From Electronic Editing to a Digital Ben-Hur - Text 2
Dana Polan does note that “non-linear” access was already a possibility on flatbed systems,[1] yet it was only with digital systems that the full benefits of non-linearity could be realized. Its very possibility had slowly been emerging, in response to the changed relations among those working on a film production and as the basis for a greater efficiency and ease of working, as studios and production companies were facing a financial squeeze. Hence, the shift to digital systems is the result of the felt need – already answered by the Moviola, and then by the various flatbed systems – for adequate means for dealing with the increasing amounts of information with which filmmakers had to contend.
Non-linear organization of material had been an incipient characteristic of television and video editing – of the pre-digital electronic visual media – and was the primary mode of editing in television long before it became standard in cinema, as John T. Caldwell has noted: “Electronic editing of videotape has been pervasive [in television production] since the early 1970s, first as control-track editing, and then as frame-accurate SMPTE (Society for Motion Picture and Television Engineers) ‘time-code’ editing.”[2]
What led ultimately to the willingness among filmmakers to adopt such systems was the fact that those working in television continued making efforts to achieve a “film look” for television production, to “infuse video with a visual style more typical of film”.[3] Thus, this technology was developed on the basis of already existing ideas about a “film-look,” which could be extended, beyond the cinema, in television production, where efforts were being made in the 1970s and 1980s to improve image quality, and to offer programming as visually complex and vivid, as compositionally intricate and engaging, as what was being offered by the cinema.
This suggests that the technology of digital editing did not alter film or film style in any significant manner. But in television, Caldwell emphasizes the degree to which new digital systems like Avid (which won an Emmy in 1993 for “technical accomplishment”), fostered a culture of formal and stylistic experimentation: “Forget orthodox editing wisdom, the whole point for editors now frequently is to demonstrate how far one can push the editing syntax on a project or a scene, and how many stylistic variations one can showcase.”[4]
But the context of television production is arguably characterized by a greater diversity of form, and depended, at least then, to a much greater degree on attracting and keeping viewers (and thereby advertisers) by offering more stylistic novelty. When such systems were finally incorporated into the cinema – particularly into narrative filmmaking, which had depended for so long on a comprehensive, effective and well-established editing “syntax” – the effects were not as profound. For, while the systems were originally developed in order to give televisual images a “film look,” filmmakers were not seeking to introduce a style from another production domain, but to consolidate the formal traditions established over decades in the cinema, and to make it easier to achieve more or less traditional effects more efficiently and effectively with new technologies, without sacrificing quality.
Still, the incorporation of electronic, and then wholly digital, video editing systems was the first major change to film technology in decades, and the first time since the cinema was invented that editing was not done on film. In “Digital Cinema: A False Revolution,” John Belton has argued that digital technology has not had a “revolutionary” effect in the cinema, but that its effects are subtle, incremental, and not easily traced back to a specific technological cause: “They are to be understood in relation to a complex array of contextual factors, which drive technological change, but also inhibit it, as conservative preferences for existing conventions and procedures are manifested.”[5] Most observers, though, have argued that the transformation of the cinema into a digital medium has altered it fundamentally, and that the most profound changes have been a result of the advent of digital editing, which has precipitated a basic change in the nature of the cinema.
Such a claim may be tested by considering the most recent version of Ben-Hur, released in 2016 by MGM and Paramount and directed by Timur Bekmambetov, who had publicly declared that he would use CGI effects only when absolutely necessary, favouring instead traditional effects.[6] Yet he succumbs most of the time to the usual sorts of temptations on display in many contemporary spectacular action films, as the film includes a lot of digital effects, which most critics thought were poorly executed, or offered merely for the sake of spectacle.
