Modes of Interfacing

"Here the image counts not for what it adds to reality, but for what it reveals of reality." (Andre Bazin, qtd. in V.F. Perkins Film as Film)

Faced with the challenge of including computers, video games, the internet, and the imagined realm of "cyberspace" in their films, filmmakers have developed a variety of methods for depicting the new digital technologies.  Below I have attempted to outline some of the methods I have observed with which internet and video game films bring their subject technologies into the frame.  The identification process is ongoing and was undertaken in order to focus my attention on moments in these films when the boundary between the photographic and the digital are blurred, obscuring the occasional abandonment of the frame of the filmstrip for bitmapped dimensionality.  As it is primarily an observational exercise, the list should be considered an incomplete theoretical taxonomy rather than a closed definition.

Hopefully you will find that the list functions like a push in: locating the digital screen, focusing on it, moving to close-up, and eventually pushing through to an imagined electronic environment.  Such a push shot rhymes with the meta-narrative of cinema's incorporation of digital technologies and actually appears in many interfacing films (as demonstrated by the clip which concludes this post which, like the other illustrations, is from Iain Softley's Hackers (1995)).

1)Mise-en-scene

• frames in frames
• digital screens are located within the shot

The most basic method for including digital technologies is to present them as elements of mise-en-scene:  computers in the laps or on the desks of characters, cell phones in the hands of characters, and video games in arcades are all examples of the inclusion of technology within an arrangement of details in the film frame.


2)Frame shot

• includes a mise-en-abyme frame
• also used when interfacing with tv, theater, and film
• generally occurs in a pov shot

The frame shot is characterized by the presence of embedded frames, the outermost and therefore most authoritative being the frame of the cinema screen, as it is constituted by the the physical boundary of the filmstrip.  Frame shots include within the master frame a secondary frame.  In the case of television, a frame shot might include the television cabinet, its dials and knobs at most, and in its capture of the screen it would reveal the dancing lines of cathode-tube projection.  In the case of a video game or internet sequence, the secondary frame is the plastic of a monitor or panel display which serves as the periphery of digital depiction.

3) Interfacing

• often a pov shot
• an equalizing substitution of one screen for the other
• alters the heritage of the on-screen image
• may be cropped due to aspect-ratio conflict
• may be photographic (camera masks interface) or digital (computer animation)
• often presents an imaginatively animated approximate to actual computer interfaces

Interfacing is marked by the focus of the camera-eye on a diegetic screen, substituting the diegetic screen for the film's own.  In interfacing with film or television, for example at the Proletariat Theater in Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (1929), the interface presents the mise-en-abyme of receding layers of photographic space.  In interfacing with computers or video games, however, interfacing cedes the photographic to the digital; the properties of digital rendering and the fixed frame of the computer screen or game console supersede filmic techniques of point-of-view, pan, track, zoom, etc.

In some instances of interfacing the camera records the digital screen, revealing in the process its shape, the glare it reflects from other objects in the room, or the pixels which construct its image.  In other instances of interfacing, the entire contents of the frame are digitally produced.  While it is often hard for me to discern the distinction between digital depiction and photographic recording of a screen, in either case the heritage of the image is ultimately aligned with the former rather than the latter.  Beyond this change in the heritage of the image, I believe that there exists an important distinction between a filmed screen, the processes related to which remain aligned with traditional film ontology, and a digitally produced environment, the processes related to which posit a momentary revision to traditional film ontology.

4)Close-up POV or Zoom Interface

• utilizes cinema techniques of zoom and, occasionally, pan in a pov shot

The Zoom Interface differs from interfacing in that it isolates a portion of the interfaced screen, generally in a point-of-view shot.  As with frame shots and interfacing, there remains difficulty in disentangling the primacy of photographic versus digital.  In most cases, however, the entanglement is representative of the intersticial characteristics of interfacing.

5) Digital animation

• animated digitally, often emulating cinema techniques (zoom, pan, tracking and crane shots)
• depicts "cyber space," imaged physical space beyond the interface

In film, digital environments are primarily conceived of spacially (an observation which may contribute as much to discussions about the primacy of space versus time in the cinema as it does to an understanding of early methods of comprehending computer technology).  Most filmmakers depict the spacial landscape of cyberspace with pure digital animation.  These animated sequences are revelatory of contemporary conceptions of internet and computer technology, often presenting anachronistic and sexualized visions of computing.

The conceptualizations of cyberspace on film can be expanded into a much longer entry.  Here I will simply note two standard visual metaphors for cyberspace:  the tunnel and the city.  The tunnel metaphor depicts the hacker as penetrating a digital environment, often overcoming obstacles and blockages in order to force foreign systems into submission.  The city metaphor is modeled on the physical appearance of circuit boards and their rhyme with an overhead view of a city.  These are not the only metaphors, nor  are they mutually exclusive.  Further, both regularly contain "information" in the form of equations (E=mc² makes a frequent appearance) floating in a digital ether, itself another standard image of cinematic cyberspace.  Hacking scenarios also often employ metaphors of virus which sometimes expand upon the sexual conception of penetrating another computer or signify associatively with contemporaneous medical concerns (for example, AIDS or cancer).

Hypothesis:  Narrativizing the role of emergent technologies pushed filmmakers to include digitally rendered animation, especially in the depiction of the imagined, spacial "cyberspace."  The technophilic co-emergence of digital animation and internet narratives therefore often occasioned the abandonment, if only momentary, of the photographic in favor of the digital, anticipating a move to a more comprehensively digital medium.

Each of the above methods of depiction occurs within the following 38 second clip from Hackers, as do examples of the tunnel and city metaphors.


(Please note that when played in the blog the clip is off center, cutting off the rightmost area of the frame.  To view without the irksome cropping, click on the video.  A new window or tab will open to the video at youtube.com.)

On The Distinction Between Interfacing and (Pre-Digital) Animation

As I continue to bend ears about my observations on interfacing in internet and video game films, friends and advisors often suggest I look into work on animation.  While no corridor of thought should go entirely unexplored (and, indeed, I am taking an animation seminar next semester), the insinuation that interfacing is merely a reversion to animation has always struck me as incorrect.

When, in films like The Last Starfighter (1984), Weird Science (1985), Hackers (1995), and Catfish (2005), filmed space is given over to the interface of a digital technology, it is more than just a shift in representational aesthetics.  In these and other internet and video game films, interfacing relinquishes the filmic space of the frame to a digital environment.  In the process, one animating technology (the movie camera) cedes to another (digital rendering).  The transition is significant because it anticipates the broader encroachment of digital technology into the medium of "film," an encroachment that has caused many theorists to revist the ontology of celluloid film in effort to understand the continuing effects of its evolving nature.

Based upon my working definition of interfacing, pre-digital animation might seem to be an "interface" with the illustrator's artwork or the sculptor's molded clay (the latter so much less so because the presence of a frame is requisite for both interfacing and film, but not for sculpture).  In either case, however, it is the camera which is the animating force; rapidly flashed sequences of photographs of the drawn or sculpted "pro-filmic" creates the illusion of movement.  The digital screens with which the films interface are powered by a new animating technology.  By giving up the filmed space to a space which is digitally rendered, interfacing in films from the 1980's introduced viewers to technologies which have since become increasingly a part of our culture and the films that represent it.

In my earliest writings on internet films I tended to view internet and video game narratives exclusively as cultural myths, narratives designed to interrogate and domesticate the digital frontier, to rationalize (indeed narrativize) new ways of life, including a prominent new form of masculinity.  Consideration of the tendency of these early internet films to interface with computer screens reveals that there also exists grounds for a formal investigation into the the role of interfacing in the larger evoloution of the medium.  More than just an aesthetic preference for animation, interfacing presents a technological interstice, a digital breach into filmic space that mirrors the contemporaneous intrusion of technology into so many other aspects of work and leisure.  The Last Starfighter, for example, not only interfaces with the computer graphics of video games but is also (according to the DVD special features) the first film to feature action sequences in completely digitally rendered environments.  Wholly remarkable at the time, the relative banality of "digitally rendered environments" in modern films suggests that cinema's encorporation of digital technology on both the narrative and formal level may have been for the medium's own sake rather than for the sake of its audience.

Testing the limits of the possibility and acceptability of digital rendering may have been enmeshed with attempts to visualize and understand the various, rapidly developing new technologies, but it was also a crucial period of self-reflexivity, the cinema discovering its digital self.  Glancing at the list of films I marshalled above as representatives of interfacing, it is clear to see that, from fantasy to science-fiction to documentary, we, too, have been getting accustomed to our new digital lives.  As digital interfaces were doubly appropriate, both documenting and enacting a switch from mechanical to digital, so these random notes on interfacing are appropriately uploaded to blogger.com, released to the imaged space of our networked environment.