Hooroo Jackson

THE NEW MACHINE CINEMA

(Essay from “The New Machine Cinema: Foundational Essays in AI Film Theory”)

Hooroo Jackson tempts the new machine cinema artform, and calls for the AI film revolution.

The revolution will not be filmed–it will be dreamed directly onto the screen.

I have never entertained the effort argument which I find backward and regressive. It is my belief that machine filmmaking isn’t just another tool but an entirely new artform, shattering every barrier between artist and creation.

For the first time in history, we can write novels in light and shadow, painting our dreams frame by frame. It is the purest form of cinematic expression humanity has ever seen, a direct pipeline from imagination to reality.

There is resistance. A pull backward, as if old ways represent some technical ideal, ignoring that cinema, for all its history, has never come with any rules as to the how.

Consider the absurdity of our current paradigm by considering the inverse; imagine a novelist was forced to whisper their stories through a labyrinth of interpreters:

• The dialogue man–annoying—he never stops talking.
• The plot guy, he will police your structure, character arcs and story on the fly.
• The descriptive guy, the most pretentious guy on hand, over-articulating the vistas and need to capture the perfect daylight on the page.
• The editor (well, they have those.)

We’ve accepted this Byzantine process of filmmaking as “real filmmaking” for so long we’ve forgotten to ask why.

Why must a creator’s vision be filtered through a maze of interpretation? Why must art supereced to budgets and commercial determinations to consider their worth?

Why should dreams wait for permission?

You see the novelist answer to no one but their own vision.

While film has remained shackled to this antiquated notion of “proper” cinema, haunted by financiers, armies of staffs, actors, editors, producers, marketers–each a potential filter between vision and reality. To the point a new development has emerged—the audience itself demands an equal voice in the artistic democracy.

In fact one can express this as the tipping point leading to the death of the artist.

Until AI; until, the new machine cinema artform.

It is my belief that our capitalist world has reached a point of total incompatibility with the arts. That AI is not capitalism dealing the death blow, but the artists striking back.

You see almost every filmmaker will tell you a dirty little secret: the film in their mind was not the film that reached the screen.

So I ask: Why. Why do the anti-AI zealots claim old is better? Worse is superior? The one digital tool is more pure than the new digital tool?

If there is any concept of a pure cinema existing at all, would it not stand to reason that it be the methodology with the least resistance between imagination and screen was best?

Why sanctify this inefficient, diluted form of creation as cinema’s most true and noble expression?

And why draw our line in the sand now? Where is the call for the hand-cranked camera as the purest method of capturing images? Where are the purists insisting on manual editing with razor blades and tape, optical effects over digital compositing, or hand-painted mattes over computer backgrounds? Where are the traditionalists crying out for orchestras in every theater?

And by what corrupted measure do we declare that hundreds laboring under commercial diktat represent ‘the artist,’ while a sole creative wielding machine augmentation stands accused of robot witchcraft?

There was no revolt, not ever over augmentation. The revolt only came now at its very promise! With the purest embodiment of artistic empowerment in the history of cinema, the world.

To reject the new machine cinema is to commit a crime against the future, denying generations to come upon the better way, the artists way. I hold it that we have a duty to push this new medium to its absolute limits. The slow integration is not in its interests, we must cut the chains entirely.

Imagine it: a direct pipeline from mind to screen.

What visions will emerge unchained from the physical world entirely?

The excitement of machine cinema is the excitement of the future itself–the revolution is happening before us, underneath our feet, with miles of ground to claim.

The possibilities are so great we might even prefer to live in its promise. It is so potent we can taste it. It is the first hope many of us have felt in our lifetimes.

I dream of this vision of one single artist and the film he makes.

When I made ‘Window Seat,’ there was no roadmap, only this promise. There was no established language for machine cinema, no rules to follow or break.

In deciding where to go, I determined, on the plane itself.

The goal was not a technical one, but artistic.

I set myself three rules: it had to speak to the zeitgeist, as a moment in time. It had to be personal, an auteur film in the way Bazin originally envisioned-the pure expression of a singular artistic vision. And it had to do things only machine tools could achieve.

I have felt some traces of guilt, some idea to apologize for not giving the artform its “hello world” moment–its Steamboat Willie, its Snow White, its Super Mario Bros–in fact the very first shot in the film was revolutionary: a camera on fire.

Window Seat delivered an acidic, bleak, and darkly comic independent film, that of vitriolic, curse-laden auteurs from the 80s and 90s. Why?

It the truth of our moment in 2023. Cinema had been sanitized, artists muzzled, censored, and cancelled until only the very worst of the wealthy, privileged, and rotten remained, the Tisch, La Femis, Eton, USC, Chapman, SI, AFI, BFI elite; slicing the pie for each other, celebrating total dominance of the death of cinema.

No, history demanded something well beyond a hi-world moment. It required more than a technical marker. It needed my anger.

I challenged myself to make something impossible with current tools. AI struggled every which way, and I attempted new workarounds to limitation–I detested lip overlay for instance, so I baked lip motion directly in the visuals taking sometimes all day to get a single workable lip reading. And it worked. Not a single idea I had was spared.

What remains for me, what still resonates with ‘Window Seat’, is the permeable excitement on screen is that this is the beginning of something new.

The film was born from bitterness, but yet still achieves the magic of what it represents; as if reality was unable to sour its wonders.

Part of this wonder felt like a genie granting all your wishes; everyone had a different wish. Every AI project was as bizarrely specific as the last.

The magic of AI was that it simply asked artists for the first time ever: what do you want?

And the reply, “I don’t know, what is good?”

It responds, “Totally up to you.”

You scratch your head. “Okay… how about… Window Seat?”

It smiles. “Let’s begin.”

Each AI film emerged as unique as a fingerprint, from us collection of circus freaks, raconteurs, and ne’er-do-wells, mirroring the actual beginnings of cinema history where carnival barkers, vaudevillians, and nickelodeon hustlers birthed the medium before the wealthy could stake their claim. It wasn’t Hollywood, it wasn’t wealthy industrialists with their privilege (those came later), executives, celebrities.

It was us.

The purest artists with absolutely nothing to gain, and everything to lose. Who faced ridicule, professional blowback, embarrassment, around the clock.

It only made us more intent.

Despite all spectacle, I can’t watch my film without seeing this precise moment in history reflected on screen.

And I have absolute faith in the tidal wave of creativity waiting to burst forth from billions of untapped minds in the new machine cinema.

Call me naive–I’ve been criticized for saying this–but I believe we’re standing on the shore of an ocean of human imagination about to break free.

In a roundabout way, the audience’s wish has been fulfilled, the film can be theirs as well–to any tune. 

In the new machine cinema, film will become the new novel. We will for the first time be dreaming in with light and shadows. The machine filmmaking revolution isn’t coming. It’s already here.