The Advent of Recording Media: Cinema

The development of recording media, different from representative media in kind as well as degree, was as significant historically as the invention of writing seven thousand years earlier. Photography, film and sound recording taken together shifted dramatically our historical perspective.

The representation arts made possible the re-creation of phenomena, but they required the complex application of the codes and conventions of languages. Moreover, those languages were manipulated by individuals and therefore the element of choice was and is highly significant in the representational arts. This element is the source of most of the aesthetics of the pictorial and literary arts. What interests aestheticians is not what is said but how it is said.

In stark contrast, the recording arts provide a much more direct line of communication between the subject and the observer. They do have their own codes and conventions, it’s true: a film or sound recording is not reality after all. But the language of the recording media is both more direct and less ambiguous than either written or pictorial language. In addition, the history of the recording arts has, until recently, been a direct progression toward greater verisimilitude (representation of reality). Colour film reproduces more of reality than does black and white; sound film is more closely parallel to actual experience than is silent; and so forth.

This qualitative difference between representational media and recording media is very clear to those who use the latter for scientific purposes. Anthropologists, for example are well aware of the advantages of film over the written word.

Film does not completely eliminate the intervention of a third party between the subject and the observer, but it does significantly reduce the distortion that the presence of an artist inevitably introduces. That is, until now. The application of digital technology to film and audio, which began to gather momentum in the late 1980s, points to a new level of discourse: one that is now revolutionizing our attitude toward the recording arts. Simply put, digital techniques like morphing and sampling destroy our faith in the honesty of the images and sounds we see and hear. The verisimilitude is still there – but we can no longer trust our eyes and ears.