Film Archives
April 21, 2018
The Undeath of Cinema
An engaging essay in The New Atlantis raises important questions that, frankly, hadn’t even occurred to me. Whether that speaks to my denseness or my innocence of cutting edge filmmaking, I cannot say. In any case, “The Undeath of Cinema,” by the young editor and playwright Alexi Sargeant, is well worth reading.
In brief: Disney’s 2016 standalone Star Wars film Rogue One, contiving to capture the popularity of the original 1977 classic, set out to revive several iconic villains. Without spoiling the plot, I’ll confine myself to saying that one such villain was easy to revive, and the revival carried off brilliantly, in a concluding scene that crowned a movie whose final act saved an otherwise uneven and mediocre production. Reviving the second villain, however, proved a much heavier lift. The actor who played him, you see, is long deceased. So Disney experimented with a novel CGI technology to “resurrect” the likeness of the late actor Peter Cushing and insert this digital chimera into several scenes. The result may well have inaugurated a new and disturbing trend in cinema, whose lineaments it is the business of Mr. Sargeant to examine with a wise and critical eye.
Grand Moff Tarkin appears throughout Rogue One, to outward appearances as if the Peter Cushing of 1977 had agreed to step through time for this 2016 film. But Cushing himself could not . . . approve of the studio’s use of his likeness. Instead, his estate gave Disney the go-ahead. How confident can we be that the studio and Cushing’s heirs — actually, his former secretary Joyce Broughton, the overseer of his estate — correctly discerned the wishes of an actor who died more than twenty years ago, about his apparent resurrection using a technology that didn’t exist during his lifetime? And, leaving aside the question of consent, what would the ethical and artistic fallout be should the use of this technology become widespread?. . . Disney made Cushing a test case for a digital resurrection freely chosen by the filmmakers. There was no overwhelming narrative need to include Grand Moff Tarkin in this Star Wars story. The script has its own cast of bickering Imperial antagonists who could have lost command of the Death Star by the film’s end without the Grand Moff appearing in person to requisition it. The reason Tarkin is in the movie is to serve as an experiment in filmmaking technology. Let us see, then, what the Cushing experiment reveals about the merits of digitally resurrecting the dead.
Sargeant then lingers a bit on the actor Cushing, an English gentlemen of grace and professional perseverance who has the ironic distinction, in light of subsequent cinematographic developments, of having played portrayed Baron Victor Frankenstein, and from that role, having launched a successful career in the horror genre, which included other noteworthy depictions of necromantic roles.
He wound up a screen horror icon. For twenty years he was a mainstay of horror films, frequently playing the Baron in Hammer Horror’s Frankenstein films and Professor Van Helsing in their Dracula films.Cushing had a particularly interesting relationship with undeath between these two famous recurring roles. As Frankenstein, he imbued corpses with a mockery of life; as Van Helsing, he put down the undead with a stake through the heart. Cushing himself pointed out this cyclical pattern in a 1964 interview: “People look at me as if I were some sort of monster, but I can’t think why. In my macabre pictures, I have either been a monster-maker or a monster-destroyer. But never a monster. Actually, I’m a gentle fellow.”
Gentle he might have been, but thanks to Hammer and many other horror studios, Cushing’s filmography was full of technicolor gore and Gothic excess. He had the gaunt face and tall frame for it, though perhaps sometimes more of a twinkle in his eye than you’d expect from a master of horror.
These qualities of hale, imperial menace appealed to George Lucas when he set out to cast the secondary villain for the original Star Wars in 1977, and desired “a face to share the antagonist role with the masked Darth Vader.”