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Popular Culture Review
It is with this understanding of substance as essence that my discussion will
proceed.
The central questions informing the remainder of this paper are twofold. First,
what is filmicity in the era of digitahzation and computer-generated imagery?
Second, in what ways does the introduction of digital images alter the essential
nature and teleology of cinema as comprehended by a theoretical tradition one
might refer to as Bazinianism. Underlying these questions is the assumption that a
cinema which readily incorporates non-photographic material necessitates a
redefinition of the substantial core of the notion of filmicity.
As of yet, the transformation from a photographically-based to a partly
computer-based film technology is perhaps most easily evidenced in certain strata
of American filmmaking. Texts like Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg 1993), Titanic
(James Cameron 1997), The Truman Show (Peter Weir 1998), The Matrix (Andy
& Larry Wachowski 1999) and The Beach (Danny Boyle 2000) putatively exhibit
a double manipulation; a film textuality twice removed from the arena of the real.
What I want to focus on in this respect is not so much the vagaries of referentiality
that these differing representational practices entail, but rather the documentary
dimension inherent in the photographic-cinematographic process. That is, there is
a quality in the photograph which exceeds - and possibly also supersedes - that of
narrativity, of ‘realism,’ and even of representation in the Aristotelian sense.^ I
choose to name this seemingly ineffable aspect a dialectics o f presence.
Let us say we are watching a fiction film, Fellini’s La Strada (1954), for
instance. The world inhabited by the main protagonists Gelsomina and Zampano
constitutes the film ’s diegesis, the sphere of the fictional. On the level of
signification, the structure of the mise-en-scene as well as the performances given
by actors Giulietta Masina and Anthony Quinn mark the act of mimesis (the technical
facilitation of the creation of the fiction). Nevertheless, however profoundly the
audience and the actors alike immerse themselves in the represented fiction, the
mimetic process cannot in manifesting itself at the same time erase the pre-fictional
embodiment upon which it rests.^^ As spectators, we do not see Gelsomina unless
we see Masina first, or at least simultaneously. The space of the character does not
completely exhaust the space of the actor Masina, who is an actual person captured
by cinematographer Otello M artelli’s camera while portraying the fictional
protagonist Gelsomina. Though the observation in itself might sound trivial, it has
vast implications for our conceptualization of the nature of the film image. With
Godard we might ask: when we see the photographed Masina, do we say she is a
fiction? As opposed to the computer-generated image, the photographic has a
profilmic substance palpable in the subsistence of an extra-fictional trace.^ It is
this feature that more than anything else defines the essence of filmicity. Narrative,
spectacle, representation are all important functions of the medium of film, but