The End of Cinema – A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age

The article is accessible at the following address: http://www.lalibre.be/culture/cinema/spielberg-et-jackson-pour-tintin-51b89320e4b0de6db9afaf65.

Peter Jackson’s comments can be translated as follows:

Peter Jackson nevertheless remarked that ‘We’re making them look photorealistic; the fibres of their clothing, the pores of their skin and each individual hair. They look exactly like real people – but real Hergé people!’

The article is accessible at the following address: http://www.lalibre.be/culture/cinema/spielberg-et-jackson-pour-tintin-51b89320e4b0de6db9afaf65.

Steven Spielberg’s comments can be translated as follows:

‘Hergé’s heroes had come to life, with emotions and a soul which far surpassed anything we had seen to date in synthetic images,’ Steven Spielberg remarked about the test performed at WETA.

The interview is accessible online (http://archives.lesoir.be/jamie-bell-tintin-est-tres-complexe-_t-20111026-01MVR5.html). In another article in Le Soir published the same day, entitled “Tintin au pays de Spielberg” (“Tintin in the Land of Spielberg”), Philippe Manche also quotes Andy Serkis, who played Haddock and who goes one step further by drawing attention to the need to use parsimoniously a technique as precise as this, with such a direct “recording synergy” with the body:

The technology is so precise, it responds to the slightest movement, that you mustn’t overdo it. You also have to be extremely aware of the way in which you use your own body (http://www.lesoir.be/archives?url=/culture/cinema/2011-10-26/tintin-au-pays-de-spielberg-872686.php).

He concludes that the viewer’s reverie in the face of profilmic reality is one of the pleasures of cinema, “including with special effects films from olden days (how big was the scale model of this space ship they built?)” and that we “might think that performance capture is a new form that [this reverie] has recently taken” (ibid., p. 71).