Flickers of Film: Nostalgia in the Time of Digital Cinema

Flickers of Film

Flickers of Film

Nostalgia in the Time of Digital Cinema

Jason Sperb

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sperb, Jason, 1978–

Flickers of film : nostalgia in the time of digital cinema / Jason Sperb.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0–8135–7602–2 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7601–5 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7603–9 (e-book (epub)) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7604–6 (e-book (web pdf))

1. Nostalgia in motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures—Technological innovations. I. Title.

PN1995.9.N67S64 2015

791.43’653—dc23 2015011171

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2016 by Jason Sperb

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

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To Simmons

Because history itself is the specter haunting modern society, pseudo-history has to be fabricated at every level of the consumption of life; otherwise, the equilibrium of the frozen time that presently holds sway could not be preserved.

—Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Self-Theorizing Nostalgia

Chapter 1. I’ll (Always) Be Back: Virtual Performances; or, The Cinematic Logic of Late Capitalism

Chapter 2. They Saw No Future: New Nostalgia Movies and Digital Exhibition

Chapter 3. Digital Decasia: Preserving Film, Database Histories, and the Potential Value of Reflective Nostalgia

Chapter 4. Going Home . . . for the First Time: Pixar Studios, Digital Animation, and the Limits of Reflective Nostalgia

Chapter 5. TRON Legacies: Disney and Nostalgia Blockbusters in the Age of Transmedia Storytelling

Chapter 6. Game (Not) Over: Video-Game Pastiche and Nostalgic Disavowals in the Postcinematic Era

Conclusion: On Clouds and Be Kind Rewind

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Preface

I suppose pages such as these are inherently nostalgic. Contrary to some assumptions, though, this has been a difficult book to write. It’s perhaps the first time I ever found myself deep within the recesses of composing something that, to admit now in retrospect, I honestly began to doubt I’d ever finish. After completing two books in back-to-back fashion on two very different topics, I found myself at a crossroads—a combination of disillusionment and exhaustion, along with an uncertainty about the general value of all the academic work that I’ve done. Writing is a long, lonely journey down a dark, seemingly endless, tunnel with—for the most part—little in the way of a guiding light in the distance. And, sometimes, we writers can come to discover that an even greater darkness awaits us at the end.

I take pride most of all in this work among all of my other writing accomplishments—given the daunting circumstances (personally and professionally) I was able to overcome in order to complete it. And I am most grateful to those who’ve stood by me through the entire journey.

What more can a scholar say beyond that?

Spring 2015

Acknowledgments

Material from the introduction and chapter 1 originally appeared in I’ll (Always) Be Back / Virtual Performance and Post-Human Labor in the Age of Digital Cinema, in Culture, Theory & Critique 54.3 (Oct. 2012): 383–97. Material from the introduction and chapter 2 originally appeared in: Specters of Film / New Nostalgia Movies and Hollywood’s Digital Transition, in Jump Cut 56 (winter 2014–15): www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/SperbDigital-nostalgia/index.html.

Introduction

Self-Theorizing Nostalgia

As film disappears into an aesthetic universe constructed from digital intermediates and images combining computer synthesis and capture, and while I continue to feel engaged by many contemporary movies, I still have a deep sense, which is very hard to describe or qualify, of time lost.

—D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film

The specters of film haunt digital cinema’s future—a future that, for all practical purposes, has already passed. We can understand this literally: culminating with the industry-wide push in 2011 toward exclusive production of digital cameras and the standardization of digital theatrical projection, no aspect of movie production, distribution, or reception today is outside the use of digital technologies. Yet the idea of a future already passed could be more usefully approached symbolically; making sense of dramatic changes may require not looking further forward but glancing back, resisting the endless rush of late capitalist innovation. It’s no secret today that movies have transitioned into the digital age, but are we seeing a radically new era of change, or a more nuanced and complicated historical moment in cinema largely dependent on film’s past? And for those shifts that perhaps have been profound, what other cultural and industrial reasons may remain still underexplored? These are easy questions to ask but not to answer.

In that anachronistic spirit this book is an ambivalent polemic about the role of nostalgia—primarily nostalgia for film but also the analog era more generally—in the time of digital cinema. In this context film of course refers to the actual rolls of celluloid that anchored every aspect of movies in the past, while cinema refers to a broader culture of movie consumption, which has technically, if not always spiritually, shifted in the transition from analog to digital media. There was always something about the old film medium that lent itself to questions of time. It took time to shoot, to process, to distribute, to archive—all in ways that the digital transition has since streamlined. Nick James has noted that what makes digital the chosen form for the industry, however, is simple: it’s cheaper, more convenient and probably more consistent in quality. [And] arguments against this ease of use are potent in artistic terms but moot when it comes to the industrial needs of a mass-market system.¹ Of course, the financial difference—as with young upstart filmmakers—is sometimes a vital (though misleading) one, but the larger point about industrial needs is key.

This project explores the value in that obstinate notion of film’s time, of its physical and symbolic resistance today, particularly given that the long-term economic impact of the digital transition is a question that has yet to be answered. There is nothing quite like speculating about the future, writes Michele Pierson, for raising questions about the way we remember the past.² The idea of time lends itself to a space for such reflection within the rush of the perpetual presents of cinematic interfaces and innovations—a hypermediated landscape that has only intensified in the digital age, a culture wherein not only history in the abstract is heavily mediated but also our own private relationships to the past (accessing memories of the past through the pop culture artifacts remaining in its own kind of perpetual present). And that sense of time inherent to the fading flickers of celluloid, an affect of the past, haunts digital cinema now; this haunting is, however, less about taking us back to the spaces of film history and more about guiding us going forward.

Of course, film’s time is already past (as in, the era of celluloid’s dominance). But there is also something of value in rethinking the importance of holding on to film as more than just regret and denial. In terms of time and contemplation, James adds, maybe we’re all losing something we’ll end up missing in the long run.³ The time for reflection here is, I argue, a nostalgic one. Nostalgia is always most intense during periods of dramatic cultural and technological upheaval, whereby the perceived reassurances of a simpler past anchor our perception of an uncertain present (and future). Nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism, writes Svetlana Boym, in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.⁴ Nostalgia, then, is less about reclaiming a vanishing past than about paradoxically resisting a potentially threatening future: how to pull back against the endless rush to change or against the inevitable end of mortality itself? In this sense nostalgia is often really about the lingering specter of death; the awareness that everything must one day end nurtures the idea that moments and memories lost will never come again. Paradoxically, personal and collective (cinematic) fantasies of a past that often never existed in the first place become the only way to relive it.

It’s easy to see how the fading medium of film, imagining its own mortality in sight, has symbolically resisted the inevitability of its own digital mummification by often retreating back to its joyous youth, even in movies that contain no necessary material connection to the decaying medium of celluloid. In late 2013 Disney debuted a Mickey Mouse short, Get a Horse (fig. 1), before the start of its more celebrated feature-length smash, Frozen. Originally promoted in the months up to Frozen’s release as a long-lost short from the early days of sound cartoons, briefly teasing animation history buffs, Get a Horse was eventually revealed to be an all new, entirely digital production, a knowing celebration of both Disney and cinematic history—centered not so much on Mickey’s role as the face of the company but on his central, and perhaps now mostly forgotten, status as arguably the first star of the sound film era. Meanwhile, six months earlier, Disney had also released the more high-profile prequel, Oz: The Great and Powerful (2013). Like Get a Horse, Oz reflexively negotiated its own playful relationship to the history of media transitions that preceded it. The opening pastiche moments of the movie, set during the days of early cinema, mimic the look of silent movies in both the absence of color and the limited aspect ratio, while the narrative of a mischievous and deceptive circus magician, the wizard Oz (played by James Franco), likewise harks back to cinema’s pretheatrical origins as a magical sideshow attraction. In this regard Oz closely echoed Martin Scorsese’s more critically acclaimed Hugo (2011), joining a line of recent titles (including Get a Horse and the Oscar-winning The Artist [2011]) that toyed with nostalgia for (much) earlier periods of media history at the dawn of the digital transition. In a 2011 review of The Artist Peter Debruge suggested that Hugo’s modest appeal was a reaction to other digital developments: the medium is in a similar transition today, as such sincere, emotional stories are forced to compete with digital spectacle and 3D extravaganzas.⁵

Figure 1. Disney’s Get a Horse (2013) is one of many recent digital movies to express nostalgia for earlier periods of technological innovation.

Thus, if the continually stark juxtaposition of film’s (sometimes distant) past with cinema’s (equally hazy) future in so many of these recent digital productions seems ironic, it really shouldn’t. Generally speaking, the forward march of progress often exists alongside the reassurances of nostalgia, such that (in Hollywood) "technological advances and special effects are frequently used to re-create visions of the past, from the sinking Titanic to dying gladiators [Gladiator] and extinct dinosaurs [Jurassic Park]."⁶ In The Virtual Life of Film D. N. Rodowick speculated that the idea of cinema persists in the term ‘digital cinema’ as a way of easing the transition to a different [technological] world beyond celluloid.⁷ "If the success of The Artist is any indication," Variety observed in 2012, eerily foreshadowing Argo’s (2012) unexpected Best Picture victory at the 2013 Academy Awards, paying tribute to the glories of Hollywood past is a far more palatable option than contemplating the uncertainties of the medium’s future.⁸ Meanwhile, Pixar Animation—long one of the industry leaders within the still uncertain, shifting, field of digital cinema—has also been producing deeply nostalgic and reassuring narratives since the baby-boomer appeals of the original Toy Story (1995). As Colleen Montgomery has argued, Pixar’s championing of the analogue, the obsolete, and the low tech, arguably functions to allay anxieties surrounding the very processes of digitization which Pixar has helped usher in.⁹

Certainly, the self-reflexively anachronistic relationship between these two media serves some manner of acclimation beyond creative convenience or comfort—but for whom? Sandra Annett previously noted Hugo as one example of what she terms nostalgic remediation, whereby one medium internalizes another but also betrays a deeper affection for its imagined loss and shifts between transcending celluloid cinema and longing for its return; between the recovery and loss of cinema’s historical memory; and between the concepts of old and new media themselves.¹⁰ Collectively, the persistence of this dynamic suggests a trend worth pursuing further, though not always in the most self-evident or, more important, progressive ways. Indeed, these movies’ own intense self-reflexivity, as well as the industry’s recent coronation of such nostalgic love letters (The Artist, Argo) should serve as a cautionary note that in the rush to defend nostalgia for film we must also be mindful of how shrewdly aware the industry itself is when it comes to nostalgia’s (economic, as well as aesthetic) value.

Outside Hollywood’s more conventional consumerist logic, meanwhile, such nostalgia need not be automatically conservative—the most common and likely assumption—but can instead be perverse, idiosyncratic, subversive, and strangely counterintuitive. How else are we to make sense of Randy Moore’s bizarre, deeply flawed, but nonetheless fascinating low-budget indie movie Escape from Tomorrow (2013) (fig. 2)—yet another variation on Disney-related nostalgia released the same year as Oz, Get a Horse, and Frozen? Shot guerrilla-style on digital video inside the Disney parks in Florida and California, Escape from Tomorrow tells the story of a father of two who loses his job on the first day of his family’s long-awaited vacation and starts to go insane—a feeling of disorientation and exhaustion that is intensified by the ways in which the movie exaggerates once-familiar Disney imagery to grotesque extremes (such as an unforgettably creepy sequence inside the It’s a Small World ride). The specter of labor and its absence is also interesting here. There is a perhaps unintended correlation between a man losing his job and a movie shot on a shoestring budget, neither of which presents a healthy option economically for the industry going forward.

Figure 2. For all its ideological flaws, the independent movie Escape from Tomorrow (2013) suggests the difficulty, and possibilities, of nostalgia for Disney that runs counter to the company’s depiction of itself.

Escape from Tomorrow represents the utopic potential of digital technologies today, since the type of tiny digital cameras needed to shoot the movie discreetly in the first place—and at such a strikingly sharp high-definition resolution—did not exist even five years earlier. And yet the movie is anchored by an ambivalent nostalgia, too—one that does not fit easily with the official reassuring brand of family consumerist nostalgia we normally associate with Disney or with the more broadly conservative forms we could identify in the other Hollywood movies discussed above. By Moore’s own admission, such nostalgia reflects his own memories of going to Disney World, while the movie also possesses a kind of affective nostalgia that such rare indexical images inside the parks themselves would inevitably trigger in much of its audience (before turning such melancholic impulses on their head). The title itself, Escape from Tomorrow, not only plays on Disney’s Tomorrowland attraction but also represents nostalgia’s most traditional appeal: attempting to resist the inevitable changes that lie ahead in life. The movie recalls the classic Twilight Zone episode Walking Distance (1959), another narrative of a middle-aged man dealing with a midlife crisis by trying futilely to return to his childhood but with predictably disastrous consequences that in turn challenge the illusory simplicities of nostalgia’s appeal in the first place. At the very least this movie suggests that such intense nostalgia at the very advances of digital cinema’s technical achievements offers no easy answer to what its value ultimately is, while also (somewhat unsuccessfully) positing an alternative to Hollywood’s aggressive commodification of nostalgia.

At first glance many of the digital movies referenced above could be read as playful variations on what Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster have noted as the curious mix of nostalgia and futurism that has dominated the digital age.¹¹ Certainly, such a specter of the (analog) past always had a special appeal. For all its surface novelty, writes Dan North, the early years of CGI proliferation in Hollywood were almost exclusively devoted to using the technology to rework older, or less ‘hi-tech’ forms of spectacle—a knowing anachronism that allowed the latest special effects to announce and celebrate their own innovation in self-evident ways.¹² Meanwhile, Nicholas Rombes has argued that there was long "a tendency in digital media—and cinema especially—to reassert imperfection, flaws, an aura of human mistakes to counterbalance the logic of perfection that pervades the digital."¹³ Perhaps most overtly nostalgic in this regard, Pierson notes in Special Effects that the photorealism of most computer-generated imagery had already lost its novelty value at least as far back as the late 1990s. This recognition led her to note, in regard to Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999), that in this context it is the digital simulation of a special photographic effect, the flickering blue image generated by a holographic communicator, that still looks special, its simulated degradation of an analog image a rare curiosity.¹⁴

More broadly, these cinematic mixtures of old and new echo what Philip Rosen once called medium hybridity within the ontology of the digital.¹⁵ Contemporary media will not be purely digital, despite utopic claims to the contrary, but rather will awkwardly negotiate the technological and aesthetic tensions between itself and its analog predecessors. In this sense remarkably advanced digital movies such as Oz, Hugo, Get a Horse, and so forth do not attempt to conceal those anachronistic differences between old and new as much as celebrate their hybridity in reassuringly nostalgic ways. Yet, importantly, this notion of hybridity was not a purely aesthetic or technological dilemma; rather, it was one deeply, and inherently, tied to the logic of late capitalism in the postindustrial age. As Charles Acland points out, Even with all the local instances of innovation—and yes, to be sure, parts of the entertainment business are shifting dramatically—the language of ‘game changing’ is another way to talk about business as usual.¹⁶ This search for radical novelty—one of the utopic ideals that Rosen argued was central to innovation in the digital age—is closely tied to the business rhetoric of "consumer culture, whose advertising logic is in perpetual search of product differentiation and hence a rhetoric of the new."¹⁷ Digital cinema, then, is the latest in a long line of economic shifts, inside and outside the entertainment industry, dependent on the seeming oxymoron that is a permanent state of change, which is fostered by planned technical obsolescence, while the digital products themselves are first and foremost commodities, ultimately defined by their exchange value—as well as by the labor that does, and does not, go into their production.

Self-Theorizing Nostalgia

The unresolved paradox here is that nostalgia for celluloid can be (at the very least) a powerful ally in highlighting and questioning, from an economic standpoint, the necessity of the digital transition—even while that same nostalgia too often serves as a fully complicit coconspirator in the industry’s relentless rush to some imagined new era. Nostalgia, Boxoffice noted (in a rare moment of honesty) in the spring of 2013, is one of our greatest commodities, just ahead of infomercials and energy drinks. And since our industry is all about escapism—don’t deny it—the act of transporting oneself to another time and place fits us like an Under Armour T-shirt.¹⁸ This intense reflexivity, cinema’s knowing homages to itself, in so many recent nostalgia movies should be read less as some kind of radical creative innovation in a new age of technological possibility and more as Hollywood’s further appropriation of the reflective potential that a more progressive (mostly unfulfilled) nostalgia might offer—with the intention of shutting down any challenges to the kind of forward-thinking consumerism that defines postindustrial late capitalism. Kevin Esch has perhaps most acutely highlighted this dilemma in his discussion of one of the more blatant examples of film nostalgia in the digital age, the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriquez collaboration Grindhouse (2007): "The nostalgia of Grindhouse attempts to offer a progressive critique of the business practices of late capitalist cinema-going and exhibition, one that ultimately fails because of the film’s inescapable place within Hollywood’s political economy—an economy exemplified by that compromised DVD release of the film."¹⁹

The failure of Grindhouse’s shrewd film nostalgia to mount a successful critique of exhibition and production shifts in the face of market realities was likewise echoed in Caetlin Benson-Allott’s insightful reading of the film and its distribution history.²⁰ Thus, the question is not just aesthetic but primarily economic. It is not a coincidence that so many of the movies mentioned above are in some sense industrial histories that both highlight and conceal, through their respective nostalgic hazes, technological and studio histories past. This kind of self-theorizing nostalgia involves Hollywood media and their paratexts’ lovingly explicit foregrounding of its own pastiche past in reflexive but uncritical ways, celebrating the relationship between film’s past and cinema’s future through reassuring narratives that promote the imagined inevitability of aesthetic and technological change. Yet moments of this kind of self-aware nostalgia block off the possibility of resistant space for doubt, critique, and alternatives regarding the messy economic realities of a digital transition that contains more troubling questions than answers beneath its self-referential surfaces (thus, is it the least bit surprising that so many future-oriented blockbusters consist mainly of the nostalgic recycling of past franchises, as Hollywood itself is largely built today around the self-sustaining economic and aesthetic value of nostalgia?).²¹

There remains room, of course, for a more fragmentary, individualized kind of truly reflective nostalgia, one somewhat outside the official channels of contemporary Hollywood culture—perhaps in the form of indie movies such as Escape from Tomorrow or Holy Motors (2012), film archives with a different perspective on the material challenges of movie history, avant-garde artists who deliberately incorporate anachronistic, poor media as a form of critique,²² or even in rethinking the past self-theorizing of older films about the impending digital transition (to name only a few possibilities). But they all remain dependent on active and idiosyncratic impulses within particular sites of exhibition and reception, which are sometimes separate from, but hardly oppositional to, the present cycles of consumption; thus, their ultimate value remains generally unclear, particularly in a postmodern culture that too often rewards the kind of ignorance and passivity that further feeds the market imperatives and dehistoricizing logic of such self-theorizing impulses in the first place. So, while there is value in considering numerous potential nostalgias, productively questioning the myth of the active viewer, rather than further enabling it, has the greatest urgency today.

Many scholarly discourses on the innovations of digital cinema, while otherwise plentiful, have still not fully come to grips with disturbing questions regarding the negative impact on labor forces, consumption, and other economic conditions, which are in large part intensified by the digital transition. What does it mean to be a postindustrial, information-based economy, particularly in the context of a modern entertainment industry (Hollywood) so dependent on the kinds of affective labor that, as Michael Hardt argued, has achieved a dominant position of the highest value in the contemporary informational economy and that by its very immateriality is susceptible to exploitation?²³ Film is (was) not only a time-intensive but also a labor-intensive medium. Yet while it may seem fair to celebrate some of the money saved as a result of the cheap economics of digital video (DV) cinematography, Internet distribution, and even perhaps digital theatrical exhibition (for some), it seems fair to ask, at what cost? In his remarkable study on the modern cultures of Hollywood production, John Caldwell documents what is too often overlooked: New technologies generally decreased the number of workers needed to operate film/video technologies, even as they made some traditional technical tasks obsolete.²⁴ This is not limited to the exigencies of DV cinematography, which has rapidly overtaken film production and literally requires fewer people just to shoot, but also extends out to the so-called digital sweatshops, on which the Oscar protests of recent years briefly shined light. Meanwhile, on the subject of digital projection in theaters, the trade paper Variety, hardly a bastion of anti-Hollywood rhetoric, reported in 2013 that "once the digital transition is complete . . . [it] could put 10,000 theatre staffers