Monthly Archives: June 2008

Soul of a New Machine

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Not much to add to the critical consensus around WALL-E; trusted voices such as Tim Burke’s, as well as the distributed hive mind of Rotten Tomatoes, agree that it’s great. Having seen the movie yesterday (a full two days after its release, which feels like an eternity by the clockspeed of media blogging), I concur — and leave as given my praise for its instantly empathetic characters, striking environments, and balletic storytelling. It’s the first time in a while that tears have welled in my eyes just at the beautiful precision of the choices being made 24 times per second up on the big screen; a happy recognition that Pixar, over and over, is somehow nailing it at both the fine level of frame generation and the macro levels of marketplace logic and movie history. We are in the midst of a classic run.

Building on my comments on Tim’s post, I’m intrigued by the trick Pixar has pulled off in positioning itself amid such turbulent crosscurrents of technological change and cinematic evolution: rapids aboil with mixed feelings about nostalgia for golden age versus the need to stay new and fresh. The movies’ mental market share — the grip in which the cinematic medium holds our collective imaginary — is premised on an essential contradiction between the pleasures of the familiar and the equally strong draw of the unfamiliar. That dialectic is visible in every mainstream movie as a tension between the predictability of genre patterns and the discrete deformations we systematize and label as style.

But nowadays this split has taken on a new visibility, even a certain urgency, as we confront a cinema that seems suddenly digital to its roots. Hemingway (or maybe it was Fitzgerald) wrote that people who go bankrupt do so twice: first gradually, then all at once. The same seems true of computer technology’s encroachment on traditional filmmaking practices. We thought it was creeping up on us, but in a seeming eyeblink, it’s everywhere. Bouncing around inside the noisy carnival of the summer movie season, careening from the waxy simulacrum of Indiana Jones into the glutinous candied nightmare of Speed Racer, it’s easy to feel we’re waking up the morning after an alien invasion, to find ourselves lying in bed with an uncanny synthetic replacement of our spouse.

Pixar’s great and subtle achievement is that it makes the digital/cinema pod-people scenario seem like a simple case of Capgras Syndrome, a fleeting patch of paranoia in which we peer suspiciously at our movies and fail to recognize them as being the same lovable old thing as always. With its unbroken track record of releases celebrated for their “heart,” Pixar is marking out a strategy for the successful future of a fully digital cinema. The irony, of course, is that the studio is doing so by shrugging off its own cutting-edge nature, making high-tech products with low-tech content.

Which is not to say that WALL-E lacks in technological sublimity. On the contrary, it’s a ringing hymn to what machines can do, both in front of and behind the camera. More so than the plastic bobbles of Toy Story, the chitinous carapaces of A Bug’s Life, the scales and fins of Finding Nemo or the polished chassis of Cars, the performers in WALL-E capture the fundamental gadgety wonder of a CG character: they look like little robots, but in another, more inclusive sense they are robots — cyborged 2D sandwiches of actors’ voices, animators’ keyframes, and procedural rendering. There’s a longstanding trope in Pixar films that the coldly inorganic can be brought to life; think of the wooden effigy of a bird built by the heroes of A Bug’s Life, or the existential yearnings of Woody and Buzz Lightyear in the Toy Story films. WALL-E, however, calibrates a much narrower metaphorical gap between its subject matter and its underlying mode of production. Its sweetly comic drama of machines whose preprogrammed functionalities are indistinguishable from their lifeforce is like a reassuring parable of cinema’s future: whether the originating matrix is silicon or celluloid, our virtual pleasures will reflect (even enshrine) an enduring humanity.

I’ll forgo commentary on the story and its rich webwork of themes, except to note a felicitous convergence of technology’s hetero gendering and competing design aesthetics that remap the Macintosh’s white curves onto the eggy life-incubator of EVE — juxtaposed with a masculine counterpart in the ugly-handsome boxiness of PC and LINUX worlds. I delighted in the film’s vision of an interstellar cruise liner populated by placid chubbies, but was also impressed by the opening 30-40 minutes set amid the ruins of civilization. It says something that for the second time this year, a mainstream science-fiction film has enticed us to imagine ourselves the lone survivor of a decimated earth, portraying this situation on one level as a prison of loneliness and on another as an extended vacation: tourists of the apocalypse. I refer here of course to the better-than-expected I Am Legend, whose vistas of a plague-depopulated Manhattan unfold in loving extended takes that invite Bazinian immersion and contemplation:

Beyond these observations, what stands out to me among the many pleasures of WALL-E are the bumper materials on either side of the feature: the short “Presto,” which precedes the main film, and the credit sequence that closes the show. Such paratexts are always meaningful in a Pixar production, but tend to receive less commentary than the “meat” of the movie. Tim points out accurately that “Presto” is the first time a Pixar short has captured the antic Dionysian spirit of a Tex Avery cartoon (though I’d add that Avery’s signature eruption of the id, that curvaceous caricature of womanhood Red, was preemptively foregrounded by Jessica Rabbit in 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit; such sex-doll humor seems unlikely to be emulated any time soon in Pixar’s family-friendly universe — though the Wolf could conceivably make an appearance). What I like about “Presto” is the short’s reliance on “portal logic” — the manifold possibilities for physical comedy and agonistic drama in the phenomenon of spatial bilocation, so smartly operationalized in the Valve videogame Portal.

As for the end credits of WALL-E, they are unexpectedly daring in scope, recapitulating the history of illustration itself — compressing thousands of years of representational practices in a span of minutes. As the first names appear onscreen, cave drawings coalesce, revealing what happens as robots and humans work together to repopulate the earth and nurse its ecosystem back to health. The cave drawings give way to Egyptian-style hieroglyphs and profiled 2D portraiture, Renaissance perspective drawings, a succession of painterly styles. Daring, then subversive: from Seurat’s pointillism, Monet’s impressionism, and Van Gogh’s loony swirls, the credits leap to 8-bit computer graphics circa the early 1980s — around the time, as told in David A. Price’s enjoyable history of the studio, that Pixar itself came into existence. WALL-E and his friends cavort in the form of jagged sprites, the same as you’d find in any Atari 2600 game, or perhaps remediated on the tiny screens of cell phones or the Wii’s retrographics.

I’m not sure what WALL-E‘s credits are “saying” with all this, but surely it provides a clue to the larger logic of technological succession as it is being subtextually narrated by Pixar. Note, for example, that photography as a medium appears nowhere in the credits’ graphic roll call; more scandalously, neither does cinematography — nor animation. In Pixar’s restaging of its own primal scene, the digital emerges from another tradition entirely: one more ludic, more subjective and individualistic, more of an “art.” Like all ideologies, the argument is both transparently graspable and fathoms deep. Cautionary tale, recuperative fantasy, manufactured history doubling as road map for an uncertain digital future: Pixar’s movies, none more so than WALL-E, put it all over at once.

GTA Not “4″ Me?

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I’m a little shocked to be saying this, but I don’t think Grand Theft Auto 4 is the game for me.

It was a birthday present from my wife, who overcame considerable resistance to give her husband a gift he had been eagerly waiting to play. Katie’s work in social services and domestic-violence prevention exposes her to some of the worst aspects of sexism and abuse, and she sees the impact of certain kinds of media on young boys as well as grown men in forming social identities and inculcating values. It’s important to note that we disagree profoundly about some of these issues — I’m no fan of effects-based arguments against the media, particularly in regard to videogames, which continue to be among the least-understood social technologies. (At the same time, videogames undeniably function as subjectivity engines, avatarial prosthetics of identity. Adopting psychoanalytic accounts of the filmic apparatus to the new medium, I’ve described first-person shooters as “suture on crack,” and certainly GTA4 [while not a classical FPS] had me thinking and even talking like Niko Bellic after only a week of play.)

But that’s not the primary reason I’m tired of playing — and violent content doesn’t seem to bother me in other games I’m currently enjoying on the Xbox 360, like Half-Life 2: Episode 2. GTA4 just isn’t holding me. I’m finding even the early, easy missions to be depressingly difficult, requiring multiple tries and even some reading of online FAQs and walkthroughs to complete. Worse, the difficulty stems less from my own incompetence than from the way the game and its interface are designed. Everything seems clumsy; my driving sucks, and in a game like GTA4, that’s a deal-breaker. But my larger objection is that the lauded sandbox-style play seems much more rail-driven than in previous incarnations of the series. I miss driving taxis for fares whenever I feel like it. I don’t like the new sense of “laddering” in the need to complete missions before moving on. It was there before as a play structure, but somehow there seemed to be other things going on — a sense of genuinely living city, full of possibility — to distract me from the underlying flowchart that marked my progress.

Plus, and maybe this does stem from the conversations I’ve had with my wife, the gameworld of Liberty City just gets me down. I feel depressed after playing; resuming the game the next day feels like going to work. And that’s not a good sign.

Many things about GTA4 blow me away. I’m struck again by the way the series transmutes urban boredom into loony spectacle, and how the combined audio and visual registers of this version’s graphic regime envelop the player in a rich, convincing cultural texture. And it’s ridiculous, I know, to quit a game of this scope after exploring perhaps .0002% of what it has to offer. Given the awesome sophistication and even elegance of its overall conception, GTA4 is in one sense hard to turn away from. Yet in another sense, I’ll have little trouble swapping it out at Gamestop or the equivalent for some friendly, colorful Wii game that makes me feel happy. Maybe it all comes down to being a year older: as I age, I may not be getting better at gaming, but I’m quicker to realize what does and doesn’t work for me.

CFP: The Science of Special Effects

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There’s an exciting conference coming up this fall — Film & Science: Fictions, Documentaries, and Beyond, (October 30-November 2 at the Westin O’Hare Hotel in Chicago). I’m involved as an area chair on the topic of special and visual effects, sharing the honor with my friend and colleague Michael Duffy, whom I met in 2004 at a London conference on Eadweard Muybridge and spectacle. Since earning his doctorate at the University of Nottingham, Michael has returned to the U.S. and is an active and valued contributor to this blog. We share a passion for special visual effects and a strong interest in thinking “outside the box” about them; we hope the readers of Graphic Engine will be inspired to contribute a proposal for the Chicago gathering. Here’s our CFP:

The ‘Science’ of Special Effects: Aesthetic Approaches to Industry

This area examines the industrial, technological, theoretical, and aesthetic questions surrounding special-effects technologies. Presenters may investigate historical changes in special and visual effects, as in the gradual switch from physical to digital applications; they may focus on the use of visual effects in film or television texts that do not fit into typically spectacle-driven genres (i.e., effects in drama, comedy, and musical narratives instead of in action-adventure, science fiction, or fantasy); they may consider the theoretical implications of special/visual effects and technology on texts; or they may concentrate on neglected historical and aesthetic values of effects development.

Possible papers or panels might include the following:

  • An investigation of the terms “Special Effect” and “Visual Effect,” what they constitute, and how their definitions have been delineated and complicated by changing technologies.
  • Special/visual effects “stars” such as Stan Winston, Douglas Trumbull, or Richard Edlund, and their impact on the construction and application of visual effects images for mainstream/non-mainstream cinema.
  • The changing relationship between visual effects technologies and pre-production, i.e. looking at “previz,” at the development of films “around” their effects sequences, or at the use of physical materials such as maquettes as templates for eventual CG elements.
  • How contemporary visual-effects practitioners negotiate and incorporate real world “physics” into their design of digital characters (“synthespians”) and environments.
  • How visual effects contribute to the formation of complete “environments” on screen, how they are incorporated into narratives, and how meaning is affected when a physical environment is entirely fabricated.
  • The implementation of special/visual effects by costume and motion-capture “artists” and actors, and how studies of these practices can offer insight into classic and contemporary working relationships between effects practitioners, actors and crew.
  • The Visual Effects Society and its impact on the industry and filmmaking throughout the organization’s history.
  • How directors or other creative personalities use physical and digital effects in their projects (e.g., Robert Zemeckis’ application of digital technologies or Guillermo Del Toro’s proclaimed interest in keeping a 50/50 balance between physical and digital effects).

The deadline for proposals is August 1; send them to me at brehak1@swarthmore.edu or Michael at michael.s.duffy@googlemail.com. We’re also happy to kick around ideas, so even if you don’t have a completed paper, feel free to get in touch!

Jumper

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It’s not hard to see what Doug Liman intended Jumper (2008) to be: a slick, stylish action-adventure, paced to the quick rhythm of its protagonist’s wormhole-assisted leaps through space. In terms of emotional tone, something a bit less serious than The Bourne Identity (2002) and more serious than Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005), with a touch of the structural experimentation of 1999’s Go (probably my favorite of Liman’s movies, even over Swingers [1996], which, while funny, bared its brand of prefab indie classic a little too emphatically).

But Jumper turns out to be an anemic misfire, its frictionless construction (which might, during preproduction, have seemed a strength) resulting in something like those Olestra Doritos I used to eat: tasty, low in calories, and passing with liquid brevity through the digestive system. Or — a better metaphor — like David Rice (Hayden Christiansen) himself, a young man who through some never-explained and never-sweated mutation of genetics, neurochemistry, or both, can teleport instantly from one place on earth to another. Building a plot around a person unbound by basic physical laws is always risky. First, there’s the problem of identification: truly super superbeings are impossible to empathize with, a notion explored brilliantly through the figure of Doctor Manhattan in Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Second, it’s hard to embed super-powerful beings in dramatic situations that offer any real challenge or suspense. Think of the “burly brawl” in The Matrix Revolutions (2003): Neo’s hyperkungfu turned his showdown with hundreds of Agent Smiths into an inadvertantly funny dance number, spectacular in the manner of Busby Berkeley musicals and charming in the manner of Buster Keaton slapstick — but never exciting, because nothing was at stake.

To get around this dilemma, our fantasies of superpower have yoked the anomalous beings at their center to various forms of existential and psychological ennui. DC got it right with Superman and Batman, both orphans, one an extraterrestrial “stranger in a strange land” and one a PTSD-afflicted vigilante. Superman’s love for Lois Lane is ultimately a hobbling force, locking him to a human scale of emotions and practical concerns (why else would he need to take a 9-5 job at the Daily Planet?). In literature, Billy Pilgrim — the haunted hero of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) — travels through time, but not under his own direction; instead he revisits traumatic moments of war and family life, adrift in a temporal ocean. (A similar theme organizes the lovely, tearjerking tapestry of Audrey Niffenegger’s 2003 novel The Time Traveler’s Wife.)

Jumper would have been more interesting if David’s teleporting ability took him only to places where he’d fallen in love or feared for his life — or if he compulsively returned to the same locations over and over, without meaning to: a Freudian trip. The film’s mystery might then have resonated as much inwardly as outwardly. As it is, the situation with which the screenwriters have saddled David, and us, is both needlessly elaborate and absurdly simplistic. Bad guys called Paladins hunt those who can teleport, using a range of electrified devices (again, both baroque and silly in their design) to anchor, trap, and ultimately kill the jumpers. It may not be a sin that the Paladins’ motivation isn’t explained in more detail — the opening crawl of Star Wars taught a generation of filmgoers the value of ruthlessly boiling down exposition — but it would have been nice to learn even a little bit about how their “civil war” with the jumpers has played out over history. (Since jumpers must use images to target their more exotic jumps, how would they have functioned in a pre-photographic era?)

Ah well. The film is more interested in portraying David as a kind of supertourist, someone who can go wherever he wants, whenever he wants — enjoying a picnic atop the head of the Sphinx, followed by surfing in Thailand. This has the effect of equating teleportation with ownership of a really good credit card, a consumerist fantasy of total access and freedom. A shame, because the charm of Steven Gould’s 1992 source novel is in showing how David learns his way gradually into his power, staged as a series of plausibly awkward experiments and epiphanies. The book, that is, eases us into a superhuman life by showing us each incremental point on the hero’s journey. The movie, by contrast, skips all that — “jumps” past it — giving us a protagonist who seems petulant rather than plaintive, arrogant rather than awesome. (The fact that he is played by the same piece of plastic who sank the Star Wars prequels doesn’t help.)

Liman’s comments to the contrary, Jumper is very much a visual-effects film; the teleportation effect is as much the movie star as Christiansen. According to the DVD extras (and here’s a tip: if the FX get their own doc, there’s a safe bet the picture was bankrolled on the basis of them), considerable R&D went into getting the jumps just right. Wikipedia records over 100 jumps in the film, each subtly adjusted to reflect distance and emotional state of the jumper. The effect itself is really a package of techniques. Characters appear and disappear in a swirl of particles, as though they’ve turned into ash and blown away; the local environment is stirred as though in a strong wind, papers fluttering, doors slamming; and hazy, prismatic “jump scars” remain in their wake, marking the point at which spacetime has conveniently ruptured. Often all of this is accompanied by offhand flicks of the camera, as though following the body’s transit through hyperspace; a shot might begin with a quick pan downward to street level, an instant before the jumper appears.

For the most part, we witness jumps from the “outside,” that is, with a body popping out of and back into presence without traveling the intervening distance. (Some of the most pleasing instances are long, motion-controlled takes in which a body — or car! — might appear five or six times, dancing from spot to spot in the frame.) But every once in a while, the camera goes virtual and follows David through a jump, as in the example below, in which he shifts himself from an icy lake to a local library:

All this jumping about is undeniably fun, a kind of cat-and-mouse in which each leap arrives slightly before or after the audience predicts. It looks stylish, as though the jumpers are being sucked away by concealed vacuums. But ultimately, it doesn’t add up to anything more than itself: in an act of accidental self-referentiality, Jumper the movie is a movie that Jumps, and that’s all.

Practical Magician

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Stan Winston has died, and it’s cause for sadness on multiple levels. First there’s the loss of the man himself, gone too young at 62 after a seven-year battle with multiple myeloma. Then there’s the knowledge that we’ll never see more of his masterful effects work onscreen; Winston, whose studio website can be found here, was responsible for some of the most iconic and exciting creatures in science-fiction and horror films of the last three decades.

His death also leaves unanswered the ongoing question of what is happening to visual effects in this era of digital colonization — what they are on the way to becoming, what they should be doing — for Winston occupied a unique industrial niche at the current renegotiation of practical and optical magic. Winston’s monsters, animals, and robots were, for the most part, built of solid matter and filmed live before the camera (rather than layered in later through CG manipulation). Yet he never confined himself to a single effects “channel”; a renaissance talent, his craft extended from makeup to stop-motion animation and full-sized animatronics. Even in something like The Terminator (1982), whose low-budget production technology seems rudimentary in comparison to contemporary franchise blockbusters, Winston’s creations carried us smoothly over the rickety joins from shot to shot, giving the T-800 a terrifying coherence — indeed, a living personality — whether that mechanical assassin was played by a miniature stop-motion model, a full-sized torso and head manipulated atop the shoulders of an off-camera operator, or Arnold Schwarzenegger himself, his glowering face punctuated by prosthetically torn skin revealing a silver cranium. By the same token, his suite of bodysuits, marionettes, and makeup gave life to a swarm of snaky xenomorphs in Aliens (1986), culminating in what was perhaps his predigital masterpiece, the Alien Queen.


But Winston’s artistry should not be considered simply in dialectical terms, as an alternative to or rejection of CG. Beginning with the landmark Jurassic Park in 1992, Winston’s creatures shared the workload with their digital doubles. CG velociraptors and T-Rex were responsible for action stunts (when it was necessary to see their whole bodies, from snout to claw), but Winston’s animatronic performers handled the beauty-spot closeups, providing long stretches of undeniable physical proximity which arguably sold the illusion to audiences, propping up the digital shots whose comparative scarcity was inversely proportional to the press and fan hype they received.

Winston’s ability to move fluidly between effects modalities, combined with his gift for designing entities that were simultaneously bizarre and scientifically plausible, kept him at the forefront of fantastic filmmaking right up to the end, with recent projects including Artificial Intelligence (2001), Constantine (2005), this year’s Iron Man, and the upcoming fourth Terminator sequel. In each of these, Winston’s work belied the “digital divide,” demonstrating a sensibility that superceded technological differences and gave our eyes and minds something to believe in. But it’s Winston’s earlier work that I’ll remember most fondly: the shapeshifting arctic invader in The Thing (1982), the scorpion-faced hunter in Predator (1987), Johnny Depp’s plaintive cyborg in Edward Scissorhands (1990). My most prized memory, in fact, is of Winston’s first credited makeup job, 1972’s Gargoyles, which I caught on TV as a little kid staying up much too late one night. That film was crude and potent, its grip due entirely to gargoyle designs whose expressive faces and gravelly voices made them perfect movie monsters: scary yet somehow sentimental, pulsing with an inner life both recognizably human and fascinatingly alien.

A final note of sadness: Stan Winston was slated to be the keynote speaker at a conference I’ll be attending this fall, Film & Science: Fictions, Documentaries, and Beyond. It will be a very different affair now, but still, I hope, a valuable one — an opportunity to consider and celebrate a remarkable man and his life’s work.

Movie-a-Day: April 2008

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Has it really been four months since I last posted a compulsive record of my movie regimen? Guess so. Around the winter holidays I stopped watching for “homework” purposes and wrote down no titles from the first few months of 2008. (All I can remember from that time is Apocalypto, which made my adrenal glands light up like a love-tester game at the carnival.) Even though movie-a-day is a summer thing and classes didn’t end till the start of May, I impatiently dived back into the ongoing mission on April 1, armed with a list of remedial filmgoing provided by my friend Chris Dumas.

Dumas, who in terms of cinema aesthetics is the filet mignon to my Philly cheesesteak, has been imploring me since our grad-student days at Indiana University to watch more European modernism and less Die Hard; hence the predominance of Godard and Bergman on the list below. As always, titles that kicked my ass get a star. The aforementioned adrenal glands can testify that I persist in evaluating even the most Brechtian of works in terms of visceral impact, despite the fact that, as Dumas naggingly reminds me, “modernism requires the cultivation of another kind of response as well.” Perhaps. Yet the frigid bleakness of Winter Light, like the inky, geometric delerium of Branded to Kill, seem at least as much about mood as mind — sweat as sentience.

Movie-a-Day: April 2008

A Woman Is a Woman (Jean-Luc Godard, 1961)*
Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
Smiles of a Summer Night (Ingmar Bergman, 1955)
City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)
1408 (Mikael Hafstrom, 2007)
Beowulf (Robert Zemeckis, 2007)
Green Street Hooligans (Lexi Alexander, 2004)
Branded to Kill (Seijun Suzuki, 1967)*
A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester, 1964)
The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963)
Hardcore (Paul Schrader, 1979)
Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936)
Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
Belle de jour (Luis Bunuel, 1967)
The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2002)
Masculin feminin (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966)*
Quintet (Robert Altman, 1979)
Sunrise (F. W. Murnau, 1927)*
Otaku no video (Mori Takeshi, 1991)
Second Skin (Juan Carlos Pinero, 2008)
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)
Feast of Love (Robert Benton, 2007)
Band of Outsiders (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964)
Who the F*** Is Pete Doherty? (Roger Pomphrey, 2005)
Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, 1962)*
The Silence (Ingmar Bergman, 1963)
The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945)
Through a Glass Darkly (Ingmar Bergman, 1962)