Ideas & Trends: Dead Stars, Alive Again; Yes, Marilyn May Fall in Love With Viggo

''August 1, 2004 By STUART KLAWANS (NYT) Late Edition - Final , Section 4 , Page 4 , Column 1''

The visual arts, wrote the French critic André Bazin in 1945, have "a mummy complex" - they spring from a desire to preserve the human body from decay.

The power of film, Mr. Bazin argued, is that it embalms more completely than any previous medium, preserving not only anatomy but movements and sounds. We tend to think of film images as real, because the person who was preserved must have been present before the camera.

The funerary aspect of Bazin's theory got a boost last week, but his case for realism took a dive, with reports on how computer technology has resurrected Sir Laurence Olivier, who died in 1989. A combination of manipulated archival film footage and fresh soundtrack dialogue will give Olivier a role - speaking lines he never spoke and making gestures he never made - in a new movie, "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," scheduled for release in September.

"I haven't seen that many movies with Olivier recently," the movie's producer, Jon Avnet, explained in an interview, "which is part of the reason why I thought this was pretty cool casting - that, and the fact that he's a great actor."

This is not the first time that a dead actor has been exhumed. For Carl Reiner's 1982 comedy "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid," special effects allowed Steve Martin to play scenes with Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney.

In 1991 Bogart and Cagney, and Louis Armstrong for good measure, appeared with the singer Elton John in a Coke commercial.

The dead stars were essentially cutouts, limited to a repertoire of existing filmed gestures. In the meantime, digital technology was evolving toward the creation of wholly digital actors, who could do anything they were told and would never demand a roomier trailer.

So far, digital characters have not fared well. The 2001 thriller "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within," with an all-digital cast, and Andrew Niccol's satire "Simone" (2002), about the first virtual actor to become a celebrity, were box office disappointments.

But what if the technologies for reanimating dead stars and for creating digital actors could be merged? Researchers have been working toward that end since at least 1987, when Swiss scientists premiered "Rendezvous à Montréal," a short film featuring digital versions of Bogart and Marilyn Monroe.

The reanimation of Olivier in "Sky Captain" seems to be a further step in this direction.

When asked if he had freed his virtual Olivier from a set of prerecorded gestures, Kerry Conran, the writer-director of "Sky Captain," said: "Our needs were very specific, by design. Within those limits, however, we did create a scene that Olivier never performed, so anything is possible."

Mr. Avnet put it another way: "We created a different performance of sorts through motion capture, modeling and computer-generated imagery. Could you create a completely new performance with what we have today? It would be pretty demanding. But clearly, the future is coming fast."

But the implications are anything but clear. "How do you protect imaginary humans? Can they have their own right of publicity?" asks Joseph J. Beard, a law professor at St. John's University, an expert on copyright and trademark law, including the postmortem rights of digitized celebrities.

Mr. Beard notes that a patchwork of laws governs the use of dead actors' images.

"California protects the images of celebrities for 70 years after death, which is the same as under copyright law,'' he said. "New York, on the other hand, does not have postmortem protection. So Bogart, who died as a resident of California, has state protection, and Cagney, who died as a domiciliary of New York, does not."

The situation will only grow more complex, Mr. Beard said, if virtual actors gain artificial intelligence and become autonomous.

What if a virtual actor that looks and sounds like Olivier, and has a temperament to match, gets into a dispute with a rival Oliver simulation that is competing for the same roles? What if the interests of both these cyber-actors conflict with those of the rights holders to the original Olivier's image?

The more pressing question for audiences may be the fate of the actor's soul. We are accustomed to think of the greatness of a performer as an expression of individuality. But when Olivier is no longer captured on film but manufactured on the computer, perhaps in multiple versions, we lose the very thing that art was supposedly preserving: our point of contact with the irreplaceable, finite person.

For Mr. Avnet, that's no problem. Noting that "Sky Captain" toys nostalgically with dated 1940's Hollywood images of the future, he says: "What holds this film together is its celebration of movie history. To me, Olivier is perfect casting, because he embodies that history."