Floating in the digital experience

Movies and our experience of them has changed so radically that it is difficult to grasp what is happening....

How much our world of moving-image entertainment has changed in the past decade. And yet,how little our world of moving-image entertainment has changed!

On a recent night,at a movie theatre rigged for 3-D projection,I saw James Camerons Avatar with an audience that watched the screen with the kind of fixed attention that has become rare at the movies. True,everyone was wearing 3-D glasses,which makes it difficult to check your cellphone obsessively,but they also seemed captivated. Although much has been made of the technologies used in Avatar,it is the social experience of the movieas an event that needs to be enjoyed with other people for maximum impactwhich is more interesting.

Avatar serves as a nice jumping-off point to revisit how movies and our experience of them have changed. For starters,when a critic calls a new release a film these days,theres a chance that what she and you are looking at wasnt made with film processes but was created with digital technologies. Yet,unless a director or distributor calls attention to the technologies used,its also probable that most reviewers wont mention if a movie was even shot in digital,because they havent noticed or dont care.

This seems like a strange state of affairs. Film is profoundly changingor,if you believe some theorists and historians,is already deadsomething that most moviegoers dont know. Yet,because the visible evidence of this changeover has become literally hard to see,and because the implications are difficult to grasp,it is also understandable why the shift to digital has not attracted more intense analysis outside film and media studies. Bluntly put,something is happening before our eyes.

Should you care? I honestly dont know,because Im not sure what to think about this brave new image world we have entered. It is because the movies and our experience of them has changed so radically in recent years that makes it difficult to grasp what is happening.

In one sense the beginning of the end of cinema as we tend to understand it can be traced to 1933,the year that a feature-length filma 1932 detective tale called The Crooked Circlewas first shown on television. Few Americans owned sets in the 1930s,but the genie was already out of the bottle,or,rather,the movies were out of the theatre.

In The Virtual Life of Film,an elegant 2007 inquiry into the past,present and future of film,the theorist D.N. Rodowick writes,All that was chemical and photographic is disappearing into the electronic and digital.

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Film captures moments in time,preserving them spatially in images we can root around in,get lost in. Digital delivers data,zeroes and ones that are transformed into images,and this is a difference to contemplate. The truth is that the film object has already changed,from preproduction to projection.