New Review of Film and Television Studies

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The drama of the digital: D.N. Rodowick, Garrett

Stewart, and narrative cinema

William Brown

To cite this article: William Brown (2009) The drama of the digital: D.N. Rodowick, Garrett
Stewart, and narrative cinema, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 7:2, 225-236, DOI:
10.1080/17400300902817000

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400300902817000

Published online: 28 Apr 2009.

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 New Review of Film and Television Studies
Vol. 7, No. 2, June 2009, 225–236

REVIEW ESSAY
The drama of the digital: D.N. Rodowick, Garrett Stewart, and
narrative cinema
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William Brown*

Film Studies, University of St Andrews, 99 North Street, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9AD, UK
This essay considers recent work by D.N. Rodowick and Garrett Stewart on
digital technology and cinema. By comparing Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of
Film to Stewart’s Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema, the essay
argues that Rodowick need not be so pessimistic about the prospects of
cinema in the face of digital technology, even if material film itself is
becoming obsolete. Furthermore, the essay queries whether the boundaries
between virtual and actual as proposed by Rodowick are so clearly defined,
and posits that a more complex relationship between the two is in existence
(and has perhaps existed for a long time). The essay also proposes that the
work of Rodowick and Stewart, among others, suggests that film theory still
has plenty to offer film studies, not least because this postfilmic cinema is
expanding so rapidly.
Keywords: digital cinema; virtuality; D.N. Rodowick; Garrett Stewart; film
theory

The cinema should never turn back. It should accept, unconditionally, what is
contemporary. Today, today, today. . . .
– Cesare Zavattini1
Is there so much to say about the effects that digital technology have had on
cinema that academics are not sure where to start? Or is it that digital technology
in fact heralds fewer changes in cinema than we might otherwise have thought,
meaning that film theorists are often left pointing at the screen saying: ‘Look, it’s
still cinema, only different . . . but actually it’s the same.’
On the one hand, Jeffrey Sconce (2003, 180) pronounces that ‘[o]nly an idiot
would claim that digital media are not worthy of analysis, an assertion that would
sadly replicate the hostility toward film and television studies encountered in
the last century’, while Henry Jenkins (quoted in Dixon 1998, 9) adds that ‘[w]e
[in academe] are paying a tremendous price for our intellectual conservatism . . .
there is enough work [in the new media environment] to keep us all investigating
and theorising . . . for decades to come’.

*Email: wjrcb@st-andrews.ac.uk

ISSN 1740-0309 print/ISSN 1740-7923 online

q 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17400300902817000
http://www.informaworld.com
 226 W. Brown
On the other hand, we now find ourselves 15 years on from Jurassic Park
(Steven Spielberg, USA, 1993), and academia has seemingly not responded to the
digital moving image with the urgency that some believe necessary, although
I shall briefly outline reasons as to why this may be.
Firstly, however, let us not overlook the large amount of work that has been
done on the digital: Lev Manovich’s Language of New Media (2001) is arguably
the seminal text on the topic of digital cinema, a book that endeavours to get to
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grips with the ontology of the new medium and to explore some of the effects on
cinema of a cinema without film. There are also plenty of useful edited
collections that cover digitextuality and other topics (e.g. Hayward and Wollen
1993; Everett and Caldwell 2003). And a range of respected film theorists have
located digital cinema historically as the latest in a long tradition of imaging
technologies and aesthetic movements, including Philip Rosen (2001), Mary Ann
Doane (2002), Sean Cubitt (2005), and Laura Mulvey (2006). Now, it is of course
important to note that digital technology and its application within cinema does
not happen in a vacuum and that there is an important sense in which these ‘new
media’ are remediations (after Bolter and Grusin 2000) that do indeed draw upon
older technologies and styles, but the collective impression made by these latter
titles can run the risk of leading us to think of the digital as a case of plus ça
change, plus c’est la même chose.
Some provisos in defence of academia should be added. It is worth, for
example, remembering that it is no doubt beneficial for academia to respond only
slowly to new developments in any field; it is important properly to perceive
whether or not the changes wrought by computers on cinema are real or simply
media-inspired fads, even if some theorists have enjoyed going overboard in their
depictions of techno dystopias and/or artificial, cybernetic paradises (Dery [1996]
provides a useful overview). A delay in responding can allow us to see the ‘bigger
picture’ of change, rather than waste precious time analysing the latest but only
short-lived trends, and 15 years after Jurassic Park may not have been long
enough a time period for a considered response, especially since the first serious
study of film (Hugo Münsterberg’s 1916 The Photoplay: A Psychological Study)
was published a full two decades after the first public film screenings in 1895.
Additionally, perhaps one of the more significant reasons for film studies not
to have paid all of its attention to new technologies and how cinema as a medium
has changed is that film theory (trying to understand what film is) is seemingly
out of fashion. In its place we have a strong drive to study film history (before
film has disappeared forever?) and the general undertaking of a cinematic
cartography in which there might be little room for theory, for we cannot talk of
what cinema is when there is overwhelming evidence that different national,
cultural, and/or industrial contexts suggest that there is no single ‘cinema’, but
only multiple cinemas. Philosophy of film also seems to have stolen some of film
theory’s thunder, although the current efforts to reimagine cinema as philosophy,
as opposed simply to enacting philosophical scenarii, do have strong theoretical
underpinnings (see, for example, Frampton 2006, whose work in these very pages
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 227
has been described as – and criticised for being – a return to ‘grand theory’
[see Price 2008]).
Finally, we should also remember that there is quite simply an enormous
wealth of information to take on board if one wants to try to get to grips with the
cinema as it has been expanded by digital technologies, as digital technologies
have converged on cinema, and as every facet of cinema’s existence has been
modified by computers. Can the expanding medium be mastered theoretically?
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Can there be a text that allows us to rethink cinema through the digital viewfinder
such that we can no longer hide in the archive and/or ignore digital technology
and its influence on this hard-fought object of study, cinema itself?
In The Virtual Life of Film (2007), D.N. Rodowick asks precisely this
question: in a world where ‘film theory has fallen on hard times’, can it prove its
ongoing worth by rescuing film studies at precisely the moment when it is most
threatened because of the digital and postfilmic nature of cinema today? ‘So what
becomes of cinema studies if film should disappear?’ Rodowick asks. ‘Perhaps
this is a question that only film theory can answer’ (3).
The Virtual Life of Film, therefore, is a bold, fascinating, and exciting attempt
to restore film theory to its former central position in film studies, although given
that Rodowick has already announced that his follow-up to The Virtual Life of
Film will be titled An Elegy for Theory – hommage à Jean-Luc Godard’s Eloge
de l’amour (2001) – it might seem that the author does not feel much confidence
in succeeding in his mission.
Rodowick efficiently describes how cinema’s ontology has fundamentally
changed: with the digital turn, what was a causal, indexical representation of
reality (causal in that reality caused the analog image’s content, regardless of
choice of angle, filters, lenses, development techniques, etc.) has become an
abstract mathematical code that, when outputted by a computer in pictorial form
offers us a simulation of reality, one that can bypass film’s material, celluloid
base entirely. That these simulations still pursue the goal of photorealism
(the image looks like an analog image) does not matter when we consider that
the digital image is caused by nothing more than the skills of a programmer or, in
the case of films shot using digital cameras, a computer that does not transcribe
reality so much as transcode it into numerical bits of information. Being infinitely
manipulable, and yet (importantly) looking like reality, what has been destroyed
is our faith that the image can offer us proof of a time and a place that did exist.
The ramifications of this apparently simple point are enormous: how does this
affect our understanding of cinema as art, for instance? Is cinema a medium that
relies on its material base? (In other words: what is a medium?, is cinema a
uniquely photographic medium?) Will cinema as a medium have been irreversibly
changed as and when film (the material) disappears from it? In which case, what was
cinema?
In answering these questions, Rodowick takes Noël Carroll (1996) to task for
ignoring the differences between different moving image media (film, video,
DVD) even though each creates ‘qualitative noise or distortion’ (watching M
 228 W. Brown
on DVD is not the same as viewing a celluloid print in a theatre) and despite the
fact that artists and spectators both ‘make strong intuitive aesthetic judgments
about the differences between film, video, and digital presentations’ (40). As we
shall see, this call for medium specificity does not place Rodowick too far from
Garrett Stewart, who, in his recent Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema
(2007), analyses the ways in which a wide selection of films from a variety of
national and transnational contexts precisely use or depict in use different
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imaging technologies in order to further their narrative, a technique, or, perhaps

better, a process that Stewart refers to as narratography.
In opposition to Carroll, Rodowick cites Stanley Cavell (1979) in arguing that
a medium can be measured through automatisms; that is to say, a medium
involves a set of practices that are repeated across different artworks, but each
of which may test these repeated practices/automatisms, thereby expanding/
modifying the medium. Rodowick argues that, with the computer at the centre of
processes of digital codification (even a DV camera computes information), the
computer emerges as a medium, with its own automatisms or operations, some
alike cinema’s existing automatisms, some unlike, and some transformations
thereof: ‘[a]mong the most familiar are copy (including ripping); capture or
sample; select, cut, and paste; search; composite; transform; and filter’ (128),
while digital cinema also retains the concepts of image, screen, (photorealistic)
representation, and frame (130).
Cinema has also changed, because analog cameras and computers treat time
differently. If photography is an automatic ‘spatial record of duration fixed in a
photochemical reaction to reflected light in a process deriving from the
mechanical operation of camera and lenses’, then cinema’s ontology has added to
it the notion of succession (even if a film is, in fact, a series of still images),
meaning that cinema has at its core animation (‘reconstituting movement from a
series of still images’) (52 – 3). Digital cinema is not this, even if it looks like this.
Digital cinema is an abstraction, that is, it is abstract in the sense that the digital
image is in fact made up of code, code that challenges our traditional
understanding of images, especially because the computer’s output of this code in
pictorial form is only one of many potential ways of expressing the code. Digital
images possess a ‘spatial similarity . . . to the now antecedent practices of
photography and film’ (98); that is, digital cinema attempts to replicate
perceptual realism, but the typical emphases on the depiction of space (and
subsequent claims that digital is therefore no different from analog) is to overlook
photography’s function as a transcription of time. Where photography recorded
the duration of a physical reality, digital imagery records only a mental or
psychological reality (what we see did not happen in front of the camera, but, in
the case of special effects cinema at the very least, is based upon the imagination
of the programmer). Where before, then, photography and cinema both
confronted us with past times and places, which we knew to be irretrievable
(sending us in search of lost time; allowing us to mourn change; placing us as a
spectator of what had been a real moment, but not involving us in that moment,
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 229
divorcing us from reality, making us question our own position in that reality),
the digital, which crushes our faith in the indexicality of images, cannot inspire in
us the same ‘ontological questions about our relationship to the world and to the
past’ (124). This in turn challenges our assumptions about images, which now no
longer possess ‘oneness’ (past time and space captured on film; proof of
something real but gone), but multiplicities (infinitely reproducible, manipulable;
not certainly real, only real insomuch as present). The result is that where
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photography inspired scepticism about (our place in) reality, digital images result
in confusion.
If we bring Stewart back in here, we can see how he and Rodowick might
mutually inform each other. Stewart argues that, say, The Butterfly Effect
(Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, USA, 2004) reflects on its own status as a
digital/digitised film by having the image itself function as part of the film’s
narrative. That is, the film’s unstable narrative (college student travels back in
time to change his past, and keeps having to do so, until he becomes lost and we
cannot tell where he is) is furthered by the nature of the digital image itself, the
reality of which we similarly cannot tell:
Everyman manqué in the age of interface, the hero of The Butterfly Effect has found
a quasi-digital and subelectronic way, by the neural routes of inherited psychosis, to
make biological time autobiographical, to render duration itself user friendly if
suicidal. Narratology might locate the ‘forking paths’ structure of the alternate-
universe plot (David Bordwell’s term) as it is undercut further by a psychopoetics of
foreclosure in the death drive (Peter Brooks). Narratography, however, is always
medium specific. (156)
In this sense, Rodowick performs some narratographical analysis when he
criticises Russkiy kovcheg/Russian Ark (Aleksandr Sokurov, Russia/Germany,
2002) for not being a real-time movie, precisely because the film has had over
30,000 digital ‘events’ added to it (165). Having been heavily manipulated and
shot using a digital camera, the film does not perform quite the
Bazinian/Zavattini-esque trick of giving us the 90-minute real time and therefore
unadulterated movie that popular descriptions of the film might lead us to believe.
However, what Rodowick fails to do, and which Stewart, had he considered the
film, might have done, is to analyse how Russian Ark is perhaps not so interested
in showing us the passing of a now-lost time (even if the film’s modernist stance
does suggest nostalgia for Russia’s history), but in having its digital
(im)materiality play a part in the telling of its story. How is this so?
Rodowick naturally cites Manovich at some length in his book, but he
perhaps overlooks the latter’s notion that where analog involves a temporal
depiction of space (we see space revealed through a series of successive frames),
the digital involves a spatial depiction of time (editing, or compositing, now does
not take place between frames but within the same frame – each piece of editing
being the equivalent of one of the film’s digital ‘events’). This ‘spatialisation’ of
time naturally leads us to consider time in its virtual as well as in its actual
manifestations (that is, we see time in all of its potential manifestations, and not
 230 W. Brown
just at the moment of its becoming actual), a perspective that, if accepted, justifies
the conflation of the digital with the virtual as sometimes occurs thanks to loose
usage in the popular press. For, the digital/digitised nature of the image brings to
the fore its virtual status, virtual not in the sense of being unreal (the popular
conception), but in the sense of its being opposed to or differentiated from the
actual (what is popularly understood as ‘real’), with the virtual and the actual
(Russian Ark is digitally shot and manipulated, but flesh actors still performed in
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the film) combining to form the (truly?) real, something that Stewart, in his
psychoanalytic slant, might characterise as the Real. Digital images are not
unreal; their proliferation in the ‘real’ world is surely proof enough of this, even if
digital images do not have any material being. Digital images are an actual
manifestation of the virtual, and as such they open up our understanding of time,
such that we view images not as a barrier separating us from a lost world
(the past-actual), but as a gateway to many, possible worlds. In the realm of the
virtual, and perhaps explained by a cinematic misnomer from Steven Spielberg,
the ‘lost’ (past) world is precisely not lost, but reinvented. Readers might shudder
at the moral implications of rewriting the past in such a manner, although one
could theorise that a scholar like Manovich does not employ the latter term of the
phrase ‘spatial montage’ (or compositing) lightly, since the rearrangement of
reality has been a goal of certain filmmakers ever since montage theory came to
the fore in Soviet cinema. However, the digital-virtual unleashes into cinema not
just the hidden meanings of the actual world, but the infinity of meanings of all
possible worlds. If Rodowick senses that the digital is an impoverishment of
cinema because it unhinges our faith in the reality of what we see, then we might
also argue that the virtuality of the digital restores to us a sense precisely of how
the actual comes into being. Making a film set in a museum (a location in which
time is spatialised) and in which the ‘lead character’ (for want of a better term to
explain the role of Sergei Dreiden’s Marquis de Custine) passes back and forth
through different moments of Russia’s history (as if time were, like space,
navigable in any given direction), Sokurov deals not so much with our inability to
know the past, but with how the past in fact stays with us, whispering constantly
in our ear in much the same way that the narrator does, a narrator voiced by
Sokurov himself. In this sense, the virtuality of the digital events of Russian Ark
are not seeking to perform the same function as the cameras of a real-time film
(Rodowick compares Russian Ark to Jean Eustache’s 1973 French film, Numéro
Zéro), and our relation to time and space is also different and not necessarily
inferior.2
Ian Christie (2008) suggests that Rodowick’s ‘confessional’ style (i.e. his
nostalgia for analog) is not a weakness of The Virtual Life of Film, but it must be
recognised as only being a mode of perceiving digital images. What is perhaps
also open to question is Rodowick’s faith not only in the analog, but also in vision
itself. It is a common argument in philosophy of film that the analog is a
‘transparent’ index of reality (see McIver Lopes 2003) and in some senses this
argument is incontrovertible. However, faith in photographic images does still
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 231
require precisely a leap of faith. Rodowick disabuses Carroll in saying that an
image of a white wall is still an index of a white wall, even if we cannot recognise
or know where or which part of this wall the photograph represents (59). This is
fair enough, but let us take a close-up of a human as an example. The face was in
front of the camera at the time of the image being taken, even if some of the
details may change and influence our understanding of the picture depending on
lighting, exposure, angle, and so on. That of which we cannot be sure, however, is
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that the rest of the body was there at the time of the photograph being taken. This
no doubt seems facetious, but it is intended seriously: the chances are of course
that the rest of the person was connected to the head photographed in the close-up.
However, it does serve to highlight that our faith in photographs is based upon
probability (‘the chances are . . . ’). What is true of partial objects (we cannot
know that the rest of the object was there) is true of entire objects if we consider
that the frame must curtail the image somewhere: that looks like the Empire State
Building in that photograph, and the Empire State Building is in New York, but
that New York existed around the Empire State Building at the moment of the
photograph being taken is again a matter of faith in numbers, a matter of
probability.
If this argument of probability be allowed to question our faith in
photographs, then we must also accept that probability is at the heart of vision
itself (see Purves and Lotto 2003). What we see is reliable enough for us to be
able to navigate reality with a certain degree of authority, but we have no way of
knowing that what we see is true: no point in our evolution from unseeing
creatures to seeing creatures involved an external power providing us with wholly
accurate information from the outside world; rather, humans had heuristically to
develop a system of vision that was probabilistically accurate. The images that
we see are probabilistic (and, thank heavens, predominantly reliable)
manifestations of the raw data we receive from reality; we trust in what we see
(seeing is believing) because we have to, but we have no way of actually seeing
true reality. Following a certain logic, therefore, what we see, the ‘actual’, is a
probabilistic rendering of information, the ‘true’ nature of which is potentially
infinite (virtual). Perception may still be analog (caused by external reality), but it
involves a complex process of the virtual (all that there is) becoming actual (that
which we see). That this process is probabilistic means that we cannot be so sure
that the actual is not, in fact, virtual.
In his somewhat overlooked work, System and Structure: Essays in
Communication and Exchange (2003 [1972]), Anthony Wilden says that ‘[a]ll
natural systems of communication employ both analog and digital communi-
cation at some level in the system’ (155). The brain, for Wilden, would seem to
operate digitally since neurons either fire or they do not (binary code). However,
some aspects of the brain’s functioning, such as frequency of firing, the spatial
arrangement of neurons, and the brain’s chemical processes are analogs (158).
The one regulates the other, Wilden contends, such that ‘[d]igitization is a TOOL
employed to maintain an overall analog relation’ (160). After Wilden, we might
 232 W. Brown
understand the transcoding of raw information into a visible format (into vision)
as itself being a digitising process, an argument that, if accepted, further blurs the
distinction between analog and digital, suggesting that the analog process of
vision is always already digital. Wilden’s definition of digital perhaps differs
slightly from the one offered here (in that the computer metaphor for the human
brain need not be anything more than a metaphor; creating digital images is an
actual process), but this aside on vision as based on probability is included to
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raise questions about Rodowick’s determination to keep analog and digital, as

well as actual and virtual, at arm’s length. A further query might be raised by
crossing Rodowick’s distinctions with the understanding of virtuality put forward
by anthropologist Tom Boellstorff (2008): Boellstorff claims that there must
always be a gap between the virtual and the actual, but then admits that there is
bleed between the two, before going so far as to say that it is in being virtual that
we are human (29), since humans are always in a process of reconfiguring
selfhood and society, a process that, after Brian Massumi (2002), is precisely
virtual. This contention does not strictly negate Rodowick at all, but is again
intended as a means of raising potential issues with Rodowick’s prognosis.3 So let
us quickly recap: analog images (photographs) remain rooted in the actual (even
if caused by the virtual), and analog images freeze the time of human perception
(we see then now), making the image uncanny and causing in us scepticism about
our place in the world (how can we see then now if the past is irretrievable?).
Digital images, too, rely on a human vision based on probability, but they also
allow us not indirectly to see the virtual, but to see the virtual as if actual, to see
the virtual as actual.4 That digital technology enables cinema to do this means we
need not only write elegies for the analog, but we might also be – hommage à the
mistranslated title of Godard’s recent masterpiece – in praise of the digital.5
The willingness to work productively with the digital is certainly more
apparent in Stewart’s Framed Time, although, perversely enough, some of the
issues that Stewart relates to the digital already applied to cinema before
computer-generated images began to infiltrate it. Drawing on many of the same
influences as Rodowick (especially Deleuze and Cavell – albeit that Deleuze
only has a muted presence in The Virtual Life of Film6), Stewart situates his
narratographic analyses (how films use different imaging technologies not just to
tell their stories but also to embody their key concerns) within the framework of
the post-1995 or ‘postfilmic’ era. And yet, his work could easily be modified to
create insights into a range of (predominantly modernist) films, in which the use
of different media also serve a narratographical function: I think of the
photograph of Carol (Catherine Deneuve) at the end of Repulsion (Roman
Polanski, UK, 1965), as well as films like Blow Up (Michelangelo Antonioni,
UK, 1966) and The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1974). As such,
Framed Time should perhaps be read as a follow-up to Stewart’s Between Film
and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (1999), with the author himself
admitting in this more recent text that he wished he had come across the term
remediation before writing the earlier tome (4). Stewart makes readers aware
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 233
of the wide applicability of his ideas, since he takes us all the way back to the
work of Charles Dickens in his Appendix (249 –66), but the emphasis in Framed
Time on the contemporary might, if considered in isolation, suggest that
explorations of medium specificity and remediation are only a recent
phenomenon.
Stewart should be praised for taking on both contemporary American cinema
(characterised as the ‘ontological gothic’) and European work (a ‘fantastic of
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interpsychic trespass’) (56), not least because there are links between the two
when the deployment of the digital in both is taken into account (a main link
being what I would term a shared ‘monstrosity’, which I cannot elaborate here but
should like to discuss in further detail elsewhere). But he perhaps also runs the
risk of displeasing a certain breed of film academic that prefers to emphasise how
Europe and Hollywood differ, rather than look at what they have in common.
Furthermore, there is a risk of perceived Eurocentrism in his work, since it does
not (have time or space to) take into account, say, recent Asian cinema
(for example, Hideo Nakata’s 1998 Japanese horror film, Ringu/Ring, also
explores many of the issues at play in Framed Time). And the book might also
receive criticism for finding worth in films that most academics might simply
ignore on account of their questionable artistic merit. This last objection is
perhaps the weakest, but it gathers momentum if we approach the films in
question from a political perspective; that is, many of the films analysed here may
be stock Hollywood fare (Johnny Mnemonic, Frequency, Identity, The Butterfly
Effect, The Lake House), but their claims for apolitical and metaphysical insights
could be critiqued as post-ideological, when in fact post-ideology could be
understood as a Western privilege, a political disengagement that is very much
political/ideological. As such, perhaps a less Eurocentric (Eurocentric as in
Western, after Shohat and Stam 1994) approach might have made the book more
convincing.7
But these would-be criticisms in fact belie this reviewer’s excitement about
the potential uses that Stewart’s work might have more generally, to say nothing
of how Framed Time is an enjoyable and thought-provoking read thanks to its
ambition and wide scope. By grounding an otherwise theoretical work in genuine
(if selective) film analysis, Stewart also aims for the development of a bottom-up
theory based upon a body of films, rather than a top-down theory imposed on
films that are otherwise resistant.
In fact, where Rodowick favours pessimism concerning the future of analog,
Stewart opts for a more upbeat ending, using Deleuze to remind us we need
something to believe in, despite our scepticism. Perhaps it is that the digital
reaffirms our faith in reality, since, by making cinema abstract, it reterritorialises
us within the domain of the actual, while previously the automatic and indexical
nature of analog cinema led only to doubts. Either way, it seems paradoxical that
Stewart, in following the advice of Zavattini, whose words were used as a
frontispiece to this essay, in analysing the films of today, restores our faith in both
cinema and reality, while Rodowick, touchingly nostalgic to the last, loosens it.
 234 W. Brown
What both texts masterfully achieve, however, and in a manner far too
detailed for this essay to convey, is to use the advent of digital technology as a
means of opening up space for the re-emergence of theory within film studies.
They are not alone, but theirs are two important additions to what may be a trend
about to reach tipping point, a potential film studies event in which theory gains
back some ground from history and sees a happy coexistence between the two
come to pass.
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Notes
1. Quoted in Williams (1980, 29).
2. This reviewer would be interested to know what Rodowick makes of Bill Morrison’s
films Decasia (USA, 2002) and Light is Calling (USA, 2004), found footage films that
feature film stock ravaged by decay over time. Not only are the films imbued with
nostalgia for these lost films, but they also turn the intervention of nature (the films
have decayed) into a productive and ‘abstractive’ quality. To this reviewer, these
beautiful films also recall the interventions made by digital programmers on ‘live
action’ film stock, something that could be characterised as the coexistence of the
actual and the virtual, the virtual revealed within the actual.
3. After Manuel DeLanda (2002), we might posit that raising problems is the beneficial
work that the virtual can do, while solving problems (actualising the solution) is to
constrict us in a world governed by timeless laws. Massumi (2002) would seem to
suggest that creating debate is an altruistic academic practice (even though admitting
uncertainty is not the standard academic posture), something that might also liberate
Stewart from the criticism that he plays fast and loose with Deleuze’s concept of
virtual time (see Vaughan 2008).
4. I suspect that readers will still feel antipathy towards this idea that the digital is also
virtual, not least because this seems a conflation of the popular meaning of virtual and the
Bergson-inspired philosophical definition given by Deleuze (1996). Even though
Massumi (2002) suggests that the digital is not virtual, he also says that: ‘Digital
technologies have a connection to the potential and the virtual only through the analog . . .
the digital always circuits into the analog. The digital, a form of inactuality, must be
actualised. That is its quotient of openness’ (138). In other words, in cinema, pure digital
animations (such as John Lasseter’s 1995 film Toy Story) aside, the digital now interacts
with the analog, and the virtual interacts with the actual, in such a way that we see an open-
endedness and a potential for novelty (anything can happen now – and look as if it were
real) that does indeed suggest a connection between the digital and the virtual. Triggering
change and inducing the new are, for Massumi, key components of virtuality (43).
5. Besides, digital need not replace the analog, which will exist for as long as is possible
in museums and the like. But if the analog, as cinematic meme, is a (kung fu?) panda
bear incapable of reproducing and sustaining itself, then perhaps analog film’s
survival will (sadly, of course) have to be the work of dedicated conservationists. This
does not mean that its digital offspring is inferior; in fact, its digital offspring is deeply
respectful to its analog progenitor, hence the persistence of classical style narratives
and photorealism/the simulation of perceptual realism in digital films.
6. Deleuze was, of course, the subject of Rodowick’s Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine
(1997).
7. Rodowick’s own Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (2001)
could also be enlisted here to critique Stewart: Rodowick sees the digital as a regime
of control, the underlying motivational force of which is capitalism.
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 235
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