How Special Effects Work #2: Virtual actors are on the way.

In some of my earlier writing about special effects, I regularly found myself banging a particular drum, and eventually had to stop myself getting repetitive. In my research on special effects, I continually found practitioners, and some critics espousing a belief that virtual actors were soon going to reach such a perfect state of simulation that spectators would be unable to tell them apart from the real thing. The following comes from a paper I wrote for Stacy Gillis’ collection The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Reloaded:

It would be all too easy to fall for the suggestion that the age of the synthespian is imminent, and that soon human actors will interact with computer-generated co-stars without the audience realising which is which. Will Anielewicz, a senior animator at effects house Industrial Light and Magic, promised recently that “Within five years, the best actor is going to be a digital actor”. The apotheosis of an animated character into an artificially intelligent, fully simulacrous figure indistinguishable from its carbon-based referent is technically impossible, at least in the foreseeable future, but visual effects are not definitive renderings of a character or event but indicators of the state-of-the-art offering “a hint of what is likely to come” (Kerlow) in the field of visual illusions in the future. It is understandable that such a competitive industry needs to maintain interest in the potential of its products, but the mythos of the virtual actor has infiltrated the Hollywood blockbuster in recent years […]

For the record, I regret the phrase “technically impossible”: I think the barriers to producing perfect synthespians are not primarily technical, but cultural and economic (if there was enough demand, money would have been found for even more research and development even sooner). I was using the “mythos” or concept of the virtual actor, the belief in inevitable progress, as an example of the kind of teleological argument that I wanted to unpick. It wasn’t hard to find it surfacing in other places. This from another essay in James Lyons and John Plunkett’s Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet:

Kelly Tyler, of NOVA Online, a science-based website, has identified the photorealistic human simulacrum as “a new digital grail.” Damion Neff, an artificial intelligence designer for Microsoft video games has called it “the Holy Grail of character animation.” In his keynote address at the 1997 Autonomous Agents Conference, Danny Ellis listed the emotionally intelligent virtual actor as one of four “holy grail” in the field. In May 2003 John Gaeta, discussing his visual effects work on The Matrix Reloaded in the Los Angeles Times, referred to a believable digital human as “the holy grail” of our world. It seems that the Grail analogy has found some currency, at least amongst those working in the relevant creative industries. This frequently uttered analogy sums up the suggestion that technologies of visual representation have been working inexorably towards a final goal, but they might also inadvertently hint that such a goal is essentially elusive.

The development of special effects over time suggests scientific progress as motion towards a logical conclusion, their development effected by a series of refinements and improvements to existing mechanisms. Certainly, computer-generated imagery, with its increasing photographic verisimilitude permitted by faster processing speeds and more efficient rendering software, appears to be advancing at a quantifiable rate, implying a final destination of absolute simulation, a point where a digital human being can be rendered to a level of detail indistinguishable from actual flesh and bone, and possessing enough (artificial) intelligence to be a star offscreen instead of just a hyperreal cartoon upon it.

So, how can this teleology by questioned? How do we construct a more continuist approach to historicising these spectacles in the face of such persuasive technological progress? By drawing the focus away from the dazzling verisimilitude of illusory technologies and focusing on the conceptual questions which underpin their fascinating surfaces. We can observe antecedents of the virtual actor and note that the same spectacular strategies, prompting the same ontological questions, were in play.

That’s enough self-promotional recapping. I hope you get the message that, whatever actual developments there might be in imaging technologies that can simulate properties of human figures, there is another narrative here. As Lev Manovich put it in The Language of New Media, “throughout the history of computer animation, the simulation of the human figure has served as a yardstick for measuring the progress of the whole field.” So, just to make sure you stay interested, every now and then some industry insider pipes up and tells you that you’re just months away from being fooled into believing in a bit of CGI as a living, breathing person. So, here we go again. Only this week, Image Metrics have announced that they’re very close to the Holy Grail. Take a look at this video of actress Emily O’Brien:

[Find out more about the process, or watch a higher resolution version of the video here.]

Pretty impressive stuff. As you can probably tell, her face has been digitally captured and mapped over her actual face, not because it’s a useful thing to do, but because it puts the digital and the flesh versions of Emily close enough that we can compare them. Presumably, the real benefits of the process will be seen in applications that can map her face onto her stunt double, or onto another actress if Emily, heaven forbid, suffers a terrible accident halfway through shooting a very expensive blockbuster movie. Or it might help our already beloved stars transcend the limits of their own bodies. Here’s the original post I spotted on IMDB:

1 January 2009 1:30 AM, PST

“Silicon Valley is on the verge of producing sophisticated software that will allow motion picture companies to create actors on a computer who are visually indistinguishable from real people, San Jose’s Mercury News reported today (Thursday). In the words of the newspaper, which closely follows the sofware industry, when software engineers finally achieve what it calls “the holy grail of animation,” stars would be able to “keep playing iconic roles even as they aged past the point of believability like Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft or Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter.” Rick Bergman, general manager of AMD’s graphics products group, told the Mercury News that his company “is getting real close” to producing computer-generated actors that will look identical to real human beings.”

Does anyone honestly believe that there is a call or a need for technologies for sustaining the shelf lives of these people? Of course not – it’s just a distracting excuse to avoid the real explanation, which is closer to “we’ve got this cool gadget, and we really want to show it off.” I remain skeptical about claims of impending perfection in virtual actors not because the technology isn’t impressive, but because the grand deterministic narrative  of progress is overriding the reality of the situation. One savvy poster over at the Blu-Ray forum says it all in a manner that needs no elaboration from me:

Oh, dear lordy, they (meaning, JU) posted the article here, too…

The same exact article (with different star insertions, hence the ’01 dated Tomb Raider ref) that studios plant once a year by the clock, in the hopes they can finally get that CGI resurrected dead-Karloff-and-Chaney Frankenstein vs. the Wolfman movie going again, because it sounded like such a neat idea back when Forrest Gump shook hands with JFK–
Twelve years, Final Fantasy, and Beowulf later, and they’re STILL trying to sell us on “With virtual actors, we could bring George Burns back from the dead, and he’d look so real! “

In case you needed more convincing, I dug up this old article from The Boston Globe, 23rd May 1999. There’s that grail again:

It sounds like a plot from a sci-fi pulp, or an old B movie: A snaggle-toothed scientist toils in the laboratory, perfecting his creation. A touch-up here, a tiny tuck there. But this is not some green-gilled monster from the house of Dr. Frankenstein; it’s a realistic human with shiny hair, glittering teeth, and liquid eyes. The pressure is on to beat other genetic geniuses racing to create human clones. Suddenly, there’s a burst of energy – and voila! – the model comes to life. Blink your eyes, and it’s Marilyn Monroe. Blink again, and it’s James Dean.

This scenario isn’t as far-fetched – or as far off – as it might once have seemed. In this case, the scientists in question are digital doctors: computer programmers developing the software needed to create a photorealistic digital actor, or ”synthespian.” Special-effects wizards have already created convincing digital dinosaurs and dolls, aliens and ants, stuntmen and superheroes. And the two biggest box office draws of the moment – The Mummy and a certain prequel that unfolds in a galaxy far, far away – showcase digital creatures.

So why not digital humans? Why not virtual stars?

”The digital actor has been the Holy Grail forever, since the dawn of 3-D computer animation,” says Brad Lewis, executive producer of visual effects and vice president of Pacific Data Images, the firm that gave life to insects in Antz. ”There’s always been someone trying to do a hand or a face or some aspect of a human being that looked real.”

Some say realistic digital humans will be on-screen within the next five years. These synthespians could be brand-new characters or reincarnations of old legends, long cold in the grave. One Hollywood producer, for instance, is planning a film that would resurrect martial-arts phenomenon Bruce Lee; another is reportedly working on a digital version of an aging screen star (rumored to be Marlon Brando), restoring his youth and making him a contender for a manly role. Another producer got permission to re-create the late George Burns in a film called The Best Man, and a California firm, Virtual Celebrity Productions, has obtained the rights to digitally reproduce a handful of stars, including Marlene Dietrich and W. C. Fields.

Hang on. Did I read that correctly? W.C. Fields? I can understand how Dietrich’s pictorial stillness might translate relatively easily to a digital avatar, but is there anyone less suited to a CGI resurrection by the pixel pixies than W.C. Fields?! Well, they gave it a go a few years back with the Gepetto software (nice puppet reference, there) for real-time 3D animation. I can’t say the results were ever going to replace the memory of the real thing, but that’s not really the point. These rumours and promises build anticipation, expectation, and a sense that something is at stake. The defiance of death, age and human inadequacies is just a cover story for the real business of special effects.

Look at the Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The stated aims of the film, in which Brad Pitt’s character ages “backwards”, might be to integrate visual effects so seamlessly that they don’t distract from the character-driven, Oscar-baiting emotional truth of it all, but there’s no getting away from the fact that, by centralising the concept of a spectacular body like Benjamin’s, a magnet for diegetic and extra-diegetic curiosity, the film can’t help but draw attention to the visual effects used to achieve the concept’s visualisation. Pitt’s body becomes a laboratory for all kinds of tricksy bits of CG animation and performance capture, and there’s a complex connection between the fascinated gaze that attaches to the character’s condition, and the one that fixes on the image of a movie star transformed into a recognisable but fundamentally changed series of physiques by means of cinematic tricks. When Benjamin strikes muscleman poses in the mirror, it’s as much about technological display as it is about his own narcissistic enjoyment. The discourses around the futuristic capabilities of digital imaging technologies shape expectations about how a particular special effect is to be viewed and appreciated. There’s an element of promotional hype in play, but by providing a set of measurable goals and projected rationales, the impression given is that special effects are contributing to a worthwhile cause with a pre-determined path, instead of offering random and occasional attractions; it all makes sure that you stay interested, and keep buying a ticket for the next attraction, and then the next. Special effects, like movie stars, exist intertextually – they provide reassuring continuities: we are expected to keep watching how they develop from film to film, how each is an improvement upon the last – so it makes sense that a certain weight of expectation should hand on the predicted hybrid of a special effects movie star, an all-digital, perhaps artificially intelligent character actor who passes for flesh and blood before your very eyes. But to truly deliver on that promise to deceive would defeat the object of the special effect, which was to attract and hold that multi-focus spectatorial gaze. What’s the use of a spectacular attraction if nobody notices it?

See also How Special Effects Work 1: The Sandman & How Special Effects Work 3: Now That’s Magic…

Lisa Bode, ‘“Grave Robbing” or “Career Comeback”? On the Digital Resurrection of Dead Screen Stars’, in History of Stardom Reconsidered. Edited by Hannu Salmi et al. (Turku: International Institute for Popular Culture, 2007) Available as an eBook at http://iipc.utu.fi/reconsidered/.

Thinking Batman

[See also my review of Christopher Nolan’s Inception.]

This May will mark seventy years since The Batman made his first appearance in Detective Comics #27, and he’s looking pretty good for his age. By the time he got his own comic book in Spring 1940, notes Bill Boichel, he was already “both a resonant signifier and a valuable property.” Here’s how he looked on his first outing, back when he was young and hyphenated:

I once picked up a giant compendium of Batman comics in a school jumble sale for 10 pence. I seem to remember it being as thick as a brick and packed with reprints of every story from his first ten years, but I was seven years old and I might be hazy on the details. I was already a huge fan of the camp, day-glo Adam West version of the franchise, but this book showed a different side to my hero. He was stern, relentless, brutal and sollipsistic. I probably would have just said “a bit scary” at the time – this was my surreptitious, under-the-duvet-with-a-torch reading material of choice for a long time.

Batman is back on my cultural radar thanks to Christopher Nolan‘s steroidal franchise revival with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. The appeal of Tim Burton’s 1989 film didn’t extend me, not even with it’s party-popper scares and Prince songs (did people really get so excited about the Batdance?!). I liked Batman Returns for its full on weirdness and old-school modelwork and matte paintings. But both Batman Forever and Batman and Robin are notable only for the previously untapped reserves of crap they seem to have brought to our screens. My interest in the Batman adaptations has never been measured against expectations of  “fidelity” to the comic books – I have no personal investment in the franchise, and the character has changed with the fluctuating tastes of its readership (at least as they were perceived by DC) so dramatically over the years – but I could probably say that they have grabbed my attention whenever they’ve show a self-reflexive bent or taken seriously the task of creating a cohesive alternative world where  allegorical dramas of heroism and villainy can be played out. What do heros have to offer us if not treatises on heroism and critiques of popular mythology? It is customary in “these troubled times™” to claim that this is no time for binaries of good and evil, or simplistic notions of heroism. But when has it ever been? Unless you’re a stranger to any literary heroes since the time of Homer and Virgil, you’ve probably noticed that heroes who don’t question, doubt or compromise themselves are the exceptions rather than the rule. So, let’s not injure ourselves in the rush to praise The Dark Knight for catching up with the game, but I’d like to pick out a few aspects of Nolan’s two Bat-films that build up to a striking and cohesive approach to the character. They work really well together, and the progression from Begins to Knight is elegantly handled, but a comparison can illuminate much about how they work.

If Begins concerns itself with the origins of the character, ascribing his drive to fight crime to a perfect storm of influences (the murder of his parents, a childhood trauma in a cave of bats, an injunction by his father to master his fear, mentoring from a group of mystical vigilantes in China), then Knight moves on to exploring the consequences of the Bat’s symbolic stance against crime. Tying the two films together is an ongoing discourse on theatricality that defines the character and opens him up for analysis.  Here lies the self-reflexivity of the Nolan films – in examining the means by which Batman constructs and controls his own mythology, they draw attention to the constructedness of broader notions of justice and heroism.

Between the two films, Nolan has stripped away much of the digital augmentation of Gotham City to give it a more palpable sense of closeness not just to the real world, but to contemporary crime dramas. When Batman is forced to destroy the futuristic overhead railway at the climax of Begins, it’s not just the passing of his father’s legacy to the Gotham architecture, but also the clearing aside of the fantastic to make way for the down-to-earth, General Motors traffic of Knight.

The Dark Knight removes a lot of the quasi-mystical bullshit of the first film, aiming to demythologise the character, showing myth to be a mechanical construct devised for public relations and manipulated to meet the changing needs of the status quo. In both films, we get countless shots of gadgetry being devised, tested, prepared for use and finally put into practice. It’s like a behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of Batman’s public performances as an insuperable figure. We, the films’ spectators get to see the cuts and bruises he sustains beneath the impermeable exterior, and we get backstage access to the spectacles he creates: Batman “flies” on wires, takes high falls and death-defying leaps, can disappear in a puff of smoke (though Liam Neeson teaches him how to use smoke bombs for distraction or vanishing, I can’t recall a scene where he actually uses them – instead he simply vanishes between shots) or intimidate through sheer force of symbolism and superstitious dread. A lot of this theatricality is played down a little in The Dark Knight, since the manufacture of imagistic power is repositioned as a facet of government and law enforcement. Batman becomes one component of a broader system of public display, a circuitry where public fear can be regulated and stage-managed. It might seem like an obvious case of the Joker being a twisted mirror image of Batman; the opening scene is that most lo-tech of set-pieces, the bank robbery, with the Joker eliminating his clown-masked accomplices one by one, followed by a mirroring sequence in which Batman eliminates a group of bat-masked imitators to assert his dominion over a criminal transaction. But it’s not always that simple. Instead of a Batman/Joker binary, The Dark Knight sets up a circuit of characters whose interrelationships will be repeatedly rebalanced. The Joker might equally be seen as the polar opposite of stable, unconflicted Commissoner Gordon (Gary Oldman; although Gordon himself indulges in a bit of public spectacle by staging his own death), with Batman closer in principle to Harvey Dent/Two Face. Nolan literalises this network of interdependence visually:

It has become a truism of the superhero genre that the hero is defined in relation to the villains he fights. Batman’s blackness, blending into the mise-en-scène and subsuming his personality and his biography behind an armoured cloak of depersonalised signification, provides a blank canvas onto which his flamboyant foes will paint themselves. Scarecrow, played in Begins by Cillian Murphy,  is not  a physically powerful foe, but a psychologist who, like Batman, conducts experiments in fear, manifesting himself as an embodiment of his victim’s deepest fears.

While Scarecrow has to use chemical agents (I remember when Batman comics were all about nerve gas, acid and nasty chemicals) to induce a traumatic vision, with his cloth-bag mask a screen onto which his victims project their deepest fear, Batman has to engineer his fearful image from scratch with a few symbols and gadgets. Batman’s scare tactics are marked as purer than this drug-induced hallucination, not just because he doesn’t use it as a weapon against the innocent, but because his resources are mechanical, homemade (albeit with massive funding) and therefore fairer. Given more space and time, I might extrapolate from this a broader argument about the discourses of authenticity that cohere around the films’ use of special effects. Christopher Nolan has expressed a wish to cut back on the CGI, as if digital effects contain the toxic side effect of inauthenticity, bringing with them the baggage of easy simulation and intangibilty. Here’s an extract from Wired magazine’s discussion of the film:

Nolan has a cogent Theory of Applied Batmatics: Insist on reality — no effects, no tricks — up to the point where insisting on reality becomes unrealistic. Then, in postproduction, make what is necessarily unreal as real as possible. “Anything you notice as technology reminds you that you’re in a movie theater,” Nolan explains. “Even if you’re trying to portray something fantastical and otherworldly, it’s always about trying to achieve invisible manipulation.” Especially, he adds, with Batman, “the most real of all the superheroes, who has no superpowers.”

The cutbacks in GGI and the grounding of these fantastic characters in a sense of reality borrowed from urban crime dramas transfers to the subtext of Batman’s own efforts to construct convincing imagery of himself as a public spectacle within the limits of the human body and contemporary engineering. When, at the end of The Dark Knight, he finally “goes digital” by enhancing his human senses with the agglomerated data from the city’s mobile phones, it is judged to be a step too far, an unfair advantage: “too much power for one man“.

The real challenge to Batman, on his own terms, comes from The Joker. The character was originally inspired by Conrad Veidt‘s performance as the disfigured clown Gwynplaine in the film adaptation of Victor Hugo‘s 1869 novel The Man Who Laughs (1928).

Jack Nicholson’s Joker, in Tim Burton’s 1989 film, was a pantomime figure. He committed some atrocities, for sure, but the actor was always winking at you from behind the facade, letting you know it was all OK. He was still Jack. Heath Ledger’s death authenticates the sense of a troubled soul underneath the make-up. Ledger is undoubtedly the main attraction of The Dark Knight; it’s hard to say anything novel about his performance, and perhaps redundant to praise it, except to add that it gains power from a subtlety that need not be demanded by such a nihilistic figure. A mess of tics, skips, shrugs and darting eyes, with a voice that  fluctuates unpredictably between Tom Waits and Tigger, he is primarily a catalyst for the main battle for iconographic primacy between Batman and Dent/Two-Face.

Like Batman, the Joker meticulously plans his spectacles, in the service of what he describes as chaos, but what might also be interpreted as an alternative kind of order where he commands fearful obediance to his terror campaign. He uses the apparatus of municipality against Gotham’s citizens: he appropriates police uniforms, corrupt cops, a garbage truck, a school bus, a fire engine, TV news and an entire hospital. It’s never made clear what sort of world he wants to create: he is, in his own words, “a dog chasing cars”, and wouldn’t know what to do if he caught one. The ending of Batman Begins implied that Batman’s dramatic (in every sense of that word) stance against criminality would escalate the criminal response. It might deter the part-timers, but would bring the truly committed agents of vice into the open. The Joker is painted as Batman’s bi-product, a symbol divorced from context or motivation. We get no backstory – there is “nothing in his pockets”. While Batman needs both of his personae, one to buy political influence and fund his night job, and the other to punch people in the head without besmirching that public profile, the Joker has no alter-ego, no ambitions which can be thwarted; to fight him is to make him exist. How is this kind of threat to be countered, and is it possible to remain heroic in the process?

This accretion of conflicting symbols can’t help but attract politicised interpretations, and Batman generates a range of views. Gotham City might be an eloquent articulation of a world where tough choices face anyone wishing to bring peace and stability by force. Or, as Andrew Klavan wrote in The Wall Street Journal, there may be a very different reading up for grabs:

There seems to me no question that the Batman film The Dark Knight is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past. And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society – in which people sometimes make the wrong choices – and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell. The Dark Knight, then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year’s 300, The Dark Knight is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

Klavan’s article attracted criticism, derision and a few astute rebuttals. But it reveals the troubling malleability of mainstream film texts, which are rarely given the wriggle-room to espouse a fixed ideological stance, at least not one without space for counter-readings: it doesn’t make commercial sense to alienate a large portion of the audience and besides, to put a more positive spin on it, ambivalence and dilemma are much more dramatically compelling than the affirmation of any particular values, whatever your political persuasion. The Bush/Batman comparison is a bit ridiculous, but there is a troubling conclusion to The Dark Knight. As my colleague Joe Kember pointed out to me, the final message of the film might be that “you don’t need to know the truth”, whether it’s the concealment of Harvey Dent’s killing spree, the identity of Batman, or the content of Rachael’s letter. Batman is only able to save the day by giving himself a bat-like sonar capacity through mass surveillance, as if monitoring the city is a natural, quasi-biological extension of his superpowers.

The public persona of Batman takes on another layer of facade. Even those who seek to judge him and reconcile the  spectre of vigilantism with the benefits he brings don’t know the full story of how he achieves his effects. More theatrics, more sleight of hand. And watching the films again, I noticed that their signature image is a shot/reverse-shot sequence of Batman gripping someone by the throat to extract information. Torture and intimidation are his main weapons against crime.

Even if the films problematise the use of force in this way (the Joker gives up misleading information under duress), we are never encouraged to doubt that his victims are deserving, and as long as it stays hidden from the public, it’s not shown as a serious transgression. And it usually gets results. There’s even a scene in The Dark Knight that cuts from Batman throwing Eric Roberts off a balcony to the next scene, where he upbraids Dent for doing the same to one of the Joker’s followers. Ultimately, the theatricality metaphor pays off with a conclusion that appearance is all-important, and Batman the empty signifier can be scape-goated and burdened with the sins of others. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not.

More info:

• The Dark Knight Official Website.
• Wall Street Journal article about the film’s marketing after Heath Ledger’s death.
• Article in Wired about special effects in The Dark Knight.
• Andrew Klavan, “What Bush and Batman Have in Common“, Wall Street Journal, 25 July 2008.
• Check out Olly Morris’ cool design for an alternative Dark Knight poster.
• 
• The Dark Knight Movie Chronicles. Unofficial blog.
• Batman Begins production notes.

• For a detailed list of characters from the Batman comics, go here. Or, if you want an incredible summary of who drew what in the Batman comics, visit the same site here.
• Want to see what the Japanese Batman comics looked like in the 1960s? Sorry, trick question – everybody wants to see that. It’s been scientifically proven, with sums and everything, that Batmanga! is the coolest thing ever. Well, maybe.
• Take a look at brand new pages from Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert’s two-part Batman story Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?

Avalon Updated

[Originally published 26 August 2008; Updated 13 January 2009]

“Oshii Mamoru’s Avalon is one of the most sophisticated and visually achieved movies ever made about intersecting levels of reality.”

Tony Rayns

[Plot synopsis: Ash is one of the greatest players of the game Avalon, a virtual battle simulation that has attracted many devotees and addicts all trying to reach its highest levels. Ash works solo, with memories of the days when she was part of a team whose leader was lost in the game. Hearing rumours that there is a more advanced level of the game that can be attained with potentially deadly consequences, Ash decides to become part of a new team.]

I dithered for some time over whether or not to use Mamoru Oshii’s Avalon on a film studies course, on a week devoted to cyberculture and virtual embodiment. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Is it a beautiful, enigmatic and elusive masterpiece that I just didn’t connect with, or is it a stodgy, pretentious mess with little substantive to say about the way we interact with virtual spaces and lives. If you don’t recognise the name of its director, Mamoru Oshii, you’ve probably heard of the anime classics he lists on his c.v., most notably Ghost in the Shell (1995) and its extraordinary sequel, Innocence (2004), which must surely rank as one of the most sublimely beautiful bits of animation ever crafted: take any frame, blow it up and frame it. It looks perfect throughout. Animation encourages that kind of carefully composed precision in its imagery – if you have time and tools to make something look exactly how you want it, why not take control of every element and make sure it is composed exactly how you want it? Paint over it if it goes wrong. Avalon is Oshii’s fourth live-action feature, but the first to get any kind of international recognition or release. Shot in Poland with an all-Polish cast (Oshii likes Polish cinema, apparently, but seems to have modelled his environments on a gloomy, post-war Eastern European template gleaned from movies rather than any kind of futuristic Warsaw), it contains many elements that are far from “live”. Soaking almost everything (food seems to come out quite colourful) in sepia tones adds to the vintage look (though it could also be that the US DVD has altered the colour of the film) and shows Oshii exerting an animator’s control over his images. CGI is used quite sparingly, and is closely integrated with the themes of the film. If the tendency with digital effects is towards excess, to show off with grand scale what can be done with a few pixels and mouse clicks, Avalon seems to go in the opposite direction. Its every move is economical. Rather than creating a virtual world that is radically different from the filmic real world, Oshii makes them visually similar. In the virtual world of the game, characters who are killed disintegrate into a shattered two-dimensional oblivion like stained-glass pictures, and in several shots (see below) Oshii fractures the illusion of the simulation by inserting these succinct perspectival tricks into the 3D world to immediately mark it out for what it is – a Plato’s cave of flat data experienced as actual space.

In an interview with Tony Rayns in Sight and Sound, Oshii stated:

I wanted to create characters in the same way that I do in animation. I did a lot of digital work on Ash’s face during the post-production, which went on longer than the actual shoot. I felt free to alter expressions to give me exactly what I wanted to see on screen.

This is all very well, but it does give the film a certain coldness, probably not in the service of its themes of alienation and emotional disconnect (although it certainly contributes to that), but in order to get everything neatly composed. Whatever, the tidy compositions of nearly every shot, and the aesthetic similarity between Avalon and the external world of its gamers cumulatively facilitate the interpretation, which is there if you want it, that none of this is real, that everything we see is just layer after layer of fabrication with no externally real reference points. Oshii himself is vague on the subject, so make of it what you will – what is probably most important is that you cannot know for certain what is real, imagined or simulated when you watch this film. While The Matrix trilogy gives you a pretty strong sense of the divide between the solid and simulacrous environments in which each scene takes place, Avalon makes that division increasingly fuzzy and suspect. This is mostly because no sequences are privileged with cinematic techniques that might traditionally be associated with filmic realism – in that sense, I suppose, we’re back to an animation-style aesthetic again.

So, let’s assume that you’re familiar with ideas of virtual reality, and that old science fiction chestnut that said virtual reality turns out to be more seductive, sensual and downright exciting than the glum, organic place where your skin and bones are situated. Avalon retraces these generic tropes, but it doesn’t seem like an insider’s view of the addictive rush of playing at being a superhero in an alternative reality: I feel as certain that Oshii is not a gamer as I am that Woody Allen doesn’t know any East End crooks. I never got a sense of why these characters were so obsessed with a game that offers actual deathly danger as opposed to the fantasy of danger, which is surely the point of video games: we play them to avoid the incursions of unpleasant realities into our lives, not because we want to risk our necks every minute of our spare time. And, of course, with her lithe physique and classy mid-1960s Anna Karina style, Ash just doesn’t look like someone who spends most of her time jacked into a games console. This piqued my suspicion that Oshii doesn’t care about the actual impact of technology in society. He hasn’t researched patterns of behaviour amongst people who spend a lot of time on the internet, and he hasn’t extrapolated his future world from the current state of things simulacrous. He treats the concept of virtual reality as a philosophical metaphor, a means to question our own solipsistic interactions with the world around us.

I should add that I watched this on a Region 1 DVD, brought to me by the good people at Miramax. Now, it’s OK that they’ve produced their own English language version. It’s not even a problem that they’ve added a Blade Runner style voice-over to some of the quiet scenes to make it a bit easier to follow what’s going on. It’s not a problem, because I’ll be switching over to the original Polish language track and turning on the English subtitles. Thanks for including both versions, Miramax, but would it have been too much trouble to offer English subtitles that don’t include the voice-over narration sequences?! That way, I won’t have to have inaninities like “Is this what they call reality?” popping up on my screen every time there’s a gap in the dialogue. It may not be entirely Miramax’s fault also (but let’s blame them anyway) that despite being made almost three years earlier, it didn’t get a release until 2002, meaning that it seemed to trail like an imitative latecomer behind The Matrix, Dark City, Existensz in a chain of popular movies about manufactured realities usurping, er… real ones. This is unfortunate, because it’s certainly an interesting film that haunts you in a way that films you can’t quite figure out often do. It’s a goal-orientated quest narrative in which a tightly-clad heroine seeks to reach a plateau of gaming achievement through skilful, choreographed violence, and in that sense it is quite conventional. It lingers in the mind because of the unnerving doubt that that goal might just be a fleeting, futile or vapourous one: you’re never sure what is at stake, what can be won, and any victory could be an empty one. This is the masterstroke of the movie, because it calls into question the value of the virtual reality that it might otherwise privilege, but at the same time it undercuts (deliberately) the potential for thrilling spectacle that its generic identity may have promised. For that reason, and because films which leave us uncertain are the ones we need to discuss, Avalon deserves its place on the syllabus.

Update: 13 January 2009

I was going to just incorporate these updated comments into the main body of the text, but I didn’t want to gloss over my initial responses. What follows are a few additional thoughts from a second viewing of the film. I may repeat or expand upon what I wrote above, but I want these revisions to demonstrate how repeat viewings can assist in the comprehension of complex or obtuse film texts.

Broadly speaking, a second viewing of Avalon irons out some of my earlier objections. Freed from the weight of expectation and bad marketing, which had originally set me up for a live-action anime or an arthouse Matrix, I could keep track of the patterns and plotting much more easily. I wasn’t quite as enfuriated by the Miramax subtitles this time, though even I could tell that the English subs were not always accurate translations of the Polish dialogue: they are transcriptions of the English dub track, which has obviously been restructured to match words to lip movements. But the subtitles for the absent voice-over die out after the first few scenes have set the groundwork of the plot.

I’m no closer to a definitive explanation of what it’s all about, except to say with certainty that uncertainty is what it’s all about. The game-world of Avalon has replaced real-world experience with a quest for experience points, though there is no explanation of who controls the game, and why they want people to keep playing without actually winning. Avalon, like the Matrix, is a system that relies on stability and continuity: transgression and weakness are punished, but excessive power (represented by rising too high on the game’s levels) is threatening to the system, and will be snuffed out or snuffed out – or it will lead to corruption of the player and subsumption into the system. we watch players taking their game very seriously, but there’s no guarantee that it is leading anywhere. It gives the illusion of progress, but by the end we might suspect that the game exists only to select those who can be made to perform missions in the service of keeping the system secure and unchallenged. Avalon is also segregated from what viewers would see as historical chronology; this is achieved not through an anfamiliar futurity, but by the depiction of environments peppered with mementos of the real world (trams, food, pets, cigarettes, clothes) that seem out of step with a futuristic vision. It evokes neither the future nor the past, but a collapsed historical circuit with no receding past and no clear sense of future goals. This semi-real place, seemingly in thrall to an indistinct system of power and control, which players only think they have volunteered for, is a broad allegorical space that permits viewers to insert any countercultural or anti-authoritarian reading they might choose.

I was again struck by the significance of food. Since the film is mostly a hyper-controlled, sepia world of pristine images, and thus rather distancing, the treatment of food as the last remaining point of sensuous contact with real-world experience leaps off the screen. The only scene where Ash really cracks some smiles or works up an enthusiastic sweat is when she prepares dinner for her dog. The camera throws us a series of extreme close-ups of delicious food. The rice sticks to her fingers, the meat glows red. It’s the closest we get to any eroticism in this non-contact world of virtual interaction. But when Ash watches Stunner eat, her disgust at the sight of someone else’s sensuality is conveyed in gross, lip-smacking detail. Yuck. There may be nothing more to this than a memorial to touch and sensation, but the apples may be a subtle link to the apples that supposedly grew on the Isle of Avalon in Arthurian legend (the name itself may come from the Celtic word for apple): Bishop points out when he enters Ash’s apartment that she is one of the few who can afford the luxuries of “real” food. Is that higher plane of reality, the access to food and haptic indulgence really what she wants to achieve by rising through the game to “Class Real”?

Other questions go unanswered:

• If players of Avalon get paid for their achievements in the game, who is paying them, and how have they benefitted from people playing?
• If the game is illegal, who is policing it? We never see anyone punished for playing.
• Is Class Real what we, the viewers, experience as our real world?
• Is the whole thing Ash’s hallucination, induced by an earlier trauma?
• Most importantly, where did the dog go?

After a second viewing, I’m converted. This is a beautiful, haunting film, not just because of any stubborn refusal to play at obviousness, but because of the way it infuses virtual reality with a sense of numbing aimlessness once it loses sight of the vivid reference points of reality for its users to come home to, and once they have none of the joy that comes from the disparities between a simulation and the sensual, enfleshed real that makes it legible as a spectacular fabrication.

[See more images from the film at my Flickr page, or in the slideshow below:]

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Read More:

• Review at Midnight Eye.
• Nine Sisters. Website devoted to Avalon.
• Article on Mamoru Oshii by Richard Suchenski at Senses of Cinema.
• Ashley Hibbert’s comparison of Avalon and The Matrix:  A Cold and Lonely Street.
• DVD Beaver’s review of the Blu-Ray edition.
• Avalon review and discussion at The Cyberpunk Review.
• Interview with Mamoru Oshii at Ex: The Online World of Anime and Manga.
• N. Katherine Hayles “Traumas of Code“, Critical Inquiry 33 (Autumn 2006), 136-157.

Hayles has quite an elaborate argument about how code mediates between human action and the intelligent machines that surround us and augment so many of our daily activities (like writing this blog, which I’m doing using a keyboard that communicates electronically with my laptop through codes which I don’t understand, but which I can see represented in a graphic format (words, boxes, windows, icons) that I do understand). She uses Avalon as one of her illustrative texts, and her interpretation of events is mostly in line with what I wrote above before reading it, though she expresses it far more eloquently:

Surrounded by code, immersed in code [Ash] experiences simulation as if it were life, investing in it all her emotional energy, and lives life as if it were a pale imitation of the virtual reality war game.

Hayles draws some nice parallels, the significance of which I hadn’t picked up on in my review: Ash vomiting after a traumatic flashback in the game is a “symmetrical inversion” of the sequence where she watches Stunner eat, and the meal she prepares for her dog is a food-based compensation for this, continuing the food motif and connecting it explicitly to that hound. The dog also reappears on the posters that lead Ash to the concert hall in Class Real, “underscoring his function as a signifier of the real.” Murphy and Ash have their confrontation while he sits on a World War I cannon, echoing the game which they used to share, but also cemented those iconographic links between Class Real and other levels of the game (or levels of reality, as we might interpret them).

While the final scene in Class Real seems to be leading the spectator to assume that Ash is now in the realest of worlds we know (i.e. the one in which we ourselves live and move and watch movies), especially when Murphy bleeds and suffers when shot:

At the next moment, however, this normalising interpretation is subverted, for at his death his body does not simply become inert but rather dissolves into the concentric rings used to signify the game death of advanced players. The double signifiers of his bleeding body and its disintegration into code create an unresolvable ambiguity about whether this world is a simulation or reality. Somehow it is both at once, and death functions simultaneously as the ultimate trauma and as a disjunction separating one round of game play from another. […] The conundrums of the final moments are unresolvable as long as we cling to the belief that the world of simulation, the world generated and maintained by code, is separate from the real world in which we live.

Pantomiming Chaplin’s City Lights

You probably don’t need me to tell you how fabulous Charlie Chaplin‘s City Lights is. Even those complaints that it’s a sickly, sentimental and simplistic piece of fluff fade away when you watch it again and realise how carefully he works towards the heart-aching conclusion, how skilfully he earns that sentiment before positioning himself as a tragically noble figure. (If you’re a truly hardened misanthrope with no interest in Chaplin, you might be better off here.) I’ve always been fascinated by the mechanics of certain kinds of performance, particularly the intricacies of the best kung fu films, or a well-worked slapstick routine, so I thought I’d have another look at some of the motifs that structure Chaplin’s physical action in City Lights. I’ll assume you’re not already an expert on Chaplin, and start somewhere simple…

By 1931, when City Lights was ready for release, the rest of Hollywood had converted to talkies. The transition had been swift and dramatic in its implications. For a great collection of online articles on the early history of film sound, you can’t do much better than the collections at Filmsound.org or The American Widescreen Museum. The conversion of theatres and studios to sound recording and playback equipment had been near-universal; for the sake of synchronised sound and music, sacrifices were made in terms of camera movement (microphones and cables tethered the action on set, and noisy cameras had to be boxed in to stop them interfering with the sound recording), and until 1931, when three-way speaker arrays to spread the sound signals were introduced, the playback was murky and sometimes indistinct. Chaplin had honed the art of silent pantomime in his films, and there was massive anticipation about how this star, whose act was so perfectly matched to wordless gesture, would adapt to the changes. As David Robinson writes:

His Tramp character was universal. His mime was understood in every part of the world. But if the Tramp now began to speak in English, that world-wide audience would instantly shrink. Moreover there was the problem of how he should talk. Everyone, across the world, had formed his or her own fantasy of the Tramp’s voice. How could he now impose a single, monolingual voice?

As it turned out, Chaplin didn’t attempt to make the transition to talkies, preferring to keep his silent craft intact. He waves away the expectation with an opening title that introduces the film as “A comedy romance in pantomime”. Time‘s 1931 review of the film quoted Chaplin’s own slightly tangential explanation:

Chaplin does not reject the sound-device because he does not think his voice will register. His objection is that cinema is essentially a pantomimic art. Says he: “Action is more generally understood than words. Like the Chinese symbolism it will mean different things according to its scenic connotation. Listen to a description of some unfamiliar object—an African wart hog, for example. Then look at a picture of the animal and see how surprised you are.”

There are a few sounds in City Lights, but they are isolated, not part of a broad fabric of ambient diegetic sound. In the opening shots, local dignitaries address an assembled crowd for the unveiling of a new statue. The PA system transforms their voices into an indecipherable, tinny squawk (a joke later echoed at the beginning of Jacques Tati‘s Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot), which one can’t help reading as a riposte to the fad for dialogue. These electrically mediated voices end up making everybody sound the same. And everybody sounds like Sweep.
Other sounds are similarly troublesome. See for instance the lovely sequence where, drunk at a party, Chaplin swallows a whistle. A fit of hiccups makes him tweet involuntarily, dismaying a singer who is trying to perform, and attracting cabs and dogs when he rushes outside. It’s a beautifully worked joke, stretched just far enough to avoid becoming tiresome, and only partially reliant on the post-synched sound effect, which appropriately disrupts the musical soundtrack, stressing the sudden, stared-at embarrassment Charlie suffers. During the boxing scene, Charlie’s neck gets caught in the bell-rope. As he falls or struggles, the bell rings, and his opponent returns to or rushes out of his corner, probably salivating like a Pavlovian pup at the same time.

Elsewhere, Chaplin is again caught out by objects that behave like other objects, as when he eats party-streamers that have dropped in his spaghetti, or tries to take a spoonful from a man’s bald head mistaken for a party snack:
These recurrent, repetitive types of action add up to a mode of performance that sees Chaplin’s body in constant tension between composure and error. His body is challenged at every turn by threats to his dignity. It all begins from a logical starting point: he begins the film asleep on a statue, an unwelcome pest on an image of static decorum. For much of the rest of the film, he will struggle to stay still or posed against the tide of unpredictable movements that characterise his experience of the city.
Much of the comedy of Chaplin’s performance style derives from his attempts to maintain his dignity, as if to deny his derelict status. He tries to behave in a manner befitting his increasingly dishevelled suit (notice how the tipping of his hit becomes like a nervous tic), while all around him see through the disguise (e.g. the paper boys who taunt him, tearing fingers from his gloves or a patch from his trousers; the butler who repeatedly ejects him from the millionaire’s mansion). His careful, fussy comportment is messed up by a series of involuntary responses to things that startle, trip or baffle him, or which taste funny.
This may be why Chaplin loves to play drunk. What else is drunkenness (relax – it’s a rhetorical question) but a battle with one’s motor skills to prove that one is not actually drunk at all? Chaplin tries to keep an upright posture when sozzled, resisting those slips-of-the-limbs that might give the game away; when driven to distraction by watching a floor full of frenetic dancers, he leaps automatically to his feet and twirls anyone in his path to within an inch of their life, his face staying grimly fixed as if his head is a motion-sick passenger on a runaway trunk.
Arthur Rankin has a wonderful take on Chaplin’s performance in City Lights. Using Sigmund Freud’s theory that there were two types of joke, the tendentious and innocent, Rankin argues that Chaplin incorporates both modes of humour in order to make barbed social critiques, and then to make them palatable (or veiled) by developing his central character into an innocent, noble figure. Chaplin’s tramp avatar was lent some credibility through extratextual appeals to his early years of poverty in London, but there would always be an irony that the highest-paid, most famous film star in the world was still drawing upon the iconography of destitution in making his anti-authoritarian satires. City Lights sees him appealing for total audience sympathy: the tramp in this version is not only brought into conflict with the law when pushed into an unjust corner, and in a final bid to get enough money to pay for the blind flowergirl’s eye operation.

Cynthia Baron and Sharon Marie Carnicke’s analysis of City Lights is also well-worth seeking out. Building on Jan Mukarovský’s 1931 analysis, they stress the importance of gestures and “ostensive signs”, those which, as I understand it, show things as they are or seem to be:

The unique operation of ostensive signs becomes apparent when one considers something like the cane that belongs to Chaplin’s costume as the Tramp. The cane itself could be represented through iconic signs. However, a picture of the cane alone would convey little information about the Tramp, whereas a single image of Chaplin striking a pose with the cane could convey a particular attitude or mental state. For example, imagine a painting or photograph of Chaplin with his left palm resting on the top of his cane. However, if one then imagines a framed picture of this pose in a scene that features Chaplin moving into position to rest his hand on the cane, the existential difference between the two types of signs comes into view.

In this model of performance analysis, we have to consider how Chaplin moves into the poses that he strikes, the facial expressions that he produces for the spectator. Movement and gesture, actions carried out with hat or cane, rather than iconic or symbolic signs presented by the presence of those costume items, become the primary source of meanings and inferences emerging from a performance. Chaplin (or at least his character) produces a series of gestures and actions which can be understood as socially legible marks of  dignified etiquette:

The perceptible elements of Chaplin’s performance can be seen as a series of interferences or disparities between Chaplin’s facial expressions, gestures and poses. The disparities among these elements make the performance visually and intellectually intriguing. They have the potential to engage audience attention because they confound expectations established by daily life; Chaplin’s gesture of tipping his bowler in apology might be followed immediately by a twirl of his canethat indicates defiance. These moments of gestural contradiction display Chaplin’s skill as a performer and can imaginatively express meanings bound into familiar axioms, quips and witticisms.

Chaplin’s anti-authoritarian physical quips arise from a rapid-fire mixture of respectable gestures of conciliation (tipping the hat, a respectful nod here and there) with more subversive behaviours (sleeping on the statue, drunkenness), best evidenced by the scene where he checks out a nude statue while miming the pretence of appreciating the sculpture next to it. Therein lies the beautifully complex performance of a man embodying socially conventionally bodily postures while revealing the basic instincts behind the hypocrisies of polite, “proper” behaviour. To a certain extent, it’s a performance about performance.

It’s probably compulsory at this point to refer to Henri Bergson‘s oft-cited mantra that “the attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine.” By this he might mean that a comic body is one that is forced into automatic responses which throw it out of spontaneity and into involuntary activity that pits the organic being against environmental factors that would transpose it into “a certain mechanical inelasticity, just where one would expect to find the wide-awake adaptability and living pliableness of a human being.” (You can read the full text of Bergson’s essay here.) This would become a key part of Chaplin’s schtick, especially in Modern Times, where the automatisation of his body as part of a factory machine would make him a site of a contest between modernity and humanity, without ever losing sight of its grounding in the comic.

If this battle for decorum is a familiar trait of the Little Tramp character across a number of films, in which he refuses to assume the slovenly posture expected from him by those in whose company he is not permitted to belong (his performance of “their” gestures is an affront to their demarcations of class and privilege), in City Lights it is a major plot point, as he has to keep up the persona for the blind flower girl who has mistaken him for a wealthy gentleman. Thus, the performance of a silent pantomime, one in which gesture trumps dialogue in establishing or confirming (mistaken) identities is made to make sense of Chaplin’s decision to keep his film quiet.

________________

P.S. You should check out the BFI’s collection of documents about Chaplin, specifically the ones relating to City Lights; a really valuable resource, my only complaint being that some of the print on the scans of the press books is too small to read. I love the exhibitors’ guides, where cinemas are given tips on how to promote the film with a series of publicity stunts, mostly involving people dressing up as the Little Tramp: the character, with its instantly recognisable agglomeration of hat, cane, moustache and eyebrows is supremely marketable.
Also see the holdings of the Bill Douglas Centre at the University of Exeter. The online catalogue has many images of Chaplinalia, some of which you can see in this virtual exhibition compiled by one of the students.

Funding mentalism

[Originally published 25th October 2008; see below for updates.]

The new film from Chris Morris, the man behind Brass Eye, Jam, On the Hour, The Day Today and countless acts of media subversion, needs your money. After being rejected by the BBC and Channel 4, Warp Films are now producing the comedy about British jihadis, Four Lions. For twenty-five quid, you can appear in the film and tell your friends you had something to do with bringing the finished product to the screen. I wasn’t a big fan of his last series Nathan Barley – it didn’t quite catch the ferocity of Charlie Brooker’s original parody of a self-absorbed, public-schooled media twat (you can read a compendium of the Barley columns from the mock TV listings magazineTV Go Home, but I should warn you that it’s really, explicitly nasty), but his comedy pedigree is second to none, and its always worth keeping an eye on what Morris is going to do next.

Here’s the e-mail sent out by Warp Films:

At the moment the detonator’s going off and you’re part of it but until the effect has gone exponential, your mails are being sorted by one person so bear with me.

Many people have asked us exactly what the Four Lions project is. Clearly we can’t launch the film before its been shot, but I’ve pulled together a few paragraphs from the paperwork that’s been flying around. Its shameless hype but its accurate – unlike almost everything you will have read in the press. No one who has read the script could disagree with a word here.

In three years of research, Chris Morris has spoken to terrorism experts, imams, police, secret services and hundreds of Muslims. Even those who have trained and fought jihad report the frequency of farce. At training camps young jihadis argue about honey, cry for their mums, shoot each other’s feet off, chase snakes and get thrown out for smoking. A minute into his martyrdom video, a would-be bomber looks puzzled and says “what was the question again?” On millennium eve, five jihadis set out to ram a US warship. They slipped their boat into the water and carefully stacked it with explosives. It sank. Terrorist cells have the same group dynamics as stag parties and five a side football teams. There is conflict, friendship, misunderstanding and rivalry. Terrorism is about ideology, but it’s also about berks.

Four Lions is a funny, thrilling fictional story that illuminates modern British jihad with an insight beyond anything else in our culture. It plunges us beyond seeing these young men as unfathomably alien. It undermines the folly of just wishing them away or alienating the entire culture from which they emerge. It understands how terrorism relates to testosterone. It understands jihadis as human beings. And it understands human beings as innately ridiculous. As Spinal Tap understood heavy metal and Dr Strangelove the Cold War, Four Lions understands modern British jihadis.

If you’d like to know more or donate, visit Warp Films or e-mail fundingmentalism@warpfilms.com. It’s rumoured that donors will receive a copy of the al-Qa’ida explosives manual, but I wouldn’t know anything about that…

Update 6th January 2009:

It seems that, even without having to borrow money from fans, Morris’s film has been greenlighted… er, greenlit… given the go-ahead. The Independent reports that Film Four will be funding it, and it should be ready by the end of 2009 (and say that’s a little optimistic, but maybe it won’t take very long to finish). So, I’ll start looking forward to the return of Chris Morris, and keep my fingers crossed that this doesn’t all end in burning embassies.

Read a bit more:

Chris Morris lays into Martin Amis.

Cook’d and Bomb’d fansite.

Clip of Chris Morris passing himself as an expert on The Time, the Place.

Winsor McCay’s The Sinking of the Lusitania

A news story caught my ear this morning: you know how it is when you’re waking up, making breakfast and reading a newspaper with the TV on at the same time? Well, since I didn’t catch the details of the story, I went online to find confirmation that divers have definitively settled the question about the Lusitania’s cargo of ammunition, and this reminded me of one of my all-time favourite films. To explain – the Lusitania was a passenger liner torpedoed by a German submarine and sunk on 7th May 1915, with the loss of 1,198 lives. It was widely believed to have been a turning point in the First World War, generating the kind of outrage that would eventually draw the Americans into the fight by 1917; that’s a delayed reaction, but the sinking of the largest transatlantic liner in existence was a key tool in the propaganda drive to get the US to help out in Europe. There was even a story spread that German schoolchildren had been given a holiday to celebrate the glorious sinking, though this was highly improbable. But I was surprised that there was still a controversy over the contents of the ship’s hold. After a little reading around the subject some years ago, I thought it was settled enough that I could state matter-of-factly in my PhD thesis that the ship had been used to transport guns n’ ammo to Europe. Perhaps I should have made it clear that there had been no categorical agreement on the matter, or at least that there was an argument about it (here endeth the lesson about accurately representing a range of views on any given topic when conducting research).
Why was I writing about this in a thesis about special effects? My first awareness of the Lusitania disaster came, like everything else worth knowing, from a cartoon. Winsor McCay‘s The Sinking of the Lusitania remains on of the most astonishing pieces of animation you’re ever likely to see; I came across it while writing about early film representations of dinosaurs, and looking up McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur. I’d recommend the DVD of McCay’s complete (surviving) works, but you can watch a lo-res version at YouTube if you want an inkling of what I’m talking about:

The question over the contents of the ship’s hold is a crucial one. If it was carrying  ammunition, i.e. contraband, it would have become a “legitimate” target for German U-boats. The German embassy had issued a warning that the Lusitania was risking destruction by crossing into British waters while a state of war existed between Britain and Germany (see image, left). It would also explain why, after being struck by a single torpedo,  the Lusitania suffered two unusually large explosions and sank within eighteen minutes, leaving little time to evacuate. As noted by Kapitän-leutnant Schwieger in his log aboard U20, the attacking vessel, “Shot hits starboard side right behind bridge. An unusually heavy detonation follows with a strong explosion cloud…” Reported in the UK and America as an unprovoked attack on civilians to no strategic end, the sinking of the Lusitania provoked outrage and became a key reference point for demonstrating the primitive brutality of the German military. Representations of the Lusitania disaster, which was not captured on film or in photographs, became vital tools in the fight to keep the public incensed enough to keep supporting the war effort.

McCay (1867-1934) started work drawing twenty-five cent portraits of customers at the Wonderland Dime Museum in Detroit, before leaving Michigan in Chicago in 1889 to work for a printer. By 1891 he was working at another local dime museum in Cincinnati. In 1899 he began submitting drawings to ‘Life’ magazine, and his subsequent publications in this humorous journal led him to work for the New York Herald in 1903. His first successful comic strip, “Little Sammy Sneeze” appeared in the Herald from 24th July 1904 to 9th December 1906. “The Dream of the Rarebit Fiend” ran from 10th September 1904 to 25th June 1911; “A Pilgrim’s Progress” from 26th June 1905 to 18th December 1910; “Little Nemo in Slumberland”, perhaps his greatest achievement in cartooning, began 15th October 1905. In June 1906, McCay gave his first show as a “chalk-talk” performance cartoonist, where he would engage the audience with lightning sketches.By 1908, “Little Nemo” had been produced as a Broadway musical and McCay was in demand as a performer. His act included a piece where he drew the seven ages of Man, ageing a character with a series of key stage drawings at the approximate rate of one new drawing every thirty seconds. His first film was an adaptation of “Little Nemo”, comprised of four thousand drawings, which he followed with “How a Mosquito Operates“, which contained six thousand. On 11th July 1911 McCay quit the Herald when they forbade him from travelling to Europe to perform there, and he went to work for William Randolph Hearst The American, where “Little Nemo” was restarted as “In the Land of Wonderful Dreams” (the Herald still owned the original title). In 1914, at the time of the release of Gertie the Dinosaur, Hearst made McCay sign a contract forbidding him from performing outside New York City. In 1924 he left Hearst to return to the Herald-Tribune, as it had come to be called, but after two more years of “Little Nemo” he returned to The American, where he worked for Arthur Brisbane until his death in 1934.

One of my favourite aspects of McCay’s cartoon work is the way characters are given a realist dimensionality that stands in dynamic contrast to the surreal events that might actually be depicted. Take a look at this episode of Dream of the Rarebit Fiend: in every instalment, a character suffers a vivid hallucination brought on by eating cheese on toast before bed. This simple formula, always ending with the dreamer’s awakening (and invariably a pledge to stay away from late-night rarebit binges in future). Here, a man’s puppy transforms into a monstrous giant:
Notice how the dog retains a believable musculature even as it reaches impossible proportions. It defies all spatial logic, straining at the corners of the frame, but McCay endows the dog with a convincing sense of weight and presence. This enhances the comic disparity between the enormity of the hallucination and the cute insignificance of the actual pup in the final panel, and is a good indicator of McCay’s interest in commenting on reality by not abandoning its physical precepts entirely.

The same strategy carries over into his amazing exercise in cartoon characterisation, Gertie the Dinosaur, in which the viewer is treated to a demonstration of the giant creature’s physical properties. It’s unmistakeably a cartoon, with all of the flexibility that such a designation entails, but you can really see Gertie’s body working, breathing, shifting her weight around. I won’t say much more about Gertie, because I’d like to give her her own blog entry in the future:

 

Dream of the Rarebit Fiend featured its fair share of catastrophic imagery, as large-scale disasters could unfold form the most trivial causes; this is the comically nightmarish feeling of a collapsing universe or a sudden fall through space. In The Sinking of the Lusitania, McCay continued to ground his animation within a realist framework, but in this case he wants to efface the superreal aspects of the medium as much as possible. He wants his film to stand as a dramatic reconstruction of the sinking, and he takes great care over the details of the ships massive weight being penetrated by an explosive force that almost overwhelms the image itself, but it never slides into abstraction: the aim is to stop the ship looking “cartoony”, and to convey a sense of palpable destruction.
As you can see in this image of one of McCay’s cels from the original film (he’s helpfully signed it for us!), even though the shot could have been presented from any angle, at any distance, the artist has designed the scene from the position of a distant observer. This allows the whole ship to be held in the frame, of course, emphasising the scale of the disaster (and gives a sense of proportion to those crowds of tiny victims stranded on the decks), but it also aligns this filmic representation with similar presentations from the media at the time. See, for instance Thomas Hemy’s 1915 (?) depiction of the disaster:
Here are some other images that maintain that same diagonal framing of the sinking ship to stress its huge size and give it a horribly vertiginous angle as it keels over in the water. This propaganda poster is especially striking and self-explanatory:

We might think of an animated documentary as a paradox. We expect documentary footage to have been recorded at the time of the events depicted, giving the film a strong indexical association with the events and branding it with a mark of authenticity – the camera stands in for us as an eyewitness, and we lend it a level of credence accordingly. James Latham attributes the peculiar fascination of McCay’s film to its combination of documentary and fantastic animated elements:

What makes The Sinking of the Lusitania among the more interesting, accomplished, and unique films of its time is its hybrid form as an artful document. Unlike most documentaries it is animated, and unlike most animated cartoons it is not a comedy. And unlike many propaganda films of the time, its production values are exceptional, even noteworthy as one of the earliest films to use cel animation. … A powerful document with images drawn and edited to resemble a newsreel, McCay’s animated film simultaneously informs, horrifies, and possibly entertains audiences with its spectacle. A self-described ‘historical record of the crime that shocked Humanity,’ the film depicts the ship being torpedoed, engulfed in flames and explosions, and sinking as passengers seek lifeboats and fall overboard to their deaths. (James Latham, in Keil & Singer [eds.] American Cinema of the 1910s. Rutgers UP, 2009, p. 218)

Without the shortcut of photographic evidence, McCay’s film has to build up its status as a historical document by other means. Principally, the film achieves its power through its meticulous reconstruction of the disaster. The opening live action sequence shows McCay researching the events and settling down to begin work. Emphasis on the facts of production gives the film an extra emotional dimension: the attention to detail is tacitly equated with historical accuracy, an attempt to give the film a level of veracity which would not normally be attributable to a cartoon film. After the adoption of cel animation as an industry standard, animation could be easily broken up into a series of production line tasks; partly as a result of this, animation would become associated with children’s entertainment and programme filler that could be easily produced along formulaic lines with simple cartoon figures.In his earlier short film, How a Mosquito Operates, McCay used cycles of drawings so that he could re-use some of his drawings for repetitive actions, such as the proboscis of the insect repeatedly penetrating a man’s neck:
For The Sinking of the Lusitania, the extreme diligence required for completing the animation becomes a sign of the artist’s sincere passion for the subject, as if it becomes more truthful by having been hand-crafted and stripped of all extraneous information: by painstakingly transferring his research onto the screen, we are expected to presume that only the facts that have passed through that distillation process will be contained in the finished work. He doesn’t use labour-saving devices like the cycled drawings for Lusitania. The spectator has to feel the weight of the labour involved, and from it infer the sincerity of McCay’s emotional commitment to the war effort.
Unfortunately, this also meant that the film was not ready for release until 20th July 1918, months before the end of the First World War, and too late to play a role in instigating retaliation. But it remains an extraordinary piece of propaganda. The final image is of a woman clutching a baby, sinking below the waves, fading into the abstract play of bubbles onscreen: the film’s simplest drawing may be its most powerful. This shot is drawn from Fred Spears’ famous “Enlist” propaganda poster of 1915-16:

The use of women in war propaganda was a common tactic, as Pearl James suggests:

Many posters represent the violence of war through the visual metaphor of a raped, mutilated, or murdered woman. What could be more different from “timeless,” classical figures? Yet the victimized woman is also very much a fantastic construction with a complex appeal, despite the attestations of reality that frequently accompany these depictions. Certainly, there were female casualties. Yet posters that depict female victims depend not on factual evidence but upon sexual fantasy and gender (and in some cases racial) stereotypes.  (Pearl James, Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture. Nebraska UP, 2009, p. 283)

Like most documentaries, the partiality of The Sinking of the Lusitania cannot be concealed by the codes of authenticity or objectivity. However carefully he carries out his drawings, McCay‘s film cannot prove that the ship was torpedoed twice. The facts continue to evade the representation. It is a wrongheaded and reactionary movie (it has some of the quaintness we tend to see in shockingly brazen war propaganda from bygone days, and a little bit of the horror), but it marks a point when animation seemed to have an expressive potential limited only by the time and energy of its artists, and when it could pose important questions about the veracity of images and the status of documentary.