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The Golden Age of Comic Book Filmmaking saw filmmakers engaging with the language of comics with unprecedented enthusiasm, often by utilizing the control offered by digital technologies. Bullet-time, which was innovated for The Matrix as a means to approximate the limitless discourse time of comics, probably proliferated most widely. However, there were many further efforts to adapt the language of comics to cinema. For instance, filmmakers often went beyond ready-made equivalents in their desire to create comic book-like panels and transitions, visualize sound, and bring previously specific codes to the screen. The enthusiasm for the comic language, coupled with the plasticity of the digital film image, even led to a measure of comic book graphiation seeping into cinema. Although many of these techniques did not enjoy the success of bullet-time, collectively they testify to a concerted effort to achieve a comic aesthetic, which has served to enrich the expressivity of mainstream cinema.

Chapter 4 covers cinematography, specifically Film Stock, Photofilms, the Freeze-Frame, Moving Camera, and Bullet Time/Time Slice. As Sponsor magazine declared in 1955, the “video portion” of the commercials needed to lead, with copywriters following. Gerald Schnitzer often relied on some of the best camera operators of the classical and, later, post-classical Hollywood eras to shoot his TV commercials, initiating a practice in which cinematographers were able to explore and experiment within limitations dictated by advertising clients and television norms.

This chapter deliberates on Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, expounding on Humbert and the nymphet love affair with the wonders behind time travel. One seems to journey across time or secure moments through the Bullet Time or the 360-degree camera invented during the mid-1990s. However, this is the unfulfilled desire of Humbert in his craving to preserve the love of his life. Virtual reproduction is then supported by Nietzsche's eternal return, some films created by Chris Marker and Hirokazu Koreeda, Philip Dick's The World Fones Made, and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. In other words, the author accentuates that an unordered flow of events exists and that because of this revelation, acceptance of the truth offers people enormous coping mechanisms—there is death after love, brokenness preceding totality, greed following contentment.