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al, to achieve absolute realistic verisimilitude, perhaps the further you stray from the secret of cinema" (Gane, 1993: 32), thus the cinema is currently abolishing in its content that symbolic dimension that, for him at least, defines its experience.
Hence Baudrillard's condemnation of those historical films whose only aim is absolute, visual, historical correspondence, and "whose very perfection is disquieting" (Baudrillard, 1994: 45). To his list of 1970s film we could add any number from the contemporary Hollywood factories -- think of Titanic's (1997) reconstruction of that ship down to the smallest details, and the orgy of visual hyperrealism that marks Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). There we find the belief that the truth of an event can be realised merely by adding on the signs of the real, by reconstituting reality in a simulacral image that, for its audience, comes to constitute that real, eclipsing precisely the experiential reality that constitutes its actual meaning. Thus a visual hyperfidelity dominates in which historical details are perfectly recreated to stand now, not as themselves in their symbolic interrelationships, but instead as signs of "history", to signify the real of the age, resembling nothing "except the empty figure of resemblance" (1994: 45). Whilst this hyperrealism isn't new in cinema, a medium built upon chemical and mechanical simulation, that this has become the raison d'etre and star of the film and that historical reality may be losing ground against it, perhaps is.
Although Baudrillard explicitly targets this mode of hyperrealism, another has emerged today about which he has yet to comment: the development of computer-generated, digital cinematography (see Bennun, 1999; Green, D 1999; Kane, 1997; Logan, 1999, and especially, Pierson, 1999). The digital manipulation and production of images is now common film practice, being used to clean up or alter existing images, as in the "digital cut-and-paste" of Forrest Gump (1994); to create CGI special effects, such as those pioneered in Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991); to fill in for deceased actors, such as in The Crow (1994) and Gladiator (2000), and even to create entirely new stars, such as those in Jurassic Park (1993) and Star Wars: Episode 1 The Phantom Menace (1999). The future of film-making may lie, therefore, in the development of the "synthespian" (Logan, 1999:16) -- of fully digital actors -- whether "virtual icons", such as "Kyoko Date", or the digitally grave-robbed recreations of stars of the golden age (Kane, 1999). To date the only fully digital films are those considered as "animation", such as Toy Story (1995) and its sequel, though many in the industry see its future here. Baudrillard's feelings towards this new, digital hyperrealisation are not difficult to guess, as all his comments upon the abolition of the symbolic relationship with and investment in the image in its forced "obscenity" apply here too. The hyper-clean, hyper-literal, perfectly realised digital image ends its quest for the real, as Romney points out (echoing Baudrillard), by expelling the real from itself -- in its presence, particularity, and uniqueness [next page]