Book review: Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality

INP, Bordeaux University, FranceDigital Visual Effects in Cinema is a very enriching panorama of, as well as an entertaining introduction to, digital cinema today. It certainly is not the first book to offer an insight into a sometimes rather encyclopaedic inventory of (once) new technologies applied to film making; however, Stephen Prince systematically highlights it with ambitious and quite telling theoretical perspectives. He digs into substantial sources, issued from works and notes of scholars as well as professionals, in a successful attempt to weigh up the different points of view at stake, so as to better base his own assumptions. Prince quite rightly argues that, far from being responsible for a chiasm in imaging, digital tools do participate in the continuation today of an art-form which spans over three centuries. There is no denying there has been a technological shift from film to file; all the same, there has been no break in the transition from analog images to digital ones when one considers meaning and formal codes. Perhaps one could here suggest, and discuss, a parallel with the evolution from silent to sound cinema.

In his introduction (‘Beyond Spectacle’), Prince speaks of continuity as a keyword: ‘Digital visual effects build on stylistic traditions established by film-makers in earlier generations even while providing new and more powerful tools to accomplish these deeds’ (p. 5). As it is, Prince repeatedly claims that digital effects are the state of the art evolution of visual effects, which, per se, have always been part and parcel of cinematic performance. There is nothing new in the realm of cinema, according to the author, but the seemingly limitless possibilities made available by new computer assisted technologies. Prince’s leitmotiv thus structures the five chapters of his book (‘1 Through the Looking Glass’; ‘2 Painting with Digital Light’; ‘3 Actors and Algorithms’; ‘4 Digital Environment Creation’; and ‘5 Immersive Aesthetics’). Each chapter is built with subparts that help follow the author’s flow of ideas, and are regularly illustrated with relevant black-and-white frame enlargements. A typical subpart will then open up either with descriptions of cinematographic tools, of image making technologies and phenomena, or with detailed rendering of film shots, scenes and sequences. The information provided is largely factual although, later on, further details provide precious and telling input when Prince focuses on principles and theory. The book is therefore a mix of historical overviews and more in-depth analysis of digital phenomena, and of what the latter add to cinematographic representation, meaning, aesthetics.

As a reader, I claim my very human partiality and natural inclination, which in this matter takes me to theory and aesthetics rather than to archival matters. Still, Prince manages to make his descriptive and history-related passages attractive enough, and definitely instructive. They can be read as strictly informative, and will satisfy a new reader in cinema studies. They should also be perceived as the stepping-stone to more abstract issues or theoretical perspectives, a few of which I wish to focus upon here.

To begin with, I would like to raise two questions. First, as early as p. 3, Prince severs narrative cinema from documentary film: ‘Questions of photographic truth are relevant to documentary in ways they are not for fiction film’. On three other occasions (pp. 153, 173 and 227), he only very briefly mentions documentary films; whereas, in a book devoted to visual effects, he develops a short aside to digital sound into a subpart: ‘Lossless Master Studio’. I can understand that documentary issues may not be the main concern of this study. However, I wish more had been said about the alternative relevant ways that digital visual effects interact with documentary ‘truth’, just as animated sequences exist in documentary films. Prince develops some analysis around Jurassic Park dinosaurs, but what of the animals in the BBC’s Planet Dinosaur series (2011), just as one telling example? Shouldn’t the issue of digital effects in documentaries deserve more than a couple of incidental mentions? Documentary film belongs to cinema. Or else, the book should not mention ‘cinema’ in its title, but rather ‘fiction film’.

Second, the book’s subtitle reads: ‘The Seduction of Reality’. If I dig into the etymology of the word, seducing infers leading astray, or misleading. When Prince concludes: ‘Visual effects create illusion, and cinema’s provision of illusion has been seen as being ideologically suspect’ (p. 221), he only hints at a key perspective that he has advertised in the title. Such tantalizing issues of perverting truth and reality, of heralding illusion and mystification, deserve further development and discussion, beyond the dry and consequently ambiguous statement that digital visual effects ‘beckon audiences in a beguiling fashion’ (p. 226). From the start, Prince draws the line between ‘special effects’ and ‘visual effects’; the former today refer to pyrotechnic stunts or spectacular car accidents, whereas the latter ‘can be used to create spectacle, but more often they work in subtle, nonspectacular ways’ (p. 2). Also, on p. 57, he states: ‘Audiences notice special effects. Most often they fail to notice visual effects.’

One cannot speak of visual effects and not consider animation film. Prince of course regularly looks into that field, and particularly so at the beginning of chapter 3 (‘Acting and Animation’). In these pages, he gives animation back the place it deserves in the art of performance, although he omits referring to the works of prevailing scholars on the topic, such as Paul Wells (1998, 2002), Alan Cholodenko (1991, 2008, 2010), or Georges Sifianos (2012). Earlier on in his book, he claims, after Manovich, that ‘cinema can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation’ (p. 51). Fair enough. This assessment acknowledges the mainstream idea claiming that, up to very recently, and still today for too many, animation has somehow been kept beyond the scope of cinema. Prince does not really clearly deny such an obsolete position, instead he only vaguely suggests that cinema, from its origins, has always been a mix of live action and animation. Or rather, he keeps it understated, while he combines examples of animation films (Ratatouille, Wall-E) with live action features in his demonstrations. Yet, maybe a more militant claim displaying animation for what it has actually always been would have nicely fitted a discourse praising visual digital effects. Some scholars, such as Cholodenko, even postulate that cinema is animation (see his Introduction to The Illusion of Life, or ‘The Animation of Cinema’). Such an issue has too often and for too many years been ignored, as if animation should not be worthy of recognition. Prince is right to recall the prevalence of animation in the new era of digital imaging; maybe one should point out that visual effects are animated devices per se, whether manually, mechanically, or digitally.

Indeed, the interaction of live action with animation is a tricky issue, all the more so when performance is at stake. One year after Digital Visual Effects in Cinema’s release, Robin Wright’s virtual character in The Congress (2013) is still science fiction; and yet Prince tackles the issue of performance in the realm of the CG era, as live actors are more and more confronted with digital imaging. His introduction to the third chapter – ‘Actors and Algorithms’ – mirrors Ari Folman’s question: why bother with real life actors when one can rely on digital ones? Prince quickly moves away from such a ‘paranoid’ issue, and develops significant points, for example on caricature and photorealism, on composited character and recombined performance. He convincingly unwraps the digital trap of the uncanny (‘The Uncanny Valley’, quoting Masahiro Mori):

A threshold is crossed where the imitation [of human beings] becomes so close and exacting that its remaining incompleteness points to a status as a surrogate, as something not real, and this results in a loss of empathy from viewers. (p. 122)

Only very recent features can achieve convincing hybridity, combining the acting of flesh-and-blood individuals and the performance of their digitalized moves and moods.

When Prince gives his definition of ‘perceptual realism’ (in chapter 1), or when he questions the scope of indexicality in cinema when confronted with digital effects, he quite rightly puts Andre Bazin’s (1967, 1971) theory to the test. One cornerstone of Prince’s argument lies in this question: ‘But how adequate is a photographic conception of realism in cinema and how useful is photography for understanding the nature of narrative cinema?’ (p. 147). Bazin’s conception of photographs as the sole basis for indexes, and a guarantee for reality, would de facto kick any digital related image out of any indexical realm. Maybe one should dare leave Bazin where he belongs, that is to say to mid-20th century film studies. No doubt his theory was more relevant at the time of silver photographs and analog images; advances in technology and filmmaking have made his position – not wrong, albeit debatable – merely obsolete in today’s digital era. Evolution in technology has taken theoretical concepts in its wake; today realism and indexicality have to be defined accordingly. My feeling is that Prince repeatedly denounces Bazin’s understanding of photographic realism, ‘the objective nature of photography’ (p. 50), but still keeps referring to his works (pp. 32, 51, 79, 94, 148, 224). It is probably time to clearly move on and look ahead. Actually, Prince stipulates digital tools ‘have created new sources of indexical meaning that were never possible with analog photography’ (p. 51). Discussing the frame of the photographic model of cinema (in chapter 4), and following Tom Gunning (1990), Prince suggests that:

… the impression of reality that cinema conveys may have more to do with its simulation of motion than with indexical referencing … realism is a descriptive category that can be applied to categories of cinematic images that traditionally have not been considered as realistic. (p. 150)

He concludes that ‘the indexical value of the image – when relevant to a given production’s aesthetic or social objectives – is not of necessity threatened by digital modalities. Digital imaging not only sustains indexical values but offers filmmakers new tools and new modes for creating such value’ (p. 224). Logically, recent – digital – filmic expression and aesthetics do require fresh theoretical perspectives and, on the whole, this is what this book actually provides.

One may probably regret the lack of a proper alphabetically ordered bibliography, all the more so with such a thorough amount of various references. Still, such a detail in the overall presentation of the volume can be forgiven when one considers the wide-ranging perspectives Prince covers in his in-depth analysis of visual effects related phenomena. Despite sometimes lengthy descriptions, and beyond arguable points (which any good development is meant to foster anyway), this book definitely offers much food for thought.