Hollywood calling

cinema's technological address

pp. 155-180

in: Martin Flanagan, Bakhtin and the movies, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Abstract

As traditional filmmaking practices become subsumed within cinema's movement into digital territories, the very terms with which we speak about film inevitably come up for re-evaluation. The notion of the "pro-filmic event"¹ as a way of understanding the materiality of the staged and arranged objects (sets, props and actors) in front of the camera as guaranteed by their straightforward reproduction on celluloid, becomes problematic in the age of computer-generated imagery (CGI). Entire features are now computer-generated, and although the kind of texts that make use of the technology to the fullest degree are still those that overlap substantially with the traditional field of children's cartoon animation² (films such as those produced by Pixar since Toy Story, John Lasseter, 1995, and by Dreamworks Animation Studios since Antz, Eric Darnell/Tim Johnson, 1998), progressively the visual practices innovated therein are finding their way into mainstream dramatic cinema through a host of genres (Keane, 2007, pp.60–1). In fact, in terms of contemporary Hollywood output, it is probably more apposite to ask which films and genres do not benefit from the assistance of CGI than to list those that do, so assimilated into the conventional palette of visual effects has the technology become.