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Sep
16
"Post-Cinema" Wiki Contribution
It was with great irony that I read over "The Futurist Cinema" article in the Multimedia book, where the futurists pronounced the death of books as a medium and that cinema was the be all and end all art form. What I found fascinating was that you could take some of the quotes verbatim and replace "cinema" with "video games" and "book" with "film" and basically depict what is going on with video game art in the world today.
This is from the forward by Gibson, I guess, but is the best example of this...
"It was in [cinema] that Marinetti and his colleagues saw the potential for a form of expression that reflected the speed and energy of the times. [Cinema] may still have been considered a novelty entertainment, but the Futurists treated it as a legitimate art form. In this essay, they contrast the flexibility of [film] against the linearity, rigidity, and canonical aura of [the book]. [Cinema], they declared, could be the most dynamic of human expressions because of its ability to synthesize all of the traditional arts, unleashing a form that was totally new" (Gibson, p11).
See!
I think it's a little unnecessarily cruel to say that books and cinema are completely dead in the water, with nothing else to offer human culture, even in this day and age where young people are practically popping out of the womb with a DS already in hand. It could be true that these two, somewhat older mediums have maybe less unexplored territory to cover, but I think both of them will always have a purpose that they can ably fulfill.
In the case of books, the paper medium has arguably greater permanence than anything else that has ever been developed. Technology progresses at such a rapid rate that the mediums on which we store digital data (floppy disks, anyone?) are often outmoded at alarming rates, making it difficult to continue viewing old work if the storage methods are not constantly updated. (Plus, print resolution is much greater than current digital display resolutions and is, thus, still easier on human eyes to read.) Film, of course, is a powerful medium that does not require active interactivity from the viewer; they just have to stay awake and keep their eyes on the screen. This makes it a fabulous narrative tool, as well as a strong way of showing other people exactly what you want them to see, which makes it great for getting your point across.
Still, this entire frame of mind that the Futurists had about cinema is encouraging for people like myself, who are likewise excited for the future of video games. The medium is currently also viewed as a formed of "novelty entertainment" for the time being, but that public opinion will certainly be changing in the upcoming years as more of us come into the field with the intent of making something fresh and different and interesting, instead of all the "profoundly passeist" (p12) first-person shooter and rehashed sequel games that are currently cluttering up the marketplace.
