Sunday's announcement that Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark had won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival might have been greeted with a loud groan by many critics, but it may yet come to be seen as a crucial moment in the history of cinema. Whatever its other qualities, Von Trier's modern musical is the first ever winner of the prestigious prize not to have been shot on old-fashioned film.
After many years of predictions that the digital future was just around the corner, it now seems to be arriving fast. From the vertiginous CGI Colosseum of Ridley Scott's Gladiator to the woozy DIY aesthetic of The Blair Witch Project, digital is spreading like a virus across the film-making landscape, from the hippest, low-budget independents to the biggest Hollywood studios. George Lucas has announced that the next instalment of his Star Wars trilogy will be shot on digital (which doesn't mean that it's going to be any better) while the most successful film of the year so far at the Irish box office has been Toy Story 2.
For the moment, the only part of the film-making process relatively unaffected by the new technology is exhibition, but that may change sooner than you think - in some selected cinemas in the UK, Toy Story 2 was projected using a digital system developed by the US electronics corporation Texas Instruments. Meanwhile, DVD players continue to make substantial inroads into the home entertainment market. Now in its second year, the Darklight Digital Film Festival, which begins at the Irish Film Centre tomorrow, attempts to give a flavour of these fundamental shifts in the technology of the moving image. The difficulty in organising such an event is in trying to impose a coherent framework on the incredibly disparate range of activities which now come under the loose rubric of "digital film-making".
The programme, under the direction of Susan Patterson, Chantal Doody, Mary Farrelly and Nicky Gogan, attempts to cover all bases: from narrative feature film to live performance events; public art installations to TV commercials; and interactive DVDs to socially-committed documentaries. Darklight kicks off tomorrow night with the Irish premiere of Harmony Korine's julien donkey- boy, the latest film to be made under the provocatively rigorous rules of von Trier's Dogme 95 group. Korine's film stars Ewen Bremner (best known for his performance as Spud in Trainspotting) as a disturbed young man who kills a child. The presence in the cast of the former enfant terrible of New German Cinema, Werner Herzog, signposts the way in which many practitioners of the new digital cinema, such as Thomas Vinterberg (Festen), hark back to the themes and aesthetics of European art cinema of the 1960s and 1970s.
It wasn't supposed to be this way, of course. Technophobes always pronounced that the new technologies would inevitably lead to flashier, trashier films. Digital's first major impact on the movie industry was in postproduction in the early 1990s, with editors throwing out their old Steenbecks and Movieolas in favour of the new desktop software programmes, such as Avid and Lightworks.
The received wisdom was that the consequence would be an increasingly frantic editing style. But, as Michael Dwyer has pointed out in this newspaper, feature films of all kinds have actually been getting longer and more leisurely in recent times, and some critics have postulated that this may be due in part to the latitude which the modern desktop editing suite allows. Ten years ago, who would have thought that hi-tech film-making would look more towards Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Cecil B. DeMille than to MTV and Miami Vice?
A certain consequence of the digital revolution, already being felt, is a glut of low-budget feature and short films, of highly variable quality, being produced around the world. With most of these films unlikely to get within a mile of the commercial exhibition circuit, new forms of distribution are springing up. In the past year, about 30 online film sites have appeared on the web, with names like Mediatrip, Dfilm and iFilm.net. These sites offer film-makers the chance, at least, of getting their work to an audience, although it's highly unlikely that they will see any profit.
One of the most significant of those sites, AtomFilms, will announce a joint venture with the Irish Film Board (IFB) during the festival. Irish Flash aims to build on the current Frameworks scheme for animation support, proposing "to add to the range and scope of Irish animation and to encourage new talent working in the animation format", with 10 annual commissions worth £3,000 each. The finished pieces will be screened in cinemas, streamed on the Internet, made available on DVD and broadcast on TV. The IFB will also be announcing another scheme, Short Shorts, for "brilliant, imaginative and eye-catching short films from one to three minutes long", which may be shot in any format, but will be completed on cinema-standard 35 millimetre.
Film in the conventional sense is only one part of the Darklight programme, which also features an exhibition of digital art: Straylight - Off the Beaten Plane is a combination of gallery-based and public work covering digital sound and video installations, interactive CD, web-based artwork, projections, digital imaging, gaming and VR, at various locations around Temple Bar.
On Friday morning, the effects team responsible for the recent BBC series, Walking with Dinosaurs, will conduct a seminar on the CGI techniques used to create three hours of photorealistic computer animation. Over the following three days, a series of programmes, including documentary strands, short dramas, experimental work and music videos, will be screened. The diversity of the work on view is remarkable, ranging from agitprop documentary to up-to-the-minute playful pop culture. Essie's Last Stand, for example, is a 20-minute Irish digital documentary about the struggle of 76-year-old Essie Keeling to prevent property developers evicting her friends from their homes in Dublin's Charlemont Street. According to its makers, Loopline Films, Essie's Last Stand "is a prime example of how digital cameras can be used to produce, on spec, high-quality film".
At the other end of the spectrum, the "Graphic Japan" programme examines the crossover between desktop publishing and desktop directing, with graphic designers, film and video directors and animation makers all using the same software, through a compilation of works by young designers from the so-called Tokyo-2000 generation, including "well-known (easy tune) pop act Pizzicato Five, whose music pays homage in a strange and charming way to nostalgia feeling". Who could resist the temptation to point and click?
The Darklight Digital Film Fes- tival runs at the Irish Film Centre from May 25th to May 28th. For further information, contact the festival office (01-6629035) or IFC booking office (01-6793477), or see: www.darklight- filmfestival.com
