Lecture Library

In briefly examining the early histories of three mediums—early silent cinema, television and video games—a recurring trend appears: an exploratory feint into new uses for the moving image, followed by a motion into more established aesthetic forms.

         The rise of “new” media produces a schizophrenic reaction from society. The dominant narrative is one of elation; for example, the mythic tale surrounding The Jazz Singer (1927) was that it was a wild success, the genesis of “the talkie” and generally a watershed in film history. Though David Bordwell's documentation of the transition in On the History of Film Style suggests a “pessimism triggered by the new technology” (37), there is a vastly differing trend in the popular press. In his essay “The Jazz Singer's Reception in the Media and at the Box Office”, Donald Crafton, though doing much to challenge the absolute nature of the legends surrounding Jolson's film, provides effective documentation of positive public reception to both Jolson's film and the advent of sound. What Bordwell refers to is a smaller, dissenting narrative of traditionalists. The specificity thesis asserted that cinema's primary power was that of the moving image, and that introducing sound to the equation would only dilute the purity of the medium.

         Conventional wisdom holds that “new” media attempts to establish legitimacy by, as Noël Carroll so crassly puts it, “aping” previous cultural forms; at the same time, the established media tries to preserve its own audience base by improving itself within the confines of its own medium. Yet the paradigm at work in new media emergence is far more complex. In briefly examining the early histories of three mediums—early silent cinema, television and video games—a recurring trend appears: an exploratory feint into new uses for the moving image, followed by a motion into more established aesthetic forms.

         In his rebellion against the perception of early films as merely proto-narratives, Tom Gunning redefined these works as “attractions” that sought to “show something.” While Méliès and Porter films do have primitive narratives, Gunning characterizes them as excuses to sequence spectacles together. The importance was to show an exotic locale; a new use or trick for the camera; or a famous performer that working-class audiences might not otherwise get the opportunity to see.

In her essay “Cinematic Spectatorship Before the Apparatus”, Vanessa Schwartz debunks the notion that the first decade of film had much to do with literary or theatrical precedent: in analyzing the public display of corpses at the Paris Morgue and the popularity of wax museums, she demonstrates that the public wished the world of events to be brought to them in media other than print. The most crucial artistic determinant present in fin- de-siècle French society appeared to be the panoramas, which “marshaled vision to transport spectators in time and place through the illusion of realistic representation.” (Schwartz 291) It would seem that this medium of expression blurs together with film, as they were sometimes used to supplement the motion present in those displays. Schwartz concludes by stating that such a quest for realism birthed the cinematic spectator, even before the birth of cinematic technologies as we know them today.

         It is interesting to ponder that the man given the most credit for inventing narrative cinema began as a playwright. D.W. Griffith certainly improved certain cinematic techniques, but he can be better appreciated as a bellwether for the importation of complex narrative onto film rather than its progenitor. Technology—most pointedly the use of multiple reels—was able to give filmmakers the ability to tell more complex stories.

In addition, the use of editing meant that a film no longer needed to be tethered to one location. It is important to note that, despite the advent of narrative, “attractions” did not disappear; according to Gunning they became employed within the structure of narrative film, only existing independently within avant-garde cinema. Narrative was the driving force; films either took plays and novels as their source material or they used those forms to construct film—either way, retreating to older, more established roots.

         Like early film, television presented itself as a new mass medium, injecting a new variety of realism into screen entertainment. The principal early selling point was that it was broadcast live. Sporting events were no longer the sole purview of stadiums, tethered to one location, or radio, bereft of image: spectators could watch the entire event as it was happening, regardless of the physical geography of the spectator. Current events similarly became a wide draw, most notably the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. Although the fiction programming was drawn from the theater, the critical attraction for the audience was that it was live—from New York.

 Again, the excitement and the discourse circulated around the fact that it was a real-time performance from a famous Broadway star, who could flub his line at any minute. Therefore the realism of early television—how it distinguished itself from cinema—circulated around the fact that the events it depicted were spontaneous, and ostensibly were being put through less content filters than the heavily edited newsreels.

         In spite of the thrill of broadcast spontaneity, televised fictional programs soon adopted cinematic methods of production. I Love Lucy was the first sitcom to record its segments for broadcast at a later date. Soon followed a torrent of popular series, from Bonanza to The Twilight Zone, which made full use of an array of cinematic techniques.

In presenting fiction, they contextualized their realism not in the use of live broadcast, but instead in the use of diverse sets and locations to set a narrative. This paralleled the development from early single-shot to later multi-shot films: the scope of the drama greatly expanded, allowing for an increased narrative complexity on the screen.

         Nascent computer games faced physical challenges not seen since silent cinema. While digital effects were being impressively used in films such as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the technological constraints of arcade cabinets (and later home gaming consoles) were a determining factor. Both an issue of size and cost, processor speed in gaming equipment was low and hard disc space small. Reminiscent of early silent film, popular titles such as Pong and PacMan utilized one screen for gameplay. Yet developments were swift in coming to these attractions: Galaga featured a simple, scrolling 2-dimensional backdrop, giving the effect of non- interactive yet dynamic movement, separate from both player and environment.

Donkey Kong advanced the narrative in video games to a new level by employing multiple levels, and most importantly, animated cut scenes.

         As the technology progressed into the 1990s, available hard disk space and processor speed increased, leading to the development of more levels and more elaborate cut scenes. Yet even into the 8-bit era of gaming, there simply was no expedient audio compression available to sync extensive dialogue to the images. Therefore many of them play like silent films: the action stops while text appears on screen, moving the plot along. For example, upon completing a level of Super Mario Bros., a rescued underling says: “THANK YOU MARIO! BUT OUR PRINCESS IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE!” The generation of 16-bit gaming made these animations more active, lengthy and complex, but they remained essentially more elaborate iterations of their ancestral forms.

         In the last decade of gaming, cut scenes have come to resemble contemporary sound film, largely due to the mushrooming of resources available to a single gaming unit. Though 3-D gaming was experimented with the the 16-bit era, it came full force in the mid-90s with the advent of 64-bit gaming consoles and the proliferation of processing power in the home computer. The fully realized three-dimensional environment allowed dynamic “camera” placement in a game environment as well as the inclusion of dialogue in short doses throughout gameplay. This effectively integrated narrative and character with the active agency of the player in the game.

These “cinematics” have also become more seamlessly integrated into gameplay. In the Call of Duty series the player has control of the camera during expository sequences; these are identical to actual gameplay, sans user interface. In The Knights of the Old Republic series, the cut scenes mirror the film series that spawned it. And finally, the latest trend in advertising computer games is to release a trailer, often featuring both a demonstration of the interface and an encapsulation of the narrative.

         When Andre Bazin wrote “The Myth of Total Cinema”, he said “...it would be absurd to take the silent film as a state of primal perfection which has gradually been forsaken by the realism of sound and color”, he was expressing a sentiment against the very notion of specificity. As it is absurd to hermetically seal art into trends such as “national cinema,” so too is it ludicrous to seal forms of media away from each other. Every art form is possessed with a cornucopia of external determinants, some simply more obvious than others. Where interactive media started as essentially an avant-garde entertainment—a unique attraction—they are increasingly coming under the sway, like television before it, of cinematic determinants. But as Bazin so acutely documented in “Theater and Cinema”, film itself fell under the spell of theater after an initial period of experimentation. Therefore the pattern that emerges is that: as the technology develops, creators delve into avant-garde storytelling to overcome technological obstacles. As the technology develops, creators then trend (to the despair of some) back to some conventions of older media forms, creating a chimera of techniques that defines that medium.

--Jesse MacKinnon