Culture November 29, 2012

In 1999, on the eve of the massively hyped release of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, J. Hoberman, at the time the lead film critic at the Village Voice, used the occasion to ponder George Lucas’s enormous influence on the movies. Hoberman’s reflections were fraught with unease: Rather than carrying on cinema’s function—perhaps even its duty—of preserving a photographic relationship to real events and performances, Lucas had initiated cinema’s move into the digital realm, where any image could be endlessly manipulated or even invented from whole cloth. “Infinitely malleable, digital imaging does not share photography’s indexical relationship to