Netflix: “Let the dead speak again”

The cinema is the only one of the arts where the dead speak, walk, love. And in movement, not like in painting or still photography. Today we can still see Humphrey Bogart seeing off Ingrid Bergman at the Casablanca airport, or Audrey Hepburn arriving alone at Tiffany’s at dawn, or Orson Welles appearing in the shadows of bombed-out Vienna in “The Third Man”. However, until the year 2000, there was a limit: we could see actors who were dead but who were alive at the time of filming; what we couldn’t do was see them “resurrected” so that the film wouldn’t be spoiled.

Precisely, in 2000 that ethical limit was crossed. That year Ridley Scott filmed his multi-million dollar “Gladiator” project with Russell Crowe. A CGI (Computer Generated Images) reconstruction of Imperial Rome. There, Oliver Reed played Proximo, a former gladiator who bought and traded Maximus (Crowe). But one night, in a pub, Reed (who was an alcoholic and had promised abstinence during filming), drank too much and suffered fatal cardiac arrest. Desperation took over the production. What were they going to do now? In similar cases, although with not very important roles, tricks were used such as modifying the script, limiting dialogue, repeating shots and creating new reverse shots (where the actor’s face is not seen). Not to mention bizarre solutions like that of Ed Wood, who when Bela Lugosi died during the filming of “Plan Nine from outer space” replaced him with an actor 20 centimeters shorter and fatter.

In “Gladiator” none of that was possible. Reshoot from the beginning with another actor? Even less: the very high budget of that film, where the Colosseum had been completely rebuilt, did not allow it. It was then that Scott decided to “resurrect” Reed: his face was recreated by CGI on an extra who physically resembled him, and some lines of script were changed. Paradoxically, it was Scott himself who was forced to reshoot some scenes of an already finished film from the beginning, “All the Money in the World” (2017), to “erase” Kevin Spacey, who had fallen out of favor. with Justice, and replace him with Christopher Plummer. But, of course, the production values ​​were not the same, nor were the number of character scenes.

As of 2000, then, many of the itches that the digital resurrection supposed before disappeared. In “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” (2016), Peter Cushing returned digitally as Emperor Moff Tarkin (the actor had died in 1994), as did Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia. However, in the latter case, Fisher’s could be considered as her posthumous film, because she lived during the filming. But three years later, in “Star Wars Episode 9: The Rise of Skywalker,” both Cushing and Fisher appeared, and she in two roles: the young princess, at the age she was in the original 1977 film, and with the what it would look like today. These were not, however, the only cases, Paul Walker died in a car accident before completing “Fast and Furious 7”, and Universal ordered to digitally recreate the missing parts.

However, the use of AI to generate the voice of a deceased person who speaks of himself in a documentary is not the same, since it calls into question the very concept of “document”. That is not a document, it is falsehood. Peter Jackson, in his series on the Beatles “Get Back”, also used AI to supply some voices that he had not found. Last year, the use of the same device in the documentary about Anthony Bourdain, the famous chef who committed suicide, sparked criticism and debate that continues to this day.

“The Andy Warhol Diaries” includes television interviews (these are real, from the archive) with artists such as John Waters and Glenn Ligon, and dealers, curators and producers such as Larry Gagosian, Jeffrey Deitch and Donna de Salvo. By the way: De Salvo was the producer, in 2018, of the Whitney Houston show in hologram, another of the horrific ways of resurrecting dead figures, just as was done with María Callas.