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No cinephile can have failed to notice, over the past few years, a certain tendency, fuelled at least in part by advances in digital film-making tools, towards an increasingly self-consciously artificial visual style. It is difficult to pinpoint a starting point for this trend, though we can see it at work, for instance, in sections of The Matrix (Andy & Larry Wachowski, 1999). In its most extreme form, it has given us three films (to date, with more sure to follow) that place actors in a completely digital universe - Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (Kerry Conran, 2004), Sin City (Robert Rodriguez & Frank Miller, 2005) and 300 (Zack Snyder, 2007). In less extreme forms, the tendency manifests itself in a number of ways - for instance, in the digitally-graded colour tones of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003), in the intoxicatingly saturated colours and impossibly swirling leaves of Hero (Zhang Yimou, 2002), and in the visual gap between the first two Harry Potter films and Alfonso Cuaron's third instalment, with its luminous silvery and occasionally sepia-tinged tones and its iris fades.
Ted Pigeon has recently written a fascinating article (link) on the impact of digital media on cinema; but what interests me is not digital media per se, but the trend, which they seemed to kick-start, towards increased visual artificiality. Digital techniques are only one aspect of this tendency, which also comprises, among other things, of a marked propensity towards a postmodern visual pastiche of historical genres - film noir in the case of Sin City, 1940s studio films in the case of The Good German (Steven Soderbergh, 2006), and everything from the giallo to the spaghetti western to the Hong Kong kung-fu film in Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino, 2003-2004).
The avant-garde and art-house cinemas, of course, have long played with the idea that the cinematic image, despite any claims made by realist film theoriticians such as Bazin and Kracauer, is essentially an artificially-created construct with no bearing on or relation to reality. The illusion of realism created due to the medium's photographic nature is precisely that - an illusion.
None of this is in any way a new revelation; what is interesting is that, as digital technology makes the link between photography and cinema increasingly tenuous, so too, it seems, does the mainstream audience's expectation of realism decrease. Bar exceptions such as the musical genre, mainstream cinema has always tended towards an essentially realist approach to the image. Even if what is being depicted is clearly alien to the real world, the cinematic images that represent it strive for an impression of reality - attempting to make the audience suspend their disbelief and accept that what is on the screen is real. The image is transparent - what is important is what is represented, not the image itself.
This recent trend demonstrates a clean break with this tradition, giving us instead films that revel in their artificiality - from the comic-panel-come-to-life shots of Sin City to films, such as Shekhar Kapur's upcoming Elizabeth: The Golden Age (at least what we see of it from its trailers) that favour floridly, elaborately beautiful visuals closer to painting than to any imaginable photographic representation of historical reality. These are images that are not afraid to show us they are images, that do not feel the need to pretend to be real; and that are thus entirely free to go as far as they wish in the quest for beauty and expressive, emotional power.
This is not new ground, of course - the expressive manipulation of the cinematic image is as old as the medium itself, entire movements (such as German Expressionism) were built on very similar ideas; it would be difficult to find a single great film-maker, living or dead, whose films do not bear witness to an at least implicit engagement with the image as artifice. What is new (apart from the aforementioned input of digital media and the postmodern tendency towards pastiche) is the extent of these ideas' penetration into the Hollywood and international mainstream. We have David Fincher's (at least pre-Zodiac) swooping cameras, Darren Aronofsky's formal compositions, Zhang Yimou's swirling colourscapes, Chan-wook Park's baroque mise-en-scene, Baz Luhrmann's carnivalesque scenes, even the dashes of surrealism that colour the two Pirates of the Caribbean sequels.
It might be pure coincidence that for the past three years the Palme d'Or at Cannes has gone to resolutely gritty, social-realist features; or it might perhaps represent a critical and academic backlash towards this increase in cinematic artifice, and a retreat to the safety of realism. Admittedly, these tools certainly can, and definitely have, been misused to create vacuously pretty but soulless showreel movies. But it seems clear to me that, regardless of their individual quality, in blowing open the established conventions of cinematic realism, in tentatively mapping out the path for a new, digitally-aided postmodern impressionism that is starting to dominate both mainstream and art-house cinemas, these films have ushered in an exciting new range of possibilities waiting to be explored.
Over the past week I revisited Apocalypto (Mel Gibson, 2006) and 300 (Zack Snyder, 2007), two of the more offbeat blockbuster big-hitters of the past year. Neither is in any way a perfect film, or even a very good one, and both suffer to varying degrees from crippling flaws. Nonetheless, the films are interesting for the similarities they share, and the light they cast on the development of the historical action epic as a genre.
The genre, of course, is one that lay largely dormant for a number of decades (with exceptions such as Gibson's Braveheart (1995))before exploding once again into the pop-culture consciousness with Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000). The box-office and awards success that encountered Scott's film was superceded a year later with the first of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy - not, strictly speaking, a historical epic, but its groundbreaking success cemented the idea that the clashing-swords and epic-battles formula was here to stay.
Fast-forward a few short years, however, and the formula already seemed stale and worn out. The Lord of the Rings franchise continued to be met with spectacular success, but other epics that followed, such as Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004) and Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (2005), failed to meet their box-office targets. More crucially, films like Troy (Wolfgang Petersen, 2004)achieved little bar a forgettable, unremarkable mediocrity, falling far short of achieving the rousing emotions, grand themes and breathtaking spectacle expected of an epic.
Something new was needed to reinvigorate the genre, and Apocalypto and 300, in proposing an answer, create a new spin on the historical epic formula. The first element in their updated formula is a difference in timescale: whereas the plot of a traditional epic would span a number of years, or even decades, both Apocalypto and 300 only cover the events of a few days. The second element, which is linked to the first in some important ways, is a rigid, narrow, straight-ahead emphasis on the action; in both cases, there is only the barest of scene-setting, followed by what is basically an extended, sustained, feature-length action sequence. One could almost argue for these films being nothing but extended third acts: introduction and development dealt with in a few minutes, with the rest of the film being one long climax.
Naturally this has a number of consequences on the films, none necessarily positive or negative. This narrow temporal focus allows for one event to be depicted in minute detail, giving the possibility of intensity and depth over breadth and scope; it would be interesting to see an epic that takes this approach with a dramatic, rather than action-oriented, bent. The emphasis on action also grants these films the kind of headlong, breathless momentum more often associated with the action film, and in fact the line between the epic and the action film is blurred here, especially in the case of Apocalypto. An argument could be, and has been, made that these films are not epics but action films with an exotically historic backdrop, and while that doesn't have to be a bad thing, it needs to be said that, despite pretensions to the contrary, neither film has much in the way of intellectual or emotional complexity; adrenalin-fuelled entertainment is their sole raison d'etre.
The emphasis on action leads to the third element in their reconfigured epic formula: explicit, visceral violence. Both films glory in their depiction of bloody, brutal violence, and use it as a primary device in their emotive arsenal, attempting to capture a raw, physical thrill (this is not a criticism in itself, although many have used it as such). Despite this similarity, however, the films' approach to the violence is very different: in 300 it is cartoonish, glorious, heroic and "cool", in Apocalypto the intended effect is gruesome and horrifying.
The fourth, and final, element in the formula is the deployment of a rich, stylized, CGI-enhanced visual style in an attempt to recapture the spectacle of the epic, now that vast CGI armies of thousands have become somewhat passe. 300 takes this much further, but both films foreground their visuals, their CGI-created spectacles and their stylized nature.
Ultimately, neither Apocalypto nor 300 is a great film, although the former is my pick of the two. Both films come close to achieving greatness in sections - Apocalypto in the sheer, manic, wide-eyed intensity of the scenes in the Mayan city, and 300 in the opening scenes, which suggest a dark, cynical reworking of classical mythology epics such as Jason and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963). Apocalypto, however, demonstrates an unevenness in tone, undecided whether it wants to be an actioner or something grander; by the end it degenerates into an enjoyable but forgettable chase movie. 300, meanwhile, tries but fails to sweep aside the obvious contradiction that the Spartans, supposedly figthing for "freedom", are defending a fascist, militaristic society that it is singularly difficult to root for; while its incessant heroic platitudes and unnecessary, glib narration start to grate almost immediately. They are interesting, however, when taken in conjunction as experiments with the structure and genre elements of the historical epic - experiments that have paid off decidedly well in box-office terms, but, so far, with mixed results in aesthetic terms.
