Ceilidh

Michael Zey
futurist3000@aol.com

BY STEPHEN WHITTY
c.2004 Newhouse News Service

It is called the art of moving pictures, but nothing moves faster than the art itself.

Films of a minute in length soon give way to films of 10 minutes, then 100. Black-and-white photography is quickly supplanted by hand-tinted shades, then full color.

Other, older arts -- drama, sculpture, dance -- can take hundreds of years to evolve. Movies change overnight -- and then, every 20 years or so, change again. An art born of modern science, they remain linked forever to its fortunes.

Now the art is, quietly, moving forward again. And this time, the new frontier is digital.

Earlier movies like "Gladiator" and the "Star Wars" prequels used computers to animate crowd scenes. Peter Jackson took the process even further in his "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, using computer-generated images to create entire epic battles. The new "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" uses it to animate and create an entire world. The sets, the props, the robots, even the human villain -- everything except the heroes themselves -- has been made on a computer.

Everything was done on a soundstage and every shot was filled out with computer-generated imagery, says proud producer Jon Avnet. "For example, there's a scene where Gwyneth (Paltrow) and Jude (Law) are driving in a car. Actually, on the set, they were sitting on two blue boxes. The only real part of the car was a steering wheel. Everything else was added later."

The state-of-the-art computer animation allowed Avnet to shave some $60 million off the budget, he estimates. More radically, though, it allowed director Kerry Conran to impose his own look on every aspect of the film, and then to tweak those details endlessly, not through reshoots, but merely via a few simple keystrokes.

"I think if you extrapolate it, what we did here has the same sort of broad-reaching implications you saw with color, and widescreen," says the visionary Conran. "It's not a gimmick, as was 3-D. Initially it may seem like a novelty, but I think it's a window into the future."

The earliest cinematic innovations came not from technology but aesthetics. Pioneering directors like D.W. Griffith and Edwin S. Porter replaced the old staged tableaux with close-ups and cross-cutting. Early moguls like Cecil B. DeMille, Jesse Lasky and Adolph Zukor eschewed slapstick for blockbuster productions.

By 1925, the movies had grown up, but they hadn't grown into something else. Then came sound.

"Ironically, the development of sound really grew out of an attempt to save theater owners money on silents," says Ron Hutchinson, founder of the movie preservation group, the Vitaphone Project. "The idea was to provide synchronized musical scores, so owners didn't have to hire their own musicians."

Technology, though, isn't so easily controlled.

Much as small-town audiences appreciated hearing their movies with recorded orchestral scores, what they really liked were the accompanying novelty shorts of vaudeville performers. Studios that had hoped only to save their exhibitors the cost of a few union musicians had unwittingly given the movies their voice.

"Wait a minute, wait a minute," Al Jolson famously ad-libbed in 1927's "The Jazz Singer." "You ain't heard nothin' yet!" And audiences hadn't. Soon every studio was making sound films -- "All talking, all singing, all dancing!" as the ads used to promise. By 1930, the silent film was dead.

A new kind of film had taken its place, but in many ways its only improvement -- spoken dialogue -- didn't make up for what was lost.

Cumbersome sound cameras made the silent era's smooth camerawork impossible. Dialogue took the place of suggestion and imagery. With sound mixing and dubbing still in the future -- the Vitaphone process required that all actors be recorded live, on disc -- cinema's beautiful orchestral scores were reduced to pop songs, or brief snatches of incidental music.

"In some of those very early films, the cameras seem to be nailed down to the floor," Hutchinson admits, "but it really depended on how experimental the director was, and how afraid he was. Every film wasn't stagy."

Indeed, some directors -- like Ernst Lubitsch, Rouben Mamoulian and Alfred Hitchcock -- adapted to the new medium, experimenting with sound while keeping the silent screen's visual sense. Some performers whose careers would have been unthinkable in silent films -- the Marx Brothers, Mae West, Bing Crosby -- became stars, replacing those who couldn't adapt. And the art itself -- an art that once depended exclusively on pantomime and imagery -- changed into something else.

And then, a few years later, Technicolor arrived and changed it again.

"Color meant huge changes for cinematographers," says Bob Gitt, the Preservation Officer at the UCLA Film and Television Archive. "The first Technicolor stocks had an ASA rating of 6, meaning you really had to flood the set with enormous quantities of light. Today (the ASA is) 100, 200 even 400. ... But the change wasn't as fast as it had been with sound. Filmmakers, and audiences, had decades to get used to it."

Yet, as always, even as the new technology gave the movies a gift, it took something in return.

Even after sound, black-and-white cinema had still retained a heightened unreality, a sense of fantasy that made clowns and monsters not only possible, but plausible. But the color camera concealed nothing. Stripped of their concealing shades of gray, a greenish man-made monster looked silly, not frightening; a mime in a fright wig and a man with a greasepaint mustache looked merely strange.

Color, like sound before it, brought the movies even closer to real life. But was the chance to see real life what really brought most people into movie theaters?

Eventually, as with sound, true artists learned to turn the technology to their own purpose. The green light shining into the hotel room in Hitchcock's "Vertigo," the Impressionist pastels of John Huston's "Moulin Rouge" -- these are moments that were impossible without color. Yet by continuing to work in black and white too, these directors insisted that color be considered not the answer, but an option.

Since Technicolor's first big successes in the '30s, other innovations have come along regularly. Few have lasted.

"For certain sorts of subjects it was absolutely glorious, but 3-D was distracting in a drama, and the early processes tended to cause eyestrain," says Gitt. "Cinerama had the problem of those visible lines on the screen (where the three images met) but in a way its idea of the huge image has come to pass anyway, thanks to Imax."

Now, with computers, moviemakers are faced with another innovation. Yet the change this step forward brings is quite different.

"When they're used creatively, I think the digital breakthroughs can be very exciting," Gitt says. "Used just to cheapen things, I think they can be very disappointing. ... People may one day long for the days when they didn't exist -- just as shortly after sound films took over, they realized they missed the silents."

In the past, each new moviemaking process -- sound, color, 3-D, wrap-around screens, even the laughable Odorama -- promised to make movies more like what we actually see and experience in real life. Aiding them in that aim were teams of stunt artists, special effects wizards, set dressers and, of course, performers.

Computers, however, promise to make things not real, but perfect -- and they create that perfection by limiting the unpredictable human element. Software takes the place of stunt people, computer programs do the jobs of squads of painters and greensmen. Once we watched a film and wondered, how did they do it? Now we take the impossible for granted.

Even actors are no longer quite so necessary. For years, digital artists have been employed to cover a star's bald patch, or disguise his paunch. Now they can replace him completely. In "Sky Captain," the surprise villain is actually played by a dead star -- his image lifted from an old film, his voice mimicked by an impressionist, the whole thing digitally massaged into a new "performance."

"It is a big question mark," Conran says of the ethics involved. "I knew that what we intended to do was quite limited but that doesn't make it right one way or another. ... We certainly tried to approach it with a respectful and loving feel, but it's certainly something that could be used to the detriment of the actors that it resurrects. I think people who control the estates of the actors need to be wary."

Though Conran discounts the widespread use of that part of the technology -- "kids want to see their own stars on screen, not Humphrey Bogart again" -- the questions it raises will keep entertainment lawyers in business for years. What's to keep a name-brand bottle of whiskey from being digitally product-placed into an actor's hand? Or an actress's evening gown from being digitally altered into a rhinestone thong?

Producer Avnet, who agrees the new technology will be "used by some with good taste, and some with bad taste," still sees this ability to instantly create sets and performers as just another tool. "The technology doesn't create a story," he says. "It allows you to tell your story, limited only by your imagination."

"It's just a production technique," echoes Conran. "I can see the value of it in mundane stuff like stunt work. I don't see the use of it in romantic comedies, or in replacing actors wholesale. You go down that road and very soon there's nothing to separate your film from `Shrek.' ... Whatever you do will always have a human touch and influence to it. There's no danger of that ever going away."

Which, of course, is exactly what they once said about silent films and black-and-white cinematography.

Sept. 21, 2004



(Stephen Whitty is film critic for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be contacted at swhitty@starledger.com.)

Movie Logo for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow