The Film Experience in Digital Cinema

Preface

This section presents my doctoral research, which investigates the fundamental shift in the cinematic medium as it transitions from analog photochemical procedures to an algorithmic logic. Drawing on semio-pragmatic and cognitive frameworks, this work explores how digital cinema functions as a distinct expressive apparatus that no longer relies on a clear referent in reality. Using female gender presentations as a primary case study, the research tracks the transformation of the action heroine from a “referentially realistic” representation to a hybrid construction that reflects the spatiotemporal and biological fluidity of the cyber-age.

Introduction

The assimilation of digital technologies into the filmmaking process and their steady replacement of analogical and photochemical procedures have afforded digital filmmakers a series of liberties, manifested in the far-reaching potential of digital image-creation and display. A broad look at the evolution of cinematic manifestations since the advent of the seventh art suggests that digital techniques inspire an innovative display of cinematic presentations that differentiate digital cinema as a distinct expressive apparatus—a mechanism of representation and channel of communication rather than a mere technical tool—which is gradually discovering its own language.

The practical and creative latitude afforded by the digital medium undermines earlier assumptions regarding cinematic presentation. Traditionally, the analogical nature of photographic and cinematographic images led to their comprehension as true indices of a pre-photographed reality. The digital image, on the other hand, as a visual representation of a binary code that can be created and manipulated by an algorithmic formula, needs no clear source or even referent in reality, and is detached from what we may term ‘material existence.’

In light of the multiple and diverse sources that come together to create the digital cinematic image, the unique artistic status traditionally attributed to cinema as a medium unrivaled in its capacity to show us “real life in a real environment” begs re-conceptualization. Appreciation of the particular status of digital cinema in the social, physical, and psychological contexts of the cyber-age generates a new understanding of the dynamic interrelation between cinema and reality. By applying ideas and concepts from digital culture’s discursive practice, or ‘cyber discourse,’ I suggest that digital cinema is shaped by a different kind of affinity between cinema and its environmental context.

The main feature of digital culture has been identified as ‘hybridity,’ a term originating in biology which characterizes any “recognizable entity that is made up of elements drawn from multiple sources [...] in such a manner as to create significant new potentials.” Hybridity will be employed here to characterize the digital film through certain aesthetic and thematic features: (1) the blurring of biological boundaries; (2) the transgression of cultural restrictions; and (3) the multiple self-identities of the human subject. Hybridization is determined as the key to understanding how digital films are in fact a faithful expression of the world we believe ourselves to inhabit.

As a convincing Gestalt based on incoherent and apparently contradictory foundations, the digital film synthesizes elements of diverse origin and media into a collage of spatial organization that produces coherent rather than dialectical expressions. By shifting from linear organization, hierarchical order, and temporal relationships to new types of organizations manifested by spatiotemporal storytelling, split-screen presentation, database narrative, and genre conflation, digital films undermine established spatiotemporal and generic conceptions in traditional cinema, and articulate hybridity as an essential attribute of new media expressions.

A central hypothesis is that the shift in narrative and aesthetic expressions in digital cinema is accompanied by a parallel shift in the reception and reconstruction of the digital film in the spectator’s mind. Relying on the semio-pragmatic approach developed by Roger Odin, this study adopts a cognitive approach in order to reevaluate the digital film experience, in particular as it pertains to the way in which the individual spectator perceives and responds to events on screen. I suggest that the changes that have occurred in the perception and thinking patterns of the spectator as a subject of digital culture have made him the most suitable spectator of the digital film.

The hypothesis proposed is that the digital film’s adequate spectator processes the digital film in accordance with its hybrid qualities and not through a process of referential denotation to actual sources in real life. As a test case for this hypothesis, the study investigates presentations of women in cinema and their transformation from ‘referentially realistic’ representations in traditional cinema to hybrid constructions in digital cinema. The research elaborates upon a new image of femininity at the turn of the millennium, one that did not exist in traditional cinema and that is presented and indeed enabled by digital cinema. Specifically, the research suggests a profile of the gender characteristics of the ‘digital woman,’ as it is manifested in digital cinema and in video-games.

Chapter 1: The Digital Film: Spatial Extension and Temporal Duration

The compound structure of the digital film, which integrates various manufacturing processes, dissimilar motion states, diverse material indications, and varying references to the actual world, incorporates “the virtual within the actual” without leaving any visible trace of the contradictory foundations of the distinct elements. According to Manovich, the outcome may be defined as: “digital film = live-action materials + paintings + image processing + compositing + 2D computer animation + 3D computer animation.” This equation reflects a process by which ‘raw materials’ based on ostensibly incoherent foundations are modified to create a convincing Gestalt that enhances plausibility as it is being formed “into what appears to be a single, continuous, coherent space.”

For example, in Titanic (James Cameron 1997), an enormous model of the ship was placed in a digital ocean setting populated by computer-generated drowning people; the final image of the sinking ship was constructed by blurring the lines between elements such as live shooting, still photography, miniature models, and computer manipulation. In Transformers (Michael Bay 2007), a lower part of a model of Megatron’s body was visually merged with CG elements of the robot’s upper body, while real-world physics such as weight and speed, flares and shadows, and layers of dust, debris, fire, and smoke were integrated to create believable physicality. In Jurassic Park III (Joe Johnston 2001), we cannot always determine whether a given element is a reality-based or computer-simulated image.

According to Spielmann, as digital techniques transform “an image of intervals” into a “collage” of spatial organization, we are unable to identify its fragments as distinct and identifiable parts in order to create the contradiction necessary for a dialectical synthesis.¹ While structures such as classical filmic montage invite a dialectical reading by offering linearly ordered oppositions, the spatially ordered digital collage, which aims to camouflage its substructure, does not invite the same dialectical reading. Spielmann suggests that the potentialities of the shift from linearity, hierarchical order, and temporal relationships to spatiality are embodied by the digital morph-type of organization, which is simultaneously a spatially ordered collage and linearly ordered montage.

According to Sobchack, while ‘cuts’ and ‘long shots’ represent a linear and hierarchical approach toward temporality and spatiality, the morph’s eternal reversibility and enduring changeability introduce the reversion and merging of time and space. In Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron 1991), there is no hierarchy between the various objects that compose the T-1000 character; its immortality is manifested by its return to an “amorphous soup of shifting matter.” Michael Jackson’s music video Black and White (1991), in which human characters of differing age, sex, and color morph into one another, expresses the same rift from a mechanical, serial, hierarchical, and linearly ordered presentation to “the temporal reversibility and palindromic quality of the morph.”

By editing strategy, interplays between linear and nonlinear space and time may exhibit new possibilities for expressive manifestations. Barker demonstrates how the ‘cosmic zoom’ practice, which simulates a free flow of a virtual camera in a cinematic space, serves expressive strategies in Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann 2001), Sweeney Todd (Tim Burton 2007), and Perfume (Tom Tykwer 2007), creating a seamless combination of optical velocity and physical kinetic movement that produces a sensation unattainable by the conventional zoom. By line of storytelling, split-screen presentation illustrates the subversion of traditional dichotomies of time and space, as in Time Code (Mike Figgis 2000).

Minority Report (Steven Spielberg 2002) illustrates a ‘video-games mode of narration’ that reveals “the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories.” This “new type of cinema,” with its “unfamiliar forms of narration and narrative,” expresses “new media structures (such as databases and ‘navigable spaces’), virtual realities (including phenomena such as parallel worlds, forking paths, and imagined ‘others’), and nonlinear temporality.” The shift from the traditional hierarchical organization is also found in digital film’s production procedures, as the importance and duration of the post-production phase has increased and the director comes to rely greatly upon effect designers and technicians who often influence the film’s aesthetics.

Chapter 2: Digital Manifestations: Expressive Potentials

The expressive potentials embodied by digital films articulate digital cinema’s fundamental attributes: the loss of natural boundaries, the blurring of traditional dichotomies, and the spatiotemporal coexistence of the ‘real’ and ‘virtual.’ The film Catwoman (Jean-Christophe Comar 2004) exhibits those attributes in terms of technical practices, narrative, visual aesthetics, and genre conventions while creating significant new potentials by obscuring conventional dichotomies such as human/animal, natural/artificial, body/machine, and male/female.²

Technically, the expanded ability to manipulate Catwoman’s malleable visual image was a product of the interfusion of over 800 visual-effect shots, produced by nine distinguished visual-effects studios. To create the synthetic versions of Halle Berry as Catwoman, Berry’s choreographed movements were interspersed with cat-like CG movements, simulated according to the real cat’s movements and integrated with models of fighters. The goal was to blend the digital characters with the real performers to create seamless, realistic, and believable action.³ On the narrative level, upon her transformation into a combination of human, machine, and animal, Patience’s personal characteristics are altered: an initially unkempt and insecure girl turns into an assertive, decisive, and daring woman.

S1mOne (Andrew Niccol 2002) presents analogous expressions of the loss of traditional boundaries between the virtual and the real, the natural and the artificial, the mechanical and the human. Simone is a desirable woman and admired film star whose fans do not know that their dream woman is actually a virtual entity, a figment of computer genius realized by a computer application. “The flesh is weak,” says the programmer, “With my new computer code it can be done.” Simone is the extension of Taransky’s identity and self-determination on the computer screen: “I am the death of real” and “I was nothing without you. I was computer code. I was ones and zeros.”

The Matrix film series (1999; 2003; 2003) addresses the collapse of boundaries between virtual and real by portraying a human identity that exists simultaneously in both tangible and virtual worlds. Instead of the totality of traditional, definite, modern reality, The Matrix trilogy shows a hyper-linked and multi-connected reality, introducing us to human existence through a cyber-link between the physical body and computer hardware. Technically, many shooting factors were done via green-screen techniques and motion-control systems, synchronized onto a digital frame with other images to compose a malleable digital environment. The complexity of visual-effects creates a feeling of disorientation that derives from the uncertainty regarding the layers of reality materializing on the screen.

Inception (Christopher Nolan 2010) represents a world in which technology enables its characters to enter the human mind through dream-invasion. On the narrative level, the film undermines the traditional hierarchy of material world, dream imitations, and the dream-state itself. Instead, the film interweaves layers of perceptions that produce the simultaneous existence in both the virtual (dream) and actual (physical) worlds. Director Nolan states that his aesthetic aspiration was to gain photographic realism, so that just as the characters do not know whether what they see is a dream, the spectators might not know the difference either.

Chapter 3: Hybridity as a Fundamental Attribute of Digital Film

The analysis of digital filmmaking methods, aesthetics, and expressive strategies reveals a fundamental characteristic of cinematic presentation that does not correspond with traditional linear and dichotomous perceptions. This characteristic may be defined as ‘hybridity,’ a term that expresses a distancing from linearity in favor of simultaneous subsistence. According to Clarke, a hybrid is “any recognizable entity that is made up of elements drawn from multiple sources [...] in such a manner as to create significant new potentials.” A hybrid entity must be acknowledged as a new instance, distinct from its progenitors, and exhibiting elements from dual or multiple inheritance that have no necessary hierarchical relationship between them.

Steffen Hantke analyzes the directorial signature of David Cronenberg, whose deployment of special effects often manifests hybrid images that “revolve around spectacularly altered bodies or bodies in the process of transformation.” Cronenberg consciously opts for “rougher, clunkier, and less versatile prosthetics effects” over digital visual-effects. His use of customary body prosthetics and make-up in eXistenZ (1999) and Spider (2002) places a tangible object in front of the camera and enables a visual discovery of its configurations, in order to expose the limits, lack, or loss of control over the body. For example, in The Fly (David Cronenberg 1986), we witness the degeneration of Seth Brundle’s body into Brundlefly—a man-insect-machine hybrid creature.⁴

However, in the digitally enhanced film A History of Violence (David Cronenberg 2005), the director took a different approach, choosing to employ digital visual-effects for the violent sequences, explaining that “you are gaining a little bit of control over them by creating them yourself.” The film’s genre-mixing is an illustration of ‘hybrid cinema’ as the radical intersection of diverse stylistic and generic currents, visually and thematically fusing elements from road films, film-noir, Westerns, and gangster films with the hyper-stylized violence of horror films. Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is simultaneously a humble diner proprietor, an amoral criminal, an agile action-hero, an existential noir character, and a Western vigilante: “Are you, like, some multiple-personality schizoid?” his wife Edie asks.

Manovich regards digital aesthetic novelty as the expression of a new metalanguage of hybrid aesthetics. The fusion of different media—the previously distinct visual languages of design, typography, cell animation, 3D computer animation, painting, and cinematography within a single computing environment—establishes a hybrid meta-language with a vast potential to articulate innovative cinematic expressions.⁵ Telotte stresses that digital film features the hybrid form not only by its technical aspect deriving from procedural practices, but also by stylistic decision: by combining images from different contexts in the history of cinema, both the content and design of the digital film entail hybridization.

Films from different genres may embody hybrid characteristics on both the narrative and aesthetic level. In The Lake House (Alejandro Agresti 2006), split identities and multiple existences in time and space are represented via the narrative, as two characters communicate from different times. In Click (Frank Coraci 2006), split identities are represented in both narrative and editing techniques as an architect manipulates his life using a digital remote-control. In The Rules of Attraction (Roger Avary 2002), a combination of rapid-fire editing, split-screen, and unique point-of-view shots fuses diverse digital-editing strategies to produce a compound spectatorship experience. These films challenge Bordwell’s fundamental insights regarding linearity by suggesting that simultaneity is the fundamental characteristic conditioning spectator comprehension in the cultural context of the cyber age.

Chapter 4: The Digital Experience: The Cultural Context

Digital cinema’s fundamental attribute is that of “hybridity,” a term that expresses an estrangement from the linear and the physical toward the simultaneous and the virtual. Just as the hybrid characteristic governs digital films’ manifestations, it also determines the digital film experience. The notion of film experience has in mind an active spectator, a “social subject” who consciously absorbs the film. Film experience is approached as the outcome of a “process of exchange” between spatial and temporal film data and spectator perception.

In digital culture, the way in which we communicate and experience the world is shaped by our sensory and psychological interactions with digital environments. Cyberspace, increasingly embedded in society as “a standard feature of everyday life,” has a major role and profound impact on the routine patterns of actions and interactions by which people coordinate their activities in both virtual and real situations. Grounded in a philosophy of sharing, openness, and decentralization, the diffused interfaces of cyberspace promote an ideology of freedom and “an effort to break down modes of exclusion.”

According to Hayles, in digital culture, in which “every day we participate in systems whose total cognitive capacity exceeds our individual knowledge,” virtuality is a measure by which to expand human functionality and embodied awareness. Through the connection with the virtual environment, the human mind is restructured, manipulated, and broadened beyond the physical body by coordinating a flexible and adaptive “distributed cognition” via a complex interplay with the virtual. According to Biocca, as “the body is becoming present in both physical space and cyberspace, the interface is adapting to the body; the body is adapting to the interface.”⁶

Clarke illustrates how the hybrid presentations of the human subject in digital environments expand human possibilities for experiencing the world. The ‘avatar’ is a visual or textual embodiment of a user-role in a shared virtual reality; the ‘digital persona’ is a “model of an identity, which is established through the collection, storage and analysis of data about that identity.” Both the avatar and the digital persona represent elements taken from two distinct origins, natural and artificial, and meet the key defining criteria of the hybrid entity. They illustrate the decline of physicality as an indication of presence and its limitations, and the widening of personal and social potential.

According to Dyens, a new model of the human self emerges from the fusion of the physical body with digital media and technology: the “post-biological” model. While human identity was traditionally defined through its biology, the post-biological model abandons the objectivity of the body and fuses virtual, cyborganic, mechanic, informational, biological, and other possible presentations to become a cultural construct that exists socially rather than physically. Thus, just as the human subject in the cyber age is defined as a cultural construct, we may also consider the spectator and the digital film experience to be expressions of digital culture’s hybridity—characterized by the blurring of biological and cultural boundaries, the existence of multiple self-identities, and simultaneous existence in both tangible and virtual worlds.

Chapter 5: Semio-pragmatism: An Accessible Explanation of Digital Spectatorship

The question of the spectator’s involvement with the digital film may be approached from different perspectives. The semio-pragmatics of Odin offers a different approach, shifting the focus from film as a textual system to the role of the spectator. The semio-pragmatic approach assumes that a film text is only meaningful in the context of external rules and conventions that the spectators themselves bring to support the films they are watching. A film image has no immanent instructions that indicate the procedures to be followed in its reading: “Any reading of an image consists of ‘applying’ to it processes that are essentially external to it.”

According to Odin, the external cultural context is a guideline for understanding the film experience. Since both spectator and filmmaker are psychologically constructed entities that “can only express themselves by obeying the constraints of the ‘discursive practice’ characterizing their time and background,” the nature of an image is a result of extrinsic ‘cultural constraints.’ The successful transmission of messages from the filmmaker to the spectator is a product of the linkage between their roles, which originates from their common social space that “constitutes the actants as ‘social subjects,’ functioning like instructions to produce meaning and affects.”

The mechanism involved in this process is built upon the necessity of ‘compatibility’—the ability of filmmaker and spectator’s mental processes to function in the same way in order to produce an accepted meaning, and the compatibility of those meaning-producing cognitive procedures with the film’s internal constraints. The compatibility assures comprehension-construction through the elementary ‘mechanism of meaning production’: (a) the spectator proposes a meaning and tries it out in the structure of the image; (b) if the proposition seems compatible with the structure of the image, meaning is produced. Hence, a film does not produce meaning on its own, but works by process of elimination, ruling out possible meanings that do not accord with the common structure of the spectator’s psychological positioning and the film’s structure.

A film’s internal constraints are the product of its designated “institution” (genre), reproduced by the permanent marks imprinted in the film every time it is projected. Fiction film, documentary film, pedagogic film, home films, industrial film, and experimental film all belong to different institutions and thus require different modes of compatibility between spectator, filmmaker, and film. The institution determines the spectator’s affective positioning, the rules of narrative coding, and the image of the director. According to the ‘mise en phase’ principle, “at every major stage in the story being told, the film produces a relationship between itself and the spectator (an affective positioning of the latter) which is homologous with the relationships occurring in the diegesis.”

Odin’s semio-pragmatic approach enables a different understanding of the relations between humans and digital films that considers hybridity to be the key for a successful film experience in the digital culture context. The hybrid affinity between the human mind and the digital film shapes the rational and emotional formation of the film experience in digital culture, while hybrid compatibility, as a necessary condition for the process of reception, interpretation, and signification, assures comprehension-construction through a certain ‘mechanism of meaning production.’ This accessible explanation offers a better answer to the question of the particular status of the digital film as an expression of its time.

Chapter 6: The Spectatorship Mechanism of the Digital Film

The “filmic codes and material of expression” that condition the process of meaning-production in traditional film representations are characterized by the mechanical duplication of reality. Reality as a coherent origin and an indicator for the physical world plays a significant role in determining spectator comprehension: (1) the spectator proposes an indexical meaning which reflects a certain state of affairs in reality, and puts it to the test in the figurative structure of an indexical image; (2) if the proposition seems compatible with the structure of the image as a mechanical duplication of reality and reproduction of motion, meaning is produced. This illustration is compatible with Torben Grodal’s PECMA (Perception, Emotion, Cognition, Motor, Action) model, which describes the successful film experience as a continuous flow of perceptions and associations that constructs and activates the appropriate sensations.

In digital culture, on the other hand, the mechanism of digital film spectatorship is based on a different relationship between film, reality, and spectator. As digital expressions are not bound to the presence or absence of a tangible source with stable logical coherence in reality, Grodal’s PECMA model needs modification. The mental signification of the digital image is enabled by the hybrid nature of both image and spectator cognition: when an object or event appearing on screen is successfully matched to the conceptual pattern of the hybrid spectator’s mind, in a way that faithfully corresponds to Odin’s ideas of compatibility between film and mind, the film experience is established as a successful mental process that activates the “appropriate” emotional responses.

The production of the film world in the spectator’s ‘distributed subjectivity’ is a cultural construct, resulting from the “dynamic partnership between humans and intelligent machines” that exists in digital culture. Since human subjectivity is a product of its “dynamical interfaces with computers,” film spectatorship may be included among the “complex intermediating dynamics” that “spark insights in the humans who use them.” As “the relationship of a human to an interface can be one of a body to an environment, or of one brain to another through a kind of conversation,” the boundaries between the spectator’s subjectivity and the film collapse, and the spectator’s cognitive system is expanded by the cinematic screen as an ‘electronic prosthesis.’

This idea is illustrated in Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow 1995), which ascribes the success of the film experience to the expansion and emergence of the spectator’s subjectivity through the virtual connection into the virtual world of the film.⁷ The film presents an underground video market of ‘real-life’ simulations where the ‘wired’ spectator undergoes recorded experiences, reliving them as if they were his own subjective experiences. Through a constant and circular interplay between the spectator’s mental images and the digital world of imagery, the spectator generates “relations with the representations” which he “can then interact and repeat this process recursively.”

The feedback loop mechanism is a key function, described by Norbert Wiener as ‘cybernetics,’ referring to natural, mechanical, and electrical systems’ control mechanisms operated through feedback and response processes. As the spectator’s consciousness is fused with the digital film and absorbed into the feedback loop mechanism of perception-formation, the spectator may be considered to be a participant in a cybernetic mechanism with a highly complex level of interaction between film and mind. Following Marks’ “enfolding-unfolding” process of perception formation, this “force of evolution” dictates the perceptional and emotional flow of the digital film experience as the spectator’s mind draws enfolded images from the “universe of images” incorporated in the film imagery—the vast platform of all possible inputs.

In digital film spectatorship, a cause may tag the enfolded image drawn from the film world; an arousal may result from the significant information selected; cognitive appreciation may result from unfolding images following their hybrid pattern; a sensation of delight may label this configuration; and action may be taken by putting it to a test in the structure of the film. For example, in the interrogation sequence from The Matrix (1999), the spectator’s comprehension and emotional reactions cannot rely upon reality as a source of reference for deciphering the film images. Rather, it is the spectator’s hybrid compatibility with the film and the feedback-loop mechanism that determine the way in which the spectator mentally and emotionally experiences the scene.

Chapter 7: An Explicatory Thesis for Digital-Women Gender Performances

As an amalgamation of elements from different sources and their assimilation into a continuous and coherent image, the digital woman embodies the new meta-language of hybrid aesthetics. Hybridity is manifested in the digital woman’s image not only through the technical synthesis of live action with computer-generated images and the aesthetic and narrative fusion of diverse stylistic and generic elements, but also through the blurring of boundaries between traditional and innovative conceptions of gender performance in films. This hybrid nature constitutes the novelty of the digital woman vis-à-vis previous depictions of female protagonists.

Traditionally, popular Hollywood films were considered to be manifestations of established perceptions of gender relations in western culture, which consider males as dominant and females as subordinate. Popular films’ presentations of gender relationships portrayed binary stereotypes: a protective, domineering, or oppressive male protagonist against a submissive, deprived, or subjugated female protagonist. Often, her salvation would arrive through marriage. The action-adventure genre, which requires presentations of body-images of action and strength, agency and aggression, power and physical achievements, traditionally emphasized masculine heroism while women played mainly supporting roles.

From the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, action heroines such as Ellen Ripley in Aliens (James Cameron 1986), Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron 1991), and Jordan O’Neill in G.I. Jane (Ridley Scott 1997) displayed new visual presentations of female protagonists—sexy and tough action women, proficient with weaponry and martial arts, who challenged male opponents. However, investigations indicate that they tend to personify male heroic qualities. According to Brown, by following “hard body” action heroes, these heroic female protagonists adopted traditional gendered characteristics that present female heroism as a function and privilege of white male power.

By the end of the 1990s, the action female adopted an excessive and overstated sexuality manifested by faultless and ideal body fragments, while physically forceful heroines were introduced who lead the action through spectacles of strength and agility traditionally ascribed to the male hero. The ‘Trinity Warrior’ template, inspired by the performance of Carrie Ann Moss as Trinity in The Matrix trilogy, combines influences from Hong Kong action films, the Hollywoodian ‘girls with guns,’ and video-game depictions of heroines. Trinity destabilizes conceptual gender binaries far more than previous incarnations of the action female by focusing on a controlled execution of the video-game/avatar-inspired heroic performance of the digitally enhanced action female.

The lead character of Lara Croft in the video-game series Tomb Raider (1996–2011) is a British archaeologist-explorer whose visual appearance is exhibited as a spectacle of the fantasy female figure. However, her demonstrations of sexual interest and emotional sensitivity, her physical engagement in action scenes, and her relative position in the narrative portray a reversed depiction of the traditional characterization of the female character. Her forceful and potent action body exhibits militancy and assertion that provide her with control over her own destiny as well as over the life of the male counterparts.⁸ Her adaptation to the cinema by Angelina Jolie in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (Simon West 2001) and Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (Jan de Bont 2003) was faithful to the performance attributes of the game character.

The dualistic manifestation of the digitally enhanced action female in both films and video-games—as seen also in Resident Evil (Paul W.S. Anderson 2002), Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Jonathan Mostow 2003), and Æon Flux (Karyn Kusama 2005)—profiles the ‘digital woman’ as a gender class of her own. The ‘digital woman’ presents a fully ‘reversed depiction’ in relation to the traditional depiction of the female protagonist by occupying the traditional masculine role, typified as dominant, active, strong, tough, independent, aggressive, authoritative, and forceful, exhibiting control and assertion by physical and mental supremacy, while abandoning the traditionally objectified and disadvantaged femininity as a crucial narrative instrument of stereotypical gender relations in culture.

The hybrid paradigm is the driving force behind the construction of the digital woman image; it magnifies her action-body impact as a site of spectacle in ways that most effectively arouse the spectator’s emotions. Rather than performing a process of referential denotation that makes a general statement about contemporary gender relations in culture, digital filmmakers chose to implement certain gender attributes as a conceivable application of the heroic body. Known according to Deleuze as the filmmaker’s “will to art,” this phenomenon exemplifies how, in digital filmmaking, “there is no longer any linkage of the real with the imaginary,” and in this way, the digital woman’s image articulates the freedom from material and analog restrictions.

Chapter 8: The Proposed Thesis in the Light of Other Theories of Gender Images

Sociological role-focused approaches and psychoanalytical approaches to gender representations have searched for the root cause of women’s secondary status in Hollywood cinema in contemporary gendered social organization; binary oppositions of gender are coded in cultural discourse, and cinema merely reflects those oppositions by presentations that ultimately reinforce them. According to Butler’s theory of gender performativity, gender identity is not a fact or an essence, but rather a performative accomplishment of a set of acts and behaviors that produce the effect or appearance of a coherent entity that people mistakenly believe to be mandatory. By imitating morphologies of masculine and feminine corporeal anatomical styles as ideal constructions of the culturally mandated practices of everyday life, gender performativity materializes and naturalizes gender identity.

According to De Lauretis, since gender representations in films are “accepted and absorbed by an individual as her (or his) own representation, and so becomes, for that individual, real,” films position the spectator in a specific relation of meaning to gender by setting expectations and identification with images that project “certain effects of meaning which are central to the construction of gender and subjectivity” in reality. Seemingly ambiguous gender representations that deviate from the expectations of the phallocentric system represent an affront to the dominant ideology. Queer theories suggest that as gendered body-construction is assigned within the binary system of western culture, its ambiguity and multiplicity may indicate abjection and resistance to the discursive practice of binary oppositions.

For example, the films of Pedro Almodóvar are seen as undermining predeterminations of the normative gender system through both narrative and aesthetical means. The focus on characters’ ambiguous genders and identities by narrative progression, the destabilization of genre conventions by parodic and ironic implementations, and the disruption of traditional linear storytelling conventions operate to subvert the legitimacy and stability of the patriarchal gender system. In Talk to Her (Pedro Almodóvar 2002), Benigno Martín’s sexual ambiguity and Alicia’s coma, which metaphorically excludes her subjectivity by reducing her to normative passive femininity, are illustrated by a “jig-sawed use of the flashback technique.”

However, the digital film spectatorship mechanism suggests a different framework for interpreting gender images, since its appreciation is not located in relation to coded acts and behaviors as ideal constructions of the culturally mandated practices of everyday life, but in the realm of the virtual world, wherein gendered bodies are subject to a different social and ideological coding. Based on a virtual fusion with the digital film world, the digital woman image embodies a gender category that exists only in virtual and imaginary worlds and not by a process of referential denotation to the real.

Alternatively, we may argue that digital woman representations do in fact embody something potentially transgressive. By transforming the material, physical, and corporeal body of the female image to a digital one and disconnecting it from traditional perceptions of femininity rooted in the existing discursive system, digital cinema contains the significant potential to construct empowered gender categories. Cyberfeminism, with its interest in the innovative ways in which cyberspace re-engineers gender relations toward gender equality, explores new cultures of communicative social spaces, suggesting that cyberspace embodies the potential to transform gender oppression in formal political institutions to a safe space for resisting traditionally imposed subordinate identities.⁹

By the same measure, digital woman presentations are “uploaded” through digital enhancements to the digital screen by visual depictions that materialize the image’s “embodied self,” detached from an actual body, disconnecting it from the patriarchal discourse that constructs gender identities in actuality. The digital woman embodies a subversive quality by signifying the potential to form identities in the virtual world, which might eventually influence spectators’ real lives and bodies by creating different meanings and interpretations of the traditional binaries of sexual attributes and gender ascriptions, and thus change established gender self-perceptions and power relations.

The present investigation suggests that, rather than offering a model of social relations as an ideal state of affairs that should be imitated in the real world, the digital film offers a virtual world to be immersed in by the adequate spectator. The process of digital film spectatorship is embedded in cyberspace and thus spectators go through an empowering experience as their consciousness floats to the virtual digital film world, which spectators live through their hybrid connection with it.

Conclusion

The preceding exploration of the phenomenon of digital cinema reveals essential characteristics at the core of digital culture. Through its unique aesthetics and content, the digital film is distinguished as an artistic expression of its time, which facilitates a novel perspective of the interpretative mechanism of spectatorship—from film as a representational mechanism to film as an expression of the cultural patterns that organize spectatorship as a meaningful experience.

By synthesizing new-media studies, digital-culture studies, cognitive theories of film spectatorship, and case studies of digital film presentations, this work proposes a fresh view of digital film spectatorship from a semio-pragmatic standpoint. As a theoretical instrument that broadens the ways of approaching the film experience, the strength of this theory lies in its appreciation of the cultural constraints that mediate between spectators and cinematic presentations, while providing a conceivable answer to the question: how do spectators make sense of digital films?

The ensuing model of the digital film spectatorship mechanism fits broadly within the ‘cognitivist’ paradigm that considers film spectatorship to be a conscious activity based on perceptual and conceptual systems. However, it represents a new approach for this activity in that, rather than presupposing the spectator’s use of prior knowledge of the real world to construct meaning and understanding, it assumes that the comprehension of the essential nature of the digital image shifts from its realistic context to the psychological positioning of the spectator in real and virtual life. Therefore, the digital film is investigated by its relation to its spectators and interpreters, rather than by its connection to actual objects in the real world.

The term ‘hybridity,’ as a concept that expresses a cultural departure from a customary linear and dichotomous perspective towards a simultaneous and non-hierarchical outlook, has been deduced by scholars to be the cultural and mental expression of human existence in the cyber age. In line with digital culture’s fundamental characteristics, the digital film’s hybrid nature is illustrated by cinematic means of expression that articulate the loss of natural boundaries, the blurring of cultural restrictions, multiple self-identities, and a simultaneous existence in both ‘real’ and virtual time and space. With hybridity as the common attribute of the digital film and of human existence as a subject of digital culture, hybrid compatibility is confirmed as a necessary condition for the process of reception, interpretation, and signification of the digital film.

The idea of the ‘feedback loop’ mechanism is discussed here as the most appropriate description of the spectator’s mental disposition toward the digital film. Spectatorship is an outcome of an autopoietic process of perception-formation, which is activated through a circular cognitive interplay between our constant interactions with the film. Throughout the feedback-loop mechanism, the spectator’s mind constantly forms perceptions of film images through reciprocal relations, determined by its hybrid compatibility with the images on screen. Detached from the real and attached to the human’s cognitive pattern, the digital experience is produced through an immersive rather than a reflective connection to virtual worlds that are constantly formed in the human mind through their hybrid fusion with digital screens.

The shifts in female presentations in digital films expose the masquerade embodied by cinematic images as authentic expressions or reflections of reality, revealing them as constructions of the ruling hegemony that enforces its fundamental ideas by an adjusted mechanism of film experience. The spectator becomes a ‘Cineborg’—a cinematic cyborg—an embodiment of the virtual worlds of the cinematic spaces through a feedback-loop mechanism that affects perceptions and alters social roles and identity. This is a realization of Barbara Creed’s vision: “celluloid cinema dramatically altered the relationship of the individual to reality. The computer-generated image is about to change that relationship once again and in equally profound ways.”