A British film recently hit the jackpot at the British box office-a glimmer of hope for a crestfallen industry. The film was shot entirely on cheap digital video cameras, a first for a box office number one. Two of the biggest movie debates in this country-the viability of British cinema and the effect of the digital revolution-have been forced into focus. The critics were sniffy about 28 Days Later, and that is part of its fascination.
Suddenly, "e-cinema" is mainstream. More film-makers are shooting on video to create electronic movies, mostly in the dominant form of digital (encoded in zeros and ones). Cheaper and more flexible than chemical film, it allows experimental directors the use of more cameras, shooting for longer from many more angles. And video cinema also has its own aesthetic properties, distinct from those of 35mm film. Pixellated digital imagery can't match the visual richness of its photochemical predecessor, but does permit a sketchier and freer approach.
In 1949, film studio boss Samuel Goldwyn envisaged "large screen televisions" in movie theatres, receiving films by cable, but it wasn't until 1992 that this was first demonstrated. Computer generated imagery went mainstream with the liquid metal effects in Terminator 2, and the first wholly CGI feature was 1995's Toy Story. In 1998, British cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle took a huge leap in the Danish film, Festen. Shot from multiple angles with pocket digital video cameras, it crafted fuzzy flickering images reminiscent of the romantic photography of 1920s cinema. The following year, the mainstream countered when George Lucas opened The Phantom Menace in four digital theatres. Meanwhile, several cinemas in Europe refitted for e-cinema projection. Within months came The Blair Witch Project, its imagery and success prefiguring 28 Days Later (also splendidly shot by Anthony Dod Mantle).
Looking at the development of digital imagery reminds me of Richard Dawkins's weird genetic analogy in The Selfish Gene, where he proposed that just as in biology there are genes and genetic evolution, so in culture there are memes and memetic evolution. Memes are a unit of cultural information and their replication explains, for example, why everyone suddenly begins humming a catchy tune. Many argue that biological evolution is a bad analogue for cultural change but digital imagery fits the model rather well; it has developed in wildly varied, geometric ways. It is catching on and appearing everywhere, even in the films of confirmed cinematic flat-earthers like Roman Polanksi (whose new film The Pianist uses some CGI) and David Lynch who, until recently, insisted that digital contributed nothing to the cinematic bag of tricks available to directors since the 1920s.
28 Days Later is about how Britain is brought to a post-apocalyptic standstill by a virus called "rage," which escapes from a lab because of well-meaning animal liberationists. The film's director Danny Boyle and producer Andrew MacDonald, who together made Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and A Life Less Ordinary, and misfired somewhat in their too- eager-to-please film of Alex Garland's The Beach, have always been interested in intelligent genre films. Their latest echoes with references to John Christopher's book The Death of Grass, the old television show The Changes and George A Romero zombie socio-horror pictures like Dawn of the Dead. Their track record shows that they have regularly judged audiences better than British critics. The indifference or apoplexy of some responses to 28 Days Later indicates that newspaper critics (most notably ageing controversialist Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard, who has been misjudging films since 1960, when he lambasted Michael Powell's Peeping Tom) are not up to assessing the new digital language of film.
The potential of this new language is the most interesting thing about the successful incursion of digital into British cinema. Dod Mantles's imagery in Festen seemed highly experimental but the same range of focus, tone and colour has now carried a film to the number one spot here. The expense of shooting 35mm meant that such cameras were regal presences on set. With the cheapness of video, time ceases to be so precious. On the first day of filming on Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, cameraman Robbie Muller shot 68 hours of tape as opposed to an average of maybe 45 minutes of film. In 28 Days Later, multiple cameras were used.
Film critic Jonathan Romney argued a few years ago that "we are not required as viewers to take stock of digital imagery as potential material for metaphor." He was talking about computer generated objects like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, but in the hands of directors like Von Trier, Boyle or the Russian genius Aleksandr Sokurov, digital is at least as inclined to metaphor as its silver nitrate ancestor.
Film editor and sonic theorist Walter Murch has written that the switch from film to digital is like the shift from fresco to oil painting in the Renaissance. Expensive, collaborative and prestigious work, relying on patronage, gave way to a profusion of simpler, more individual and personal modes of art. The result was a golden age. n
