Studies and research: digital film

What is Digital Film?

The author is concerned with the effect of the so-called digital revolution on cinema as defined by its »super genre« as fictional live action film. What happens to the cinema’s indexical identity if it is now possible to generate photo realistic scenes entirely in computer using 3-D computer animation; to modify individual frames or whole scenes with the help of a digital paint program; to cut, bend, stretch and stitch digitised film images into something which has perfect photographic credibility, although it was never actually filmed?

This essay addresses the meaning of these changes in the filmmaking process from the point of view of the larger cultural history of the moving image. Seen in this context, the manual construction of images in digital cinema represents a return to the 19th century pre-cinematic practices, when images were hand-painted and hand-animated. At the turn of the century, cinema was to delegate these manual techniques to animation and define itself as a recording medium. As cinema enters the digital age, these techniques are again becoming common in the filmmaking process.

Consequently, cinema can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation. It is no longer and indexical media technology, but rather a sub-genre of painting. Moving image culture is being redefined once again; the cinematic realism is being displaced from being its dominant mode to become only one option among many.

Lev Manovich