The conflict between high definition and low definition in contemporary cinema

3D as a theoretical question

In order to understand the implication of three dimensions (3D) in the movies, it is worthwhile to remind ourselves of the partly obscured definition of cinema offered by Marshall McLuhan (1964). In Understanding Media: The Extension of Man, he claims that film belongs to ‘hot media’ (as opposed to ‘cool media’, among which he lists television [TV]). ‘Hot media’ are denoted by a perceptual intensity, an overwhelming appeal to the senses that brings the spectator to a state of ‘numbness’: filmgoers are immersed in the represented world, and at the same time, they pay for this powerful experience with a sort of ‘autoamputation’ of their abilities to react and move. The introduction of 3D to cinema, especially in the early 1950s, has been largely considered as a way to provide a more intense relationship with the depicted reality; spectators were expected to get a sense of being at the center of events, even if they still remained only as witnesses, to be immobile and mute. Such a move was perfectly appropriate for film’s orientation toward ‘high-definition’ images, as opposed to the ‘low definition’ offered by other screens. In this way, cinema was reaffirming its own specificity through 3D.

The recent return of 3D encounters a different situation. First, film can no longer claim a specificity; now it is just a region (if not a periphery) of a larger domain that of screened images. Second, the small screens – and even handheld screens – are achieving ‘high-definition’ images. It is no coincidence that only a few months after the movie Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) was advertised as featuring a 3D technology that only film could accommodate, many TV sets were offered with the same technology. Third, film is increasingly courting the opposite pole: ‘low-definition’ images. In recent years, this kind of image has become quite common in films oriented toward an artistic, experimental, or essayistic mode. It is enough to mention the use of amateur formats such as 8 mm, the reworking of previous film sequences (Martin Arnold), the use of found footage (Bill Morrison, Angela Ricci Lucchi, and Yervant Gianikian), the introduction and exploration of surveillance images (Harun Farocki), and so on. These ‘poor’ images belong to cinema just as much as ‘rich’ images do. Since the use of the ‘poor’ images often give filmmakers the opportunity to criticize current modes of representation, the images offer a different kind of ‘intensity’, not perceptual, but rather cognitive.

Does this new situation imply that 3D has lost its significance? No. On the contrary, when considered at the crossroads of different media, and when compared with the relevance of ‘low definition’, 3D can provide a touchstone for understanding the role of cinema today and the different strategies it is pursuing.

Back to McLuhan: hot media, cool media

In his influential Understanding Media, McLuhan places cinema among high-definition media, as opposed to TV, which is characterized by low definition. What identifies cinema as such is the presence of a strong interpellation of the senses, which produces a state of ‘numbness’, as with any sensorial solicitation. Television offers less sensorial detail, and it therefore requires more perceptive completion by the spectator. Cinema is a hot medium, as opposed to that emblematically cool medium, the TV.

To fully understand the distinction between hot and cool, which is central to McLuhan’s thought, we must keep in mind that such a distinction, in Understanding Media, has both a classificatory function and a historiographical/evaluative function.

First of all, it is used by McLuhan in order to classify the various media based on two correlated criteria: the quantity of perceptive data offered and, proportionally, the greater or lesser degree of participation that they require of their users. Hot media are those that grant their users such a great wealth of perceptual intensity that no form of integration is required, while cool media are those that propose low-definition messages, which must in some way be completed or interpreted by users, on both a perceptual and an interpretive level. ‘Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by audience’ (McLuhan, 1964: 23). Based on this description, McLuhan considers hot media as alphabetic writing, the printed book, photography, the record player, radio, and cinema, while he considers cool media as the spoken word, manuscripts, the telephone, comics, the mystery novel, cool jazz, and TV.

Secondly, McLuhan’s distinction between hot and cool helps him to distinguish different epochs within the history of media, emphasizing in particular the transitions from one medium to another: from the coolness of orality to the hotness of the written alphabet; from the coolness of medieval culture founded on the transcription and commentary of manuscripts to the hotness of culture transformed by the diffusion of the Gutenberg movable-type press; and finally, the transition from the hotness of the mechanical epoch to the coolness of the electric epoch: ‘the past mechanical time was hot, and we of the TV age are cool’ (1964: 27).

Finally, the distinction between hot and cool allows McLuhan to evaluate the epistemic, economic, social, and political range of the various media that he analyses in Understanding Media, highlighting, on the one hand, that the hot media of the mechanical era tend to favor the diffusion of professional specialization, logical–linear thinking, individualism, nationalism, and the detribalization of culture and, on the other hand, that the cool media of the electric era tend to favor instead a return toward integral, nonlinear, simultaneous forms of knowledge, as well as toward a renewed unity of the social community and new forms of tribalism. It is in the framework of these reflections upon the cultural, social, and political impact of cool and hot media that McLuhan expresses his clear preference for cool media characterized by low definition and high participation: ‘We […] find the avant-garde in the cool and primitive, with its promise of depth involvement and integral expression’ (1964: 27).

For McLuhan, then, cinema is a high-definition medium. This characteristic places it in relation with the book, insofar as the linearity of the printed word corresponds to the linearity of the film stock that runs through the movie camera and the projector, while the discrete and uniform subdivision into words, sentences, and chapters corresponds to the subdivision into frames, shots, and sequences. Similarly, cinema is a natural development of photography, with which it shares the ability to produce high-definition, analog images through a photochemical process of impression and developing. And like the book and photography, cinema is addressed to a viewer who is engaged mainly in visual terms: cinema is an optical medium, which appeals first of all to the sense of sight. Considered in this light, cinema is deeply involved in that process of the ‘Westernization’ of society that consists in substituting the eye for the ear:

The giving to man an eye for an ear by phonetic literacy is, socially and politically, probably the most radical explosion that can occur in any social structure. This explosion of the eye, frequently repeated in ‘backward areas’, we call Westernisation. (McLuhan, 1964: 55)

By characterizing cinema as a high-definition medium, McLuhan, without being fully conscious of it, picks up on a tradition advanced by theoreticians such as Béla Balász, Jean Epstein, and even Walter Benjamin, all of whom thought of cinema in terms of sensory intensity, proximity to things, the ability to grasp the world, wonder, amazement, and abandon. In his extraordinary text ‘Magnification’ (1988 [1921]), Jean Epstein describes the impact on the spectator as follows: ‘A head suddenly appears on screen and drama, now face to face, seems to address me personally and swells with an extraordinary intensity’ (1988: 235). Balász (2010 [1924]) reaffirms this combination of intensity and proximity: ‘Close-ups are a kind of naturalism. They amount to the sharp observation of detail. However, such observation contains an element of tenderness, and I should like to call it the naturalism of love’ (201: 39). Finally, writing about the ‘optical unconscious’, Benjamin (2008 [1935]) observes:

We are familiar with the movement of picking up a cigarette lighter or a spoon, but know almost nothing of what really goes on between hand and metal, and still less how this varies with different moods. This is where the camera comes into play, with all its resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object. (2008: 37)

As indicated by all the three theorists, cinema has always found its specificity in hotness.

The double arrival of 3D

The first 3D explosion (around 1952–1954) was advertised and experienced in a key of high definition. Then 3D was in fact presented as that which could offer something that other media – TV, in particular – could not: a total vision, capable of both intensifying the shock of the image and allowing an immersion into the represented world. In films such as House of Wax (André De Toth, 1953) and The Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954), there is an abundance of objects that are catapulted toward viewers, almost to the point of striking them; while in a film such as Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954), which was based on a play that had already been made into a version for TV, and was filmed in 3D but distributed in normal vision, there is a clear desire on Hitchcock’s part to make the spectator themselves feel endangered.

The relaunch of 3D in its digital version (D3D) began with Avatar, and has followed a different logic: cinema always offers something that represents a kind of specialty, but it does so in view of the adoption of this same standard by other media as well. It is no coincidence then that soon after Avatar’s release, first TV sets and then smart phones featuring stereoscopic vision came on the market. Therefore, cinema no longer reacts to the competition of other media that might threaten its specific territory; rather, it attempts to place itself at the vanguard of the experimentation with a form of vision also adopted by other media in an era dominated by media convergence (see Jenkins, 2006).

From here, we can see a sort of eclipse, or at any rate a profound transformation, of the notion of specificity. It is no longer an ‘exclusive’ feature. ‘High definition’ can also function in media that tend toward coolness (like TV): these media can ‘heat up’ by drawing nearer to cinema. And, in turn, images in cinema may change nature and approximate those of newer devices. In fact, cinematic images function progressively less as windows on the world and increasingly as active surfaces that can be touched and manipulated. They are images upon which we can act with our hands and through which we can perform actions: images that touch us and that we reciprocally touch, enlarging and diminishing them with a simple swipe of the fingers, bringing them into focus, archiving them, sending and receiving them in a continuous process of circulation, and exchange made possible by the Internet. It is no coincidence, then, that their place of choice is on the touch screen: it is here that the images can best demonstrate their tactile, active, and operative dimensions (Casetti, in press). ‘High definition’, having become widespread and common, now involves not only sight but also other senses and forms of practice.

A genealogy?

Considered in this light, D3D leads us to trace out a map of the cinema that is more complex than the one imagined by McLuhan, even if it is in the same spirit.

Cinema appears as both the heir to and the advocate for a form of perception that first became popular in the mid-19th century with stereoscopic photographic images, which were enjoyed both with individual viewers and with devices for collective vision (such as the Kaiserpanorama); though its roots go even deeper, back to the images projected into space, for example, onto plumes of smoke by the magic lantern or the phantasmagoria, or to the encompassing images of the panoramas, in which the represented scene was not simply situated statically in front of the spectator, but rather mobilized a vision that turned 360°, without interrupting the circular development of the image (see Elsaesser, 2012).

In one of his final articles, ‘About Stereoscopic Cinema’, Sergei Eisenstein (1949 [1947]) composes a similar though more extravagant genealogy of stereoscopic 3D – a strategy typical of his writing in the 1930s and 1940s – including, on the one hand, all forms of theater since the Dionysian rites that assume a deep level of the audience’s involvement in the action, and, on the other hand, all the most effective methods with which the relationship between foreground and background has been depicted throughout the history of world painting from El Greco to Hokusai. By returning to a series of deep-focus shots gleaned from his own films, as well as from experimental subjective cinema such as Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1946), Eisenstein presents 3D cinema as the heir to a centuries-old tradition, and as the necessary development of a recurrent tendency in the history of the arts, the desire to project the image toward the spectator, overcoming every form of frame or barrier, and, simultaneously, including the spectator in the image, swallowing them up, and plunging them into it.

With this wide-ranging and many-branched genealogy, Eisenstein makes clear that 3D’s entrance did not (and still does not, with D3D) constitute a greater realism of the image, but it rather opened up the possibility of entering into the represented world of enveloping oneself in it and of being able to ‘touch’ the image. It constitutes an attempt at reconquering the physicality of the world by overcoming that purely visual spectatorial condition in which the observer places themselves in front of a scene and enjoys its effects and the dissolution of reality as such – the transformation of reality into spectacle. It is an attempt at living in the world, in the midst of the world, and at the heart of the world.

Poor images

Contemporary cinema is also developing an opposing strategy. If, on the one hand, it works with high-definition images on a visual and sensory level, it is increasingly incorporating ‘low-definition’ images on the other.

In Understanding Media, McLuhan recognized the first signs of this tendency in films characterized by an attempt to respond to TV’s assault through what he calls ‘low definition or low-intensity visual realism’ (1964: 293). Films such as Marty (Delbert Mann, 1955) and Peter Sellers’ films (I’m All Right, Jack [John Boulting, 1959] and Only Two Can Play [Sidney Gilliat, 1962]) are all ‘perfectly in tune with the new temper created by the cool TV image’ (p. 293). In contemporary cinema, this path is followed by films that recuperate ‘poor’ images from other media, such as security cameras, webcams, cell phones, and even digital images created on laptops and texting from cell phones and tablets. These can be thought of as throwaway images; or, better, as everyday images, ‘indistinct’ in the sense that they are not characterized by special features; or, to put it differently, they do not foreground any qualitative difference (and also in this they are opposed to high definition that follows a logic of distinction). German experimental filmmaker and theorist Hito Steyerl (2009) writes about these images in terms of a kind of Lumpenproletariat in the present-day iconosphere: products made in a hurry, recuperated from YouTube, Vimeo, or some social network, and incessantly in transit from one platform to another, from one format to another. In any case, these images are always blurred, fuzzy, pixelated, and unmistakably low-definition. Cinema lifts these images from elsewhere and literally makes them its own.

Why is this happening? The first and most immediate reason is that it is through this type of image that cinema tries to lower its own temperature. As we have mentioned, contemporary culture tends toward the cool; it is quite true that it occasionally tries to raise its thermic condition (as demonstrated by the diffusion of D3D even in cool media such as TV); but the messages that surround us tend in general toward low definition. By ‘cooling down’, cinema adapts itself to the level of intensity that characterizes many of the media that are currently most visible.

However, there is a second reason: the adoption of poor images allows for the opening of a different field of action. In fact, McLuhan suggests that every change in temperature, especially if it leads one medium to invade the territory of another or even to overlap with it (as it occurs when cinema, e.g., makes use of images from security systems, social networks, etc), gives rise to a liberation of hybrid energies. ‘The crossings or hybridizations of the media release great new force and energy as by fission or fusion’ (1964: 48). These hybrid energies are put toward various ends. For example, they support new forms of creativity, such as those expressed through grassroots practices, in which circulated material undergoes heterodox manipulations in the name of a constant détournement of common sense. They also support the elaboration of a ‘critique of the political economy’ of signs, that is, of a line of thought that attempts to develop a reflective consciousness of what media are and do. In this second case, by adopting ‘poor images’ and placing them at the center of attention, cinema becomes a ‘thought machine’, just as it was able to become an ‘illusion machine’ by working in ‘high definition’.

This process is brought to the fore in the work of a director like Harun Farocki. Appropriation of the most commonly circulated images translates into a reflection on the very status of the contemporary image. In films and video installations such as I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts (2000), Eye/Machine (2003), Counter-Music (2004), and Deep Play (2009), Farocki develops a critical reflection on the immense quantity of anonymous and ‘operational’ images that contribute to the disciplined and efficient functioning of contemporary society, by collecting and reworking material gleaned from sporting events, security and control devices, TV programs, and so on. Here, cinema becomes the privileged terrain on which it is capable of maturing a consciousness of the landscape in which we find ourselves immersed.

This brings us to a somewhat paradoxical conclusion. If, on the one hand, the adoption of ‘low definition’ leads cinema far from what seems to be its primary vocation, on the other hand, it allows cinema to remain in its space of choice. Poor images force cinema to renounce ‘high definition’ on the level of perception, but they help cinema to gain ‘high definition’ on the level of cognition. The senses cool down, but thought heats up.

The autoimmune paradigm

The situation depicted here results in a strict functionality in the use of both the solutions. Poor images can help stereoscopic images and vice versa.

We stated at the beginning that hot media lead the spectator to a state of numbness. Cinematic 3D (and then D3D) allows spectators to project themselves into the represented world, almost to the point of touching it; but it also seems to render them prisoners of this world, practically ridding themselves of the ability to free themselves of it. The critical energies made available by the process of ‘cooling down’ the images allow the spectator to find a path of liberation, while simultaneously leaving the door open, if the images were to heat up again, to a return to the pleasures of perceptual intensity. Therefore, we can say that in today’s landscape, 3D reaches its full effect when working alongside found footage.

The same goes for the opposite direction. Hotness is born not only of the richness of perceptual data but also of the frequency with which an image commands attention. The enormous quantity of images in circulation can numb us to the single image, rich in detail. In this case, the pleasure of perceptual intensity can correct the sense of satiety and even nausea that derives from an excess of available images, even before and as strongly as critical reflection. Therefore, we can see that if contemporary cinema is engaged on two fronts, it is in order to find at each one the counterpart of the other.

Again, Farocki can help us to grasp this logic. Faced with a flow of continuous images that tends to induce numbness – just as when faced with images that aspire to testimonial accuracy, while in reality lying – the cinema of Farocki demonstrates film’s ability to perform the function of ‘immunization’ that McLuhan assigns to art in Understanding Media:

The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptic. If the operations are needed, the inevitability of infecting has to be considered. For in operating on society with a new technology, it is not the incised area that is most affected. The area of impact and incision is numb. It is the entire system that is changed. The effect of radio is visual; the effect of photo is auditory. Each new impact shifts the ratios among all senses. What we seek today is either a means of controlling these shifts in the sense-ratios of the psychic and social outlook, or a means of avoiding them altogether. To have a disease without its symptoms is to be immune. No society has ever known enough about its actions to have developed immunity to its new extension or technologies. Today we have begun to sense that art may be able to provide such immunity. (1964: 64)

In this scenario, in which various types of images and modes of presentation function alongside continuous interferences – and it is in this landscape that cinema opens itself to a dialogue with other media rather than countering them with its specificity – we see the reasons emerging as to why 3D has become a strategic element on the contemporary scene, and not simply the most recent invention for sustaining a market in constant search of novelty.