I read an article the other day about how people are scandalized to learn that actors in movies have been digitally altered in post-production.
In the “before” shot Jennifer Connolly [sic], the leading lady, was shown talking on her mobile phone. The digitally manipulated “after” shot showed her talking on her mobile phone with a tear rolling down her cheek. Such alterations are becoming increasingly common, but practitioners are discouraged from discussing this work.
“Acting is all about honesty, but something like this makes what you see on screen a dishonest moment,” said a leading technician. “Everyone feels a bit dirty about it.”
In my opinion, this is completely ridiculous. “Acting is all about honesty”?! Nonsense. Acting, and the theater, is all about telling a story. If Jennifer Connelly had been faking a tear, or had added a drop of water to her cheek, would that be any more “honest” than a bit of digital manipulation?
I can understand the outrage over digital manipulation in magazines or advertisements, where an airbrush or lighting tricks can paint a misleading picture of a skin cream or a shampoo. But movies are supposed to be about make-believe. They’re supposed to be about suspense of disbelief. I know that Christopher Reeve can’t really fly, that it’s all cinematic tricks. I know that the protagonist’s wife’s tragic death is a portrayal of the story, that the actress is really alive and healthy and the actor isn’t really married to her at all, and probably has no emotional connection with her whatsoever. But I suspend my disbelief in order to enjoy the story that the writer and director have engineered. The actors are mere puppets in the tale.
And I can certainly see how the actors would be more than a bit miffed at this. I can imagine those who could paint realistic pictures were miffed at the invention of the photograph. Nobody enjoys being made obsolete. But just as theater made the certain set of skills required for the stage obsolete, the ability to digitally alter video footage to an unprecedented degree may make the set of skills possessed by the current Hollywood status quo obsolete. So I don’t blame “actors such as Tom Cruise [who] have begun to write clauses into their contracts granting them full control of their own digital assets”. But in the end, it’s a losing battle. The kind of digital manipulation people find scandalous today will be commonplace ten years from now.
This may have serious ramifications on the traditional role we give celebrities. If a film is particularly moving or a performance compelling, we tend to honor the actor for their role. What if the actor becomes simply a model for their CGI character, with their actions and voice digitally created and/or enhanced? Who gets the credit for an amazing film or a lifelike portrayal of a character? What will happen to the Oscars? It will certainly be a different world!
Some don’t have “moral” issues with such retouching, but still “think that it makes it tough to consider films and photographs that have been doctored genuine art forms anymore.”[1] I think this is a bit ridiculous, too. As I’ve said before, art is not art because it is rare, or because it is difficult to create, or even because it is “honest”. Art is art because it touches our mind in a particular way which we enjoy. If a retouched film or photograph is inferior artistically to an “authentic” one, it is because of failures in the process, not because of something intrinisic to the process itself.
I hate watching movies with an abundance of CGI effects, but that is because they are instantly recognizable as CGI effects, and inferior aesthetically. The reason I preferred the look of Star Wars III-VI over I-III doesn’t have anything inherently to do with CGI—if the prequels had managed to digitally convey the same environment as the originals, I would have been just as happy. The problem was that they looked much more fake and contrived, from the digitally-inserted Jabba to the robot battle scenes on Naboo. It was aesthetics that made it inferior, not the fact that it happened to be fake. The original Jabba was fake too (a Jim Henson puppet), but he looked real.
Actors will have to get used to the fact that their role may be changing. Audiences should already be aware that everything presented to them for consumption is heavily altered, be it with camera lenses, trick angles, splicing together multiple shots, or digital trickery. Adding a digital teardrop isn’t some new and scandalous travesty—it’s the same fakery that Hollywood has used for decades, only now in a computerized form. That’s not going to change, but hopefully our awareness of it will.
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