Reality Madia
From DV Realism to a Universal Recording Machine
Introduction
If Mike Figgis’s remarkable Timecode (2000) exemplifies the difficult search of digital cinema for its own unique aesthetics, it equally demonstrates how these emerging aesthetics borrow from cinema’s rich past, from other media, and from the conventions of computer software. The film splits the screen into the four quadrants to show us four different actions taking place at once. This is of course something that have been common in computer games for a while; we may also recall computer user’s ability to open a new window into a document, which is the standard feature of all popular software programs. In tracking the characters in real time, Timecode follows the principle of unity of space and time that goes back to the seventeenth century classicism. At the same time, since we are presented with video images which appear in separate frames within the screen and which provide different viewpoints on the same building, the film also makes a strong reference to the aesthetics of video surveillance. At the end, we may ask if we are dealing with a film that is borrowing strategies from other media; or with a “reality TV” program that adopts the strategies of surveillance; or with a computer game that heavily relies on cinema. In short, is Timecode still cinema or is it already new media?
This essay will address one of the key themes which accompanies both the evolution of new media technologies during its four decade long history and the current ongoing shift of cinema towards being computer-based in all aspects of its production, post-production and distribution. This theme is “realism.” The introduction of every new modern media technology, from photography in the 1840s to Virtual Reality in the 1980s, has always been accompanied by the claims that the new technology allows to represent reality in a new way. Typically it is argued that the new representations are radically different from the
Introduction
If Mike Figgis’s remarkable Timecode (2000) exemplifies the difficult search of digital cinema for its own unique aesthetics, it equally demonstrates how these emerging aesthetics borrow from cinema’s rich past, from other media, and from the conventions of computer software. The film splits the screen into the four quadrants to show us four different actions taking place at once. This is of course something that have been common in computer games for a while; we may also recall computer user’s ability to open a new window into a document, which is the standard feature of all popular software programs. In tracking the characters in real time, Timecode follows the principle of unity of space and time that goes back to the seventeenth century classicism. At the same time, since we are presented with video images which appear in separate frames within the screen and which provide different viewpoints on the same building, the film also makes a strong reference to the aesthetics of video surveillance. At the end, we may ask if we are dealing with a film that is borrowing strategies from other media; or with a “reality TV” program that adopts the strategies of surveillance; or with a computer game that heavily relies on cinema. In short, is Timecode still cinema or is it already new media?
This essay will address one of the key themes which accompanies both the evolution of new media technologies during its four decade long history and the current ongoing shift of cinema towards being computer-based in all aspects of its production, post-production and distribution. This theme is “realism.” The introduction of every new modern media technology, from photography in the 1840s to Virtual Reality in the 1980s, has always been accompanied by the claims that the new technology allows to represent reality in a new way. Typically it is argued that the new representations are radically different from the