R OLF G IESEN Metropolis, City of the Dead Fig. 1: The Subterranean City of the Workers, Metropolis (1926). Deutsche Kinemathek. The Wandering Shadow Through the ages picture makers had one objective: to make images alive and record mortal life. Photography and filmmaking eventually provided the key to open Pandora’s Box. The first artists to try and deal with the new techniques, however, were not the painters. Fischinger, Richter and others came in later. Among the first were the actors who hoped to have a record for immortality. They clearly had fallen in love with their mirror image and wanted to preserve it for posterity. One of the early acting stars of cinematography was the German Paul Wegener (1874-1948). He was the first German to walk through the mirror and sell his shadow (like Peter Schlemihl) or better his mirror image to the devil of the movies, as early as 1913 in Der Student von Prag. R OLF G IESEN 110 During World War I, in a 1915 lecture, Wegener, the original Golem of the movies, whose fascination with the romantic and fairy tales helped shape the creative destiny of his country’s fledgling film industry, spoke prophetically of his dream to engender an absolutely artificial, animated movie out of animated metamorphosis, a quarter of a century before Walt Disney produced Fantasia while animation was still in its infancy: You have all seen films in which suddenly a line appears, curves and changes its form. Out of it grow faces and the line disappears. To me the impression seems highly remarkable. But such things are always shown as an intermezzo and nobody has ever thought of the colossal possibilities of this technique. I think the film as art should be based - as in the case of music - on tones, on rhythm. In these changeable planes, events unreel which are partly identified with natural pattern, yet partly beyond real lines and forms. Imagine one of Boecklin’s sea paintings with all the fabulous tritons and nereids. And imagine an artist duplicating this work in hundreds of copies but with each copy having small displacements so that all copies revealed in succession would result in continuous movement. Suddenly we would see before our very eyes a world of pure fantasy come to life... We are entering a new pictorial fantasy world as we would enter a magic forest. We are setting foot in the field of pure kinetics - or optical lyric as I call it. This field will perhaps be of major importance and will open new beautiful sights. This eventually is the final objective of each art, and so cinema would gain an autonomous aesthetic domain for itself. A movie could be created which would become an experience of art - an optical vision, a great symphonic fantasy! (Künstliche Welten 69) This is a vision of a true parallel world created by the manipulation of a sequence of moving images, an illusion put together by the dream machine and mechanics of the cinema projecting a light beam, perceived by the human eye and transferred to the brain. Where does the idea to cut individual movements into separate frames come from? It must have been as old as mankind and art. Imagine setting up a monolith with the sun hitting its top. A wandering shadow will form (and perform) on the ground, and if you take a stick and mark that shadow frame by frame you will have cut that movement into individual frames. Observing the course of the sun and the moon requires a kind of thinking along the lines of sequential frames. This is what led to a scientific approach of single-frame animation, and therefore we nowadays use (digital) animation in research and industry to illustrate the shape and particularly simulate movements of the infinitesimal, the core of microcosm. Then there is the cult of cave art. Cave art depicting man and animals traditionally was illuminated by fire and thus, stroboscopically, seemed to bring to life again what was preserved by collective memory. This leads us to the (irrational) world of make-believe and religious art. Ghostly, atavistic images preserved life and ‘resurrected’ the dead. Consequently, the first personalities portrayed in early Daguerreotypes were people who had recently died. Metropolis, City of the Dead 111 From the Catacombs of Metropolis up to Outer Space What once started with the Shadow Plays in the Far East and China (where it was called pi ying xi) and with the first Zoetrope by Chinese inventor Ting Huan (in 180 AD), in late 19 th and in 20 th century developed into an industry of animated images that is still growing worldwide. The first animated films present a metamorphosis of the human face and shape, an innocent manipulation that apparently affected the integrity of the human body (Humorous Phases of Funny Faces by James Stuart Blackton, Fantasmagoria by Émile Cohl) similar to the digital images of our days, with the morphing process of human, animal and even robotic life (Terminator 2). Feature films rarely used trick photography for art as Wegener had hoped for, but rather for gigantism and the creation of artificial life, from Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse to the Machine Maria of Fritz Lang’s way-overbudget movie, Metropolis, conceived in 1924 and released in January 1927. The film was cut to pieces after its premiere failure and completely butchered in America before it was (almost) restored to its original form in 2010. Metropolis is a tale about the New Tower Babel, about the rise, fall and resurrection of mankind after overcoming the burden of class struggle. And it is a speculation about the God-like cloning of man. In front of Günther Rittau’s trick camera Brigitte Helm transformed into a robotic Galatea or an E.T.A. Hoffmannesque Olimpia who leads the uproar of the working class out of the catacombs of the dead. The motif came from Karel Č apek’s science fiction play RUR (1920). The figure itself, however, looked Teutonically medieval in appearance, a girl clad in armor. Fig. 2: Female (Brigitte Helm) transformed into Automaton, Metropolis (1926). R OLF G IESEN 112 Fig. 3: Female (Brigitte Helm) transformed into Automaton, Metropolis (1926). Both stills are located in the Deutsche Kinemathek. Trick photography and animation were also used in science and last not least for military purposes in World War I (map animation to illustrate the action on the fronts) and for training and propaganda films in World War II and thereby anticipated the destruction of Metropolis with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The doomsday imagery became the model for the Planet of the Apes and the TV images of the fall of the Twin Towers (those might have been inspired by products of the so-called entertainment industry like Jack Gold’s movie The Medusa Touch). Trick photography also became the means to promote the expensive financing of space and rocket technology and moon flight. As early as 1925 when Berlin-based UFA released an educational feature titled Wunder der Schöpfung (some footage was incorporated in the American Our Heavenly Bodies), cinematographers have looked up to the night sky. Even Fritz Lang originally wanted to end his Metropolis movie with scenes of space flight (as he told interviewer Peter Bogdanovich 1 and did so in Frau im Mond (1928-29). After World War II, in the era of Cold War, the race for the moon culminated in the famed collaboration of Wernher von Braun and Walt Disney on TV’s three-part Man in Space (1957) and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) which prepared Americans for NASA’s moon landing and intro- 1 See his book Fritz Lang in America from 1967: “In our original version of Metropolis, I wanted the son of the Master to leave at the end and fly to the stars. This didn’t work out in the script, but it was the first idea for Woman in the Moon” (125). Metropolis, City of the Dead 113 duced the idea of transforming man into a spiritual entity that Kubrick and his co-author Arthur C. Clarke properly named “space child.” 2 From Dinosaur to Man Not only Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray) knew that imagery has a tendency of absorbing its creators. Some religions foreshadow with an often alarming tone too what kind of deluge might happen once you have opened ‘Pandora’s Box.’ On screen the resurrection of the dead had started with the extinct animal life of dinosaurs. In the early days of cinematography Winsor McCay animated Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) in 2D, Willis O’Brien already created 3D dinosaurs for his film version of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1925) in stopmotion technique (and German Major Hans Ewald followed and copied him in an educational entry released the same year, Aus der Urzeit der Erde - From Primordial Times). With the advance of computer technology Steven Spielberg was able to produce Jurassic Park (1993) and BBC an equally ambitious series, Walking with Dinosaurs (1999). Fig. 4: Ball-and-socket armature of the Cyclops, the stop motion creature from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1957-58), designed and animated by Ray Harryhausen, engineered by Ray’s father Fred. First came the dinosaurs, then John Lasseter’s toys, Nemo and other fish, Ice Age mammals, finally caricatures of human beings (Pixar’s Up), James Cameron’s photorealistic Blue Man Group of Avatars that broke all box-office records and eventually there will be truly ‘life-like’ people, authentic reproductions which one day might even accept Academy Awards for Best Actress or Best Actor. 2 According to director Theo Mezger, Von Braun also helped a former employee, who by then was in charge of the technical facilities of Bavaria Studios in Munich, on the making of German TV series, Raumpatrouille, in the mid-1960s. R OLF G IESEN 114 In their striving for naturalism and photo-realism Americans seem to have fewer and fewer problems to reproduce believable human beings. In the long run synthetic actors will be unavoidable as we all need those ghostly avatars (a term taken from Sanskrit) representing us in the world wide web of digital images. Thus, one could argue, a new ‘master race’ of people is being created and future generations will be raised according to and accustomed to the aesthetics of the digital age from childhood on, preferring the sometimes questionable plastic surgery of the computer to the real thing. Synthespians In the history of animated films this process was supported by Max Fleischer’s rotoscoping device, which allowed artists to copy human movements exactly on drawings. In digital animation we advanced from biomechanics to what we now call motion analysis and motion capture. Synthetic actors, synthespians, will not only absorb our physical identity and movements like the ‘body snatchers’ from George Romero’s zombie world but will commence and master artificial intelligence which would make their appearance in an interactive scenario much more interesting and unpredictable. In interactive environments, more successful by now than the story-wise analogue product of the movie industry, one can better work with digital actors, as they are easy to transfer cross media, through the transcultural spaces of one medium to another. Out of once primitive video and computer games true parallel worlds will evolve one day, and the viewers thrown into them might either be seized and hypnotized by an irresistible comic world of sheer banality or overwhelmed by unknown optical lyric as Paul Wegener decades ago had imagined and hoped for. The question is if the animated images of the future will be created by the growing forces of dilettantes under the wings of YouTube who will by then have acquired cheap but greatly improved software as easily to handle for everybody as a photo camera or by professionals and, in the best case, devoted artists who are aware their an ethical responsibility. Standardization of Animation and Digital Media Product in Asia Asia and China will play a key role in the combat of digital forces. A quote from China Daily: Real estate and manufacturing are passé. For businesspeople and policymakers, the next gold mine lies in the animation and cartoon industry. Being a high-profit and emission-free, creative industry, animation has received strong government support and been blessed with large capital injections for its development in China in the past two years. More than 20 national-level and hundreds of provincialand regional-level animation clusters cradling the industry have cropped up in these Metropolis, City of the Dead 115 two years, while Beijing and a dozen-odd cities along the country’s coast have declared their ambition to be China’s ‘animation and cartoon capital.’ Welcome to the changing business priorities of 21 st century China. (30 April 2007). Critics, even in China, fear these cultural industries might lead to less culture and more industry, which results in standardization of product, taste and knowledge. The idea of ‘copying’ is an integral part of Asian and Chinese culture. With the demand of the industry to produce more and more, with the chance of financial revenues of billions of dollars there is a lack of quality in the business everywhere which contradicts what actor Paul Wegener foresaw in 1915. In 2008, China produced a total of more than 130,000 minutes of animation. In a mass like this it is almost impossible to detect any quality. So there are challenges as well as great dangers in the beautiful new world of digitally animated imagery, especially in manipulating life-like images. Is there a chance to escape the dangers of pictorial mass production for an overpopulated world that might end in the helpless, isolated cyberspace worlds of a William Gibson? Phantomology and Disembodiment While there might be synthetic societies commanding artificial intelligence as told by author Daniel Francis Galouye (Simulacron-3, 1964), a book from which the Matrix trilogy heavily borrowed, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Welt am Draht, the first film version of Galouye’s novel), Ray Kurzweil, America’s futurologist of the cyborg age, already predicts disembodiment. In less than a hundred years, images might be broadcast straight into the human brain which will serve as the ideal interface between the human and the digital world. In less than a thousand years, parts of mankind might have merged with the digital world. Right now we are on the threshold to virtualization. Phantomology, i.e., not putting the tiger into the tank but the body right into the brain, might become a welcome alternative to escape overpopulation on a polluted planet and a way to fulfill the spiritual ideal of Christianity. What Stanislaw Lem termed “phantomization” will allow no return to the world of the living but condemn the users to continue as spiritual record somewhere in Nirvana (another term from Sanskrit) with the total control of the human subconscious mind, its dreams and nightmares as side effect. In an interactive world, emotions will no more be evoked by means of empathy. Currently Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman (Oscar-nominated for Waltz with Bashir), a George Romero fan, prepares a film version of Stanislaw Lem’s 1971-published book The Futurological Congress in both live action and Flash animation. He hired American actress Robin Wright (of Forrest Gump R OLF G IESEN 116 fame) to play herself and sell her complete image and identity to Paramount Nagasaki. First the global company will release her motion capture avatar on screen, then use biochemistry and drugs to make everybody feel like their idol and create an imagery of a stunning environment that is no more than camouflage. One of the elder statesmen of visual special effects, Douglas Trumbull (2001, Brainstorm), predicted artificial manipulation and control of emotions to be one of the most powerful, dangerous tools. Biochemistry might play a key role in the Brave New Worlds of the Future. Fig 5: Artwork from China’s first ecological animation project: “Shanghai Super Kids,” supervised by Rolf Giesen (CUC Anima, Communication University of China Beijing) and Martin Zimper (The Zurich University of The Arts). Metropolis, City of the Dead 117 Works Cited Bogdanovich, Peter. Fritz Lang in America. London: Studio Vista, 1967, Eisenschitz, Bernard, Paula Félix-Didier, Kristina Jaspers, and Martin Koerber. Fritz Langs Metropolis. ARTE Edition. Munich: belleville, 2010. Giesen, Rolf. “Die digitalen Welten der Moving Images.“ FKT: Die Fachzeitschrift für Fernsehen, Film und elektronische Medien. Berlin: Fachverlag Schiele & Schön, 2007. 11-13. Giesen, Rolf and Claudia Meglin. Künstliche Welten. Hamburg: Europa Verlag, 2000. Rickitt, Richard. Special Effects: The History and Technique. New York: Billboard Books, 2007. Vaz, Mark Cotta and Patricia Rose Duignan. Industrial Light & Magic: Into the Digital Realm. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996. III. Urbanity, Ecology, and the Environment