Scale†

Scale is pertinent to the study of film and digital media. A foundational work is Powers of Ten (1968/1977), created by the architects and designers Charles and Ray Eames. Elaborating on the theme of scalar travel in Kees Boeke’s illustrated book Cosmic View (1957), the animated film depicts a spectrum of entities from the atom to the galaxy at graduated scales. The opening shot presents a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago. As if the camera were zooming out, more entities come into view: the Great Lakes, North America, the Earth, the Solar System, and the Milky Way. When the camera presumably reaches the outer edges of the universe, it quickly returns to the starting point and zooms in on the picnic itself. Again, more come into view: a sleeping picnicker, his hand, his skin, blood vessels, a white blood cell, DNA, a carbon atom, and the atom’s nucleus. Each scale is distinguished from the next by a factor of ten, as the film’s title suggests. Meanwhile, the relative size of people and things often informs the plot of feature films. For instance, Jack Arnold’s The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and Yonebayashi Hiromasa’s The Secret World of Arrietty (2012) showcase miniature protagonists struggling to survive in a world of human scale. Striking images of human beings in outer space in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) highlight humanity’s precarious existence in the vast universe. In Richard Fleischer’s Fantastic Voyage (1966) and Joe Dante’s InnerSpace (1987), the human body becomes its own universe within which microscopic spaceships navigate. The juxtaposition of entities of dissimilar sizes serves as a recurring theme in cinemas around the world. Films about China tend to employ the rhetoric of the monumental and the insignificant to comment on the country’s rise in the global market economy at the turn of the millennium. Jia Zhangke’s The World (2004), for example, is set in a Beijing theme park featuring replicas of international landmarks. The film not only alludes to China’s quest to find its place among these great nations, but also paints a grim picture of migrant workers suffering behind this Potemkin village of economic development. Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes (2006), which introduces Edward Burtynsky’s photography,