Movie 666

Stanley Kubrick died in his sleep early last month. Kubrick’s death as a filmmaker comes at a time when filmaking itself is dying at the hands of digital technology. Although moviemaking will continue for a great many years to come, filmmaking as a kind of moviemaking is a vanishing species. Computers are rapidly removing film from the process of moviemaking: images are created and manipulated with digital cameras; movies are edited on computers; special effects are created on graphics workstations. In the end, movies are transferred to film for projection in theaters. Film is rapidly becoming less a medium of production than a medium of transmission.

No director more than Kubrick represented the earlier filmic era. Kubrick ground his own lenses, exposed endless meters of film, and built elaborate sets to subject to the filmic process. Consider 2001: A Space Odyssey. The special effects in this movie are the result of carefully filmed sets and models; the more abstract sequences in this film were created through laboratory development techniques and the use of an optical printer. Although computers play an important role in 2001, it is not a computer-made film. If 2001 were produced today, its effects would be created through computerized, digital means.

Kubrick saw the end of the filmic era and investigated the possibilities of digital technology. He planned a return to the science fiction genre with AI, a film set in the future when New York City is underwater from melted polar icecaps and robots roam the earth. Kubrick had already met with digital pioneers James Cameron and George Lucas to learn more about the technology needed to realize his vision. AI would have been a digital film — that is, if AI ever saw completion. It is possible that even if Kubrick lived a great number of years more, he would have never come to terms with the rapid development of digital technology. He would not have been able to achieve the technical mastery of his subject that he preferred. AI might have been abandoned, postponed, or partially filmed and left to completion by others. Kubrick had already delayed production on AI more than once to come to terms with new technology. He postponed AI in order to film Eyes Wide Shut, a character-driven film that allowed him a final mastery of filmic, photographic technique. When Stanley Kubrick died, filmmaking died with him.

– Demon

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