Motion capture mediation et al.

I was recently directed by a poster on a message board to this fascinating featurette, which touts the innovative marriage of technology and artistic virtuosity by an actor.  Andy Serkis is already getting Oscar buzz for his performance as Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes.  Caesar is an ape, but instead of those wonky body suits you remember from the original Planet of the Apes, he is rendered with the latest advances in motion capture technology.  The question on the board was whether or not Serkis deserves an Oscar nomination, but I think the question has broader implications than that.  Many films in the last several years have featured performances delivered with the aid of mo-cap technology, the real question, for me, is how these technological advances should (or will) affect the way we think about film acting itself.

Musings inspired by the May/June ’11 issue of Film Comment: thoughts on Woody Allen, Francis Lawrence, and genuine populism in film criticism

The new issue of Film Comment is out; though it hasn’t yet arrived in my mailbox, some of the goodies are available online.  I’d like to comment on three of the articles.  First and foremost, David Bordwell contributes an article on how the divide between ivory tower intellectuals (my term, not his) and amateur film buffs (ditto) is bridged by his own innovative work.  My summary of his thoughts may cast him in a bit more of an egocentric role than his own words, but given how much I esteem his work, I won’t begrudge the man a little egocentricity.  He’s earned it.  On a basic level, it seems to me that his argument is thus: there needn’t be a sharp, hostile divide between highly theoretical analysis and less analytical celebrations.  He ends the article by citing the Web as a place where that divide can be bridged constructively:

Cineliteracy: Who’s leading the charge?

“If anything I have said here sounds “elitist,” you might consider the vast movement we see occurring in this country’s politics, especially on the far right, where any learning at all is equated with elitism and any experience in public office is equated with being tainted. When our educational system is being systematically downgraded, expecting people to learn things is simple common sense.” – Kristin Thompson

The above quote is the final thought in a recent post at David Bordwell’s blog, in which Thompson muses over the fact that people who have little working knowledge of film — let alone expertise — try to engage her (and other film buffs and scholars) on the topic of movies, when the end result is almost always the same.  To wit, the film expert comes across as an elitist snob, and the average viewer awkwardly shifts to another bit of small talk.  It’s a common occurrence; I’ve experienced the same thing.  Over and over.  (And over again.)  I’m not even a proper expert, as Thompson or Jim Emerson (whose blog post inspired hers) is.  Thompson takes a few stabs at possible psychological motives, but it’s all anecdotal.  There’s no substantial body of research she cites one way or another.  What she says seems consistent, on the whole, with what I’ve observed in my own interactions with people who do not share a crazed enthusiasm for cinema.