Film as a Universal Medium

After Kittler referred to writing as a "universal medium" in a group of readings about film, I had to question what exactly a universal medium is. Writing has the ability to convey any information that can be reduced to letters and digits, but there is so much of human existence that transcends that. Literature and poetry attempt to capture our inner emotional lives, and do so in writing, but writing also relies on creating images in the reader's mind. Film skips the middle steps and communicates the images and scenes and even emotions vicariously through actors. Can all of that really be reducible to something that can be written down? Besides, writing cannot be universally accessible. There are those who are illiterate and languages which no one living understands. Although this must be straying quite a bit from the widely accepted definition of "universal medium" which Kittler almost certainly is using, I feel like a true universal medium should be able to transmit information directly. Without that feature, it might be universal in content, but not in communication. Film, especially once it became coupled with sound recordings, closely mimics the sensory experiences we all live with. Films may be two dimensional and suspended in time, but there is almost no code to translate before what we see on screen becomes something we've practically experienced ourselves. Kittler also uses fiber optic cables as an example of a universal medium. Even more removed from immediate human comprehension, I also realized that films can be transmitted through them, even if they couldn't through writing. Then films must also be reducible to some string of ones and zeros, however unintelligible. It must then be the product of translation I'm stuck on, not the medium itself. The difference, I believe, is that writing takes its final form in something we can understand and translate ourselves, while film and fiber optic cables rely on machines to do some translation for us. So is it the richness of the final product that determines the medium's universality? If so, film must be at least on equal footing with writing when it comes to human experience.

    I have heard it say that "seeing is believing", and the fixation of that saying is no more relevant than in Tom Gunning's piece "An Aesthetic of Astonishment": Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator".   Like attending the theatre, a person would have had to pay a small fortune to see the latest in entertainment.  The fortunate first audience to experience the novelty of this moving image must have felt real fear at the sight of watching a train pull up to a station because, physically, there was no train nor station at the theatre yet they were there watching the event.

    This new technology gave entertainment a new twist on the experience of being entertained, an interactive experience in which the audience has a conversation with the film: "I know, but yet I see".  It seems that the projection of Lumiere's Arrival of a Train at the Station allowed for this interactive entertainment, internalizing their experience:  This image moves, it is there, in real time, but is it really?  This is sort of a game of "now you see it, now you don't" and a 19th century audience did not know what to make of it.  How can that be?  A moving image?  Is it possible?  And it's this that Gunning is emphasizing on, the reaction of the audience to the film.  They are astonished and in disbelief.

    Cinema has come a long way and, it certainly has had a long path of an evolutionary trajectory working itself into our own homes using YouTube for example to make instant films/videos.  Cinema is now used not only for entertainment, but used for i.e., education, science, art, and of course the film industry which uses new technology at every opportunity.  We have visual effects that make us feel as if we are in the film using 3D glasses, not to mention, computer animation that helps elicit the experience of a range of emotions from fear, to sadness and, on to happiness.

    From YouTube here are three links to the moving image:
 
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=JGugm8Dzmuc&feature=endscreen

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dgLEDdFddk
 
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O6Z_59Jf6o

Digital Effects as a Numbing Agent

Whissel got to her most interesting point in the last page or two of writing. She pointed out that the dramatization of the digital multitude has mediated important issues that are significant problems. While she mostly presented examples of the digital multitude and its effects, rather than evidence for this specific claim, it is a reasonable conclusion to make, and it helps to explain a certain complacency that we find in place of outrage that might be more appropriate, given the myriad of crises the world faces and the way they're being handled. It's also worth noting that the world outside the U.S., with less addiction to/access to movies, is also less complacent.

This idea could even go a step further, to digital effects other than the digital multitude. A number of "Disaster Movies" have come out in the last decade, based on digitized effects depicting exaggerated versions of real problems: global warming, meteor strikes, the switching of the poles, etc. These are real problems, that are largely ignored, but could have catastrophic impacts on humanity; but they are largely ignored. The question can certainly be raised: how much of this is just normal head-in-the-sand human nature, and how much because the threats have been made into myth by digital depiction?

Art, Magic, and Film

In all sense, film is an adaption of artwork that has gone through many different periods of both wowing the audience with its landscape and as well as the message it try’s to convey. Just as one may watch a magic show, film is also magic and holds more tricks. These tricks are stimuli that have your perception which can lead you to be placed in a relax state of mind watching scenery or increase your heart rate as suspense is placed in the story. People aren’t ignorant of knowing that many films, other than nature films, are fabricated, but still seek pleasure in watching them as a form of art. Unlike other forms of art, a film does need 4 basic aspects that can conclude a deep meaning, which is a beginning, middle, climax, and an end. These aspects make the artist message of the film known to the viewer so they can somewhat understand the director or creators point of view.

Film has come a long way of changing what it was originally, continuous photos put together which created an a illusion of movement, to a media of ideas to either show a point of view or form of art. For example, recently Argo won the Best picture during the Oscars, but was considered by most people as propaganda due to the Iranian situations we have at the moment. However, this is still considered a point of view of movie how America was able to outsmart others with a less than believable tactic. A form of art movie would be such as Life of Pi where beauty of colors and nature captured the audiences’ eyes. Thus, the point is that a film in modern times can show different things, but the main thing it needs is an idea, in other words a story.

             

Shock and Awe

You know those commercials for Universal Studios, with the family in the 3D movie theater? Some massive creature reaches out at them and their ridiculous 3D glasses, causing an all too exaggerated reaction. Everyone recoils back into their seats, popcorn and drinks going flying into the air. What, were they not expecting this? Do they really think King Kong is going to pluck them from out of the screen? Of course they don’t. They paid to see a movie in three dimensions. They put on the glasses. They knew exactly what they were signing up for.

This commercial was the first thing that came to mind while reading Gunning’s article on early film spectators. He explains how the myth of the “incredulous audience” present at the earliest projections is incomplete and misguided. He does not question that there were people screaming or in shock at the sight of a train barreling down the tracks at them, but he dispels the notion that they were truly overwhelmed by the realism of the image, and really feared for their safety and well-being. Gunning proposes that the truth is quite the opposite. The appeal of such illusions was that even though they could appear quite real, they were always discernibly illusionary.

People were not tricked into thinking that the illusion was genuine, and that wasn’t the point anyways. People were mystified, enchanted, shocked by the ability for something so obviously not real to convince their eyes that it was. Gunning uses the phrase “I know, but yet I see” to convey this optical phenomenon. Spectators know that they are merely looking at an image, but cannot squash the perplexing, thrilling feeling that they are seeing something that is not what it seems. It is the knowledge that this thing is, in fact, not legitimate that makes the feeling more potent.

This is why we ride roller coasters at amusement parks. This is why we jump out of airplanes with nothing but a backpack full of nylon and strings. This is why the nice family in the commercial goes to the 3D movie. We have a deep-seeded desire to feel such thrills, but we fear the repercussions. So we remove danger from the equation. The problem is that it is difficult to get a powerful feeling of thrill without that imminent danger, we know in the back of our heads that this roller coaster/sky dive/3D movie is not what our body thinks it is. The most successful illusion is the one that blends these lines in a way we haven’t seen before. So for the audience at the first projection, certainly they were thrilled. But not because of all-encompassing fear, because at some point, maybe just for a split second in their mind, the line between real and fake became just a little blurry.

The Replacement of the Theatre

The advancement of the film will eventually lend to an experience more versatile than theatre production could ever achieve. The artistic capabilities of a film has lend itself to a new form of abbreviated story telling for the masses that photography never has been able to capture. The technology that allows for the creation of the film allows for greater mobility and realism to replace the theatre production. Streaming images in a way that recreates the view of the world serves as a less artistic recreation an individual photograph. Given the time restriction from viewing the world through a secondary recreation, the film forces an individual to feel limited of their own existence through the monotonous points of the reproduction. By editing a stream of film, a narrative can be told to capture a story or a set of emotions similar to a photograph except as versatile as a novel.

 In Tom Gunning’s essay, An Aesthetic of Astonshment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator, he comments on the first film as a means of departing from the standard theatre yet having to appeal to an audience used to a three dimensional form of entertainment. Gunning argues that “while such a transformation would be quite capable of causing a physical or verbal reflection the viewer, one remains aware that the film is merely a projection. The authenticity of the production must still capture a viewer in a way that can create an illusionary experience on par with the existing artistic dimensions. American culture in the early 20^th century eventually relied so heavily on the escapist qualities of a film that theatre would be unable to match the potential to reproduce at the same pace as a film. 

An Evolving Reproduction of the World

In Andre Bazin’s essay, The Ontology of the Photographic Image, he discusses the photograph as a utility that improves on the existing technology of painting to capture the realism of the world. The painting as an artifact exists as an aesthetic creation that is able to demonstrate the talent of its creator but then also replicate a portion of the world through the mind of the artist. However the limitations of the photograph rely on the mind of the artist who visualizes reality in order to reproduce the image that has been interpreted. The camera obscura and the Daguerreotype allows for an artist to capture a view of the world in its most detailed and realistic perspective. Although the Daguerreotype prints on a copper plate through iodine vapor, the technology of capturing light to replicate an image steals more realism from the image than an artist’s painting could ever mimic.

            The digital age of photography has allowed cameras to surpass the scope of even of the human eye so that pixels can be more focused than can be readily detected. This maximized level of realism combined with a network that allows for an extended audience gives the artist an ability to recreate the world through a digital means. The imaging done by satellite photograph through projects such as Google Earth allows for humans to interact and explore all terrain never previously accessible. However this form of reproduction no longer contains the artistic quality of the original reproduction or portrait photography done by analog cameras. The emotional connection associated with a photograph still allows for a response to the subject of the photograph rather than the strictly the perspective of the photographer. This connection is what allows for photography to remain as an artistic alternative to painting even as the technology surrounding the photo continues to undermine the integrity of a well-captured moment in time.