Stills from Avatar
After 11 years, James Cameron's "Avatar" was re-released in China. For the global film industry deeply affected by the new crown pneumonia epidemic, the re-screening/re-screening of important films has once become a means of "self-help" for the industry, and since July 2020, domestic and overseas blockbusters such as "King Kong Chuan", "Mermaid", "Nezha's Devil Boy Descending", "Inception", "Interstellar", "Crazy Animal City" and "Super Marines" have been re-screened in China, becoming the first batch of films after the theater resumes work and production.
We can certainly understand Avatar and other films that have been or are planning to be re-released in 2021 – such as "Avengers 4", which was re-released in North America in early March, and see them as a necessary impetus to promote the recovery of the global film market. However, as a topic that is difficult to avoid in the history of film technology, the re-screening of "Avatar" has its special significance: it is the most famous 3D digital film, Cameron used this film to promote the global wave of theater "3D" and indirectly formulated today's mainstream commercial theater technology standards The story is told to this day; and today, 11 years later, when the global cinema continues to face the challenge of streaming media and the impact of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, it once again reaffirms the audiovisual advantages of the digital cinema system. However, can the re-release of "Avatar" really answer the dilemma faced by cinemas today?
Cameron's "success studies" obscure complex historical dynamics and industrial structures
In 2009, James Cameron developed a servo system of motion capture, virtual cameras, and simultaneous analog cameras during the filming of Avatar, creating a visual experience unique to digital 3D – a continuous, sensual, holistic world that is tied to a new round of technological innovation in the global cinema system. Soon after, 3D movies and IMAX screens became the industry standard worldwide, as its production company Fox had expected. Nowadays, in many occasions, the image of 3D glasses has replaced the camera or film and become a symbol of film.
Ten years later, before the release of Ang Lee's 3D/120fps high frame rate movie "Twin Killers", many people thought it would once again promote the systematic upgrade of commercial theaters, and the film's publicity also compared it to the next "Avatar", but the film's poor box office performance and word-of-mouth split made Ang Lee's plan to surpass digital 3D movies as a whole have to slow down. In fact, in the "Hobbit" series that began in 2011, Peter Jackson took the lead in using the high frame rate format of 60fps, but the producer Warner Company was difficult to promote the mainstream theater to upgrade the system for high frame rate screening; in 2015, Ang Lee's "Billy Lynn's Halftime War" has used the 120fps format, but until the release of "Twin Killers" in North America, only 14 AMC theater theaters have the ability to play 4K/3D/ Technical conditions for the 120fps version.
Twin Killers
Avatar has pushed 3D movies and IMAX screens to become the world's technical standard, but Peter Jackson and Ang Lee have failed to do so, and it seems that the popularity of high frame rates has not yet been able to make "Avatar" come. In 2005, while Cameron was making Avatar, visual effects supervisor Eric Brevig was tasked with validating some of the technical aspects of digital 3D shooting, which allowed him to pilot the Pace FUSION shooting system designed for Avatar with two F950S cameras in advance and produce the 3D film Adventures in the Center of the Earth. Adventures in the Heart of the Earth became the first all-digital 3D film to introduce Chinese mainland, but the childish story and unrestrained visuals left the film with a cold reception and box office. The mediocre Breivig further highlighted the importance of Avatar, ultimately tying the popularity of 3D production and digital cinema systems with personalized genius behavior.
In this success story, Cameron used "Avatar" to pry the historical process of film evolution from 2D to 3D, bringing new vitality to the global film industry at that time. Success stories are the most popular narratives of monopoly industries, always leading people to focus on individual geniuses, convincing people that their achievements can be understood and recognized in a general sense, but ignoring more complex historical dynamics and industrial structure issues.
Adventures in the Center of the Earth
Avatar and digital 3D obscure the film industry's core alliance of interests
It is obviously naïve to think of Avatar as an overnight push for the 3D of the film. Beginning with the Lumiere brothers and Edison, the film's exploration of 3D effects has never stopped, and Griffiths sees it as "the most powerful medium of expression." For a long time, the 3D film effect was mainly composed of a chromatic aberration system of red and blue lenses and red and blue glasses on the left and right eyes, a technical structure that dates back to the early 19th century, when the film was not yet born, and chromatic aberration-based 3D effects were used in the slide shows at that time. By the 1930s, 3D film effects had become a very common visual presentation technique, and in 1952, the adventure film "Bowana's Devil" set off another round of 3D film production and broadcasting with a dual-camera shooting and dual-camera projection system.
However, the real commercial popularity of 3D movies will not be until after the new century, which is inseparable from the digital transformation of the film industry. In 2003, the Digital Film Association (DCI), which is composed of production companies such as Disney, 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Sony Pictures, warner bros., etc., took the lead in developing a normative standard for the open architecture of digital cinema, and established the digital film package (DCP) as the standard format for digital film screening worldwide. The attitude of the production company is very firm: compared with bulky and expensive 35mm film, digital storage is flexible, lightweight and inexpensive, and has long been doomed to be the main tide of the future industry. For them, compared with the film creators and audiences' obsession with the film format, the most difficult part is how to promote the technological reform of the theater to cooperate with digital projection.
This is understandable why, after the new century, the exploration of digital 3D cinema has suddenly picked up. In 2005, Disney remade the animated film "Chicken Run" based on Real D technology, opening a mature digital 3D film screening; by 2009, in addition to "Avatar", many mainstream commercial films including "Flying House", "Christmas Carol", "Glacier Age 3" and so on began to try 3D production.
"Chicken Run"
This trend of making digital 3D movies eventually forced mainstream cinema lines to turn to digital screening as a whole, and when the mainstream cinema lines once they completed the investment in technological innovation, they generated a greater market demand for digital movies that matched their audiovisual presentation effects, so that 3D productions and broadcasts of digital special effects blockbusters dominated the global film market for the past decade: since 2010, the proportion of digital production and broadcast movies in the highest-grossing films in the United States in the past years has begun to rise sharply. In 2012, the Chinese film market achieved a breakthrough of 10 billion yuan, with a total of 27 films exceeding 100 million yuan throughout the year, in addition to the 1.35 billion box office champion "Avatar", as well as 3D movies such as "Alice in Wonderland", "Harry Potter 7", "War of the Gods" and other digital IMAX movies such as "Inception" and "Iron Man 2".
Flying House Tour
It can be said that the wave of digital production and broadcasting led by hollywood mainstream production companies has brought the global film market into a new development cycle. However, in this wave of cinema digitization and screen 3D, the box office success of "Avatar" is so dazzling that it is difficult to link it with the production company's calculation of cost and efficiency, which obscures the driving force of the film industry's core interest alliance to promote the digital transformation of the global film industry.
Digital special effects blockbusters obscure the changes that are happening in movie theaters
It also reminds us that it is clear that the technological innovation of cinema cannot advance beyond the overall interests of monopoly industries. Cameron proposed the aesthetic value of the high frame rate system as a "future format" in 2012, but this technological innovation has only been suspended in the stage of market experimentation because of the lack of support from film dealers.
Today's film industry, however, faces more troublesome problems. On the one hand, since the rapid growth of Netflix's online movie sales in 2011, the impact of streaming media on the film industry has always been an important crisis in the industry, in 2020, in the new crown pneumonia epidemic, this crisis has been concentrated on the head of the cinema, and even there has been a discussion on whether the physical cinema still has the value of existence; on the other hand, the film industry suffered the biggest loss in the epidemic Unit is also the cinema, and the world's largest cinema chain line AMC is almost bankrupt under the blow of the epidemic.
In this context, the re-release of Avatar has a new meaning, which reaffirms a view built with a digital 3D film system: cinemas have audiovisual advantages that cannot be matched by home entertainment systems and mobile Internet terminals. But what we must realize is that it is itself a concept that has been constructed in the film and television industry in the face of the trend of digital production and broadcasting, so it will also be questioned by a new round of technological change.
Therefore, a more immediate question than "defending cinema" is to explore the "future of cinema". Today's cinemas inherit the structure of digital multiplex cinemas since the new century in terms of technology and space, but in terms of cultural functions and consumption methods, they are mainly linked with new media technologies such as streaming media and social media. Therefore, we cannot simply use digital audio-visual systems to understand the characteristics of today's cinemas, and we cannot simply recognize that the future of cinemas lies in the broadcast of "blockbusters" that meet the digital audiovisual effects.
Today's film and television content flows on various media platforms, including theaters, and film marketing and communication have long been closely linked to the mobile Internet and social media, so we must have a new understanding of theaters to explain the changes that are taking place. The emergence of the Spring Festival movie "Hello, Li Huanying" is a deconstruction of the principle of digital commercial cinema: it is obviously not a film based on the audiovisual advantages of the digital cinema system, but it has created a consumer spectacle in the new film market environment affected by the epidemic. The decisive factor in the cinema box office is no longer the audiovisual effect, but the emotional effect. It is not that audiovisual effects are no longer important, because as long as they are in the basic structure of digital multiplexes, audiovisual effects have their market value. But at the same time, we must also realize that when discussing issues such as "cinema survival" and "film future" today, we must have an understanding perspective that goes beyond digital multiplex cinemas, and overcome the creation, production and dissemination thinking based on this understanding, such as "suitable for big screen films".
Avatar did lead the way, but what we are facing today is a very different industrial cultural reality. If we still try to draw momentum from Cameron's story, respond to today's cinema problems with digital special effects blockbusters, and try to push the Chinese film industry into the Hollywood-style logic of industrialization, we will replace the future direction with a look-back perspective.
Author: Zhao Yi (Associate Professor, School of Film and Television Media, Shanghai Normal University)
Editor: Zhou Minxian
Image source Douban