The wow factor: A scene from Star Wars

This isn?t the first time an emerging technology applied without sufficient forethought has proved banal. But film media?s unscrupulous love affair with computer- generated imagery (CGI) techniques as crowd-pleaser could reopen even the best-healed wounds. Since Eisenstein?s days, cinema has been a medium unparalleled in its scope and breadth. Sadly, filmmakers of recent years have swapped class for crassness, wielded cameras to show vistas, not visages. As Alfred Hitchcock did in Vertigo, Sergei Eisenstein in Battleship Potemkin, and Ingmar Bergman in The Rite, cameras aren?t brought up close any more. Instead, they seek apparent glamour in a technocratic world where the one with the widest possible shot and the wildest CGI tops box offices. A silent degeneration is underway in the film industry.

Embracing digital technology indeed spawned a revolution. But add to that the cumulative ?wows? generated by the sudden brain activities of humans unfamiliar to react to impossible situations like dinosaurs gulping down desultory meals or cyborgs walking rampant on crowded streets, and you get an approximate idea of the ensuing anarchy that engulfed cinema. But how one could woo viewers by bombarding them with more of the same is a thought best left for future generations. With the entire film industry chasing after technological fantasies while clearly lacking an artistic backbone, the end might be closer than is intuitively imagined. Bound to fail due, if nothing else, to its own weightlessness, this raises timely questions about art?s misdirected adoption of technology.

Consider George Lucas?s first Star Wars prequel, The Phantom Menace, a movie which could safely be relegated to the heap of infinite boredom. How ? or more importantly ? why CGI has killed its foreground and produced faceless actors will be the subject of intense research by future critics. And while other hi-tech movies have augmented an audience gasping at the destruction of major metropolises, some of us have barely held our breaths long enough to wonder if enough neurons were spared to craft a quality work unspoiled by CGI.

It?s worthwhile, therefore, to peer into the styles of the most talented directors of today. Things, respectfully, are not worse off with those who even, when shooting digital, hadn?t allowed CGI to foil their attempts at creating masterpieces. Acclaimed as one of the best, Iran?s Abbas Kiarostami has embraced the digital media in his recently released Ten. A movie that ought to force Lucas back to the old drawing board, the new technology has had zero effect on Kiarostami. With every shot in the movie except one being a close-up, Ten rings like the words of Sartre in a trapped car, like Beckett in Iran with no escape. Just as pristine nature is best left untouched by the harmful ravages of society, so too the truest art seems best enacted without an incorrectly administered dose of technology.