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Digital cinema: The transformation of film

practice and aesthetics

Article in New Cinemas Journal of Contemporary Film · May 2006

DOI: 10.1386/ncin.4.1.21_1

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New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film Volume 4 Number 1 © 2006 Intellect Ltd
Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ncin.4.1.21/1

Digital cinema: The transformation of

film practice and aesthetics
Adam Ganz Royal Holloway, University of London
Lina Khatib Royal Holloway, University of London

Abstract Keywords
This article discusses the emergence of digital cinema and the effect it has had on the digital cinema
practice of filmmaking as well as on the aesthetics of cinema. The article does not Iranian cinema
look at digital cinema as a kind of technological determinism; rather, digital film- film aesthetics
making is looked at as creating new possibilities for cinemas around the world. The performance
article proposes a new way of thinking about digital cinema that locates it within the filmmaking
process of cinematic development, yet that also recognizes the medium’s uniqueness
in transforming the relationship between the director, the actors and the audience, as
well as in impacting narrative structure, performance and image. The article applies
this theory to the case of cinema in Iran, where digital technology is having a
remarkable effect on the existence of the industry in a new, freer form.

Everything in the world, from every possible angle.

(Sontag 2002: 76)

This article looks at the effect of the merging of film and electronic media to
create the phenomenon of digital cinema. Digital cinema is defined for the
purposes of this article as both a technical phenomenon whereby films can
now be originated, edited and distributed through digital/electronic media,
and also the kind of cinema that has come to be through those changes. Film
theorists and practitioners are divided in their stance towards digital cinema,
with opinions oscillating between regarding it as a revolution (Ohanian and
Phillips 2000) and an evolution (Le Grice 2001) of cinema practice. Our
argument is that digital technology has transformed cinema in the creation
and recording of the image and sound, how the two are edited and manipu-
lated, and how the final piece is delivered to the audience and watched by
them. But this is not just a technological transformation; it is most of all a
transformation of perception. Not only are the means by which image and
sound are recorded and manipulated fundamentally different, far more
important is the different significance that these transformed images and
sounds have on the relationship between the film and its audience. In what
follows, we will first give an assessment of the impact of digital technology on
the practice of filmmaking and the aesthetics of cinema, tracing the journey
to digital cinema, and then examine the application of this practice and
aesthetics in Iranian cinema, focusing on two landmark digital Iranian films:
Ten (2002) by Abbas Kiarostami and 20 Fingers (2005) by Mania Akbari.

NCJCF 4 (1) 21–36 © Intellect Ltd 2006 21

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Digital technology, by transforming the relationship between the

actors, the director and the camera, has offered a moment of liberation or
rather a series of liberations, because it allows a fundamental redefinition
of what cinema can be. It is nothing less than a re-imagining of the spatial
relationships between the different parties. Film was a language of respect,
with privileged access to the camera and the viewfinder. It was accorded
an enigmatic numinous quality, which came from the trust and secrecy
involved in fixing a chemical image on light-sensitive material. Only the
camera operator could watch the image as it was being made. Even the
director could only check what the film had recorded at the rushes screen-
ing the next day. Sidney Lumet describes this unspoken relationship in his
book Making Movies:

(. . .) basically the operator is filming the picture at all times during the take.
His sense of beauty, of drama, his sense of rhythm, his sense of composition—
all that is critical to the creativity of the shot. His technique has to be practi-
cally subconscious, because I want him watching the actor, not the corners of
his frame. It’s been invariably true that the best camera operators will do their
best take when the actor’s doing his best take. It sounds romantic but it’s part
of the mystique of moviemaking (1996: 118).

John Belton in Digital Cinema: A False Revolution (2002) has argued that
digital cinema as a practice offers nothing new for the audience. But we
argue that digital filmmaking, in conjoining the traditional methods and
rituals of filmmaking with the different traditions of the electronic media,
is creating a new kind of practice associated with the purely digital image.

The journey to digital cinema

What are the defining characteristics of digital cinema? A major difference
between the making of film and digital drama is the spatial relationship
between the players. The feature film depends on one person looking
through a camera while the director engages with the actors. There is a
clear difference between space behind and in front of the camera, which are
connected by a clear one-way gaze in which the director and the camera
look at the actors and the actors do not look back. Furthermore, these
places were separated in time as well as space, born from the requirements
of the physical properties of the medium (the chemical recording of light on
film and the physical manipulation of celluloid). Viewing the developed film
was dependent on an industrial process and a highly developed infrastruc-
ture. Space in digital drama is vague. There is a zone rather than one angle.
This is because first, there are often multiple cameras, and second, because
there is feedback and crossover between the area behind and in front of the
camera. There is usually a monitor or monitors on set available to the crew
and actors. Tape can be rewound and reviewed instantly.
One can identify the first stage in this linking between those two areas
and perhaps the first step towards a digital cinema as the video assist –
invented to assist comedian Jerry Lewis with the process of simultaneously
acting and directing. The patent ‘Closed Circuit Television Applied to
Motion Pictures’ is owned by Lewis. It was first used on the film The Bellboy

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(directed by and starring Lewis) in 1960, allowing him to monitor his per-
formance in front of the camera while directing it from behind the camera.
But it rapidly had a different effect from the one first imagined, because
the electronic image that appeared on the monitor was available to be
watched by anyone in the vicinity.

Associate Producer Ernest Glucksman used the monitor many times to view
rehearsals and takes and sometimes after discussions with Lewis, changes
were made. Cinematographer Haskell Boggs, ASC used the monitor to evalu-
ate set-ups. Arthur Schmidt, the editorial supervisor, and Claire Behnke, the
script supervisor, used the monitor when access to the set was restricted by
equipment. The set painter Gene Acker sometimes used the monitor to locate
highlights to be dulled down. The assistant directors viewed the monitor
occasionally to observe empty areas to be filled or crossed with extras.
(Frediani 1995/6)

Suddenly the private world of the viewfinder was a public property and the
sightlines of cinema changed. Instead of the clear arrow from camera
operator to performers there was a potential for all of those involved in
working on the film to see, reflect and act on what was being made.
The effect of the video assist on the practice of filmmaking is that ‘(the
director) no longer confronts the world directly but looks instead at an
image formed through an optical contraption. In other words a mediation
is taking place’ (Geuens 1996: 21). And this digital mediation is becoming
the primary way by which we record and receive the world. The image
now begins as well as ends on a screen and the mediated image has grad-
ually become the primary one. We can see, in the evolution of the home
video camera, how the screen has developed, first as an appendage to the
camera, and now as an integral part of the design. Moreover the addition
of the video assist to the camera had the perhaps paradoxical effect of
making the camera more manoeuvrable, giving rise to the Steadicam, the
remote-controlled crane and all other devices, where the camera operator
does not need to look directly through the camera. These developments
continue the change in spatial relationships between subject and object.
What is transformed by the video assist is not only who can view the
image and where and when they can view it, but also how the camera
sees, and where it can go.
The second key moment in the development of digital cinema was the
project developed by Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios, which he
described in his address at the 51st Annual Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences telecast (April 9, 1979):

We’re on the eve of something that’s going to make the Industrial Revolution
look like a small out-of-town tryout. I can see a communications revolution
that’s about movies and art and music and digital electronics and satellites,
but above all, human talent and it’s going to make the masters of the
cinema, from whom we’ve inherited this business, believe things that they
would have thought impossible.
(quoted in Brown 1982)

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Coppola attempted at Zoetrope Studios (significantly established in San

Francisco, away from the film industry’s traditional base in Los Angeles, but
close to the burgeoning computer industry of Silicon Valley) to synthesise
film and television practices in what he called the electronic cinema. At the
heart of the operation was the Silverfish, a custom-designed motor vehicle
with a video editing system, an audio mixing console and video and audio
feeds from the five sound stages where the director could preview something
as close as possible to the finished film. As Thomas Brown, who supervised
the design of the Silverfish said, ‘Francis envisioned an environment where
image, sound and data flowed like hot and cold water’ (Zoetrope 2005).
Although the technology was not yet portable as we now understand it,
portability was central to the way in which this was envisaged. The Silverfish
could be moved from place to place around the sound stages and the director
could be simultaneously remote from the action and present – ‘if needed
he could easily walk on to the sound stage’ (Brown 1982).
The electronic cinema envisaged a transformation of the traditional orga-
nizational structure of film production by enabling pre-production, produc-
tion, and post-production to occur simultaneously. The script could change
in response to the input of the actors, or the way a scene was edited. But the
technology was not yet able to cope particularly with the demands of post-
production. The subsequent development of non-linear editing systems such
as Avid and Lightworks and the enormous leaps forward in digital compres-
sion, digital storage and distribution have meant Coppola’s vision has come
to pass, and made it more available than he could have imagined. Digital
cinema transforms sounds and images to zeroes and ones, which can flow
seamlessly between what were previously discrete areas of production.
As Walter Murch, one of Coppola’s editors on Apocalypse Now, wrote in
1999,

(. . .) digital techniques naturally tend to integrate with each other because

of their mathematical commonality; thus they come under easier control by
a single person. I can see this already happening in the sound-mixing work
that I do, where the borders between sound editing and mixing have begun
to blur. And it is about to happen in the further integration of film editing
and visual effects.

Films can be recorded or created on computer; they are edited on com-

puter; if they have special effects they will be created in the computer. The
physical limitations of the medium, which defined many of the practices of
traditional cinema, have become more or less irrelevant.
It is not just that digital filmmaking means generally speaking fewer
crew, lightweight equipment, less money, tapes cheaper than film stock (or
no tapes at all); freeing film from the physical effect of light on silver has
meant that digital technology is potentially available to all. Film is a com-
paratively unstable fragile medium. It needs to be protected from light and
extremes of temperature. Its very expense aestheticizes. Often the film is
more expensive than the things it is filming. The digital images that
replace it have no physical existence, can be copied for nothing and are
more or less indestructible.

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There is a physical limit on the number of cuts that can be made on a

piece of celluloid, and on the amount of manipulation that an image can
take. A range of practices which were only available to big budget studio
drama (like special effects, high shooting ratios, and on-camera improvisa-
tion) are now available to all filmmakers. For example, the particular kind
of studied naturalism epitomised by the likes of Pacino, Brando and De
Niro, and dependent on creating a performance from multiple takes,
improvisation and rehearsing on camera, has become available to cinema
of all kinds and all budgets. The finished film is increasingly likely to be
viewed as a digital artefact. Increasingly the DVD is the original. Star Wars:
Attack of the Clones (Lucas 2002) was outputted to the DVD as code not
from an image. That is to say it existed in its primary form not as a film
but as computer code. Digital projection, the final stage in the migration to
digital, is only a few years away.

The private and the public in digital cinema

Susan Sontag writes in On Photography, first published in 1977 as Coppola
was editing Apocalypse Now:

One of the effects of the newer camera technology (video, instant movies)
has been to turn even more of what is done with cameras in private to nar-
cissistic uses, that is, to self-surveillance. But such currently popular uses of
image-feedback in the bedroom, the therapy session and the weekend confer-
ence seem far less momentous than video’s potential for surveillance in
public places (2002: 177).

What Sontag could not have foreseen was that, with this new technology,
there would be ultimately no distinction between the private and the
public. Both the public and private spaces have become above all filmed
spaces, spaces where filmmaking can and does occur. There is nowhere
that is not accessible to the digital camera, whether inside the body, or outside
the Earth’s atmosphere. Simply put, there are more cameras filming more
people in more places than ever before. The images will consist of both
impersonal, ‘objective’ surveillance images and private images shot on hand-
held cameras and mobile phones.
The change in our relationship to digital images and the different ways
they are used in practice has transformed the idea of filmed space. If cameras
are ever-present and always recording, the space where the drama occurs is
no longer assembled from shot reverse-shot or careful camera moves.
Instead there is a zone, in which the camera(s) operate. This consists of a
web of complex spatial relationships inhabited jointly by the audience, the
filmmaker and the actors; the audience is encouraged to think of themselves
as potentially inhabiting any part of this space and thus (like Jerry Lewis in
The Bellboy) to be potentially both behind and in front of the camera.

The aesthetics of digital cinema

The cost of stock and processing in traditional cinema means that many takes
that were shot were not printed and would never see the light of day. The
digital camera does not forget. It sees everything and it records everything.

Digital cinema: The transformation of film practice and aesthetics 25

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And everything it remembers can be easily found. It is unsurprising, then,

that the sense of privileged access and disclosing secrets is a common theme
in digital cinema. Take as an example Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme film Festen
(1998), perhaps the defining work of the Dogme movement. It is significant
that this film, which dealt with incest in an apparently successful bourgeois
family, is about re-remembering and revealing. The digital allows the repre-
sentation of multiple yet fractured points of view, which gives a sense of privi-
leged yet partial access. The audience is everywhere and nowhere at the same
time. A comparatively conventional screenplay (which could almost have
been written by Terence Rattigan and has been a success throughout Europe
as a theatre piece) is transformed through the prism of the digital cinema and
its different relationship between the audience the performers and their
stories. We have a different kind of access. We never watch the story directly,
instead we are present where it occurs, we overhear it. The analogy is with a
camera at a football match that films the players in the tunnel before they
appear on the pitch. We are present before and after the normal boundaries of
the story.
The digital camera continues to look when the film camera averts its
gaze. We can see this in the blurring of boundaries between art film and
pornography in Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs (2004), or in Lars von
Trier’s Dogville (2003) where the audience has privileged access to the
various levels of illusion which go into the making of the drama. As well as
watching a drama with many similarities with the stylized studio dramas
of the forties and fifties, we are observing and participating in how the
drama is made. The film simultaneously constructs and deconstructs
Nicole Kidman’s virtuoso performance, and we are constantly reminded of
all the aspects of the cinematic illusion as we are re-drawn into it. As the
actors must, we too construct the sets which exist only as chalk lines on
the studio floor. The audience inhabits the same dramatic space with
apparently the same privileges as the actors and filmmakers.
Digital cinema allows for a different kind of relationship between actor
and camera, because the digital video camera looks in a different way.
Since the digital camera is potentially always on, the performers are
potentially always performing. Cameras are cheaper and more mobile: it is
common for more than one camera to be on set. The camera is often
explicitly or implicitly returned to the context. It is on the dashboard of the
car. It is part of the action. It is in the hands of the actors. There are often
many points of view represented instead of only one. The camera is not
attempting to frame the action but only to cover it. As we have grown used
to the non-aesthetics of the CCTV camera, which does not frame, but
instead is placed to record activities that occur in a given environment, we
also accept the non-aesthetics of the filmmaker’s camera(s) – as Abbas
Kiarostami’s in Ten (2002) – as being one of a number of ways of record-
ing the action.

To us, the difference between the photographer as an individual eye and the
photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the difference
often regarded, mistakenly as separating photography as art from photogra-
phy as document. But both are logical extensions of what photography

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means: note-taking on, potentially, everything in the world from every possi-
ble angle.
(Sontag 2002: 176)

This changing relationship between camera and ‘action’ has an impact on

both the acting and the directing, marking a return of improvisational
techniques to storytelling. Stephen Soderbergh (whose breakthrough film
Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989) was dependent on the perception of a quali-
tative difference in the personal electronic image – Sex, Lies and Super 8
would have been a very different film) describes this process when dis-
cussing the making of Bubble (2005), shot on hi-definition video: ‘Every
night I had the footage in my room on my computer so we would watch
what we shot that day. I could edit scenes and shoot it differently the next
day. It was amazing’ (Christie 2005b). Sigourney Weaver’s experience
while making Tadpole (2002) is another example, described by the film’s
director Gary Winick:

She loved it. She said it’s like a hybrid between the theatre and film. Because
mini digital video is such a performance-oriented medium and she was able
to just act and act which I kind of feel is the exact opposite of a film day.
(Christie 2005a: 52)

It is not just that a much greater percentage of the day is taken up in

acting, but that actors are freer to move in space, and lines of action are
no longer so defined by what lighting is possible, allowing much more time
to be spent in the act of performance. The zone of action can be pre-lit and
the stock is sufficiently sensitive to operate under all kinds of conditions.
The fourth rule of the Dogme’s vow of chastity makes this clear: ‘Special
lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene
must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera.)’ (Dogme 95
1995). What both the objective and intensely subjective uses of the tech-
nology through which we increasingly experience the world have in
common is our lack of aesthetic expectations. Classic three-point lighting
is not a feature either of the CCTV image or the home video.
The elision of the boundaries between the space in front and behind
the camera means that the actors participate in the making of the film in
a different way. The boundaries between the actor as person and the actor
in performance become less clear when all can be recorded and edited into
the finished film. In an interview with the Moviecrazed website actor Paul
Bettany describes the process of working on Dogville:

There’s just me and Nicole with mikes in our hair—so there’s no boom—and
Lars with a video camera that has a tape in it that runs for an hour. . . . You
can’t hope to know what you’ve done, remember what you’ve done . . . you
just have to let go . . . I’ve got no sensation of how I did, because 98 percent
of it isn’t going to be in the movie. And 98 percent of it, I can guarantee you,
is some of the worst acting I’ve ever done in my life. So I’m really banking on
the other two percent being left in the film.
(Flatley 2002)

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The process of acting becomes less about performing for a single observer
and more about the condition of being observed, whether by a small fixed
camera, a camera in the hands of another actor, or by several cameras
simultaneously. The techniques of making are adapted to a dynamic rela-
tionship between director, performer and audience.
In the digital film the immediacy of the image becomes the aesthetic.
And that has led to a transformation of the nature of cinema. As Thomas
Brown then recognised, electronic cinema will eventually cease to be an
auxiliary tool of the filmmaking process: it will be the process. These
effects have proportionately been felt more in countries without an estab-
lished film industry or where that industry was subject to strong central
control. The technology is not only transforming the film industry, it is
allowing film industries to exist where there were none previously. In the
second part of this article we are going to see to what extent these insights
are true in the Iranian cinema.

Digital Iranian cinema

The introduction of digital technology to emerging film industries like
Iran’s has allowed the creation of all kinds of cinema at once in places that
did not have cinema before or where cinema practice was limited. The
affordability and ease of use of the technology have pushed the boundaries
of form in those industries, enabling the instantaneous existence of an old
form (film) as well as a new one (digital). Digital cinema has therefore
enabled the creation of industries where it would have been impossible
otherwise. As Geoff Andrew argues,

the very notion of world cinema is about empowerment: about people telling
their own stories rather than simply accepting what Hollywood and its
clones offer. Digital cameras, because they’re comparatively small, inexpen-
sive, portable, versatile, and able to record and store images in far greater
quantities and in a far wider range of conditions than other cameras, play a
crucial role in that empowerment (2005: 13).

Palestine for example is a place with few cinema resources where digital
technology has allowed several young people to make films under the
harsh conditions of Israeli occupation. Digital technology is also beneficial
in reducing distribution costs. For a thriving industry like Bollywood, the
process of refitting Indian cinema theatres with digital projectors that
started in 2003 has meant not only better picture quality, but also the
ability to premiere films simultaneously in different cinemas across India
(Chadha 2003).
Moreover, as we have argued above, digital cinema makes a new kind
of aesthetic possible. This may explain why world cinema directors who
have access to relatively high budgets sometimes choose to shoot films digi-
tally. The Egyptian director Mohammad Khan for example, known for
making epics like Ayyam Es-Sadat (Days of Sadat, 2001), chose to shoot his
most recent film Klephty (2004) on digital video. Khan says that digital
technology allows him to narrate the story differently (Habshian 2004).
The story of a streetwise thief filmed on the crowded streets of Cairo,

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Klephty is dependent on hand-held digital cameras that give it a ‘rougher

edge’ than Khan’s 35mm films. Khan’s deliberate use of digital cameras
stems from his desire to make a film that is ‘docudramatic’ in nature, a
film that depends on ‘stolen shots, on people going about their ordinary
lives becoming part of the backdrop and texture of the film’ (El-Assyouti
2004). The film’s foregrounding of the city of Cairo necessitated the use of
a small crew – ten members on location compared to fifty working on Days
of Sadat – that enabled a greater mobility and the scope to shoot ninety
per cent of the film on location in one of the world’s most crowded cities
(El-Assyouti 2004).
Khan’s experience reminds us of that of Abbas Kiarostami’s while
working on his landmark film Ten. Like Khan, Kiarostami is a world
cinema veteran who chose to use digital technology to shoot on location.
The location in Ten is limited to a car driven by its main character Mania,
played by Mania Akbari. Akbari herself has directed and starred in a film
titled 20 Fingers, which is a homage to Ten, where location is mainly a
series of moving vehicles: cars, a taxi, a motorbike, a boat, a cablecar and
a train. However, for those two films, digital technology is more than just a
convenient way of shooting in confined spaces. One of the major impacts
of digital technology on Iranian cinema is its challenge to censorship.
Iran’s cinema is a heavily regulated industry where censorship occurs at
every stage of the filmmaking process: scriptwriting, shooting, postproduc-
tion and distribution (Golmakani 1992). Samira Makhmalbaf (2000)
argues that digital technology allows filmmakers to ‘screen’ their films on
the internet, thereby evading the government’s control on distribution.
Another advantage of digital is that

[t]he only way to shoot in Iran on 35mm is to hire equipment from the
central authorities, which means script approval and a government minder
attending the shoot to ensure the script is adhered to. Shooting on digital
video requires script approval, but no minder is sent along.
(Reuters 2004)

The result of this is that for Ten and 20 Fingers, Kiarostami and Akbari
respectively submitted scripts for approval that were sanitized versions of
the ones they proceeded to make. But both films do not rely on traditional
scripts; while they are not strictly improvised, the films present characters
telling stories in a way that appears ‘unacted’, and therefore both have a
natural feel in terms of image and performance. In Ten specifically, the
characters are ordinary people like us, giving the film a documentary feel.
However what makes Ten and 20 Fingers different from ‘docudramas’ is
that first, their stylistic minimalism takes their subject matter beyond
drama, documentary, or melodrama (or any mixture of those categories),
meaning that they are films that go beyond genre conventions. And
second, that they can be classified as non-plot cinema, telling us stories
without a ‘narrative’. What we mean by this is not only that the films
cannot be looked at from a linear/non-linear narrative convention, but
also that they go beyond the expectation of narrative; in the words of
Kiarostami, ‘[w]ith 35mm there’s an expectation for you to tell a story. But

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with digital, I think we’ll get used to new styles [of film-making], so maybe
we need not rely so much on stories’ (2003, quoted in Andrew 2005: 35).
This intention to go beyond traditional narrative cinema can be seen as
creating ‘a cinema without a story (. . .) cinema before the story of cinema,
and cinema that does not necessarily have to tell a story, although stories
might well surface in this kind of cinema’ (Bergala 2004: 45, quoted in
Elena 2005: 183). Divided into separate sequences (ten in the case of Ten
and seven in the case of 20 Fingers), the stories in the films are circular
and episodic. Each sequence stands alone and can be understood as a
whole piece of art, yet viewed together, the sequences take us on a ride
into the inner lives of Iranian women. Those lives are presented to us as
moments and feelings mostly through long takes that contain few almost
invisible cuts in Ten, and through single shot episodes in the case of 20
Fingers. Mania Akbari (2005) has assessed the use of single shots as
enabling the editing to be in the acting.
Digital technology has pushed the boundaries of seeing in less observed
societies, showing us things filmed for the first time. This is seen in the
way Ten and 20 Fingers present their subject matter: the stories of women
in Iran. Ten presents ten sequences depicting conversations in a car driven
by a young Iranian woman, which together give us a glimpse of the life of
women in modern Iran: the conversations tackle the relationship between
the woman and her ten-year-old son, her divorce, the problems faced by
women like the breakdown of relationships, prostitution and abortion, and
are conducted between the driver and a variety of female passengers, in
addition to her son. 20 Fingers goes further into addressing women’s issues
through seven sequences depicting seven different couples played by the
same actors, who are also the film’s director (the actress, Mania) and pro-
ducer (the actor, Bijan). Each of the couples engages in a conversation
about controversial issues regarding women in Iranian society, from vir-
ginity to adultery to lesbianism and abortion. The films illustrate digital
technology’s changing of the relationship with the subject of film, how it
allows us to go places we do not normally go. We listen in on the conver-
sation between Mania and her passengers in Ten, and between her and
Bijan in 20 Fingers, but we are not guided by the director as is the case in
a traditional narrative film. The stories in both films are intimate and
revealing. They allow us to inhabit what is a woman’s space without going
through the filter of a film crew. The drama in the films comes not from
the stories they tell (Iranian cinema has in the recent years produced a
number of films about women’s issues, like Dayereh (The Circle, Panahi,
2000) and Roozi ke zan shodam (The Day I Became a Woman, Meshkini,
2000)), but from the audience’s seemingly direct access to that space. The
audience is given privileged access to the space, and through listening to
fragmented conversations, is allowed to deduce what the story is. In other
words, the stories in themselves are not ‘different’, it is the relationship
between subject and object that makes them different. The audience is
allowed to make a decision about the material that the director would
make. Moreover, the absence of wide shots in both films means that the
space we see is intimate, allowing for a different representation of image
and performance.

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Looking on the inside and the outside

As we have argued above, digital technology presents room for experimen-
tation. We can go as far as saying that it demands informality in mise-en-
scene. One of the most striking aspects of Ten and 20 Fingers is the way the
films look. Shot mainly in moving vehicles, the films are testimony to the
fluidity of working with digital cameras. Both rely on very narrow camera
angles, with Ten shot using two cameras fixed on the dashboard of the car,
each pointing at the driver and the passenger seat, respectively. The fact
that the cameras in Ten are static means that the film’s frames are
unusual. Traditionally, the frame follows the characters as they move in
space, giving the audience a privileged position that allows them control
over the spatial movements of the characters. But in Ten, the frame
becomes a window through which we peep on the characters, transform-
ing the audience into voyeurs who do not have full access to the move-
ments of those they are observing. Thus the characters sometimes move
slightly outside of the frame, and appear differently in the space of the pas-
senger seat: this is most clearly seen when sequence ten ends and
sequence nine begins: in sequence ten, the passenger seat is occupied by
the ten-year-old boy Amin, his child proportions giving the frame plenty of
space to fully record his movements as he shifts in his seat. In nine,
Mania’s adult sister replaces Amin, and we are immediately struck by how
her presence almost fully fills the screen space. Kiarostami does not seem
to adjust the zoom on the camera to give the actress more space within
the frame, thus making the camera mimic the natural eye of the
viewer/voyeur.
Being set almost entirely in the car, Ten does not allow us to see what is
happening outside it. What we do see is the characters reacting to such
events. Mania comments on the traffic. We see her and her sister looking
at a driver in front of them and commenting on their actions. We accept
what the characters are commenting on despite the events’ happening
outside the frame. The frame almost transforms the scene into a theatrical
piece, where the audience have to use their imagination to fill in the gaps
in ‘real’ imagery as they listen to characters on the stage describing their
surroundings. Kiarostami goes further by sometimes denying access to the
characters themselves. A prostitute who Mania gives a ride to in the car in
sequence seven is only seen for a fraction of a second as she leaves the car.
And in the first 16 minutes of the film we do not see Mania, although we
can hear her arguing with her son Amin. Kiarostami only shows us Amin,
making Mania a disembodied voice. Yet through the argument we are
introduced to Mania’s story: a divorcee who had to lie in court in order to
get a divorce, whose son is unhappy with her new husband and who feels
caught between his parents. By not seeing Mania, we identify with Amin
whose framing in mid shot allows us to register his facial expressions and
body language even before he launches his verbal counter-attacks on his
mother, accusing her of loving no one but herself. Kiarostami has com-
mented on his deliberate use of omissions by saying that it changes the
relationship between the spectator and the film into an active one
(Andrew 2005), which creates a bigger impact on the viewer: ‘To capti-
vate a viewer is to rob him of his reason’ (Kiarostami 2004).

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20 Fingers follows Ten in its use of tight camera angles, however, Akbari
allows the camera to move. But the movement of the camera is also used
to parallel the eye of the viewer/voyeur. Like Ten, 20 Fingers presents char-
acters whom the audience is invited to peep at. However, instead of cutting
between the two characters in each of the seven sequences, Akbari
chooses to have one camera filming the actors, panning left and right,
back and forth between Mania and Bijan as they talk to and argue with
each other. The camera’s movements mirror the movements of our eyes
when we watch two people having a conversation, giving the film a more
natural feel and a sense of immediacy. As Dovey argues, we are sur-
rounded by digital images of ourselves, from mobile phone images to
family videos to CCTV to accidentally appearing on television; therefore,
the digital video image has become ‘the privileged form of (. . .) “truth
telling”, signifying authenticity and an indexical reproduction of the real
world’ (2004: 557). 20 Fingers’ naturalized camera movements can be
seen as a revival of the ethos of 1960s’ Direct Cinema, where the concern
was ‘[h]ow to convey the feeling of being there’ (Leacock 1995, quoted in
Dovey 2004: 557). What takes the film beyond Direct Cinema is that this
feeling is shared by the director and the viewer: because we are sur-
rounded by digital images of ourselves, we are more familiar with the aes-
thetics of the digital image.

The lucidity of performance

Digital cinema’s allowing room for experimentation can be seen as almost
demanding informality in performance. While making Ten, Kiarostami
often directed the actors from the back seat of the car, while in 20 Fingers,
Akbari is both the actor and director, existing behind the camera as well as
in front of it. This new relationship resulted in a transformation of the
space filmed, and in the performance of the actors within this zone. Ten
and 20 Fingers present striking, natural performances by non-professional
actors. Abbas Kiarostami has often commented on Ten as being a film
without a director. In an interview with Geoff Andrew, he compared
directing the film to managing a football team, believing that distancing
himself from the shoots makes the actors more comfortable:

It’s difficult to see who’s the director, me or them [the actors]. Ultimately,
everything belongs to the actors—we just manage the situation. This kind of
directing, I think, is very similar to being a football coach. You prepare your
players and place them in the right places, but once the game is on, there’s
nothing much you can do—you can smoke a cigarette or get nervous, but
you can’t do much. While shooting Ten I was sitting in the backseat, but I
didn’t interfere. Sometimes, I was following in another car, so I was not even
present on the ‘set’, because I thought they would work better in my
absence. Directors don’t always create, they can also destroy with too many
demands. Using non-actors has its own rules and really requires that you
allow them to do their own thing (2005).

Using digital video meant that Kiarostami could use a high shooting ratio
without financial repercussions: the film’s 90 minutes have been edited

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down from an original 23 hours of footage. This gave room for the actors to
improvise as they were being filmed without interruption from the director:
‘while it’s difficult if a scene’s going the wrong way, if I wait a bit they may
come up with something better than I’d have been able to think up’
(Kiarostami 2003, quoted in Andrew 2005: 38). This flexibility in perfor-
mance can be seen as allowing Kiarostami to almost ‘discover’ the film as
he made it. Digital cameras also had an impact on the performances. The
cameras are small and non-intrusive to the extent that they are forgotten
by the actors (Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum 2003). Kiarostami comments:

It’s very true that non-actors feel more comfortable in front of a digital
camera, without the lights and the large crowd around them, and we arrive
at much more intimate moments with them. So I do believe that a film like
Ten could never have been made with a 35mm camera. The first part of the
film lasts 17 minutes, and by the end of that part, the kid has totally forgot-
ten the camera (2005).

Another aspect impacting on performance in the films is their use of

moving vehicles. The characters in cars in Ten and 20 Fingers talk to each
other without having to register each other’s facial expressions, which
gives another dimension of freedom to the actors who do not have to look
at each other, but only do so when they wish to (Kiarostami 2005). In 20
Fingers, the cable car journey in sequence 2 sets a boundary to the con-
versation between Mania and Bijan who is jealous of her dancing with
another man at a party. As she argues that she only did that to get Bijan’s
attention, the cable car arrives at the other side of the snowy valley it has
crossed and with it the conversation abruptly ends. While this is unusual
in terms of filmic conventions, where time is usually manipulated to fit the
narration of a story by characters, in 20 Fingers the technique works to
make the conversation further mimic ‘real life’.
‘Real life’ is also perceived in the films through their pushing the
boundaries of what can be represented. This must be read in the context
of society in Iran, where looking at others is heavily subjected to moral
codes defining what is permissible and what is not. In Ten, the perfor-
mances can be seen as intimate as Kiarostami chooses to show us char-
acters caught off-guard. In sequence nine, the camera focuses on Mania’s
sister as she waits for Mania on her own in the car. We see her adjusting
her veil and absent-mindedly scratching her face – mundane actions that
are striking in their closeness and intimacy, for they are actions from
which, in ‘real life’ as well as in filmic conventions, the viewer (as
observer and audience) may be expected to avert their gaze. Akbari
ensures that the audience recognize themselves in the individual charac-
ters in 20 Fingers – especially the women – by focusing the camera on
and ‘interrupting’ the stories with the mundane actions of everyday life.
The second sequence starts with a side shot of Mania’s head as she applies
lipstick. In the fourth sequence, Mania tells Bijan about a couple who have
had extramarital affairs while absent-mindedly flossing her teeth. In the
following sequence, set in a restaurant, Mania orders food and speaks with
her mouth full. Akbari’s merging of intimate stories and intimate acts are

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testimony to the foregrounding of physicality in digital cinema, and its

linking of the inside of the body and the outside. Moreover, through this
practice, gone is the illusion of seamlessness that cinema traditionally
presents. In its place are ‘“dead moments” [that] enhance the impression
of documentary authenticity’ (Andrew 2005: 48).
However, what makes the films intriguing is their seemingly contradic-
tory combination of this sense of closeness and the distance of observation
and surveillance, or as Dovey puts it, the ‘combination of quasi-scientific
accuracy and voyeuristic pleasure’ (2004: 565). Ten is broken down into
ten sequences divided by the image of the number of each sequence on the
screen counted down to the sound of film reel rolling followed by a bell
resembling that signalling the start of a boxing match, which has a ‘dis-
tancing and formalizing effect’ (Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum 2003: 100).
20 Fingers is more self-reflexive: By playing all the characters themselves,
Mania and Bijan remove the illusion that we are watching ‘real’ people.
We are constantly aware that these characters represent different aspects
of Iranian society. The audience is less likely to identify with individual
characters than with the stories they tell. As Mania Akbari comments,
‘[t]his is real Iranian life’ (Reuters 2004). The film itself emphasizes this
point in its last sequence, where Mania and Bijan are revealed as them-
selves, in the role of actors playing a number of characters. Cruising across
a lake in a boat, Mania tells Bijan ‘each part is one side of yourself ’. Mania’s
statement is also a self-reflexive comment on her role as both actor and
director in the film. In this new cinema, she can be both subject and object.
This fundamental change in the relation between subject and object is
at the heart of digital cinema. Film is aesthetic. Video is demotic. We have
probably seen ourselves on video; we do not know how we look on 35mm
film. On film we look at other people. On video we watch ourselves. We now
all belong to this digitally perceived world, where the real and the pho-
tographed come together. All the tools necessary for a complete industrial
film practice are arriving in places that did not have the infrastructure to
support an indigenous cinema. The technology not only has the potential
to revive the ossified Hollywood cinema, but also to enable storytelling from
different cultures and from people who were previously unheard. The tech-
nology is therefore transforming relationships of power between different
cinemas: it is not only the West that is the bearer of the gaze.

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Suggested citation
Ganz, A., & Khatib, L. (2006), ‘Digital cinema: The transformation of film practice
and aesthetics’, New Cinemas 4: 1, pp.21–36, doi: 10.1386/ncin.4.1.21/1

Contributor details
Adam Ganz is a lecturer in Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. He
studied English at Cambridge University followed by postgraduate study in Film
Practice at the University of Bristol and the National Film and Television School
directors course. He has written and directed a number of shorts in both film and
digital formats. Contact: Adam Ganz, Department of Media Art, Royal Holloway,
University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK.
E-mail: adam.ganz@rhul.ac.uk

Dr Lina Khatib is lecturer in World Cinema at the Department of Media Arts at

Royal Holloway, University of London, where she teaches media theory and non-
Western cinemas and international television. She is the author of Filming the
Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World (I.B.
Tauris 2006). Her research interests include media representations of Middle
Eastern politics, Middle Eastern cinemas, and postcolonial theory. Contact: Lina
Khatib, Department of Media Art, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham,
Surrey TW20 0EX, UK.
E-mail: lina.khatib@rhul.ac.uk

36 Adam Ganz and Lina Khatib

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