Digital impressionism

What’s the difference between Miami Vice, the oncepopular prime- t i me cop show that aired between 1984 and 1990 on NBC, and Miami Vice, the major motion picture, released in the summer of 2006, exactly 10 years ago this week?

The clothes, for one thing. The clothes in Miami Vice the series were a riot of Italian- linen yacht- wear and beach- dandy pastels, allwhite unstructured sportcoats and T- shirts the colour of candy floss, a look so unmistakable that “Miami Vice” became a kind of fashion shorthand, like mod or punk. Whereas the clothes in Miami Vice the movie ... short- sleeve sport shirts, black V- necks, brown and grey suits by Ozwald Boateng with not even a flash of silk pocket square in sight. Monochrome couture, nondescript chic and most importantly, not so influential at all.

But actually of the two incarnations it’s Miami Vice the movie that’s proven the more significant, esthetically. After all, it’s the look of the movie itself that matters rather than any specific objet d’art that may be in it. This US$ 135 million dollar s ummer blockbuster — which was very nearly a fiasco as far as Universal Pictures was concerned thanks to its legendarily abysmal production, months behind schedule and hugely over budget, a dozen times derailed by inclement weather and location- shoot catastrophes and the petulance of Jamie Foxx, who in the time between agreeing to make the film and shooting it had won an ego- ballooning Oscar — is really a magnificent thing.

It might have begun life in the multiplex. But it should be screened in galleries.

To understand this you have to look at how Miami Vice was made. Back in 2006, you’ll remember, there still prevailed in Hollywood the quaint notion that a film ought to be shot and projected on film, i. e. celluloid, which indeed most were — and those that weren’t, like the second Star Wars prequel, were designed to look like they were, because the studios figured that audiences would mind the transition to this cheap new technology less if they didn’t know that anything had even changed. But Michael Mann looked at digital cameras and must have thought, “Look, these things don’t work like regular film cameras, and it’s silly to pretend that they do. It’s like trying to recreate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in watercolours.” He didn’t want to work in recreations. So he went out and made a watercolour movie that looked exactly like watercolours should.

For example, there is this incredible night sky early in the picture, seen from the top of a nightclub roof. You can see the whole skyline in the distance — a great glittering vista, like nothing you’ve ever seen in a movie before. It looks that way because digital cameras capture light in a completely different way than film cameras do, supposing they’re used as they’re intended to be. There are streaks of lightning against a backdrop of charcoal, and streetlights blazing this impossible amber ( such streetlights!), and drips of Pollack orange as the sunrise strikes the ocean. You hear the way that critics describe these images: they talk about the smears, the blur, the movement of the colour, the electric blacks and blues. This isn’t how one typically talks about a blockbuster movie. It’s the vocabulary of impressionism.

Anyway, Miami Vice the movie isn’ t really Miami Vice the video installation, however tempting it is to talk about in terms of pure form — the day- glo digital daydream, just rapture with a two- hour running time. Miami Vice the movie does have characters and dialogue and a story about undercover drug investigations along the crime- ridden Florida coast, and I don’t think Michael Mann, whatever his painterly gifts, ever consciously aspired to the avant-garde.

Its otherworldly beauty is just one of those things an artist happens upon by chance or afflatus. More remarkable is how rarely the look of the movie has been replicated in the decade since. It’s been 10 years! Digital is ubiquitous, and permanent, and still it tries to look like film. We’re good and ready for more watercolour masterpieces.

It’s time for the Mann school of digital impressionism to sink in.

MIAMI VICE MIGHT HAVE BEGUN LIFE IN MULTIPLEXES, BUT IT SHOULD BE SCREENED IN GALLERIES