Jonathan Romeny writes (via Aeon),

CGI has become wearingly dull and cliched. Can its deep weirdness be recovered and filmgoers’ minds stretched again?

 “…One tradition in writing about cinema, represented notably by the mid-20th-century French critic André Bazin, asserts the primacy of the photographic capture of the real – the recording on film of objects that have actually existed, events that have actually happened.

Digital cinema rewrites that conception, because we can no longer assume that a screen image represents anything that has ever been real. A landscape might be a composite of several actual landscapes, or wholly or partly fabricated from pixels. Film theory has been forced to confront a radical change in its object of study.

Stephen Prince, professor of cinema studies at Virginia Tech, noted in his essay ‘True Lies’ 1996 that CGI severs the ‘indexical’ or causal connection between an image and the object it represents, which might have no original in the real world; instead, we are presented with imaginary objects that can nonetheless be considered ‘perceptually realistic’.

Another theorist, Lev Manovich, at the City University of New York, has argued that CGI reveals that the conception of photographic recording as essential to cinema was a historic accident, and that the new digital regime returns cinema to its place in an earlier conception of visual representation as involving the manual construction of images. ‘Cinema becomes a particular branch of painting – painting in time,’ he writes in ‘What Is Digital Cinema?’ 1996.

For Bazin, however, the recording of real presences, of people’s real engagement in the material world, comprised a crucial ethical dimension of cinema. And this dimension cannot disappear without making a difference…”