From Electronic Editing to a Digital Ben-Hur - Text 3
More significant, though, is his reliance on digital technology to give coherence to an enormous amount of imagery shot on digital video, his succumbing to the almost limitless storage space of computer hard-disks, without, it seems, having a clear vision for the organization of all this information. Despite the “previsualizations” of major scenes like the chariot race, the result is more of a visual jumble, as he and the editors struggled to make sense of the massive amounts of material that had been recorded on many cameras, including those around the track but also Go-Pro cameras embedded in the ground and fixed to the chariots, giving a wide range of coverage.
In this most recent Ben-Hur, the editing is subordinated to the novel effects of digitally-generated imagery. This is less an inevitable result of the fact of the technological change to digital editing systems than a creative and conceptual failure, an inability to envision a clear thematic purpose to the construction of the representation. Digital editing itself cannot in any obvious way be described as more likely to produce such a result, any more than the Moviola is to be understood as the source of the formal brilliance of the 1925 version.
