Technical aspects of assigned films and chapters

Technology in Film: Is it a harbinger of the doomsday scenario?

Film has depended heavily on technology since the medium's inception. However, of late, this trend has taken on a whole new life with films such as Bladerunner, Kill Bill and Minority Report. Now, technology is no longer the means to an end in filmmaking, but the end itself.

Take the opening scenes Kill Bill, for instance. The wedding shoot-up scene is veritably haunted by the uses of technology and the start-stop framing sequences that change Roland Barthes' observations of punctum in the film. The vanishing points on the frames keep changes via technology, so that at any given moment, we lose sight of our protagonist. We do not recall for whom we want to root, and this changes our entire perspective on the narrative.

The same applies to Minority Report, except the fact that the music and lighting play an even more critical role than they do in Kill Bill. The music swells, and the camera frames get darker with the progression of the opening sequence in Minority Report, cluing the viewer into the fact that technology will truly play a destructive role in the work.

In the Matrix, music is of consequence, yes, but the opening scenes focus on camera work almost entirely. Again, the freeze-frame and slow motion are used to distinguish Neo-as the everyman character. That is the key distinction here in Matrix from Kill Bill: Matrix uses technology in film to demonstrate to us exactly who is the protagonist, and for whom we'll root throughout the film.

The Cybersurfer article establishes that computer side effects are cheaper than ever to insert into films. In fact, they can become the focus of the film with ease, and the costs are not prohibitive.

A common theme throughout the articles we have read is that artists involved in film are able to use technology to truly change interpretation of the films: "The forking paths of computer narrative will help some artist create a new medium."

And this, indeed, is the theme that draws the films in our class together: These are not at all films in the truest definition of the phrase: Rather, they are collaborative mediums that allow directors to do what midi technology allows musicians to do. They can combine mediums to demonstrate entirely different viewpoints.

The New York Times article establishes this fact, and takes it a step further. "Not surprisingly, contemporary cinephelia finds its expression in the blogs and online magazines written by undiscriminating fans, would-be critics, serious scholars and the usual malcontents, along with review sites like DVDBeaver, run by geeks whose fetishistic attention to technical detail mirrors that of hardcore audiophiles. The Internet is a natural home for this more rarified type of cenephilia not only because it's cheap, but also because it provides ready-made communities. Much of what is online originates with entertainment companies, and many independent sites do rely on commercial links for support. Yet for the best sites, like the online magazine Senses of Cinema, movie love doesn't begin and end with the latest Miramax release as it does for many offline publications. For these cinephiles, the Hungarian director Bela Tarr isn't an art-house curiosity; he's a star."

The language in this passage deals not only with technology in film, but of technology as an application to the distribution and comprehension of film. The advent of technology has truly made film a more plebian medium, available for all to peruse and critique.

These cinephiles are so drawn to the technological fervor in film and the marriage of that fervor to the film's distribution that they idolize film purveyors so far out of the mainstream. This was never the case before the advent of technology in film.

Take the merging of technology in the video clip shown in class, Total Recall. Arnold's scene is one that is not only enhanced by computer technology, it is made by computer technology. But that is not where the advent of technology ends in the clip: Rather, the clip itself is about technology, so we have the metafictional aspects of film on display here.

This is a true merging of technology as a tool and technology as a theme, a status that even the most respected "technological" novels such as Bladerunner and Brave New World and Time Machine could not accomplish. Film truly gives the modern day director the ability to merge means with end, and the result is a scary one indeed.

Take Minority Report, for instance. In the film, technology is trumpeted as a savior: With the ability to foretell crime, police officers are able to save innocent people from dying. However, the obvious challenges to our constitutional law system are not only latent, they are openly discussed and debated in the work. The courts and legislature, for instance, have yet to decide on the viability of declaring "perpetrators" guilty simply because of the innocent-until-proven guilty tenets of our system.

Minority Report deals with the negative ramifications of the advances in technology with frightening bleakness. In society and on the media, we generally hear only about the positive advances in technology, especially information technology, but this film truly brings home the scarier aspects.

Based on a Philip K. Dick short story, Minority Report takes place in the 2054 in Washington, DC. The Washington, DC Police Department has begun to incorporate technology to stop crimes before they happen. The work is done in the pre-crime division, and the purpose of the division is to use the precog (nitive) thinking of three genetically altered humans who float in a tank of fluid. The three precogs have a vision of a crime that's going to be committed in the future and they transmit the video imagery of the crime, the exact time it will happen and the future-perpetrator's identity to the DC pre-crime police force.

The police force then uses that info to arrest would-be perpetrators before they commit the crime. The would-be perpetrators are then put into holding, since no can figure out what to do with them legally: They have not committed a crime per se since they were stopped from doing so, so they cannot be found guilty. The people are going to vote on that issue in the near future.

In the mean time, the crime rate plummets because of the technology. John Anderton, the main character, loses his son to crime six years ago, and takes up a job with the pre-crime division, and works earnestly to get would-be-perpetrators off the streets. However, one day he too finds his name on the list of future perpetrators of crimes, accused of a murder of someone he does not know 36 hours in the future.

He flees, and is on the run from his own colleagues trying to prove his innocence from a crime he did not even know he would commit. He pursues a minority report - of the few occasions in which one of the three precogs disagrees with the others about a perpetrator's "guilt."

This scenario represents a legitimate threat regarding computer technology. With the advent of artificial technology, Dick forces us to ask at what point are we ceding agency over our own lives to computers and artificial technologies?