parts for broken 16mm-projectors are irreplaceable, laptop computers have been introduced as a delivery system—and then in a feeling among cinema-oriented intellectuals that film culture is disappearing. The latter may be seen in the increased marginalization of movie criticism as a journalistic practice and the experience of a more general lost love of movies (or cinephilia), as most eloquently and pessimistically articulated by Susan Sontag in her widely read centennial essay, “The Decay of Cinema.”
“Each art breeds its fanatics,” Sontag declared. “The love that cinema inspired, however, was special.
It was born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other: quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral—all at the same time. Cinema had apostles. (It was like religion.) Cinema was a crusade. For cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything. Cinema was both the book of art and the book of life.1
This objective anxiety is also a factor of what film theorist David Rodowick has termed the “digital will”—namely the sense that CGI technology inherently strives to remake the world while motion pictures (as we knew them), having surrendered their privileged relationship with the real, are in some sense obsolete. It is this anxiety that underscores the neo-neo-realist position of the Danish Dogma ’95 group despite, or perhaps because of, its use of digital video. The most important motion pictures produced according to Dogma’s ten commandments were Lars von Trier’s Idiots (1997) and Jesper Jargil’s The Humiliated, a 1998 documentary on the making of Idiots, precisely because of their emphasis on “life-acting,” namely the staging and documenting of authentic transgressive behavior.2
The key expression of objective anxiety, however, is Jean-Luc Godard’s magisterial In Praise of Love (2001) which, no less than Godard’s first feature Breathless—albeit with somewhat less jouissance—responds to a new situation in cinema history.
Two-thirds shot on black-and-white 35mm and the rest on luridly synthesized digital video, In Praise of Love mourns the loss of photographic cinema, as well as the memory and history that, more than an indexical trace, photography makes material. Studied as they are, Godard’s unprepossessing, sometimes harsh images of the city and its inhabitants—many of them dispossessed—feel as newly minted as the earliest Lumière brothers views; they evoke the thrill of light becoming emulsion. Much of the movie is a voluptuous urban nocturne with particular emphasis on the transitory sensations that were the essence of the first motion pictures. (Pace Bazin, there are passages where In Praise of Love appears like a fact of nature while Hollywood movies, exemplified by Schindler’s List and The Matrix—which are, at least by association, digital—are rather, Godard insists, a substitute for history.)
Such cinematic eulogies were not uncommon in the early twenty-first century. These twilight movies include Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), a lament for vanished popular cinema, its audience, and its means of presentation, in a specifically Taiwanese context, as well as several notable avant-garde films such as Pat O’Neill’s Decay of Fiction, Bill Morrison’s Decasia, and Ernie Gehr’s Cotton Candy (all released in 2002). As Tsai presented the ghost-ridden movie theater, so Decay of Fiction evokes a haunted movie set. O’Neill spectrally populated the abandoned Ambassador Hotel, an old-time movie-star hangout and frequent movie location, with transparent actors dressed according to period styles.3
In a 2011 roundtable on experimental digital cinema, filmmaker Lynne Sachs identified a nostalgic “fetishism of decay,” noting digital effects designed to simulate film scratches and dust: “We don’t want things to age. Nevertheless, we miss the chemical reactions, the fact that physical things change, so we simulate decay.” Each in its way, Decasia and Cotton Candy savor photographic disintegration even as they are overtly preservationist in intent. Rather than a moldering hotel, Morrison documents decomposing 35mm nitrate footage culled from a number of film archives, while Gehr records the ancient pre-cinematic toys in San Francisco’s Musée Mécanique, notably the sort of hand-cranked photographic flip-book known as mutoscopes and most particularly (so it seems) those with photographs that are torn, faded or damaged.4
We may not, per Babette Mangolte, experience time according to the rhythm of twenty-four frames per second, but we are watching change. That Decasia and The Decay of Fiction have been largely exhibited in digital form while Cotton Candy was digitally produced infuses their pragmatism with a measure of rueful, guilty digital ambivalence. (The abandonment of the old medium is similarly acknowledged in Linkletter’s Waking Life which, shot and edited as an ordinary motion picture, yet proposes a new sort of indexicality.) At the same time, however, several distinguished film artists created digital works which in their use of real time and duration, could be said to make the motion picture medium more itself. However dissimilar, Abbas Kiarostami’s “undirected” Warholian tracking film and acting vehicle Ten and Aleksandr Sokurov’s ninety-five-minute single take Russian Ark amplified each other for both premiering in competition at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. (Neither won any awards.)
Russian Ark, in which Sokurov’s camera tours Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum in one choreographed movement, was distinguished by a number of historical achievements—as the first unedited single-screen, single-take full-length feature film; as the longest single SteadiCam sequence; and as the first uncompressed High Definition movie recorded onto a portable hard disc. And yet, as pointed out by Rodowick, who insists that “digitally acquired information has no ontological distinctiveness from digitally synthesized outputs that construct virtual worlds,” the certainty of watching absolute, unmediated continuity is gone. Rodowick does not address the possibility of an automatically printed time code, assuming perhaps that it could be easily forged. Russian Ark has significant post-production manipulation. In some instances, the frame has been resized to eliminate unwanted objects, the camera speed adjusted, the lighting modified, and the color temperatures conformed. In one scene the perspective of a wide-angle lens is simulated, while the movie ends with a swirl of digitally-created snow and fog. No less than The Matrix, then, Russian Ark is an animated movie created from photographic material.5
And yet, Russian Ark’s single take is what Tarkovsky would have called the “impression of time” and the movie is essentially Bazinian, most radically in its performative aspect—that is, in the orchestration of the camera and profilmic event. The same is true for Ten, for which the filmmaker placed his mini-camera on an automobile dashboard to document the conversations of the car’s driver and passengers as they drove through Tehran. Each in its own way, these digitally created “film objects” confound the distinction between staged fiction and documented “truth.” In both cases, the directors have made something happen in life. While these motion pictures may be considered as a form of canned theater, both employ digital technology in order make quintessential motion pictures.
Elsewhere, the loss of indexicality has promoted a new, compensatory “real-ness,” emphasizing film as an object (if only an object in decay). In Praise of Love, which begins in media res and ends with a prolonged flashback, can be understood as a continuous loop—and hence, as a film installation. Goodbye, Dragon Inn—a sort of superimposed double-feature with the older movie “inserted” inside or framed by the newer one—also suggests an installation, perhaps one designed to be projected in the since-demolished Taipei theater where the movie is set. Both Decay of Fiction and Michael Snow’s 2002 perceptual vaudeville show *Corpus Callosum (which, like Decay of Fiction or Eric Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke, is a twenty-first-century Méliès trick-film to Kiarostami and Sokurov’s digital actualités) were exhibited as gallery installations.
History doubles back on itself. *Corpus Callosum ends in a screening room with the presentation of Snow’s crude cartoon of a weirdly elastic, waving human with a twisty foot kick. Rigorously predicated on irreducible cinematic facts, Snow’s structuralist epics—Wavelength (1967) and La Région Centrale (1971)—announced the imminent passing of the film era. Rich with new possibilities, *Corpus Callosum’s self-described “tableau of transformation,” largely set in a generic fun-house office and featuring wackily distorted “information
