Skinamarink (Kyle Edward Ball, 2022).
In 1873, a penniless Claude Monet visited the opera baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, hoping to sell a hazy impression of the Seine. He often called on this early patron of the Impressionists with a stack of small paintings under his arm, usually sold at fifty francs apiece, but this time, he brought only one painting, or even less than one, according to Faure.
“If I buy your work without haggling for it, I expect it to be painted,” the singer said. “There’s no paint on this one. You must have forgotten it. […] Now, just between you and me, what do you suppose this canvas represents?”
“I don’t suppose, I know that it shows the fog rising from the Seine at Vétheuil,” replied Monet.
Faure’s demand for finished and legible representation is animated by centuries of Western art history. For thousands of years, painting had been in the chokehold of figuration. When Faure laments that the “mist muddled the view of the Seine,” he is echoing the prevailing logic that had circulated in Europe since antiquity. By the 19th century, pictorial figuration reached its logical conclusion with photography, which mechanically reproduced the sensible world with more fidelity than the most skilled of academic painters. Instead of heightening the demands of realism, photography freed painting to pursue abstractions and disfigurations, and the Impressionists became key figures of this newfound liberty.
One year after Monet’s visit to Faure, the first Impressionist exhibition took place in a Parisian photography studio. Contesting artistic techniques they considered outmoded and the elitist structures of the Paris salons, Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, and others showed works that already demonstrated what would become some of Impressionism’s defining characteristics: quotidian subject matter; plein-air compositions; a complementary combination of colors; a novel rendering of light and shadow; and rapid, broken, conspicuous brushstrokes. Among the artworks was Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872), which Louis Leroy criticized, saying, “Impression I was certain of it… A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more finished than this seascape." With that derisive comment, an artistic group was baptized.
Impression, Sunrise (Claude Monet, 1872).
By blurring the edges of individual elements in his paintings, Monet softened the demands of figurative representation. To be sure, he still depicted forms and scenes of the empirical world, but the correspondence between image and reality in his work is determined by evocative, affective, and instantaneous bonds—not by strict fidelity or precise mimesis. This gesture forever changed painting and other traditions of image-making.
In The Cinema Effect, media scholar Sean Cubitt argues that the representational logics of Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism influenced cinema from its very inception. The “all-over composition” of Georges Seurat’s pointillist paintings departed from a beaux-arts tradition that set hierarchies of attention toward the center of the frame. If Monet dissolved the lines around individual elements, Seurat introduced what Cubitt calls an “anarchy of vision,” compelling the viewer to move their gaze all over the image. This new form of decentered composition informed the nascent medium of film, as seen already in the Lumière brothers’ Workers Leaving The Factory (1895), a static shot of workers spilling out of the factory at the center of the screen, dispersing toward the left and right. For Cubitt, early cinema democratized attention by asking viewers to follow workers around the frame rather than focus on a perspectival vanishing point. Impressionism continued to leave a mark on 20th-century cinema, its genealogy both figurative and literal: without Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean Renoir would have never been born. In the 1920s, the French avant-garde film movement took up the Impressionist banner. Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, and others used superimpositions and the granularity of celluloid to create vaporous images and reimagine the use of light and shadow.
Skinamarink (Kyle Edward Ball, 2022).
In recent years, digital cinema has adopted some of Impressionism’s misty airs. In the final minutes of Skinamarink (2022), the camera travels sluggishly through a hazy field: pixels melt into each other, contours fade away, and there are no discernible figures except for a white speck in the distance. It hides menacingly behind a veil of visual noise, gradually gaining the features of a human face but never quite revealing itself, even as it whispers, “Go to sleep.” Throughout Skinamarink, director Kyle Edward Ball and cinematographer Jamie McRae pursue similarly gaseous compositions, pushing their digital cameras to their limits to come up with eerie evocations of a pre-digital past. The blurry image recalls the aesthetic of 1980s and ’90s home videos: flickering white noise and the crepitant crackle of VHS tapes haunt us in the background. But the film’s straddling of the line between figuration and abstraction is best understood by going further back, all the way to the 1870s and ’90s, when Monet played with the cold light of dawn to dissolve the architectural lines of a Gothic cathedral in Rouen Cathedral, Facade (Morning Effect) (1894), or when he portrayed his dying wife in Camille on her Deathbed (1879) as if she was drowning in the errant brushstrokes that surround her, her whitened face coming up for air.
Like the Impressionists, Ball and McRae play with light in Skinamarink. The movie is exclusively set in interiors without any natural lighting; the cold bluish hues of a flickering TV set replace the rising sun that tinted Paris in orange and pink tones. McRae has said he used the Sony FX6 to film in such dark settings because it “performs really well in low light and contributes a lot to the look because of the natural— I don’t wanna say grain, it’s the noise of the camera, but it works.” In his hesitation to use the word grain, which refers to the physical texture of the celluloid caused by small metal particles, McRae divulges the importance of technological specificity. There is no film grain in digital cinema, but there is noise. Taking advantage of digital cameras’ ISO, a setting that modulates light intake to brighten or darken an image, McRae shot the domestic penumbra using ISO values between 51,000 and 102,000—way past the range recommended to avoid creating the visual distortions and discolored pixels known as “noise.” Skinamarink’s hazy, dusky patina is not a result of technological constraints, quite the opposite; in this case technology was pushed to its limits to achieve a pre-digital look. Ball and McRae exploited the Sony FX6’s ability to brighten even the murkiest locations, even at the cost of intelligibility. Having at their disposal technology intended to achieve sharpness and clarity, they opted for something foggier to match the movie’s hazy narrative. Ball also added digital filters from a package of “film grain overlays,” grading and playing with the levels for each shot to push the distinctive texture of the image even further.
Top: Camille on Her Deathbed (Claude Monet, 1879). Bottom: The Human Surge 3 (Eduardo Williams, 2023).
While Skinamarink gained overnight notoriety for its unorthodox use of digital ISO features to dissipate contours within the frame, another contemporary film went after the cinematic frame itself. Eduardo Williams’s experimental documentary The Human Surge 3 (2023) follows groups of people in Sri Lanka, Peru, and Taiwan as they walk and talk through scenic landscapes. Most of The Human Surge 3 is made up of 360-degree images that were distorted to fit into a rectangular frame. Williams first shot every corner of his surroundings with an Insta360 Titan, an eight-lens camera designed to record images for virtual-reality headsets, and then composed each scene by watching the recordings on one such headset, moving his gaze, and fixating on the specific parts he wanted to include in the final frame in an editing process that he has described as a “performance.” The result is a movie that blends observation and deformation. It offers empathic portraits of its young characters’ faces and, shortly after, warps and distorts them. Cities are turned inside and out in, skies and mountains bend inward, and pixels glitch and crackle at the image’s open seams.
“I always try to create a type of image where it is not so obvious where you are supposed to look,” Williams has said. “As you don’t have a clear focal point, my idea is that a viewer’s eye can wander around the screen.” Williams’s decentering of the frame is an aesthetic gesture akin to Seurat’s scattered brushstrokes, but it is also a conceptual statement: it signals the importance of the oft-forgotten periphery of cinematic composition and comments on the exclusion of the Global South from mainstream cinema’s frames. The Human Surge 3 revives the plein-air, spontaneous composition; loose figurative approach; and unfinished look of Impressionism. However, with its exhausting long takes and sometimes unpleasant visual stimulation, the film offers a very different viewing experience from the contemplative one usually induced by a Monet or Pissarro. In the film’s climactic scene, the camera centripetally folds in bodies, mountains, and everything in its path—an apt illustration of how Williams vigorously pulls his viewer, as well, into the image. The Human Surge 3 visually meanders through the mundane, but it compels us to look intently rather than simply meditate.
We might refer to these faint echoes of the 19th century artistic movement in our contemporary images as digital impressionism. It is a way to name a form of representation that takes digital tools beyond their intended purposes to loosen the link between image and reality, without breaking it completely. The tentative lineage of digital impressionism can be traced back to the early days of digital filmmaking: Dogme 95, Harmony Korine’s Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2005). Indeed, Sam Wigley’s characterization of the critical reception of early digitally shot films is uncannily similar to early criticisms lobbed at the Impressionists. Wigley points to a Variety review that called the German film Birthday (2009) a “poorly executed digital video improvisation being trumpeted as fully developed film” and a review of Mike White’s and Miguel Arteta’s Chuck & Buck (2000) in which Gavin Smith writes, “shot on DV, transferred to film, cost next to nothing, looked like shit: cold, fuzzy, and coarse.” The figurative prejudice that led Faure to reject Monet’s painting was still alive in the early 21st century, as was the artistic impulse to reject it and create hazy and “unfinished” images. But perhaps there is something beyond aesthetic preferences undergirding these rebellious gestures.
Like the early 21st century, the late 19th century saw plenty of technological innovations in the realm of visual representation. Renoir, among others, has claimed that Impressionism never would have been possible without the portability and speed afforded by the invention of paint tubes and the variety of brushstrokes introduced by paintbrush ferrule—the band of metal that connects handle to brush head. But Monet’s misty artworks weren’t merely a result of technological advances. As the scholar Anthea Callen suggests, this narrative ignores the ideological and aesthetic innovations of the movement that gave artists a novel way of looking at the world. The Impressionists gained notoriety thanks to their rejection of Academic-art dogma; they didn’t just use new technologies to optimize their practice, they also used their tools in unconventional ways to create unorthodox images. At a time when photography gave image-makers a chance to represent reality with more fidelity than ever, Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir decided to deform it to create paintings with enduring beauty. When paintbrushes allowed for detailed, realistic line work, Seurat broke the brushstroke into small points. And when the processes of academic art had become most developed, the Impressionists decided to turn the process on its head and focus on the unfinished feeling of sketches.
The introduction of digital technologies is akin to these innovations in artistic tools, with an important caveat. While photographic cameras capture lifelike images of the world, CGI and, most recently, Open AI’s Sora promise to generate them out of thin air. For most of its history, film was a medium of mechanical reproduction; it operated through the contact of light and celluloid that was hard to falsify. To be in the image, you had to be in front of the camera. But digital technologies complicate this indexical link between image and phenomenal reality because now you can render almost anything on a computer without having to film it. Cinema seems to be losing its status as an art of recording and becoming one of animation, or as media theorist Lev Manovich argued in 1995, “the manual construction of images in digital cinema represents a return to nineteenth-century pre-cinematic practices, when images were hand-painted and hand-animated.” Paradoxically, cutting-edge digital technologies push the mechanics of cinema away from indexicality and closer to painting and other graphic arts. Some filmmakers have responded by rejecting realism at a time when it is more attainable than ever.
Sunset on the Seine at Lavacourt, Winter Effect (Claude Monet, 1880)
Aggro Dr1ft (Harmony Korine, 2023).
Shot entirely in infrared, Harmony Korine’s Aggro Dr1ft (2023) is brumous yet warm, immediately recalling painterly practices in which the contours of bodies are porous and the components of the image melt into a single, oceanic drift. In fact, Korine made paintings based on these images for the Aggro Dr1fter exhibit at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles. He has said that he was bored with “2D, normal photography-based film” when cinematographer Arnaud Potier gained access to infrared cameras from NASA: “They were very, very high-resolution infrared, and beautiful... We came up with this look that was close to the idea of being inside of a video game. It felt completely immersive and closer almost to a drug experience.” An experience it is—a hallucinatory, soporific, and often tedious one. The resuscitation of Impressionism’s gaseous aesthetics points to similar historical and technological contingencies in both periods and to an uptake of Impressionism’s rebellion against expectation. Yet, in his direct reference to established art forms, Korine also highlights the limits of digital impressionism as a term. The Impressionists played with their tools to create new ways of seeing, but Korine seems more invested in replicating established forms and congealed conventions. Whether a new wave of digital impressionists can revive their revolution of sensorial perception is yet to be seen.
Beyond mere stylistic resemblances and fuzzy coincidences, then, digital impressionism designates a complicated relationship with technology. It points to a choice that filmmakers face today: adhere to expected uses of novel technologies or overstep them to create something new. Given the rate at which those tools are advancing, it is easy to fall into the temptation of replication, as seen in the millions of AI-generated images that only mask their lack of pictorial specificity with misty contours, clichéd “painterly” techniques, and pastiches of popular art movements like Impressionism. Not every image that resembles a Monet painting should be called Impressionist. The label connotes a disobedient use of artistic tools that goes beyond merely showing their capabilities; it suggests an artistic disposition to disrupt conventions of legibility and figuration in favor of ambiguity and deformation. With different techniques and to varying degrees of success, Skinamarink, The Human Surge 3, and Aggro Dr1ft push digital cinematic tools beyond clarity but not all the way to abstraction. Digital impressionist cinema uses distortion, noise, and thermal vision to image the world, just as Monet found a new way of representing the mist over the Seine.