Dr. Tube and Mr. Snow

REVIEW DR. TUBE AND MR. SNOW I think we tend to talk interchangeably, and not very usefully, about film and cinema, as if they were the same thing. Cinema is a social institution, while film is a medium. And I think while the medium may change, the institution will be just fine. I don't see how the institution of cinema-which involves the social act of looking at moving images, and talking about them-is going to be threatened by new technology. Of course, it will be affected by it in terms of how films are made, distributed, and exhibited, but it won't be destroyed by it. I can quite easily imagine film as a medium disappearing quietly in the next ten years with scarcely a blip in terms of the practices of cinema. -Anthony McCall1 Given its overt use of computer-generated effects as well as what critics perceive to be its numerous allusions to its maker's previous films, it is tempting to view *Corpus Callosum (2002) as Michael simultaneous farewell to the and ode to the new possibilities of digital image technology. Rigorously predicated on irreducible cinematic facts, writes J. Hoberman in his review of the film, Snow's structuralist epics-Wavelength and La Region Centrale-announced the imminent passing of the film era. *Corpus Callosum heralds the advent of the next.2 Yet elsewhere in his review, Hoberman remarks that piece bridges the gap between film and video,3 reminding us that art often occupies an ambiguous position between mediums-between film and photography, for example, in One Second in Montreal (1969). Paradoxically, I argue here, in its very exploration of the new possibilities of digital image technology, *Corpus Callosum returns to and extends some of the cinema's earliest, most fundamental traditions. (Corpus callosum is, after all, the name of the connecting tissue between the brain's two hemispheres). In doing so, it suggests that, for all of their novelty, the use of digital technologies in filmmaking will be driven by some of the same basic impulses and desires that have shaped much cinematic art over the last one hundred or so years, and that the will survive even if celluloid is no longer used to make films. The film thereby offers a salutary antidote to the death of cinema rhetoric of rupture and revolution that tends to predominate-much to the delight, one suspects, of those who make and profit from the new technology-in the discourse on digital media. One contributor to this discourse who has emphasized the continuities between the and digital media is Lev Manovich. To start with, Manovich points out, digital media have borrowed many representational conventions from the cinema. For example, when data is represented three-dimensionally, access to it is often modeled on the film camera and its movements. During the 1980s and 1990s the camera model became as much of an interface convention as scrollable windows or cut-and-paste operations. It became an accepted way of interacting with any data represented in three dimensions-which in computer culture means literally anything and everything-the results of a physical simulation, an architectural site, the design of a new molecule, statistical data, the structure of a computer network, and so on. As computer culture gradually spatializes all representations and experiences, they are subjected to the camera's particular grammar of data access. Zoom, tilt, pan, and track-we now use these operations to interact with data spaces, models, objects, and bodies.4 *Corpus Callosum makes extensive use of these camera movements, especially tracking (or what Snow likes to call trucking). Once inside the office in which much of the film takes place, there begins a series of tracking shots edited together into a continuous loop, with the camera repeatedly tracking across the space of the office from left to right, beginning and ending each time in roughly the same places. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.