[Air-l] Technology in Hollywood

[Sean Cubitt]

To some extent, the question would be: which Hollywood films don't address
technology, and why?  Of course there's verisimilitude in costume dramas
(tho look at the anachronistic technologies in Swoon, and compare to the
set for Hitchcock's version of the same crime story, Rope). The classic
instance is Peckinpah, who is supposed to have said that the only
technologies worth a damn were the six-gun and the movie camera. Now Sam P
was given to role-playing the california ranchhand, but seems too to have
had a genuine fascination and nostalgic commitment to the myth of the old
west. To complicate matters, The Wild Bunch reflects on the good old days -
and contrasts the cowboys' horses wqith the villain's car, for instance.
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is set in the 'good old days' and is equally
filled with nostalgia for an even older epoch. One technology in evidece is
the contrats between Billy's romantic six-gun and Garrett's corporate
rifle. A brief glance at Virilio's War and Cinema is probably not necessary
to indicate the relation between the movie camera and the rotary action of
the six shooter.

I recognise that the object of discussion is the banality of technological
devices' presence in Hollywood flicks. All the same, there is a fascinating
insight to be gleaned from La Valley, Albert J (1985), 'Traditions of
Trickery: The Role of Special Effects in the Science Fiction Film' in
George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin (eds), Shadows of the Magic Lantern:
Fantasy and the Science Fiction Film, Southern Illinois University Press,
Carbondale, 141-58. La valley argues that the narrative business of SF
movies is to establish some sort of explanation, or victory or whatever, in
the conflict between the photographic (human) and the special effect
(alien). The notorious product placement of the Nokia mobile tumbling from
the office block early in The Matrix seems to sit between your interest in
the banal and La Valley's in the special (and banality, like realism, is
also a cinematic 'effect' -- as Metz once said, to some extent all cinema
is a special effect)

Final note: I'm impressed by two essays of Michele Pearson, one in Screen
40.2, one in WideAngle 21.1, in which she argues for a periodisatioon of
digital effects movies, an early era of effects as spectacle for their own
sake, and a second she dates from the early-mid 90s where effects are far
more bedded into the diegetic world. Pearson has a book on effects
forthcoming from I believe California UP. Like Don Ihde's distinction
between 'new' technologies of which we are constantly aware and 'old'
technologies which, by familiarity, become transparent (like signage in
your home language is transparent while signs in another tongue are not),
Pearson in common with a lot of digital artists and critics observes the
passage of digital comms from new to old status, but she also observes what
aestehtic impacts that has, and opens the way to a sociological analysis of
what familiarities are breeding among, in this instance, film audiences.

best

sean



Sean Cubitt
Screen and Media Studies
Akoranga Whakaata Pürongo
The University of Waikato
Private Bag 3105
Hamilton
New Zealand
T (direct) +64 (0)7 856 2889 extension 8604
T/F (department) +64 (0)7 838 4543
seanc at waikato.ac.nz
http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film/

Digital Aesthetics
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