I find myself thinking a lot about technology these days, and how it frames our experiences.
Not, as it happens, in terms of hand-wringing lamentations of the manifold dangers of AI that we’re so frequently bombarded with—but just in terms of our basic expectations when we start to read a book or watch a film because both books and films are technological vehicles for transmitting information.
That’s not the way most of us think about them, of course, but that’s simply because they’re so familiar to us.
The interesting point is that it’s that very familiarity, and the habits that flow from it, that shape—and sometimes limit—our expectations of what their content should be.
Take books. Everyone appreciates that books come in many different types, from airport thrillers to serious scholarly analysis, but a fundamental feature of all of them is just how easy it is to jump around within the content—from rereading particularly enjoyable (or difficult) passages to checking references and footnotes—which makes the medium a perfect vehicle to convey sophisticated and subtle ideas to a wide variety of readers.
The first time I read Michael Baxandall’s famous Painting & Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, I remember thinking that it was impossibly dense, and had to put it down every couple of paragraphs to stop and reflect.
But now that I’m more familiar with the context and historical background, I naturally read it quite differently.
For film, on the other hand, the consumer experience has long been limited by the fact that cinemagoers, or TV-watchers, had no opportunity to stop and rewatch particularly interesting or subtle or memorable aspects of the movie, which meant that those on the production end were naturally forced to generate works that could be appreciated in one fell swoop.
Which made it particularly challenging to create a thoughtful and illuminating film project about a serious topic that could appeal to a broad general audience. And while a few did manage to get produced—such as Kenneth Clark’s wonderful Civilisation series of 1969—the constraints associated with doing so (time, money and, perhaps most of all, finding the right sort of people to be involved) naturally prohibited the production of such efforts on any sort of a regular basis.
Now, happily, things have changed: “films” have become, technologically, much more like “books”, with every viewer able to watch them, in whole or in part—with limitless pausing and playback—whenever it’s convenient. So there’s now space to create a whole new range of films to explore visually-relevant topics in a powerful new way, where—just like books—different viewers can experience the content in a spectrum of different ways, should they wish.
But while structural capabilities have transformed the potential of the medium, our mindsets haven’t yet made the transition. On the whole, “films” are still expected to be “dumbed-down entertainment”, a very distant cry from the potential comprehensiveness and intellectual subtlety of books.
Just like for AI, as it happens, the problem isn’t actually technology per se. It’s us.
– Howard Burton, June 30, 2024
Howard is the Director of Pandemic Perspectives (2022), Through the Mirror of Chess: A Cultural Exploration (2023), Raphael: A Portrait (2024) and Botticelli’s Primavera (2025) which is the first film in our Renaissance Masterpieces Series.