contemporary movie makers work preferably on the repertoire of images and solutions they have previously acquired and they renounce to experimenting the unknown. If you read over again the remarks put forward to Kathryn Bigelow at the time of <Strange Days> you can pinpoint the critics' disappointment for a waste of terms. The S.Q.U.I.D. (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) make-believe sold by Nero-Ralph Fiennes is a drug promising the cinema viewers a prodigious freak-out just to ground them back down to earth again. The Squid is no less than the usual subjective!

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