Journal of Contemporary European Studies

Vol. 15, No. 1, 15–22, April 2007

Emobility and the New Cinema

of Complexity
GRAEME HARPER
University of Wales, UK

ABSTRACT The ‘Cinema of Complexity’ describes the condition of film in the late 20th and early
21st centuries in which the form itself is no longer film as it was once understood, but a complex
interaction of no longer mechanical production techniques and their attendant human readings and
responses. ‘Post-digitalism’, a condition in which mobile technologies are at the fore, draws its
discourse and its modes from a sense of space and time not necessarily connected with location.
However, this is a technological revolution in which Europe has led the way. Its impact on European
culture and European individuals is itself revolutionary, although it has so far been little discussed.
KEY WORDS: film, Europe, emobility, post-digitalism

It is now at least two decades since Europe entered the period of the Cinema of
Complexity, connected to new modes of home or domestic film viewing and the
technologies that have developed and supported these. The Cinema of Complexity, a term
coined in 2005 (Harper, 2005, p. 102), describes the condition of film in the late 20th and
early 21st centuries, in which the form itself is no longer film as it was once understood,
but a complex interaction of no longer mechanical production techniques and their
attendant human readings and responses—initiated by new technologies, but doubly
supported by personal, cultural and societal shifts, shifts that contributed to the end of
cinema as it once was and has seen, in the period from the late 1970s to the present, the
growth of a new form of ‘film’ (although, because of these shifts, that word itself now
perhaps requires replacing in relation to contemporary movies).
In essence, the Cinema of Complexity owes its foundation to a shift from mechanical
to electronic media production and reproduction, much of this very soon to be located
in the domestic space and much of it very soon to be connected with developments in
expectations and understandings of what ‘media’ might entail. Expectation is indeed
fundamental here.
However, none of this would have developed in Europe had changes not occurred
alongside these material changes, in both the receptive capabilities and the knowledge-
ability of individuals and social groups. As we know, changes in receptive capabilities
reflect changes in the material environment, changes in structures which act holistically,

Correspondence Address: National Institute for Excellence in the Creative Industries, University of Wales,
Bangor, Gwynedd LL57 2DG, UK. Email: [email protected]
1478-2804 Print/1478-2790 Online/07/001015-8 q 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14782800701273300
16 G. Harper

not least in economic and political terms, and yet also impact on makers and viewers of
film in quite individual ways.
For example, changes in copyright regulations in the light of technologies such as DVD
and MP3 have undoubtedly impacted on European’s daily lives, although not necessarily
on all of us in the same way, in one holistic block. Changes in global attitudes to
the outsourcing of the industrial needs of ‘developed’ countries’ media industries to
‘underdeveloped’ countries have impacted likewise, but, again, not on all of us in the same
way or at the same time.
All this has been empowered by the growth of a relatively media-literate European
audience (relatively media-literate, that is, compared with early mass media European
audiences whose media knowledge base was narrow). The Cinema of Complexity is a
product of a similar discourse of Futurism to that which drove European Modernism, and
contains within it similar pointers to the ways in which film text and film audience form a
relationship and both consciously and unconsciously build on that relationship.
Of course, the interpretative skills of today’s European film audiences are certainly not
those that originally helped to determine the nature and style of film as it was understood
before, and at the birth of, Modernism. Today, distinctively, they find voice in a particular
kind of nonlinear dynamics.
The arrival of the Internet is often quoted as determining such forms of nodal thinking,
i.e. thinking that is unbound by measured unitary movement. And indeed, the Internet
offers a ‘webbed’ sense of connectivity and interconnectivity (what is sometimes called, in
computer programing, ‘global optimization’). However, the web is not the sole reason for
the arrival of the Cinema of Complexity in Europe. DVD and its supplementary platforms,
movies on mobile phones and online and disk-based gaming, have all had an impact on
what Europeans now understand as ‘film’. Simply put, for more than two decades we have
been engaging in a change from analogism to a period of digitalism and now, most
importantly here, to post-digitalism.
Post-digitalism, a condition in which emobility is at the fore, draws its discourse and its
modes from a sense of space and time not connected with a location or with scientific time,
as it was once usefully called. Indeed, an analogous and important sense of such
emobilism is the obvious one brought about by the use of mobile handset technology, a
technological revolution in which Europe has led the way.
The emobile is neither always static nor always moving. Nor is it either solely our inner
or our outer sense of place. In other words, it transcends physical boundaries, but also
conceptual ones. Because it has no fixed point, the emobile is detached from the solar or
the sidereal, which require fixed points of reference—in the first case the Sun and in the
second case the stars—and these have been, until relatively recently, the way in which we
have all calculated both our general sense of time and our specific relationship with space.
However, emobilism isn’t connected with either. In the sense of space and time, the
emobile is neither the real around us nor the virtual that is transmitted to us as simulated or
simply transported reality. Our new post-digital sense of emobility—and it is no mistake
that this word sounds like ‘immobility’, because one of the keys here is that even a thing
that appears to be immobile is moving through time—is driven by progress towards the
resolution of contradictions between scientific time and what Henri Bergson (1910, p. 90)
called ‘pure time’, i.e. lived time.
Contemporary ‘new media’ technologies have utilized the moving visual and the
enhanced aural to provide revolutionary challenges to our perceived sense of the world,
 The New Cinema of Complexity 17

whether metonymically or metaphorically. We still have limited ways at present to

describe these changes in perception, although such terms and expressions as
‘cyberspace’, ‘blended’, ‘from geography to infography’ and current research at the
MIT Media Lab in such things as ‘responsive environments’, ‘human dynamics’ and
‘media fabrics’ all have a connection with endeavouring to articulate this revolutionary
change of perception. Likewise, and more commonly, the term ‘supplementary material’,
which for users of DVD is well known, is part of this perceptional change.
The technologies that have driven post-digital emobility in Europe in the early 21st
century, like the technologies that drove the foundational concepts of European
Modernism (i.e. in the case of Modernism, the X-ray machine, the telephone, the
aeroplane and the motor vehicle) are highly pragmatic, functional and technically
progressive. And yet, it has not been widely discussed that what they have achieved in
practical terms is matched, if not exceeded, by what they have achieved in terms of
altering our modes of consciousness.
So, for example, in 1895 the discovery of X-rays by a German physicist formed the
basis of a machine that would not only provide for breakthroughs in medical science but
would change our perception of human shape, of the relationship between the inner self
and the outer self, even of such psychological or religious notions as ‘the mind’ and ‘the
soul’. That is, of course, if you could see inside the human being—if it was possible to
delve into the interior, where in that interior was the mind, the soul, even the emotions?
X-rays, as the novelists James Joyce and Thomas Mann quickly showed, in Ulysses
(1922) and The Magic Mountain (1924), altered our perceptions of inner and outer, and
began a process of dissolving previously held notions about the separation of the two
realms. Similarly, the aeroplane which, with its conceptual stablemate the rocket, not only
changed the way we perceive distance but also changed our concept of size and,
ultimately, impacted upon such long-held notions as those of ‘place’, ‘home’, ‘nation’ and
even ‘our world’.
While this might seem a grand claim, it only takes a brief comparison of the length of
the journey from London to Sydney by ship in the early 20th century (45 days) with that by
plane in the early 21st century (22 hours) to recognize that a sense of the world had to
change in order to incorporate new ideas about travel, distance, time taken, even our
psychological and physical states on arrival. We can see in this a very simple example of
the interaction between the psychic and the physical, and it is to this interaction that
I’m very much addressing the argument here.
With the arrival of digital media technologies in Europe, many of them quickly found
somewhere in the production and reception of film, it was inevitable that the cinema as it
had been from the last years of the 19th century would change, as would its reception.
Digital media technology has been the basis of a shift in individual and group attitudes to
film and has, in a key sense, created the Cinema of Complexity. Beyond the Internet, three
digitally based technologies might be taken as indicative within this shift and its ongoing
results in Europe. I’ve mentioned two of them briefly already. The three technologies are:
micro or ‘home’ computers, the compact disc (CD and CD-ROM) and the digital versatile
disc (DVD and DVD-ROM).
Although digitalism alone, much like analogism, has not produced a change in filmic
terms, it has required and informed identifiable changes in knowledgeability. It can’t
be understood solely through textual interpretation or through cultural analysis, or even
through behavioural psychology, nor solely by consideration of action, consciousness
18 G. Harper

or social structures. The only probable way to approach a reasonably valid explanation of
the impact of digitalism and the emergence of post-digitalism is through a synthetic
analysis. And this is where we have a brief analytical interlude. What we’re looking for
here is an approach that best avoids what we might call the fetishization of appearance
over our need to grasp the real relations that lie beneath appearance.
The programme from the contemporary BBC web site Film Network (available at
www.bbc.co.uk/filmnetwork) which is ‘designed to showcase new British film talent by
screening films and profiling the people who made them’ provides ample evidence of what
is meant here. On the 1 September 2005 this web site contained the following digital films,
among others.

Sweet, written and directed by Alex Tanner. The plot is as follows:

Two bored office workers have found a satisfying way to get themselves through the
working day. However, their routine is disrupted with the arrival of a new employee
and when these indulgences get out of hand their true feelings are finally revealed.

Baby Dogs, directed by Dave Anderson. The plot is as follows:

A cut-out photo animation depicting what your dog would be talking about if he was
down the local with his mates.

Brief Encounters, written and directed by Alison Edgar. The plot is as follows:
A woman searches for her ideal partner in just fifteen seconds.

By the time you log onto the web site these films will probably either no longer be on the
site or they will be archived in some other part of it.
This, indeed, is the result of a certain method of delivery of these films to their
largely British audience, and that delivery could indeed be called digital. So these are
British films made on digital technology and delivered on digital technology. However,
they share a place on this web site with films not necessarily made on digital
technology but delivered via digital means. This doesn’t make them discernibly
different, although as films made in time they will be informed by differences brought
about by post-digitalism.
In a similar fashion, were we to examine European films made by analogue means or
even, historically, before what we could identify as the impact of digital technologies their
similarities to, and differences from, digitally produced films would not confirm or deny an
analytical position in relation to them, although they would be informed by analogism.
So, to approach digitalism or post-digitalism as if it in itself produces a new mode of
aesthetics, new forms of narrative, new themes, new filmic representations and so on is
naı̈ve. The analysis needs to be based on a relating, a synthesis targeting technological
change, society as a whole and the individual. The film text, then, can be considered to be
both a reflection of and a product of its environment. This, to coin phrase, ‘is not rocket
science’, but pockets of Film Studies as a discipline seem currently incapable of
transcending the weakness of some existing methodologies of socio-historical explanation
to incorporate post-digitalism, and thus are proving inadequate in analysing its impact on
European cinema.
Inaccessible names, such as the Scelbi-8H Mini-Computer, the Altair 8800 and the IBM
5100, meant that true personal computing didn’t properly arrive until 1977, with the
 The New Cinema of Complexity 19

domestically named Apple Macintosh Apple II range of minicomputers. These had been
preceded by quite a variety of mainly ‘home-build’ kit computers, with largely
inaccessible names and inaccessible platforms.
While the names might seem insignificant, the process of naming, and of adapting to
new ways of describing what was to become a familiar home appliance, was part of our
familiarization with computer technology. In effect, these new media were connected
not simply by their physical forms nor merely by the act of using them, but by the
often random thoughts of those first experiencing digital media’s domestication.
For example, it’s not entirely incidental that it was a 13-year-old girl who gave
her inventor father the name for the Altair 8800, finding it in an episode of the
TV show Star Trek.
The story of the initial impact of digitalism in Europe is the story of exactly this kind of
media convergence, the informing and interacting of one media form and another, and
much of this being done at the point of individual human agency. The Apple II brought
computing fully to the layperson’s personal space. It was the first domestic computer with
colour graphics, therefore referencing consumer sensory expectation born out of colour
television, colour movies and colour photography.
It had expansion slots that made it appear as the hub of digitally driven flexibility.
The digital seemed open to every European’s needs. Its floppy disk and audio cassette
systems allowed data retrieval and promoted tactility. This was not a hard-hearted
mechanism, it wanted to assist you! And the Apple II was not only a technological
innovation, it combined something that conceptually made of it a contradiction: it was
both a potential work machine and an advanced device for play, neither a typewriter nor an
arcade game, but in some way both. It was not solely for the serious pragmatist or the
jovial hedonist. Based in the domestic space it was, paradoxically, something that seemed
to arrive from the science laboratory.
Digitalism, from its very arrival in Europe, was about reconciling needs, offering and
providing alternatives, combining conscious and unconsciously induced functions,
automatically. If there was anything that had the potential to do what Surrealist Andre
Breton once described as the ‘creation of a collective myth’, digitalism in the form of the
home computer had that potential. And it indeed did this from the late 1970s, largely
because of the Apple II, in our personal domestic spaces.
Humans, however, are creatures that value tactility and thus digitalism, in the form of
the home computer, made much of its ‘controllers’, its ‘keyboards’ and its ‘mouse’. While
based in numerical concepts, digitalism found its connection to humanity not in its true
form, which was abstract, but in its representation of an interface based initially on touch.
Disk technology also provided that kind of tactile experience.
The CD, launched in Europe in 1982, contained within its digital audio information data
called ‘sub-code’, giving it a sense of being both what it appeared to be on the surface and
what was beneath. CD-ROM, launched three years later, provided access to data
previously only able to be held on computer hard drives. Thus it made digitalism, founded
in the domestic space by minicomputers, increasingly mobile.
The one problem of the CD-ROM, as Brian Winston (1998) pointed out, was that it had
it ‘limited capacity for full motion video’ (p. 123). This still had to be provided by
videotape. Videotape itself had ‘gone digital’ in 1987. However, while home computers
and CD/CD-ROM were promoting nonlinear, trouble-free digitalism throughout Europe,
digital videotape seemed, at best, a compromise.
20 G. Harper

Launched in Japan in 1996, although not arriving on the consumer market in Europe
until 1998, DVD (digital versatile disc or digital video disc, both terms being used) finally
placed film on the same domesticated footing as music and computer data. That was, and
is, its revolutionary contribution. Prior to DVD the possibility of a digital ‘bridge’ for film,
from old to new technologies, had no platform on which to build.
DVD, which could be played either on a free-standing player linked to a television or
on a computer, proved to be the key technology. What was at stake was so well
summed up by Jim Taylor (2001) that it seems ponderous to try and paraphrase him.
Taylor said:

DVD is the ideal convergence medium for a converging world. We are witnessing
watershed transitions from analog TV to digital TV (DTV), from interlaced video to
progressive video, from standard TV to widescreen TV, and from entertainment to
interactive entertainment. In every case DVD works on both sides, bridging from
the ‘old way’ to the ‘new way’. (p. 3)

These three technologies, the home computer, the CD/CD-ROM and the DVD/DVD-
ROM worked together to emphasize something very significant about the digital world.
Alongside these three technologies, the Internet, the evolution from narrowband to
broadband and the mobile or cell phone, lead the way for emobilism.
To reiterate the suggestion here: it is that the physical, in the form of new digital
technologies, has united with the metaphysical and psychological, in the form of emotive,
intentional and unintentional human acts, expressions and feelings. Film’s reincarnation in
Europe has been technologically driven, connected with the emergence of home videotape
and, soon after that, home computing, linked to the arrival of disc technology and the
Internet, but, equally, linked to changes as noted in both the receptive capabilities and
the knowledgeability of individuals and social groups.
To finish the analysis, we could add to these things other developments and connections
that have helped to inform the Cinema of Complexity. One of these was the emergence and
then predominance of the movie multiplex in Europe, which was as much a result of the
multiple choice philosophy of post-1950s consumer culture as it was a direct product of
the impact of domestic videotape on mass single screens. In fact, the general movement in
Europe from the Fordist, or productionist, ethos of the earlier 20th century to the
consumerist ethos of the 1960s and onwards has been driven by increased leisure time
brought about by a decrease in general working hours and by generally improved working
conditions. The arrival of movie multiplexes in Europe, which certainly made much of the
factors of choice connected with home film viewing, was therefore also in keeping with the
pattern of consumer desire – satisfaction– renewal of desire that is at the heart of late
modern consumerism. And this has connected well with the fundamental change in the
pattern of film consumption that videotape introduced in the 1970s and that its later digital
companions have carried forward into emobilism.
Videotape film viewing, domestic and personal, helped to ground film as both home
entertainment and as a televisual art form. Digital disc technology and the Internet have
built on this further, the mobile phone is building on it further still, and each technology
has subsequently brought about changes in human perception.
That is not to say that film from the 1970s became directly televisual in an aesthetic
sense, but it certainly became televisual in the sense of the relationship the majority
 The New Cinema of Complexity 21

of viewers had with the medium. Already by that point no longer an art form only for mass
response, because of the impact of television, by the end of the 1970s film was increasingly
a tradable home consumer product, even for those European audiences who could not
regularly attend the cinema, and we know these are by far in the majority.
And of course, the emergence of the post-1960s media-literate European relates directly
to the impact of videotape and the web interface and DVD that followed it. It is paralleled
by the growth in European consumption of video games (particular hand-held games,
which provided the tactile interface for the mobile phone movie) and an increasing variety
of television programmes, some of which, even by the end of the 1960s, had already taken
on the form of being ‘historical’ and in that way formed the basis of what might be called a
‘master to acolyte’ exchange.
The initial impact of new digital film technologies from the later 1970s was to begin to
unburden film producers of the high cost of producing a film, while at the same time the
tying-up of mainstream film production and distribution prevented the entire opening up of
film-making to smaller, independent European producers.
This is one of the great paradoxes of contemporary film-making, digital technology has
lowered the cost of production, but market forces have insisted on maintaining high
production costs. This is essentially not aesthetic nor even technological, but driven to the
greatest degree by the stock market position of global film companies. In other words, it’s
a product of the money market not of the film-maker or the film consumer. The film-maker
and film consumer have had other things to preoccupy them.
Cinema, until the arrival of domestic videotape in the 1970s, had been largely a reactive
rather than an interactive medium. It was like many, but not all, of the most traditional of
theatrical forms in which the audience is participatory largely only in absorbing and
recalling the experience. Even more so, there were considerable limitations on consumer
individualization. These were both technical and cultural limitations. The culture of film
viewing was one in which the audience was discouraged from associating with the act of
production and pressed to undertake one mode of consumption. The quiet, darkened
cinema literally restricted the audience from devolving their experience from the central
presentation and, in a reverent fashion, asked for complete dedication to the primary
performance.
Not long ago sameness of performance was one of the film industry’s unique selling
points in that it was suggested that the text of a film screened in the cinema would be the
same no matter in which cinema you might view it, whether it was in Paris, Prague or
Potsdam.
Domestic video viewing issued considerable challenges to that practice and DVD
(with its game options and its emphasis on ‘special features’ and multi-modal
consumption), the Internet (with its global optimization) and mobile phone delivery
(with its personalized, ‘lived time’ choices) have further challenged the notion that
sameness is a filmic necessity.
Add to this that videotape introduced into Europe the idea of film viewing in an
atmosphere of light and noise, that domestic film viewing per se was far less reverent and
far less separate from the world beyond film than films viewed in the cinema could ever be
and that it was also far more participatory and it’s easy to see that by the time DVD arrived
consumers were very familiar with demand-led, domestic, choice-based film.
DVD’s primary point of convergence, then, was to make mainstream cinema no longer
simply a medium primarily of entertainment, but to make it equally a media associated
22 G. Harper

with knowledge acquisition, regardless of its genre. In other words, as with the Apple II
computer, DVD drew together two seemingly opposing ideals: the relatively focused
effort associated with improving receptive capabilities and the ‘low effort’ playfulness
associated with mainstream cinema.
The Cinema of Complexity is the cinema of supplementaryness in which activities
beyond the visual and aural content of the primary medium are highlighted in its
consumption. Complexity, or the grouping together of similar ideas, activities and actions,
makes the centre of this interaction not even what we might once have considered film,
but, rather, a vast array of other activities.
In the development of post-digitalism and emobilism we have moved closer than ever to
a form of relationship with ‘film’, or indeed ‘media’, that is more like notions of what we
might say is sur-realism rather than realism, at least in the way we currently consider
realism. Here I quote from the Second Manifeste du Surréalisme: ‘The real and the
imaginary, past and future, communicable and incommunicable, high and low, will no
longer be perceived as contradictions’ (Breton, 1930, p. 45).
Something not so far removed from this can be seen at work at present. The Cinema of
Complexity is not based simply on changing our points of reference within what might be
called, paradoxically, a fixed sense of the movie. Rather, the Cinema of Complexity is one
element of the revolutionary change that we’re seeing now through emobilism, begun in
the late 1970s and linked in Europe to an evolving new 21st century esprit.

References
Bergson, H. (1910) Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (trans. F.L. Pogson)
(London: George Allen and Unwin).
Breton, A. (1930) Second Manifeste du Surréalisme (Paris: Éditions Kra).
Harper, G. (2005) DVD and the cinema of complexity, in: N. Rombes (Ed.) New Punk Cinema, pp. 89 –101
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).
Taylor, J. (2001) DVD Demystified (New York: McGraw-Hill).
Winston, B. (1998) Media Technology and Society: A History from the Telegraph to the Internet
(London: Routledge).