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The Ontology of the Digital Image: Hollywood Cinema in the

Post-Photographic Age

Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland, 2000

Digital Delivery
What is involved in the term digital cinema? And is it possible to identify in contemporary
Hollywood cinema a hybridity - a cinema currently undergoing a transition from an optical (the
photographic) to a digital (post-photographic) mode of delivery? In this paper we aim to define
contemporary Hollywood as a hybrid cinema, and then look at the aesthetics of this hybrid, before
considering the implications of this aesthetics on film spectators belief structures and investment in
the image. Spielbergs two films Jurassic Park and The Lost World will act as case studies.
To begin with, we shall focus on the apparently so odd phenomenon that much of the digital
revolution around the cinema seems to have at its heart a commodity we are all familiar with, the
narrative feature film, together with its aesthetics of realism and illusionism. In the first instance,
changes seem to come from new distribution and circulation opportunities, where digital cinema is
basically a new delivery system, adding value to the product as it percolates through the
entertainment industries, but where digital transmission would not per se have an effect on the product
itself, or at any rate, no more than television and video transmission has had on the Hollywood feature
film: even if new releases were to be digitally transmitted to individual movie houses, we would still
be dealing with the big picture, the blockbuster movie (and its moons and satellites). The
blockbuster movie is among other things, as we know, a marketing concept, generating attention, high
recognition value, and involving shorter exploitation spans by implementing in the audio-visual
market a principle perhaps better known from publishing and music business: the best-seller and the
promotion of a top ten or popularity chart.
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Such a marketing principle is not only crucial for the secondary markets (recognition value is
what television buys from the film industry, because it in turn is what advertisers are buying time for
on television).
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In the primary market, too, the best-seller or blockbuster, because of the size of its
budget, acts as a sort of engine, usually pulling along or in its wake other productions, as well as often
providing the funds to finance changes in the infrastructure of the industry, such as updating
equipment and investment in the plant. It can also provide training-sites for new skills, talent and
services, as well as occasions for other kinds of spin-offs.
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The principle or model would be that of
the prototype, as it features in other industries, such as the car industry, which develops and tests
them in-house, or in the aircraft or armament industries, where fighter planes and advanced weapon
systems often function as prototypes, tested by the military.
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Finally, the blockbuster as prototype
helps set standards also on the service side, for the exhibition sector: for instance, demanding better
sound and projection equipment in cinemas.





2
Digital Effects and Default Values
Thus, despite the fact that the narrative feature film is still at the centre of the system, we must be
careful not to underestimate either the multiple types of input that are invested in this single,
apparently unified commodity which is the Hollywood movie, nor can we ignore the mesh of
connexions tying such a smoothly coherent feature of the media-scape into its economic and semantic
surroundings.
Perhaps the best way to describe contemporary cinema is to focus on its boundary status and
its hybridity. By boundary status we mean two aspects: one is that of a conceptual boundary, in the
sense that when we speak of the cinema today, we speak of a cinema after television and a cinema
after the video game, the CD-ROM and the theme park. The second aspect refers to the possibility
that what we have come to think of as the centre of a given practice may, from another vantage point,
appear as the margin within a different order of generality or a shift in use and application. What does
this mean in practice? From the point of view of production, cinema has always been a composite
business, with very different skills and very different techniques and technologies coming together in
the finished product. The big difference in recent years is perhaps in the balance between pre-
production and post-production input, but even so, the completed film can still combine live action in
real settings; live action in studio settings; live action plus matte paintings; live action and animation
combined; mechanical special effects, robotics and animatronics combined with digital visual effects;
and all of the above combined with digital sound effects (we shall look at these combinations below
and consider their aesthetic effects on spectators). In this respect, digital cinema is not new in itself,
but a possibly more efficient and maybe in the long run even cheaper way of continuing the long-
standing practices of realism and illusionism in the cinema, but at the same time conferring upon them
a new ontological status, as we shall discuss below.
In the light of this, and given the central importance of the narrative, live action, star-cast
feature film for the economic system, it is fair to assume that traditional ways of making films will,
for the foreseeable future, continue. We know that the revolution announced by Francis Ford Coppola
in the late 1970s, which he hoped to implement with his Zoetrope Studio and all-digital film-making,
has so far not materialised, while another guru of digital cinema, George Lucas - the inventor and
owner of Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) - has voiced, as recently as February 1997, a certain
scepticism, and this not after failure, but with the tremendously successful relaunch of his Star Wars
behind him, as well as a multi-billion empire working at full capacity to his name.
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Thus, from one vantage point, it would appear that we are arguing that the cinema in the age
of the digital will basically remain the same. Yes, it will remain the same, and it will be utterly
different, it is already utterly different. For the digital is also a new horizon of how to think about
cinema as a theoretical and historical object, giving us a position from beyond the horizon: digital
cinema, irrespective of whether we define it as a delivery system or a production mode, functions as a
conceptual boundary, as well as its threshold. Therefore, extrapolating from the present, but with this
border-limit in mind, one comes to something like the following considerations: Faced with the
(quantitative) increase in special effects, but also the use of digital visuals in applications as diverse as



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advertising, industrial design and diagnostic medicine, one is tempted to speculate on a qualitative
reversal. Could it be that one day the norm we have so far referred to, namely the Hollywood-type
feature film, will no longer be seen as what Lev Manovich has called the default value of the
cinematic system?
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What Manovich's use of the term `default value' signals is a significant shift in the meaning of
`norm' and `deviation', centre and margin. A new continuum has been introduced which makes it
possible to conceive of so many other ways of generating moving or animated images, all of which
fulfil the perceptual criteria (or perceptual standards) of photographic presence (Manovich calls it
perfect photographic credibility) that the most common form today, the live action film, will seem
but one variant among others, a historically and culturally specific type, with no further claims to be
treated as the norm, the dominant, or in any other way privileged either in the marketplace or
conceptually. In fact, the photographic mode may come to be seen as a typical left-over from the
nineteenth century, part of a curious obsession with footprints.
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At the present time, we are
witnessing a transition from what we call the optical (or the photographic) to the digital (the post-
photographic) mode of image production. Our paper explores this transition mainly in its aesthetic and
philosophical dimension as it is inscribed in a number of contemporary films; but we might also read
the textual inscription of this transition as pointing towards the external - technological and economic
- histories of the cinema.
Manovich, for instance, takes a further step in reversing the traditional priorities, arguing that
we need to understand the digital not as a photographic, but as a graphic mode, one of whose many
possibilities is the photographic effect, or the live action cinematic effect. Considered as a graphic
mode, the digital presents itself with a long history, predating the cinema and accompanying its
development throughout. Such a view implies that the rise of photographic cinema marginalised
graphic cinema, making, for instance, animation a minor genre, to this day relegated either to avant-
garde forms, such as abstract cinema, or more frequently associated with cartoons, which is to say,
with cinema (or television) made for children. Now the lines of force are reversed: the more
encompassing, general category for the cinema may have to be animation, of which live action,
photographic-based or photographic-effect film constitute the specialised sub-sections. No-one yet
knows how central they will remain, within the overall possibilities of the graphic mode, especially
when we add 3-D graphics, simulated environments and other kinds of virtual reality spaces.
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But rather than follow Manovichs important speculations in their technological or
representational revisionism, we want to explore a different kind of revisionism, which has to do with
questions of ontology and belief, with the gap between the actual and the possible and the spectators'
investment in either. This brings us to our second analysis of contemporary cinema not as a threshold
phenomenon, but as a dual system, the simultaneous co-presence of two distinct modes. As a case
study, we shall look at Spielbergs films Jurassic Park (1993) and The Lost World (1997).

Contemporary Hollywood: A Hybrid Cinema
We currently see before our very eyes in contemporary Hollywood cinema a hybrid - a hybrid of the



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optical (or photographic) and the digital (or post-photographic) image. What is the aesthetics of this
hybridity, and how does it affect film spectators epistemic relation to the film? Firstly, we shall look
at the transition taking place between optics and digital technology, and then see how digital cinema
technology is continuing the practices of realism and illusionism, but making them utterly different at
the same time.
Photography is dependent upon the presence of pre-existing real objects, whose appearance is
automatically reproduced by means of optics and photochemisty (or electronics, in the case of video).
The photographic image is therefore indexically bound to the actual world. The photographic is an
analogue of the real. However, the digital (or post-photographic) image is not determined or limited to
the actual world in the same way. Whereas the photographic image is an analogue of the pre-existing
real objects whose appearance it reproduces automatically, the digital image is produced by numerical
digital codes, each of which is then realised on screen as a pixel, or point of light. The continuous
lines, masses, and contours of the analogue are divided up into discontinuous, discrete fragments of
information, or pixels, on a monitor. Lucia Santella Braga points out that:

Each pixel corresponds to numerical values that enable the computer to assign it a precise
position in the two dimensional space of the screen, within a generally Cartesian co-ordinate
system. To those coordinates are added chromatic coordinates. The numerical values [the
digital code] transform each fragment into an entirely discontinuous and quantified element,
distinct from the other elements, over which full control is exercised.
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The crucial phrase here is over which full control is exercised. The film maker has the potential to
transform each pixel into an entirely different value, for each pixel is defined in terms of a numerical
matrix that can be modified and transformed by a mathematical algorithm. The result, writes Braga,
is that the numerical image is under perpetual metamorphosis, oscillating between the image that is
actualised on the screen and the virtual image or infinite set of potential images that can be calculated
by the computer.
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Practioners of the special effects industry distinguish between invisible and visible special
effects. Invisible special effects, which constitute up to 90% of the work of the special effects
industry, simulate events in the actual world that are too expensive or inconvenient to produce, such
as the waves in James Camerons Titanic, amongst numerous examples. As their name implies,
invisible special effects are not meant to be noticed (as special effects) by film spectators. Visible
special effects, on the other hand, simulate events that are impossible in the actual world (but which
are possible in an alternative world), such as the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and The Lost World. The
crucial aesthetic point in relation to the digital special effects in these two films in particular is that,
while clearly visible, these effects attempt to hide behind an iconic appearance (or Manovich's
perfect photographic credibility); that is, they are visible special effects masquerading as invisible
effects. What we mean is that the digital images in Jurassic Park and The Lost World combine the
aesthetics of both visible and invisible special effects, since they have the potential to replicate the



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realism and illusionism of the photographic image by conferring a perfect photographic credibility
upon objects that do not exist in the actual world.
From this discussion we can begin to determine the motivation for the digital special effects
in Spielbergs Jurassic Park and The Lost World: namely, to simulate the actuality of dinosaurs living
in the present day. This actuality is of course an illusion - or, more accurately, what Richard Allen
calls a sensory deception,
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which shows dinosaurs inhabiting a world that otherwise looks like the
actual world. In accordance with Allens term, we see something that does not exist, but this doesnt
necessarily lead us to believe that it actually exists. Of course, such deceptions have been created
before by optically printing two separately filmed events onto the same strip of film. The result is a
composite, or layered image. In theory, this optically produced composite fabricates a spatio-temporal
unity, giving the impression that the two separate events are taking place at the same diegetic space
and time. The first event may be of live actions, and the second event may consist of stop motion
animation. However, the optical and photochemical equipment used in this process has inherent
limitations that cannot be disguised - such as loss of resolution, grain, and hard edge matte lines.
Therefore, although optical composites can always give the impression that the two separate events
occupy the same screen space, they eventually fall short in convincing the increasingly sophisticated
spectator that the separate events occupy the same diegesis. Digital compositing equipment does not
have the technical limitations inherent in optical printers, and so it can create a more seamless blend
of live action and animation, leading to the deception that the composited events do occupy the same
diegesis.
In Jurassic Park and The Lost World, this deception is heightened even further in the
moments when the digital dinosaurs and live action characters interact. In these shots, Industrial Light
and Magic (ILM) has created a seamless fusion of live action and computer generated dinosaurs. (Of
course, the Stan Winston studio also created live action puppet dinosaurs, but these have a profilmic
reality beyond the films capacity to generate a sensory deception.) Such a seamless fusion and
interaction greatly contributes to the realism of these films. We can even argue that (however
paradoxical it may sound), the shots showing the humans and digital dinosaurs interacting are the
digital equivalent of the long takes and deep focus shots praised by Bazin for their spatial density and
surplus of realism, in opposition to the synthetic and unrealistic effects created by editing. According
to Bazin, there are three types of realism in the cinema: (1) an ontological realism, which (to
paraphrase Bazin) restores to the object and the decor their existential density, the weight of their
presence; (2) a dramatic realism, which refuses to separate the actor from the decor, the foreground
from the background; and (3) a psychological realism, which brings the spectator back to the real
conditions of perception, a perception which is never completely predetermined.
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For Bazin, all three
types of realism are achieved via the long take and deep focus, because these techniques maintain
spatial unity.
In light of the exponential advances in film theory since Bazin, we need to discuss a fourth
type of realism in the cinema - the impression of reality, developed in the seventies within a
psychoanalytic (read: Lacanian) framework, of which Stephen Heaths work on suture is



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representative. Suture designates a process whereby the spectator is continually positioned and
repositioned in an imaginary, as opposed to symbolic, relation to the image. Positioned in an
imaginary relation to the image, the spectator enjoys a sense of mastery and pleasure, since he gains
the impression of being an all-perceiving eye (analogous to the child at the mirror phase). The result
of this imaginary positioning is that the spectator perceives the space of the image as unified and
harmonious. For Heath, this position of imaginary plenitude and spatial unity constitutes the cinemas
impression of reality. This impression is not, therefore, based on the images relation to profilmic
reality, but on the cinemas ability to conceal from the spectator the symbolic dimension of the image
(the image as signifier, as representing lack). Inevitably, the symbolic dimension of the image
becomes apparent to the spectator when this illusion of all-seeingness is broken - most notably, when
attention is drawn to off-screen space. The spectators perception of spatial unity and harmony in the
image is similarly broken. But a cut to this off-screen space realigns the spectator to an imaginary
relation to the image (that is, sutures the spectator back into the film), and restores to the image the
sense of unity and harmony - at least until the symbolic dimension of the image becomes noticeable to
the spectator once more. According to this theory, realism is nothing more than an effect of the
successful positioning of the spectator into an imaginary relation to the image, a position which
creates a sense that the films space and diegesis is unified and harmonious.
Heath and Bazin share this privileging of spatial and diegetic unity, despite the many
differences that otherwise distinguish their respective accounts (Heaths emphasis that this unity is
imaginary, that it has ideological effects, and so on). Bazin privileges spatial unity throughout his
work, but we shall look at the long footnote to his essay The Virtues and Limitations of Montage.
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He refers to a scene from the film Where No Vultures Fly. The film is about a young family who set
up a game reserve in South Africa. In the scene that Bazin discusses, the young son of the family
picks up a lion cub in the bush and takes it home. The lioness detects the childs scent and begins to
follow him. The lioness and the child with the cub are filmed separately, and the shots are simply
edited together. But as the child reaches home, the director abandons his montage of separate shots
that has kept the protagonists apart and gives us instead parents, child, and lioness all in the same full
shot. This single frame, writes Bazin, in which trickery is out of the question gives immediate and
retroactive authenticity to the very banal montage that preceded it.
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In this particular example, the
realism of the shot for Bazin is a matter of spatial unity, in which the child and the lioness clearly
occupy the same diegetic space. Indeed, Bazin concludes his footnote by writing that: Realism here
resides in the homogeneity of space.
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More specifically, the realism resides in the fact that this
homogeneity of space is created optically.
In the digital images of Spielbergs dinosaur films, trickery is of course employed to bring
together in the same full shot humans and dinosaurs. The first sighting of the digitally created
dinosaurs in Jurassic Park is significant in this respect. Approximately twenty minutes into the film,
Grant (Sam Neil) and Sattler (Laura Dern) are given a tour of the park, where they see the dinosaurs
roaming around. But the dinosaurs do not simply appear in the film; instead, they are depicted



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through a strongly orchestrated point-of-view sequence. The jeep transporting Grant and Sattler is
brought to a sudden halt. In the back, Grant looks off-screen right and the camera dollies in on his
face. The camera cuts to a new position as he then jumps out of his seat, takes off his hat and
sunglasses, maintaining his face full frame. But instead of cutting to what he sees, the camera instead
cuts to Sattler, sitting in the front seat of the jeep looking at a large leaf. Two additional shots then
depict Grants hand as he forcefully turns her head away from the leaf and towards off-screen space.
She similarly jumps out of her seat, mouth agape, and takes off her sunglasses. Only then do we cut to
this off-screen space - of a brachiosaurs. Furthermore, Grant and Sattler appear in the shot, which
therefore only represents their awareness, rather than their actual point of view. Or, in Edward
Branigans terms, the shot is externally (rather than internally) focalised around the collective gaze of
Grant and Sattler, since they are present in the shot of the brachiosaurs.
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Numerous shots of other
interactions between humans and dinosaurs populate both Jurassic Park and The Lost World. What
this means is that ILM has created a seamless composite of both the digital and analogue image in the
same shot - that is, layers, combines and merges the digital and the analogue into a single coherent
image, resulting in a unified diegetic space. The films that ILM has worked on during the 1990s (not
only Spielbergs dinosaur films, but also Hook, Terminator 2, Death Becomes Her, and Dragonheart)
constitute an authentic hybrid cinema, or a mixed-media cinema. Contemporary Hollywood has thus
combined features of analogue special effects with narrational procedures of illusionist realism. In this
respect, digitization still supports the classical mode. Another instance of this can be seen in respect of
camera movement, which rather like it did with the advent of sound, poses special problems for the
hybrid mode.
One of the technical innovations effected at ILM in this respect is their breakthrough film in
digital compositing, as evidenced in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (Robert Zemeckis, 1988). This film
created a seamless fusion of cel animation and live action by breaking one of the fundamental
principles of compositing - moving the camera:

The commandment of locking down cameras [that is, keeping them stationary] for effects
photography was particularly strict in filming and compositing live action and animated
elements. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? would not only break the mold and have a lively
camera tracking both live actors and animated cartoon characters, it would be up to ILM to
see that the twain would met - to create through optical alchemy a world where humans and
cartoons could live together.
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In previous attempts to combine live action and cel animation, the live action had to be filmed using a
stationary camera to provide the animators with fixed reference points around which to integrate the
animation. But this resulted in a static composite in which the live action and animation, although
occupying the same screen space, did not fabricate the impression of interacting with one another in
the same diegesis. With Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, ILM created a more believable composite partly
by means of camera movement, which gave the impression that the camera is equally following the



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live action and cartoons, resulting in the illusion that they are occupying the same diegesis.
Advances in computer technology and software enabled Spielberg to use more complex
camera movements in The Lost World than in Jurassic Park, as well as more intricate interactions
between the digital dinosaurs and the live action. The result was a believable composite of live action
and computer generated dinosaurs. The Lost World begins with an intricate interaction between a
young girl and dozens of small compys. When Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and his team visit Site B
on Isla Sorna, they first encounter a herd of stegosauruses which, significantly, pass in front of as well
as behind the team. And when the second team, headed by Roland Tembo and Peter Ludlow, invade
the island in an attempt to catch the dinosaurs, we see 3-D interaction between them and the digital
dinosaurs. And this is the primary difference between Jurassic Park and The Lost World: it is not a
matter of 50% more dinosaurs in the second film, but a more complex series of composited
interactions between the live action and computer generated dinosaurs.
What are the consequences of this process of compositing the photographic and post-
photographic images using digital rather than optical technology? The interactions created between
the digital dinosaurs and live action/real backgrounds within a single shot help to create a new realism
in the digital image, for the effects create the illusion of spatial and diegetic unity. This is analogous
to Bazins discussion of spatial unity in the shot from Where No Vultures Fly. Moreover, ILMs
digital compositing creates all three types of realism identified by Bazin: ontological realism, in that
the digital dinosaurs appear to have equal weight and density as the photographic background and live
action characters; dramatic realism, in that they are seamlessly blended into and interact with the
photographic background and live action characters; and psychological realism, in that they are seen
to occupy the same space as the photographic background and live action characters. Finally, Heaths
discussion of the impression of reality - in which this impression is created by suturing the spectator
into an imaginary relation to the image, producing the impression that the images space is unified and
harmonious - is also applicable to the new digital technology, since it conceals the symbolic
mechanisms from the spectator more seamlessly than optical technology, thus suturing the spectator
into an imaginary relation to the image. It is in the reproduction of the three types of realism central to
the Hollywood feature film as conceived by Bazin, together with Heaths theory of suture, that digital
cinema continues the practices of realism and illusionism.
As a final point, the hybrid mode has also developed a digital effect that reinforces the
impression that digital and analogue events take place in the same unified space and diegesis: the
illusion that spectators are watching movement. This effect is the motion blur. In live action shots,
when people and objects move, they become blurred. However, when objects are moved via stop-
motion animation, they are not blurred; instead, the animated model simply consists of quick, hard
movements. As each frame is exposed, it photographs a still model. Before the next frame is exposed,
the model is moved very slightly. The next frame then records the result of that motion, but it does not
photograph the motion itself. The result is that the model is always pin sharp, however fast it is meant
to be moving. But in producing motion in Spielbergs digital dinosaurs, motion blur is added to the
image. In the composites, the live action characters have optical blur when they move, and the digital



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dinosaurs have digital blur when they move. This sutures or inscribes the spectator into the image and
thereby strengthens the illusion that the humans and dinosaurs occupy the same diegesis.
We are now in a better position to consider the spectators investment in the realism and
illusionism of the image in the hybrid mode. As we have already seen, the special effects in films such
as Jurassic Park and The Lost World attempt to combine the aesthetics of both visible and invisible
digital special effects - to repeat what we said above, they have the potential to replicate the realism
and illusionism of the photographic image by conferring a perfect photographic credibility upon
objects that do not exist in the actual world. In other words, digital special effects simulate realism
and illusionism as theorised by both Bazin and Heath, whereas in other films visible special effects by
themselves are used to create totally synthetic, futuristic worlds. For the moment, we are only
concerned with the digital images simulation of realism and illusionism and, more particularly, in the
way spectators react to this simulation. Rather than referring, as one might expect, to Jean
Baudrillards theory of the simulacrum, we shall instead use the theory of possible worlds, because it
will able us to go some way towards explaining the ontology of the digital image.

Possible Worlds and Digital Aesthetics
The theory of possible worlds challenges the philosophy of logical positivism. For logical positivists,
the actual world is all there is, and non-actual objects or possible states of affairs are meaningless
because they do not correspond to immediate experience. It was only with the rise of modal logic (the
study of possibility and necessity) that analytic philosophers broadened their horizons to analyse the
possible as well as the actual.
Modal logic studies the range of possible - that is, non-actual - states of affairs that emerge
from an actual state of affairs. These possible states of affairs have a different ontological status, or
mode of being, to the actual state of affairs. Possible worlds form part of the actual world but have a
different ontological status to the actual world. This is where the link between digital images and
possible world theory emerges: the digital image is not bound or limited to the actual world in the
same way as the optical image. At first glance it therefore seems that both the digital image and
possible worlds have a similar ontological status: namely, both articulate non-actual possibilities - that
is, abstract, hypothetical states of affairs, whose ontological status is different from the actual world.
The basic premise of possible world theory is that the world could have been otherwise. David Lewis
argues that:

It is uncontroversially true that things might be otherwise than they are. I believe, and so do
you, that things could have been different in countless ways. ... I therefore believe in the
existence of entities that might be called ways things could have been. I prefer to call them
possible worlds.
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But we must not make the mistake of equating fiction with possible worlds. Fiction holds a different
relation of possibility to the actual world than possible worlds do. Ruth Ronen argues that Fictional



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worlds are not possible: they are not alternative ways the world might have been.
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It is therefore
incorrect to say, as many literary theorists do, that fiction necessarily manifests a possible world; one
should not equate fiction with possible worlds.
Contrary to postmodern theorists, possible world theory maintains that an ontological centre
grounds experience and knowledge, a conception that is based on a hierarchical relation between
fiction and non-fiction. Possible world theorists object to the postmodernists activity of levelling
distinctions, of collapsing everything into the hyperreal, the realm of the simulacrum. Nonetheless, the
actual world is not thought of in logical positivists terms, as a realm of raw experience or objective
reality. As we shall explain later, the distinction between the actual and the possible is that the
existence of the actual world is independent of the mind, whereas possible worlds are dependent on
the mind. This position does not argue that the actual world is knowable independent of the mind; it
simply argues with Kant that we can only know the actual world through the minds conceptual
apparatus.
The reference world in Jurassic Park and The Lost World is not the actual world (these films
are not documentaries), nor is it a purely imaginary world (these films are not purely science-fiction
either). The reference world of Jurassic Park and The Lost World is a possible world that is very
similar to the actual world. Jurassic Park and The Lost World mark their difference to the actual world
by altering a scientific law of nature - namely, biological evolution by means of genetic engineering.
The fact that this genetic engineering is being carried out in the actual world, only not on the scale
depicted in Jurassic Park and The Lost World, demonstrates that there is a strong compatibility
between the actual world and the possible world of Jurassic Park and The Lost World. The research in
molecular palaeontology upon which the films are based has not discovered any dinosaur DNA; it has
discovered prehistoric insect DNA. Jurassic Park and The Lost World represent a possible world from
the extremely small probability in the actual world of eventually finding dinosaur DNA in a blood-
sucking insect fossilised in amber and then growing dinosaurs from this DNA. However, Spielberg
has actualised this extremely small probability on the movie screen with the aid of digital special
effects.
One important point we need to consider is the film spectators belief systems regarding the
ontological status of the objects represented in the photographic image and the digital image. But how
can we characterise this system of beliefs? Firstly, we can look at the two approaches to the way the
film spectators set of beliefs regarding the realism and illusionism of the fiction film have been
theorised - the psychoanalytic theory (epitomised in Heaths theory of suture, discussed above) and
the more recent cognitive theory. The difference between these two theories of fictional representation
concerns the ontological commitment the spectator is regarded to invest in the fictional objects. In
psychoanalytic theory, the investment is high, to the extent that it involves a modification of
consciousness (the spectator is postioned in an imaginary relation to the image), whereas in cognitive
theory, the investment is low or zero. For cognitivists, the spectator simply knows that fictional
objects are unreal; there is no need to resort to systems of belief regarding the spectators investment
in the ontology of fictional objects. For this reason, cognitivists tend to reject the illusionistic theory



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of realism altogether.
Whether either the psychoanalytic or the cognitive theory offers an accurate or plausible
account of fiction is a moot point. What we want to emphasise here is that theories of fictional
representation cannot adequately characterise the belief system that spectators require to comprehend
the worlds articulated in films such as Jurassic Park and The Lost World, due to the difference
between fiction and possible worlds discussed above. When presented with a possible world on
screen, spectators do not make a high ontological commitment to the reality of the objects on screen,
but neither do they simply reject them as imaginary. The digital image can, by means of special
effects, make the possible believable. The spectators system of belief can be characterised in terms of
What if, As if, or What might have been propositional attitudes. The modality of these
propositions indicate that (pace the modal realism of David Lewis), the existence of possible worlds is
mind dependent. This conceptual approach to possible worlds reveals the hierarchy set up by possible
world theorists, which posits that only actual states of affairs exist - that is, are mind independent.
Possible, or unactualised states of affairs are mind dependent. Possible worlds exist insofar as they are
thought of, hypothesised, imagined, or assumed. Nonetheless, possible world theory is not merely
concerned with the possibility in thought of unactualised states of affairs, but with the probability of
occurrence of the unactualised but possible state of affairs. This is what makes films that articulate a
possible world so compelling: the probability of occurrence of scientists finding dinosaur DNA and
growing dinosaurs from it, are presented as if they were mind independent - that is, actual states of
affairs. The power in the presentation of a possible world is increased when it is actualised on the
movie screen with the aid of digital special effects, which create the perceptual illusion that the
possible world is actual. The spectators belief system regarding films that articulate possible worlds
can therefore be characterised as a combination of modal propositions (descriptions of possible
worlds) and declarative propositions (which describe the actual world).
20


Conclusion
At the beginning of this paper we noted that digital cinema is not new in itself, but is a more efficient
way of continuing the long-standing practices of realism and illusionism in the cinema. The traditional
techniques for fabricating cinematic realism and illusionism - spatial and diegetic unity created by
means of the long take plus deep focus, the reproduction of motion, together with high resolution
detail, and image compositing created via photochemical optical printing - has simply been replaced
by digital technology, which can mimic and improve upon these techniques. And so it appears that
the cinema in the age of the digital has indeed remained the same. It would seem paradoxical to adopt
a teleological argument and suggest that digital realism is more real than photographic realism,
because in fact the new and improved digital realism offers just another - a more recent - cultural
vraisemblance. We simply need to remind ourselves of the way the minatures in Albert E. Smith and
J. Stuart Blacktons The Battle of Santiago Bay (1899) or the stop-motion animation in the original
The Lost World (1925) were viewed as realistic by their contemporary audiences. The fact that both
films were shot photographically is not the whole story: in The Battle of Santiago Bay, it is the sense



12
of scale - or the loss of actual scale created through the use of close-up photography - that fabricated
the sense of realism, whereas in The Lost World it was the animation of the dinosaurs by means of
stop-motion. Both techniques (loss of actual scale and stop motion) fabricated a sense of realism
because they had not at that point been reduced to a convention, a cultural vraisemblance. To carry
this argument into the digital realm, we can say that, at the present time, digital special effects have
yet to be reduced to a convention.
Can we seriously be arguing that the fabrication of realism in the digital image is business as
usual? The cinema in the digital age, we want to suggest, has remained the same, but is also utterly
different. To take the idea of cultural vraisemblance to its logical conclusion is to end up believing in
absolute relativism - that everything is relative to everything else. The truth of the matter is that
there is a progression of realism from the 1925 version of The Lost World to the 1997 version. That
progression can be measured. For example, we said above that the realism in the 1925 version of The
Lost World lies in its use of the then new technique of stop-motion animation. The problem with this
technique is that it does not produce motion blur. The absence or presence of motion blur in an image
is quantifiable (it can be observed and measured), and its presence in Spielbergs dinosaur films
creates a more authentic realism than the realism created via stop-motion. Moreover, the interactions
between digital dinosaurs and live action, created by means of digital compositing, is more credible
than interactions created by means of optical compositing, because of the inherent limitations of the
optical and photochemical equipment (loss of resolution and increase in grain when making optical
copies of prints, hard edge matte lines, etc.). Again, these inherent limitations and the resulting
decrease in image quality can be quantified and measured. In Heaths terms these inherent limitations,
which constitute the symbolic dimension of the image, are visible to the spectator; they therefore
break his imaginary relation to the image. As a final example of a quantifiable difference between the
photographic and the digital image, we simply need to refer back to what we said above about
stationary cameras. The lack of camera movement in optical composites gave the resulting film a
static look. But in the digital image, with the help of 3-D animation packages such as SoftImage, these
optical limitations are overcome, allowing the camera to move about.
21

However much we may wish to reduce the realism of the digital image to just another cultural
vraisemblance, we need to take note of these technical advancements and determine their ontological,
epistemological, and aesthetic potential. The hybrid nature of todays filmic image (photographic and
digital) has utterly transformed the spectators relation to the cinema. With the aid of digital
technology, film makers can fabricate a believable, photorealistic effect without being limited to
imprints left by profilmic events. As Dennis Muren, senior visual effects supervisor at ILM, observed
with reference to Jurassic Park: The viewers will see something they have never seen before:
dinosaurs that look as if they are actually in the shot. This is not the usual effects trickery, this is
another level of experience.
22







13

Notes:

1. The video market is the through-put system, which supplements the cinema's function as the poster-billboard.
The video cassette as best-seller has, like the big theatrical release, a relatively short shelf-life and thus in
principle needs fewer specialized outlets: if every news-stand or department store can sell the top ten of the
month, there is less need for videotheques.

2. `[The production] boom is not in television. It is in theatrical feature films. A feature gets promoted by its
theatrical distributor and reviewed in the press. To the cable industry, that is the value of your film: the hoopla
that surrounds it. They could not care less about your chef d'oeuvre as such. What they buy is the audience
awareness of it.' Conrad Schoeffter, `Scanning the Horizon: A Film is a Film is a Film' in T.Elsaesser and K.
Hoffmann (eds). Cinema Futures: Cain Abel or Cable (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998), p. 116.

3. Companies like Disney or Industrial Light & Magic fund extensive in-house research-and-development units,
staffed with the best brains from the MIT media labs.

4.. `The cinema of the future will be a simulated roller coaster ride. Go see Star Tours at Disneyland. That is the
prototype. The cinema auditorium of the future will be a modified flight simulator. You will literally fasten your
seat belt for the ultimate flight of fancy. That's why you're seeing alliances forming between the motion picture
and aircraft industries.' Conrad Schoeffter, `Scanning the Horizon...' p. 115.

5. See interview with Lucas by Kevin Kelly and Paula Parisi, Beyond Star Wars, what's next for George Lucas,
Wired, February 1997, pp. 162-167.

6.`[Real-live action films with actors] may become merely the default values of the system cinema, in the future,
all kinds of other options are possible, so that both narrative and live action may seem to be options rather than
constitutive features of cinema.' Lev Manovich, `Digital Cinema' (http://www.jupiter/ucsd.edu/~manovich).

7. `Cinema emerged out of the same impulse which engendered naturalism, court stenography and wax
museums. Cinema is the art of the index; it is an attempt to make art out of a footprint.' Lev Manovich, `Digital
Cinema', loc. cit.

8. `Born from animation, cinema pushed animation to its boundary, only to become one particular case of
animation in the end. [...] The same applies for the relationship between production and post-production.' Lev
Manovich, `Digital Cinema', loc. cit.

9. Lucia Santaella Braga, The Prephotographic, the Photographic, and the Postphotographic Image, in
Winfried Nth, ed., Semiotics of the Media: State of the Art, Projects, and Perspectives (Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter, 1997), p. 125.

10. Braga, The Prephotographic ..., p. 126.

11. The term sensory deception was coined by Richard Allen, who distinguishes it from epistemic
deception: Most illusions are deceptive in two respects: They deceive the senses, and they lead us to make
false inferences. We see something that does not really exist, and believe that it does exist. These two kinds of
deception are distinguishable, however. We may experience a sensory illusion without being deceived into
believing that what we see is real. The definition of illusion as deception must be modified. An illusion is
something that deceives or is liable to deceive the spectator, but the deception need not be of the epistemic kind.
Sensory deception does not entail epistemic deception. Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship
and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 98.

12. Andr Bazin, Orson Welles: A Critical View (Los Angeles: Acrobat Books, 1991), p. 80.




14

Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1981), esp. Chapter 3.

13. Andr Bazin, The Virtues and Limitations of Montage, in What is Cinema? Volume 1, trans. Hugh Gray
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 41-52.

14. Bazin, The Virtues and Limitations of Montage, p. 49.

15. Bazin, The Virtues and Limitations of Montage, p. 50.

16. Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 100-107.

17. Mark Cotta Vaz, Industrial Light and Magic: Into the Digital Realm (London: Virgin Publishing Ltd., 1996),
p. 123.

18. David Lewis, Possible Worlds, in Michael Loux, ed., The Possible and the Actual: Readings in the
Metaphysics of Modality (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 182.

19. Ruth Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 51-
52.

20. In the theory of suture, the propositions relate to imaginary - fictional - events; here we get into a discussion
of the truth status of fiction: a wider field than we can deal with here.

21. The various software breakthroughs, building on the advances pioneered during Death Becomes Her,
would allow for unprecedented freedom in the digital compositing of CG [computer graphic] creations and live-
action film. For the first time in ILMs history all restrictions on camera movement in background plates were
removed, thanks to such tools as SoftImage, which allowed CG artists to create 3-D match-moves for any live-
action plate and weave those shots with complex and hand-held camera moves. Vaz, Industrial Light and
Magic, p. 221.

22. Dennis Muren, quoted in Vaz, Industrial Light and Magic, p. 214.