As any filmmaker will tell you, one of the greatest worries for the cinema’s future, as both art and industry, is the advent of artificial intelligence (AI). The incipient technology has already begun to infiltrate each level of filmmaking, primarily at the pre-production stage, where casting, location scouting, and even screenwriting have begun to incorporate AI tepidly. AI tools can now create blends of facial expressions to change an actor’s performance in the editing room digitally, and some programs are on the way to being able to create entirely AI videos of cinematic quality. 

Besides the obvious worries over what these new developments mean for the many film jobs they could potentially replace, the possibility of AI increasingly being used to imitate film is disquieting on a more fundamental level  – it undermines and overturns film’s axiomatic, natural, and, to the influential theorist Andre Bazin, spiritual purpose: to capture reality as fully as possible and transfigure it into “reality made art.”

The French critic Andre Bazin best put forward the film’s unique power and relationship to reality. Bazin observed how what distinguished both photography and film from the other arts was its ability to mechanically reproduce reality, freeing film of the obligation to manually approximate realism, and freeing “the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.” In a medium where the photographic image and “the object in itself share a common being, after the fashion of a fingerprint,” it is undoubtedly cinema’s strength to prioritize art in which the viewer’s automatic acceptance that what they are being shown is perfectly visually identical to the reality filmed is never in doubt. AI video, and CGI before it, plant that doubt and give it a logical base. 

If AI videos and video-making tools are dangerous for reasons of misinformation, they pose an existential threat to cinema. As director Michael Roemer wrote in his essay, “Surfaces of Reality,” “only film renders experience with enough immediacy and totality to call into play the perceptual processes we employ in life itself.” Film can capture the sometimes mundane, “intimate detail” of reality, such as a priest looking away from the eponymous figure in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), which gives the medium its power. The fact that film uses “the stuff of life itself” as its material means that in reality, every detail can “yield a wealth of meaning” that instantly conveys “a complex web of feeling.” Just as no painter or animator can consciously recreate or imagine every detail we might see in a photographic recording of reality, neither can an AI video. Even a simpler AI tool, such as the facial expression technology mentioned above, or any CGI effect invented over the past two decades can undermine and paint over these details that belong to reality. Roemer uses a vivid example to demonstrate the human intolerance for in-concrete fakery in cinematic imagery: 

In Dreyer’s unproduced script on the life of Christ he describes the crucifixion by showing us the back of the cross, with the points of the nails splintering through the wood. On the screen these would be undeniably real nails going through real wood, and the authenticity of the moment would not be challenged. If, however, Dreyer had chosen to show us the cross from the front we would know absolutely that the nails going through the flesh are a deception-and the suffering figure would turn into a performer.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, audiences tend to test a film on whether or not its sense of reality is superior to our own, always being aware of unreality. In our latter-day popular cinema, be it in the computer-generated landscapes of Avengers films, the LED-projected environments of shows like The Mandalorian, or the storm of non-human-produced visuals brewing on the horizon, our sense of reality inevitably comes out on top, and film’s power of reality is betrayed. Some of this is due to genre conventions, some is due to convenience and new technological opportunities. But what is the point of technological development if it dilutes the advantages of the original medium? How can the CGI battles of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (2023) appear to any viewer’s eye less impressive than those in Abel Gance’s 1927 film of the same name? It is not only that they do not appear real; in the modern cinema, we have been taught not to expect reality. With the advent of AI, we may never expect it again.