FOLLOWED BY YOUR OBSERVATION:
(Case in point: Snyder speaks as though computers didn’t exist at the time of Blade Runner. Yet it is only through the airtight registration made possible by motion-control cinematography, dependent on microprocessors for precision and memory storage for repeatability, that the film’s beautiful miniatures blend so smoothly with their surroundings.)

To clarify, there were no images i.e. matte paintings, miniatures & settings that
were computer generated. You are correct in fact, that images shot in Mo-Con
allowed the marriage of, in some instances up to 12 elements. This would not
have been possible in the absence of these components. In closing, let’s just say
say that Ridley’s astonishing moving pictures were ‘computer assisted images’.
This would have never been possible without Doug Trumbell’s EEG wizard team.

I commend you for writing a most intellectual analysis of the art of the film. dls

I’m not up on the latest *conneries* from our French friends, but here’s a bit of Baudelaire that is *a propos* on more than one level:

“Do we display all the rags, the rouge, the pulleys, the chains, the alterations, the scribbled-over proof sheets, in short all the horrors that make up the sanctuary of art?”
–From _Flowers of Evil_, “Three Drafts of a Preface”

(That quote is even better in context. I urge you all to read the whole essay.)

I looked up Scott on IMDB after seeing an ad for _Body of Lies_ today. Dude’s got SEVEN more movies various stages of production.

IGN: The second question is,”What liberties have you tried or wanted to take with the character, but were told to shy away from because it didn’t fit with the character at all or at this point in time?”

Daniel Craig: “I wasn’t allowed. [laughter] … I haven’t been denied anything really … you know, I think one of the things about making a film is ????this is kind of a long roundabout way of answering this question but what makes movies sort of immediate is the restrictions you put upon them. This is an example which is probably a bad example but I love the original cut of Blade Runner with the voice-over. I mean I still love it. I still think it’s great because that was the movie they had to put out at that time because those were the restrictions that were put upon it. And so it has sort of something about it — you know, despite the fact there’s ten others now that are kind of an hour longer than all the others.

That’s kind of what we have when we’re making Bond movies. We are under the tightest of schedules so you’re on the hoof, you’re inventing things as you go. You go, “Oh, what about this?” I mean we can’t change a lot because once things are set and once the ball’s rolling on a movie like this there’s no stopping it so we can’t change action sequences all the time. We do but I mean they’re kind of it’s because when things — it’s not because we suddenly have inspiration, it’s because physically we can’t do something or we have to change an idea. You have to keep thinking and trying to bring these things and say, “Oh, I’ll try this out.” But it’s the restrictions that make it interesting.

It’s a really convoluted way of answering the question. I’m just pushing it back but that for me is sort of the process of filmmaking. It’s about what you can’t do more than what you [can], as opposed to the freedom that you’re given. Often the more freedom you’re given the more kind of meandering a movie becomes and maybe less interesting.”

http://movies.ign.com/articles/911/911930p3.html

I’l put in a good word for Ridley Scott – his director’s cuts of Alien and Blade Runner (the one that removed the voice-over, the trees and stuck in a unicorn) were shorter than the originals. Amen to that. I remember one review of Costner’s The Postman (apologies to anyone who’d succeeded in forgetting it) that said “I suggest, when the inevitable director’s cut comes around, losing half an hour from the beginning and an hour from the end.” How much time do these people think we have for their “vision”?!

I’m glad you guys pointed to Bazin. I’ve been reading Bazin all day, with the vague sense that I wanted to make sure my students didn’t dismiss him as a straw man who was wrong about his ontological claims for cinema. It’s not easy when he proffers that teleological argument about cinema’s vocation for realism and its unique ability to appeal to a human desire for resemblance. Where I suspect he retains relevance is in the minds of people like Snyder who evoke artifice as meaning something that never had a profilmic existence. There’s definitely a discourse around CGI that says it doesn’t have the same sense of “presence” as animatronics, even though those puppets may have less articulation than a performance-captured CG figure. I tend to agree, but I’m not sure on what grounds I’ve based that agreement. A good is example is the difference between Alien and Alien 3. The former is so much more frightening than the latter, but is it because the cable-operated or man-in-a-monster-suit creatures are inherently more vivid than the sleek CG beasts of Fincher’s movie, or is it just that the films as a whole are differently mounted? I wonder if cognitive film theory has anything to offer on this, and if our extratextual knowledge of the film’s making has any input to that sense of presence (i.e. we know that the puppet is profilmically present, even if we don’t perceive the CGI version as conversely absent).

I don’t know about the USA, but in the UK the fad is for “ruder, uncut” versions of gross-out comedies on DVD – the “unseen edition” or whatever. I have no doubt that they just hold back some T&A from the theatrical release to give them something to shout about on the video circuit. The Region 1 release of The Big Sleep, to take this back a few years, has footage from the first release of the film, which had a lot more plot exposition and was missing some of the saucy dialogue from the later, more famous release. Warners were worried that their heavily invested new starlet’s career was off to a bad start and wanted to give her more big scenes that would capitalise on the offscreen love affair between the two headliners. I’m sure there are countless proofs that revised re-releases are nothing new.

Derek: thanks for your comments. I too use Bazin as a corrective to the idea that “everything is artificial” — a position so sweeping that it might as well be “everything is real.” In this regard, I really like Phil Rosen’s Change Mummified, the last chapter of which deftly deconstructs claims about the digital’s supposed break with indexicality.

I’d also agree that the distinction (or perception of it) between CG and pre- or non-CG has fueled many a rant, alongside more nuanced responses. (Do you know the late David Foster Wallace’s essay on Terminator 2 and “FX porn”?) Here I think Shilo McClean’s Digital Storytelling is useful; though the author engages in the same convenient forgetting as most scholars of digital effects (she writes as though visual effects largely didn’t exist before the computer), her main argument is valid, mapping FX not in terms of an artificial/natural divide but through how successfully they integrate with and support traditional narrative forms — “good” storytelling.

That said, I think Snyder’s comment is fascinating because of the line it draws between what have really long been pretty permeable production modes (“computer-generated” vs. not). This distinction matters more to practitioners and critics than to studios and viewers, and has long roots in the cultural positioning of every form of art. It enables sloppy reasoning (“I hate CGI!” kinds of blanket rants), but it also enables compelling arguments (e.g., Dogme 95 films).

To be quite specific to the Hollywood visual-effects realm, the invocation of the moving line between “nature” and “artifice” tries to align particular people and projects with traditions of craft and/or art, vs. commerce, with “CGI” really standing in to the more specific issue of “bad CGI.” I personally can’t stand “bad CGI,” and I think it’s made too many recent action and/or genre films near unwatchable (I’m looking at you, Spider-Man 3). However, I’m all for “good CGI” at any level (subtle to, say, Speed Racer). When particularly people go after “CGI,” they’re really lumping the good in with the bad, and (as you point out) conveniently forgetting how much the entire endeavor of filmmaking is dependent on technology.

If I may go off on a slightly different tangent of your post:

I think your point about films being revamped, re-cut, re-released, is lately applying to everything — or at least anything the studios think they can make an extra buck on. With these continuous DVD releases of “Extreme Editions” and such, now often done without any of the filmmakers involved, I’m seeing a real problem with the archiving of the “original” cuts, because — what exactly does that mean these days? I myself would classify the “theatrical cut” as always the baseline to operate from in terms of analyzing a release, however, I’d say over 50%, perhaps more, of popular films these days out of Hollywood are now altered in some fashion, sometimes minutely, sometimes significantly, by the time they reach DVD or cable — if not in their immediate release, surely within a few months or a year or two. Actually, it’s common now that digital “touch-ups” are done to releases that “didn’t have enough time” to finish everything in “post” just before their theatrical debut. It’s actually yet another one of these contemporary problems in industry that really frustrates me in a critical way.

I used to think I’d always want what was called the “director’s cut” — but these days I’m not so sure. It’s called “The Donner Cut” yet we find out Michael Thau actually did most of the grunt work on it. Is Scott’s uncut “Kingdom of Heaven” significantly better than the underwhelming theatrical cut I saw, with tepid lead performances and Edward Norton under a mask? I don’t know, but I wasn’t interested enough in the theatrical cut to give a hoot. I still haven’t seen the “Spider-Man 2.5″ DVD and I don’t think I’m going to — the original film was pretty perfectly done, as far as I was concerned. Internet fanboys, DVD reviewers, and even academics sometimes love to “rail” against the studios, but really, these studios wouldn’t have been in business for as long as they have without being right *more* than some of the time. Sometimes they’re *very* right about a “theatrical cut” — unfortunately, now that home video revenues proved to be a huge boost to their fortunes, they’ve raided their own libraries and continue to flood the market with unneeded “extended cuts” or “restored cuts” of movies that for the most part were “OK” just the way they were — how many DVD/video versions of “Evil Dead” have there been — 35?? But this isn’t just genre products — it happens with everything, from “Wedding Crashers” to Orson Welles (who I’m all for getting what was “intended” out — but how would we ever truly know? From some notes he left? Even if they were extensive? Maybe he would have changed his mind, too, who knows?).

And yes, perhaps “Blade Runner” is the king, or to put it another way, one of the top offenders, in this new “game” — although it hasn’t been released as many times as “Star Wars”, yet (it’s about tied with the number of “Godfather” DVDs out there, though). Ridley Scott, nor Fox (a studio is lately notorious for mucking with its own genre projects) for years (years!) couldn’t settle on a “definitive cut” for this movie. I’m very interested in watching in-depth documentaries like the one you mention on the “Blade Runner” set — I’m just sick of having to sift through three-to-five versions of a movie before I can feel like I’ve seen the cut that “they” want me to see. I don’t know quite what to make of Blade Runner (I’m an oddball, I’ve never been a huge fan, though I can recognize it’s achievements in visual design), but all this “re-issue, re-package, re-package, buy both and feel deceived” culture (to quote a somewhat famous singer — has, for me, almost killed the enjoyment of buying films for home viewing anymore. Even the “Superman” DVD cuts confuse me these days — they’re really not very much different!

Theoretically, yes, the studios tend to often “own” the final product, and are usually within their rights to do whatever they wish with it following it’s release, but now filmmakers *themselves* seem to be dilly-dallying more and more frequently — has technology, yes, digital technology, brainwashed these “auteurs” into thinking that they can and should continually much with their own pieces of art, and that we’ll keep buying them over and over and over again? Yes, even some directors I love — Alex Proyas and Guillermo del Toro — are now guilty of this. Mr. Proyas: “Dark City” was perfectly brilliant in the cut which was released in 1998 and on DVD soon after, and its use of visual effects holds up surprisingly well, I’d argue — you didn’t need to do anything at all with it (except perhaps remove that spoiling opening narration).

More and more, I am appreciating filmmakers who seem to have the integrity *not* to go back and re-visit their own movies — even when they want to. Unfortunately, most of them don’t live in Hollywood. I’m looking at you, Michael Winterbottom, Patrice Leconte, Steven Soderbergh (who’s never “re-cut” “Sex, Lies and Videotape” once!), Phillip Noyce, Spike Lee (say what you will about his controversial career, but he’s never re-cut his movies), Beat Takeshi, Ang Lee (no matter how much “Hulk” forced Universal execs into a stunned silence at an early screening, Ang didn’t re-cut it — and wasn’t forced to — and still hasn’t re-visited it, and probably never will!). Bob, did Bergman ever re-cut any of his films? Did Godard (perhaps someone can enlighten me whether he’d believe in this sort of thing)?

“Always being made” indeed.

Now, as for special effects…