Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 8 No. 19, June 2004
Eddie Duggan
Mucking Out Augean Stables with Systematic Rigour:
Manovich's _The Language of New Media_
Lev Manovich _The Language of New
Media_ Cambridge, MA, and London:
MIT Press, 2001 ISBN:
0-262-63255-1 354 pp Lev Manovich's _The
Language of New Media_ has been well received, and hailed by
reviewers as, for example, 'the most rigorous definition to
date of new media', and 'the first rigorous and far-reaching
theorization of the subject'. [1] It is an ambitious
project, (necessarily) broad in scope, as it attempts to
provide, as the back cover tells us, 'a systematic and
rigorous theory of new media'. Rather than retread ground
and re-hail the rigour that has already been covered and
hailed by others, I will identify here some of the aspects
of Manovich's work that I feel don't quite work (whether
that is due to my own subjective, stylistic preferences or
prejudices, or due to what I consider to be omissions or
oversights), as well as the parts which seem to make
assumptions or which gloss over issues which might be
explored in more detail than they are currently. This is not
to say this will be a negative review -- far from it --
Manovich's book is interesting, useful, and, while it is
already three years old, still timely. Almost undoubtedly it
will be revised for a second edition (updates of Chapter 3
and Chapter 6 have recently appeared on Manovich's website).
Hopefully, some of the points identified here will be
addressed in a future revision. The book is organised in
six chapters, which follow the Introduction: 'What is New
Media?', 'The Interface', 'The Operations', 'The Illusions',
'The Forms', and 'What is Cinema?'. At the very beginning of
the book, before the Introduction, we find a Prologue:
'Vertov's Dataset'. Over the course of twenty-three pages
Manovich reproduces fifty-four stills from Dziga Vertov's
1929 film, _Man With A Movie Camera_, together with passages
-- sometimes just a sentence, sometimes a lengthy paragraph
-- from later parts of the book. The idea is that the
Prologue 'thus acts as a visual index to some of the book's
major ideas' (xiv). While this might have seemed a good idea
at the draft stage, it only serves to point up the
difference between old, linear, analogue media (such as
books), and new, interactive, digital media (such as CD-ROMs
and hypertext). A 'visual index' such as this would work
better online than as the book's opening gambit.
[2] Manovich next provides us
with 'a personal chronology' at the beginning of the
Introduction, before reaching what might be called the
introduction proper on page 6 (the reader has already turned
some thirty-odd pages and feels that the book has still yet
to begin). The overall effect of these irruptions is to slow
down the pace of the book, to defer the beginning, and
generally make the reader feel the very text itself is an
impediment to progress. The book seems quite repetitive,
due, I think, to the Prologue, the slow Introduction, and
subsequent reiteration of ideas in the Introduction to each
chapter. To borrow from new media-speak, the book seems to
book provide a lot of 'cut scenes' or foreplay, but little
in the way of game-play or action. Another example is where
Manovich suggests that a way of refusing interactivity
(selecting from menus, options, etc) is to make *no* choice:
'using Microsoft Windows exactly the way it was installed at
the factory instead of customising it in the hope of
expressing my 'unique identity'' (129). However, it should
be noted that it takes Manovich some hundred pages to get to
this position after it is first implied, which is another
reason why the work can appear slow and
repetitive. However, even though the
book seems to move slowly in places, in other places quite
the opposite effect is achieved, as Manovich seems to move
too quickly over a point where more subtlety is required.
Discussing the emergence of 'new media', Manovich blithely
asserts: 'The ability to disseminate the same texts, images
and sounds to millions of citizens -- thus assuring the same
ideological beliefs -- was as essential as the ability to
keep track of their birth records, employment records,
medical records and police records.' (22) If 'the same
ideological beliefs' really could be 'assured' as simply as
this, there would be no dissent, no struggle over ideas or
political views, and no change. However, Manovich cannot
possibly mean what he appears to mean here (and later, on
page 209). There is indeed a more sophisticated engagement
with ideology in relation to the tendency toward
self-reflexivity in advertising, which is both useful
(useful for anyone teaching or engaged in the study of
advertisements) and thought-provoking. What is New
Media? Pontificating on the
emergence of 'the new media machine' (the projector)
Manovich declares: 'Film images would soothe
movie audiences, who were facing an increasingly dense
information environment outside the theatre, an environment
that could no longer be adequately handled by their own
sampling and data processing systems (i.e. their brains).
Periodic trips into the dark relaxation chambers of movie
theatres became a routine survival technique for the
subjects of modern society.' (23) It sounds marvelous -- a
great sweeping statement about the impact of kino-technology
as entertainment for the 'overloaded' consciousness of the
masses -- but what does it actually mean? It's the kind of
purple prose that tempts one to write in the margin 'Can you
provide an example to clarify this point?' However, there is
no clarification, and Manovich's text presses on like a
juggernaut, as it does on more than one occasion. Another
example of Manovich moving his argument too quickly occurs
where he seems to take the Sapir-Whorf of linguistic
determinism as given, although he doesn't say so in as many
words, it is implied (on page 64). The Interface Manovich likens the
interface to 'language' -- one can find no problem with
that, there are 'rules' and 'meanings' to be gleaned for
sure -- but he develops this to suggest that the interface
structures what it is possible to think about computer data
and, by extension, about the world. 'By organising computer
data in particular ways the interface provides distinct
models of the world . . . a hierarchical file system assumes
the world can be organised in a logical multilevel hierarchy
. . . a hypertext model of the WWW arranges the world as a
non-hierarchical system ruled by metonymy. In short, far
from being a transparent window into the data inside a
computer, the interface brings with it strong messages of
its own.' (65) I have shortcuts all over
my desktop and in my browser's links bar, to local data and
online data (to material created by me, and to material
created by others) but that doesn't impact upon my
understanding of, say, the North American electoral system,
or my understanding of the morality of invading a country to
remove its head of state, or of the way one state can
continue to occupy territories in another, impose curfews,
launch air strikes, etc., without heed of international law
or UN resolutions. Computer data *can* be manipulated and
organised in certain ways, some of which I understand and
some of which I don't -- who really uses Microsoft Office,
or their powerful desktop computer, to anything like its
fullest capability? -- but this really doesn't impact upon
my understanding of the political, social, and economic
factors that stop the world from being a better place. I
find it rather disingenuous of Manovich to make
extrapolations from 'the interface' to assertions about what
and how it is possible to think about the 'the world' and
the way it is organised. But again, as with the example
regarding ideology (above), it must be a case of Manovich
not quite meaning what he appears to mean. More interesting and
relevant (and, frankly, less irritating) is Manovich's
consideration of the bluring of the boundaries between
'work' and 'leisure'. Another aspect to consider is the
contemporary phenomenon of traveling to and from work as an
extension of work. Britain has the most over-worked labour
force in Europe. [3] It is not uncommon to see a
significant proportion of passengers on trains tapping away
on laptop computers -- already at work whilst traveling to
work, or still at work on the way home. The high penetration
of personal computers in the home, equipped with the same
software as office computers, provides workers with the
means to 'just finish off' something that might have been
left in the office. However, Manovich leaves this digital
drudgery, one aspect of the collapse of the division between
computer-work and computer-play, unexplored. Again, the question of
'meaning' comes to the fore in Manovich's discussion of
hyperlinks. One can *see* what Manovich wants to mean as he
conceptualises the hyperlink as
'non-hierarchical': 'The two sources connected
through a hyperlink have equal weight; neither one dominates
the other. Thus the acceptance of hyperlinking in the 1980s
can be correlated with contemporary culture's suspicion of
all hierarchies, and preference for the aesthetics of
collage in which radically different sources are bought
together within a single cultural object.' (76) There is, however, an
idealisation in this conception (the same idealisation that
perhaps inspired Ted Nelson to develop the cul-de-sac known
as Project Xanadu [4]); hyperlinking is controlled
by hierarchical order inasmuch as the page containing the
link has primacy over the page or resource to which it
links. Moreover, hyperlinking is not reciprocal, it is a
'one way' activity (Nelson wanted the web to be more than
that) and authorship determines those links. While it is the
case that 'individual texts are placed in no particular
order' (77), one has to access them somehow, in some order.
The page from which one clicks determines that
order. Cinematic conventions
inform the computer's spatial representations, especially so
in games. However, the 'cinematic code', the 'grammar' of
Hollywood conventionality, is being challenged by the
reconfiguration of cinematics in machinima. Machinima (a
compound word made up of 'machine' and 'cinema') becomes
possible due to several aspects of that computer game; the
result is something that is not a game, but a hybrid, a
genuinely new media form. Game manufacturers, notably Id
Software, released games that could be modified (first
_Doom_, and later _Quake_). Players were able to become
designers, using 'level editors' to create their own custom
layouts and characters. Once created, custom levels (wads)
could be shared via the internet. Taken to extremes, a game
or a level can be a 'total modification' so that, for
example, locations and characters might be based on _The
Simpsons_ or _South Park_. As well as 'mods' based on most
of the popular American television series, one can also find
examples of layouts and characters based on schools (one
pre-Littleton mod is known as 'School Doom') or on specific
workplaces. Multiplayer games allow
groups of players to engage in competitive play or to work
collaboratively. The key point here is that several human
players control avatars simultaneously present in the same
3D space. Teams of players (called 'clans') can compete
against other clans. Games like _Quake_ allow players to
capture sequences of game-play, and even to control the
point of view from which the game-play is captured. These
sequences can then be replayed in the game as 'demos'. For
example, clans can demonstrate prowess by finishing a level
as quickly as possible (a 'speed run'). However, the
possibilities presented by these features allow for more
than game play. Once a level has been modified and
characters 'skinned', players can do more than play the game
in the conventional sense. The game engine can be used to
provide a desktop CGI and characters can engage in
improvised or scripted performances. The result can be, and
often are, edited and converted to a more accessible format
such as QuickTime video or AVI for playback in widely
available software applications such as Apple QuickTime or
Windows Media Player. [5] Manovich discusses several
'projects' (generally examples of avant-garde film, or video
installations) which refuse the standard conventions of
cinema. But machinima is not so much a 'project' as a
genuinely new hybrid form: not cinema, not animation, not
puppetry, not computer game, but a narrative (or
non-narrative) form which overlaps the interstices of all
these. Far from a slavish adherence to convention, machinima
constitutes a radical break from the conventions of
production practices, narratives, and economics. [6]
Perhaps a later revision might include some consideration of
what is, in my opinion, a new media form that merits some
analysis. Discussing the
Human-Computer Interface (or 'HCI'), Manovich states 'both
cinema and the printed word eventually achieved stable forms
that underwent little change for long periods of time' (93).
This assertion seems to assume that cinematic and textual
forms are now static, somehow 'finished' or 'complete'.
Manovich can't possibly know this and, even if these forms
may seem relatively stable now, one cannot say with any
certainty how long this apparent stability will remain in
its current state. Manovich discusses the
concept of 'the screen', from renaissance painting to
television; from what he calls the static or 'classic
screen' to the dynamic screen of television, video, and
cinema, and their 'viewing regimes' (the immersive form of
cinema; the domestic form of television). For Manovich, the
'dynamic screen' has been disrupted by the newer computer
screen which, with its multiple windows (not to mention
dual-monitor set-ups) offers an experience akin to
television 'zapping'. But how safe is Manovich's distinction
between the television screen and the computer screen?
Widescreen PC monitors and widescreen laptops are already
widely available, as are TV tuner cards. Thus the computer
screen is *already* a television screen. Televisions accept
input from digital video as well as from game consoles and
from computer 'TV out' cards. Some televisions offer
multiple windows with PIP (picture-in-picture). Sony is
currently advertising its Network Media Receiver, a device
used for leisure and entertainment-based multimedia
networking in a domestic environment, serving images, video,
sound, and other content from computer devices to
'televisions'. [7] The television screen is already
a computer screen. The television and computer screen are no
longer as distinct as they were only a few years ago. The
boundaries are blurred and remain fluid, as televisions also
offer access to email and web browsing. Manovich offers a potted
history of the computer screen, from the radar screen in
WWII to SAGE (a total 'homeland defence' security system) in
the 1950s and proto VR in the 1960s. We remain in 'the era
of the screen' which 'threatens to take over our offices and
our homes' (115), and the example of Sony's range of
domestic network devices shows one of the ways in which that
is happening, but again a chance to discuss the sociology of
the collapse of work and leisure activity into a continuous
'screen time' is not taken up. Rather, as he makes
concluding remarks toward the end of the book, Manovich
states 'we now use the same interfaces for work and leisure'
and that 'we may . . . think of the information density of
our own workspaces as a new aesthetic challenge' (329).
Somehow, I think, that 'challenge' would not go down too
well on the 07.35 to London Liverpool Street. The Operations In the chapter entitled
'Operations', Manovich discusses the software tools used by
designers, and the operations performed, namely 'selection,
compositing and tele-action' (118). Operations, he reminds
us, are not software specific, but are ways of thinking,
ways of working, used in cultural production. Manovich
offers an interesting perspective on the notion that to
navigate (e.g. through webspace or gopherspace) is
tantamount to 'co-authoring' as the user weaves a unique
path through data. This notion is often rehearsed in
relation to post-structuralist ideas of textuality (in
_S/Z_, for example, Roland Barthes distinguishes between the
'readerly' and the 'writerly' text, and the way in which the
reader of the writerly text in a sense produces the text).
However, Manovich makes this notion of 'co-authorship' much
less contentious than it sometimes appears: for Manovich,
the user doesn't so much create something new, as access
only one subset of a much larger dataset (takes one of all
the possible routes). Considering Photoshop as
'postmodern' because it encourages users to select
pre-defined routines from menus rather than create something
from scratch, (selecting, combining, and re-using
pre-existing content is one of the defining characteristics
of postmodernism), Manovich declares: 'it is this software
that in fact made postmodernism possible' (131). Photoshop,
like many other software packages, allows filters and other
effects (pre-written algorithms) to be applied to text or
image files. Selection and compositing 'simultaneously
reflect and enable the postmodern practice of pastiche and
quotation' (141). Compositing is, in a sense, the opposite
of the disruptive effect of montage (editing), where the
joins are emphasised (e.g. Godard, Warhol). In compositing,
the joins and discontinuities are 'airbrushed out' for a
seamless effect. Manovich argues the case
for a new concept, a new form of montage, which he calls
'spatial montage'. This is achieved through using software
to arrange elements to create a 'new space' (157). However,
following a suggestion made by Erkii Hutamo in personal
correspondence, Manovich restricts the term to what he calls
'strong cases' because to use the term too freely -- to thus
describe any juxtaposition of elements -- would, apparently,
render it meaningless. Manovich goes on to illustrate the
logic and aesthetics of the concept of 'spatial montage'
using examples which, he points out, 'were [all]
created before digital composting became available' (158).
It's a shame Manovich could not draw on an example of
digital compositing to illustrate the case. The examples --
Rybczynski's _Tango_ (1982); the use of juxtaposition in
Konrad Zeman's films; Olga Tobreluts's _Gore ut Uma_ (1994)
-- are all discussed without the use of images. The Illusions In chapter four,
'Illusions', Manovich discusses the way in which the
computer has taken on the burden of producing
representational images that were once the preserve of
'optical and electrical machines'. This process of
replacement generates the economic turnover that drives the
industry. He asks two questions: What effect does using
computers to generate illusionistic representations have on
our perceptions of illusionism? And how do illusionism and
interactivity work together? Beyond the lack of an indexical
relationship with its referent, a computer-generated image
isn't so different from a photograph or a painting. For
Manovich, the real difference comes with navigable 3D space,
'something one cannot do with an illusionistic painting'
(184). Manovich compares Bazin's
discussion of cinematic realism, which he calls 'idealist'
(186), with Comolli's 'materialism' (187) and Bordwell and
Staiger's 'industrial model'. He then considers 3D animation
in light of the preceding positions, noting that technical
development was prompted by the needs of both Hollywood and
Washington, although he 'is not concerned here to trace
fully the history of these sponsorships' (193). Discussing the
construction of 3D worlds, Manovich returns to the theme of
designers using pre-defined routines -- 'fractal landscapes,
checkerboard floors, complete characters, and so on' (197).
He distinguishes between the realistic image produced by
computers, which is a form of photorealism, and experience,
which isn't faked at all. For Manovich, the key point is
that photographic and filmic representations are sometimes
mistaken for their referents (or an equivalence is assumed).
Virtual Reality isn't 'reality' at all, but a representation
of space: 'the reason we may think that computer graphics
have succeeded in faking reality is that . . . we have come
to accept the image of photography and film as reality'
(200). In the final section of
the chapter Manovich asks: 'what effect does interactivity
have on the reality effect of an image?' (205) Here, he
discusses the shift between 'playing' and 'viewing' in
games, and the 'juddering' effect experienced while moving
in VR environments as 'a new kind of suturing mechanism'
(208). For Manovich, this is a means ofinterpolation, a
device to 'fully involve the subject in the illusion' (208).
He suggests that the military simulation is the 'only mature
form of interactive narrative' (208-209). The Forms In this, the longest
chapter, Manovich identifies the database and 3D space as
the dominant metaphors in both work-related and
leisure-related applications. For Manovich, 'all new media
design can be reduced to these two approaches', either
creating the interface to give access to data of some kind,
or 'defining navigation methods through spatialized
representations', and he likens these two aspects to
'effects that before were created by literary and cinematic
narrative (215). However, according to Manovich, the two
might be thought of as polar extremes: 'often the two goals
of information access and psychological engagement compete
within the same new media object' (216). While some new media
objects may be databases, they are not always experienced as
such by users: games, for example, can often be thought of
as puzzles and, in order to solve the puzzle, the player has
to figure out the series of tasks or discover the algorithm
necessary to overcome a specific problem, finish a level, or
complete the entire game. Players learn the algorithm during
the course of the game, which works in two ways: the
algorithm that is 'the rules that operate within the
universe constructed by this game', which Manovich
distinguishes from 'the algorithm of the game itself'
(222-223). Manovich considers the way
in which the World Wide Web is also a database of sorts,
with myriad interfaces, so many front ends, pages that
organise and provide access to content, that the same data
is often indexed by (i.e. is accessible from) very many
pages, to the extent that the indices are greater in
magnitude than the data itself, a phenomenon that Manovich
likens to the Jorge Luis Borges story of a map greater in
size than the territory it represents (the story, for which
Manovich doesn't provide a reference, is 'On Exactitude in
Science' [8]). Comparing the database to
narrative, Manovich describes them as 'natural enemies
competing for the same territory of human culture, each
claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world'
(225). While he suggests narratives don't usually demand
'algorithm-like behaviour from their readers', Manovich
finds narratives similar to databases inasmuch as the reader
has to 'uncover the underlying logic' of the text (225). For
Manovich, new media objects arranged as databases (he offers
CD-ROMs and websites by way of example) 'correspond to the
data structure whereas narratives, including computer games,
correspond to algorithms' (226). Manovich suggests that in
programming, both database and algorithm are needed (which
makes his earlier assertion about 'natural enemies' all the
more infuriating) each is as important as the other but, he
asks, is it the same in computer *culture*? Here, Manovich is
attempting to distinguish between interface and content: in
the pre-computer age, he avers, 'the interface and the work
were the same; in other words, the level of the interface
did not exist' (227). Manovich needs to establish a
distinction because he wants to separate interface from
content in new media objects. While such a distinction may
seem straightforward enough, there is a risk in treating the
interface as something other than the work, or something
other than part of the work, of implying that the interface
is *merely* a way to access something within, however the
interface might be thought of as much more than mere
interface alone, as demonstrated, for example, by
csszengarden. [9] Although Manovich considers the
interface to be an example of variability, it is difficult
to concur with his assertion that 'the database is the
centre of the creative process in the computer age'
(227). Manovich uses his
distinction to create what he calls 'a new formulation',
namely 'the new media object consists of one or more
interfaces to a database of multimedia material' (227).
This, he asserts, places the opposition between database and
narrative in a new light. Here, Manovich posits the
narrative user as one who effectively follows links between
records in a dataset, thus an interactive narrative (or
'hypernarrative') 'can then be understood as the sum of
multiple trajectories through a database. A traditional
linear narrative is one among many other possible
trajectories' (227). While this is an interesting metaphor,
it is just a metaphor using the terms of computer science to
describe that which has previously been the preserve of 'the
arts' or the humanities. I'm not sure we need to go as far
as Manovich, however, in marginalizing the interface in
order to legitimise a metaphor. In considering navigable
space, such as that constructed in 3-D computer games, which
he calls 'genuinely original and historically unprecedented
aesthetic forms' (244), Manovich compares and contrasts
_Doom_ and _Myst_. These are similar in that both require
the player to navigate space in order to undertake a quest
which requires exploration and discovery. However, while for
Manovich navigable space 'is something that transcends
computer games' (248) -- and fans of Odysseus and Gawain, or
the road movie will no doubt concur -- it is also 'another
key form of new media' (252). Manovich draws on theory
from art history (e.g. Panofsky's notion of space) to
discuss examples of navigable space, which include MIT's
_Aspen Movie Map_ and Jeffry Shaw's _Legible City_. However,
because of the original date of publication, 2001, _The
Language of New Media_ was unable to consider the genre of
game which puts navigable space to the fore, such as _Grand
Theft Auto 3_ and its sequel, _GTA Vice City_, which provide
fictional spaces, or _The Getaway_, which is set in central
London. Discussing the
cinematography of Tamas Waliczky's _The Forest_ (1993) in
terms of its 'liberat[ion of] the virtual camera
from its enslavement to the simulation of humanly possible
navigation' (261), Manovich explains: 'the virtual camera of
_The Forest_ neither simulates natural perception nor does
it follow the standard grammar of cinema's grammar: instead,
it establishes a distinct system of its own' (262). Because
this exegesis is directly applicable to machinima, it is all
the more disappointing that Manovich doesn't give any
attention to this particular new media form. Asking 'why is navigable
space so popular in new media?', Manovich relates it to
Baudelaire's notion of the flaneur, likening the flaneur to
one who is 'traversing a crowd of strangers', this
*Gesellshaft* being 'the psychological price paid for
modernization' (269). For Manovich, the 'Data Dandy loves to
display his private and totally irrelevant collection of
data to other net users' (270), a description ideally suited
to the activities and, perhaps, motivation, of the blogger.
[10] We cannot however, know
for sure the motivations of a user, or what satisfactions or
fears they encounter. However, this doesn't prevent Manovich
from offering suggestions that seem to embody certainties on
his part. As he confidently reported on the 'survival
techniques' of the early cinema audience, he tells us too
how his flaneuese finds peace and comfort in the
datasphere: 'If the subject of modern
society looked for refuge from the chaos of the real world
in the stability and balance of the static composition of a
painting, and later in the cinematic image, the subject of
the information society finds peace in the knowledge that
she can slide over endless fields of data, locating any
morsel of information with the click of a button, zooming
through file systems and networks. She is comforted not by
an equilibrium of shapes and colours, but by the variety of
data manipulation operations at her control.'
(274-275) This flight of fancy is
predicated on a very big 'if'. Manovich cannot know with any
certainty what 'comfort' the flaneur/flaneuse may derive
from surfing. The reader needs to be wary of his tendency
toward hyperbole, that here presents an image of an
idealized user 'zooming though file systems and networks'
that owes something to the fictive representations of
cyberspace from films like _Tron_ and novels like
_Neuromancer_. Less contentiously, Manovich suggests
'computer spaces have a long way to go' (281) in terms of
the continuing development of immersive
environments. What is Cinema? The thrust of the first
five chapters is a consideration of new media in light of
ideas derived primarily from film studies. The final chapter
looks the other way, asking: 'how does computerisation
affect our very concept of the moving image?' (287) The
chapter is divided into two sections. The first, 'Digital
Cinema and the History of a Moving Image', considers the
relationship of cinema to animation, while the second
section, 'The New Language of Cinema', looks at 'examples of
new directions for film language' (292). 'Computer media redefine
the very identity of cinema' (294) because, as Manovich
explains, 'given enough time and money, almost everything
can be simulated on a computer; filming physical reality is
but one possibility' (295). However, pre-computer age cinema
yields examples of options other than 'physical reality'.
_Avant garde_ and experimental films aside, animation (such
as _Snow White_, _Bambi_, _Fantasia_, as well as non-Disney
animation) springs immediately to mind. Manovich considers the
implications for cinema 'now [it is] possible to
generate photorealistic scenes entirely on a computer'
(295), which is not entirely unproblematic, unless one
accepts Manovich's starting point, that cinema is, at root,
a realist (indexical) medium. For Manovich 'cinema can no
longer be distinguished from animation. It is no longer an
indexical media technology but rather a sub-genre of
painting' (295). Again, Manovich forces a
distinction to make a point. It's not clear how, and nor
does he make the case, that cinema is, should be, or can be
distinct from animation; that the indexical possibilities of
cinematic recording techniques should be emphasised or
privileged over any other (such as animation or abstract
cinema). It's difficult to talk as Manovich does, of
'traditional' film technology when the industry and the
technology is still relatively new and continues to develop.
There's an unstated teleological assumption at work that
film has a direction and a purpose that Manovich is somehow
privy to, and this is now changed somehow by digital
technology 'destroying cinema's identity as a media art'
(295). This appears to be at odds with the history of cinema
Manovich sketches in, emphasising as he does the
illusionistic nature of early cinema and the optical toys
from which it developed, yet concluding 'once cinema was
stabilised as a technology . . . all references to its
origins in artifice [were] delegated to cinema's
bastard relative, its supplement and shadow -- animation'
(298) until, 'in the 1990s', computer technology causes
'these marginalized techniques [to move] to the
centre' (300). The key, I think, to Manovich's reading of
cinema lies in his sense that twentieth-century avant-garde
filmmaking should be excluded from consideration because it
is outside ''normal' filmmaking procedures and the intended
uses of film technology' (306), until that is, avant-garde
strategies are 'legitimised by technology' (307). Manovich
appears to see the problem with his argument and then
attempts to gloss over it: 'in retrospect we can see that
twentieth-century cinema's regime of visual realism, the
result of automatically recording visual reality, was only
an exception, an isolated accident in the history of visual
representation, which has always involved, and now again
involves, the manual construction of images'
(308). Manovich considers the way
in which non-linear narrative and effects, such as those
found in music video, and the 'new visual language' that
evolved in CD-ROM design, has filtered through to cinema.
Again, his discussion would be enhanced by an awareness of
machinima. For example, his description of an effect in the
game _7th Guest_ -- 'a camera follows a complex curve, as if
mounted on a virtual dolly' (313) -- might not only be
applied to the machinima film _Anachronox_, but also
developed further in light of the distinct/ive narrative and
non-narrative artefacts that are quite different from each
other, yet which are all examples of machinima.
[11] Nonetheless, he does,
however, offer a wide range of interesting and innovative
examples (e.g. Olga Liliana's interactive narratives at
www.teleporticia.org; and the 'ASCII films' of Vuk Cosic,
although the URL Manovich cites for Cosic's work leads, in
fact, into a site offering pornography with a torrent of
pop-up pages and premium rate dialer-downloads). The discussion of
compression might acknowledge, if only in a footnote, the
development and rapid spread of DIVX. Originally a hackers
improvement of Microsoft code, it has, over time, been
completely rewritten and is now a widely adopted and
legitimate implementation of the MPEG-4 standard. This
omission might be explained by Manovich's emphasis on
QuickTime: while QuickTime allows video clips to be played
on the two most widely used computer platforms, Apple Mac
and PC, QuickTime doesn't support AVI which is the file type
generally (but not exclusively) produced with the DIVX
codec. [12] In the final section of
the last chapter, Manovich shifts emphasis to consider the
way in which digital effects have helped to 'redefine'
Hollywood cinema since the 1990s. Again, less contentiously,
Manovich sees 'live action footage' as 'raw material to be
manipulated'; in other words, 'production becomes just the
first stage of postproduction' (302-303). In seeking to provide a
critique of the whole work, I have identified some of the
ways in which Manovich's prose doesn't quite (to me, anyway)
yield the expected meaning. This may be a fussiness on my
part over stylistics, as the anticipated meaning is usually
to be found some time later. And while I have suggested that
Manovich has undertaken an ambitious project, on a task akin
to mucking out the Augean stables, at the same time I have
suggested there are places where the book has not quite done
enough: places where I would like to see some further
discussion, some clarification in passages where, for me,
the argument seems to move too quickly. Elsewhere, I have
identified areas left unexplored that might usefully have
been developed. This is not to, as Enid and Becky from
_Ghost World_ might have it, 'accentuate the negative', but
is simply a subjective critique of an ambitious work.
Overall, Manovich's book *is* useful and thought-provoking,
even if it does contain some irritations in style and
pacing. I have already ordered a library copy, and I look
forward to a revised second edition. Suffolk
College, Ipswich,
England Notes 1. Extracts from reviews
of _The Language of New Media_ posted on Manovich's website
<http://www.manovich.net/LNM>. 2. The website doesn't
really function as a standalone resource, rather it is very
much an adjunct to the book: <http://www.manovich.net/LNM_SITE_NEW/lnm_main.html>. 3. See, for example: 'Long
Hours a National Disgrace', BBC News (Business), 4 February
2002 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1799518.stm>. 4. See
<http://xanadu.com>. 5. For a discussion of the
form and some examples, see, for example, Katie Salen,
'Telefragging Monster Movies', in Lucien King, ed., _Game
On: The History and Culture of Video Games_ (Laurence King:
London, 2002) pp. 98-111. 6. See
<http://www.machinima.com>. 7. See
<http://applications.sony-europe.com/avit.html?lang=uk>. 8. Borges, _Collected
Fictions_ (Penguin: London, 1999). 9. See
<http://www.csszengarden.com>. 10. Blogs, or web logs,
are online journals. See _The Guardian_, Special Report:
Weblogs <http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/weblogs/0,14024,1076754,00.html>. 11. See, for example, the
camera movement in the opening sequence of part one of
_Anachronox_, but also compare the quite different artefacts
below that are all examples of machinima: _Anachronox_
(2002) <http://www.machinima.com/films.php?id=231>;
_Hardly Workin'_ (Ill Clan, 2001) <http://www.illclan.com/movies.htm>;
and _Ozymandias_ (Strange Company, 2000)
<http://www.strangecompany.org/Ozymandias>,
or <http://www.planetquake.com/polycount/guplicity/3d_ozzy.shtml>. 12. See
<http://www.divx.com>. Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2004 Eddie Duggan, 'Mucking Out
Augean Stables with Systematic Rigour: Manovich's _The
Language of New Media_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 8 no. 19,
June 2004
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n19duggan>. See also: Michael Truscello, 'The
Birth of Software Studies: Lev Manovich and Digital
Materialism', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 55, December
2003 <http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n55truscello>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
salon, and receive the journal articles via email as they
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