The Opacity of Representations of 3D Scanning and Motion Capture in the Cinema - Text 14
Carax thus makes us understand the principal theoretical problem of these systems: the resulting cinematic form of performance capture cannot convey cinematically what the technology itself produces, which is to say an image conceived and captured in volume from every angle at once. It can only suggest this aesthetically, which attenuates the scope of a cinematic point of view, or even questions its legitimacy.
One year later, Ari Folman’s The Congress (2013) also served as commentary on the recent evolution of digital 3D capturing by shifting the issues raised in Carax’s film to ethical considerations. The central sequence (a capturing session of the actress Robin Wright) was shot in a real 3D scanning studio, Light Stage 5 at the University of Southern California,[8] a fact that leads one to believe that this time Folman is going to reveal how the process works in a documentary-style approach. Here too, however, the filmmaker masks this aspect under a science fiction treatment of a kind of Faustian pact, because he attributes to the studio features which in reality it did not have: digitising the expressions and movements of an actress in order to use them later by means of an avatar which could be manipulated by studios at will. The doubling of the spherical dimensions of the original apparatus by recording moving images thus confines the actress’s body, whose changes of expression are literally “captured” to the point of stealing her soul.
