future cinema: the cinematic imaginary after film

Gene Youngblood "cinema and the code"

p157-158
Image Transformation
If mechanical cinema is the art of the transition, electronic cinema is the art of transformation. Film grammar is based on transition between fully formed photographic objects called frames. It is done primarily through that collision of frames called the cut, but also through wipes and dissolves. In electronic cinema the frame is not an object but a time segment of a continuous signal. This makes possible a syntax based on transformation, not transition. Analog image processing is one vehicle of this particular art-- for example, scan processors. But it becomes even more significant in digital image synthesis, where the image is a database. One can begin to imagine a movie composed of thousands of scenes with no cuts, wipes or dissolves, each image metaphor sing into the next.
A cut is a cut, but a transformation or metamorphosing operating is open-ended. There are infinite possibilities, each with unlimited emotional and psychological consequences. Metamorphosis is not unique to digital imaging; it is familiar strategy in hand-drawn animation. What is unique is he special case of photoreal metamorphosis. It is one thing for a ling drawing or fantasy painting to metamorphose, quite another for a photographically "real" object to do so. This is theoretically possible in mechanical cinema and has been prefigured (but never fully realized) in hand-drawn animation, where it is so difficult and time consuming that it is, for all practical purposes, impossible. It is possible digitally, because the code allows us to combine the subjectivity of painting, the objectivity of photography and the gravity-free motion of hand-drawn animation.