For in Leng Quintana, digital technology is not contrary to realism which since the birth of cinema inspires the seventh art. It is that there is not one but several realms, and that the cinema is not content to take the imprints of reality, it also reveals the traps of our relationship to the world.
A kangaroo boxer was one of the subjects shot in the so -called “ Black Maria »Edison workshops at the end of XIXe A century in 1895, while the slight float of a foliage was seized by the camera of the Lumière operators. Two realism traditions are born at the same time, as soon as the technique stammered. The book by atngel Quintana is built on this contrast between two tendencies of cinema, of which it follows traces and mixtures until contemporary times. To the question: virtual ? You said virtual ? He answers: in the digital age, cinema is always the most realistic of the arts. Question and answer are displayed from the title, but the thesis, immediately stated, becomes more complex, because there is no Abut of the realisms at the cinema. Each period, until today, has grown them. The reader leaves the book enriched with a typology that sets milestones in history while leaning over the most recent technologies and aesthetics of the animated image.
The realism of “ as if »»
According to a first trend, cinema feeds on an aesthetic of fair. It is the reign of the Kangaroo Boxer. Qualified by the attraction cinema Quintana, he appreciates illusionism and the special effects. With the Hale’s Tours, popular in the 1900s, spectators were put in the place of travelers on a train discovering the landscape that scrolls. In The electric hotel From Segundo de Chomón (1908), the trips of objects are rigged thanks to a device linked to the shooting. From the 1920s, cinema gained its art status by highlighting the manufacture of an artificial image, by lighting glamorousby the makeup that sculpts goddesses, by the assembly daring to the effects of rhythm, ellipse or rapprochement of distant realities.
The great contemporary successes connect to this tradition of spectacle cinema, Bigger than life. Their aesthetics are that of the marble statue, more beautiful, larger than life, infinitely retouched. Digital post-production makes it possible to lead to masterpieces of illusionism, the first of which was Jurassic Park by Steven Spielberg (1993), endowed by to the nintana with a funny descendants: “ The Spielberg Theme Park is a prefiguration of Second lifethis parallel world where the Internet user performs all types of simulated transactions ». Digital manipulations lead to a robot which turns into a human (by the technique of morphingIn Terminator 2 de James Cameron, 1992) or on penguins that make tap danks (HAPPY FEET by George Miller, 2006). One day they could give birth to a world where Lara Croft would have the Oscar awarded the best actress.
There is a real effect. The spectator believes in it ; At least, the image on the screen is likely. Atngel Quintana evokes a realism of the representation. Neo-baroque architectures of Rings of Peter Jackson (2001-2003) or Matrix From Andy and Larry Wachovski (1998-2003) do not exist in the world, they are created, but like the palimpsest of old baroque forms. Sensory stimulation is very real, which occupies all the efforts of production. Frankenstein leaves the screen so that the spectator shudder.
The realism of the imprint
Conversely, the trembling of the foliage of the Lumière laboratories captures the movement of life itself. He needs the duration to express himself. He engages in a contemplative attitude. Atngel Quintana talks about attention cinema. This realism is that of time and space experienced. In Charlie Chaplin’s films, the actor’s body, exercised in the music hall, produces mutations in the image, without special effects. In Stromboli, terra dio dio From Roberto Rossellini (1948), history is a fiction, there is narration, but the natural setting – the volcano thrown on the sea – brings a dimension of reality. A document is born, which records telluric activity at the time of filming. The symbolism of the mystery and the random is rushing into it. These are “ exploding the real inside the fiction ». According to this aesthetic, the real, as it gives itself, comes to deposit a footprint. Shadows by John Cassavetes (1958) claims his status of improvisation of actors, and if the catches are not connected to the assembly, it is that the impetus of the moment is privileged.
In Lngel Quintana, following many other analysts, notes that today the images generated by computer undermine this aesthetics. Digital post-production makes any seizure of the flow of life. The omnipotent, autonomous image is cut off from its worldly reference. The original chemical imprint has disappeared. The technique takes the idea of a “ seen on the screen »Dalocked from reality: that retouching becomes widespread, making us imagine or more real than life, or more exciting to our senses as spectators, or more in line with the expected standard.
However, tongel Quintana devotes the last third of his book to show that contemporary cinema has not abandoned the utopia of reality in the sense of the footprint, and that the digital technique, by certain minority but fruitful uses, takes its share. With much lighter cameras, lower recording costs, less bulky storage, faster assembly, a reduced number of stakeholders, it is possible to engage in projects whose budget would have appeared, a short time ago, inaccessible. From these attempts, it reveals the variety.
Digital contemplative
The capture of everything that happens, when it happens, in a certain improvisation, a poetics of the ephemeral, seized as it is at the shooting, then rewritten in the editing, forges a style. West of the rails De Wang Bing (1999-2004) is attached, in a nine-hour triptych, to describe the state of industrial ruins of contemporary China. The image is artisanal, the movements of approximate camera, drafts, sometimes without sharpness or with sudden blows of zoom, according to an aesthetic, but also an economy, of amateur cinema. On a completely different plan, the exploration of territories and people is going through the intimate experience, with Prolonged holidays by Johan Van der Keuken, 2000. The chronicle of the director’s last trip, suffering from cancer, is filmed using a small digital video camera.
The act of documentation is also at the center of the films of Jia Zhang-Ke, as Still Life (2006) which camps a fictional history in the context of the swallowing of the city of Fengie by the Trois Gorges dam, or as 24 City (2008) which shows the last years of existence of a steel factory in a China during post-industrialization. The high definition image and the fixed plan serve the construction of a collective memory there.
In Vanda’s roomfrom Pedro Costa, 2000, follows the destruction of the Fontanhias district, in Lisbon, through the portrait of a woman, Vanda, heroinomaniac. The narration, without effects or false cuts, is inspired by witness stories, then the module. Pedro Costa returns to Fontanhias to turn In front of youth2008, where the “ digital coldness offers a new aesthetic of reality ». By cultivating the fixed plan and a static of the meetings, the filmmaker stylizes the real.
Waltz with Bashir From Ari Folman (2008) is a cartoon: there is no doubt that the image is artificial, in contrast to the imprint. The effect of reality comes from the fact that the director participated in the Israeli military campaign in Lebanon in 1982, during which the Sabra and Chatila massacres took place. The quest for memory, here, now, potentially experienced by the author twenty five years later, stages himself. The search for testimonies whose film is woven accompanies the reconstruction of the memory of Ari Folman himself. At least the narration plays this spring. What is then given as real is the very movement of the film, made explicit, even if this gesture leads to a story drawn by computer.
Thus, the digital revolution leads to the Fair of illusionism as much as to the collection – problematized – of imprints of the real world. This new realism is not naive, because the images, even the most faithful, make the look, but for in the nostana, the cinema remains “nonetheless” The most realistic arts ». The effect of real that he prefers gives all its magnitude to the act to see, to soak up textures, duration, space, movement, corporeality, in a certain minimalism of representation, by the beauty of small formats, by raw, simple forms, by attention to the ephemeral. The globalization coupled with the industrialization of the image, with all the technological, economic and social determinism which is associated with it, leaves room for heterogeneous. The cinematic aesthetics make resistance: “ Digital allows the conquest of an image of the world which does not go through the many stereotypes generated by globalization but by the search for a space open to heterogeneity and heterodoxy ».
Under certain conditions, the desire for reality spans in the creation of a thought on the world where fiction and contemplation reinforce each other ; Cinema does not only pretend to take the truth about reality, it shows “ Some of the traps of our relationship with the tangible ». The image shaping our relationship to the world is realized, doubt included.