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Digital Cinema’s Heterogeneous Appeal: Debates on Embodiment, Intersubjectivity, and Immediacy

Ariel Rogers

in Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies

This chapter examines the industrial and critical discourses surrounding the increasing dominance of cinema by digital technologies in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Discussions of digital cinema in ... More

This chapter examines the industrial and critical discourses surrounding the increasing dominance of cinema by digital technologies in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Discussions of digital cinema in this period reflect two different trends. On one hand, there was a steady interest in big-budget digital visual effects with films like Titanic (1997), The Matrix (1999), and the first two Star Wars “prequels,” Star Wars: Episode 1—The Phantom Menace (1999) and Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones (2002). At the same time, there was a surge of interest in ultra-low budget filmmaking made possible by the introduction and popularization of high-quality, but inexpensive digital cameras and editing software. The concept of digital cinema was thus popularized as digital technology began to play a prominent role across the different components of production, postproduction, distribution, and exhibition.Less

Awe and Aggression: The Experience of Erasure in The Phantom Menace and The Celebration

Ariel Rogers

in Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies

This chapter studies the aesthetic transformations accompanying the technological shift in the late 1990s, focusing on two films widely identified as watersheds for digital cinema: George Lucas's ... More

This chapter studies the aesthetic transformations accompanying the technological shift in the late 1990s, focusing on two films widely identified as watersheds for digital cinema: George Lucas's Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace (1999) and Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration (1998). The pervasive and intricate use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in The Phantom Menace not only provoked a sense of awe in terms of its technological excellence, but also addressed contemporary concerns with the boundaries of human life, inviting viewers to marvel at its devaluation. While The Phantom Menace's use of CGI allows for the proliferation of detail, The Celebration's use of consumer-grade digital video cameras produces a low-resolution aesthetic, especially in long shots and low-light situations.Less

Points of Convergence: Conceptualizing the Appeal of 3D Cinema Then and Now

Ariel Rogers

in Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies

This chapter examines how the appeal of stereoscopic 3D was formulated in conjunction with its periods of popularity in the 1950s and its reappearance in 2005. The recent reemergence of 3D offers a ... More

This chapter examines how the appeal of stereoscopic 3D was formulated in conjunction with its periods of popularity in the 1950s and its reappearance in 2005. The recent reemergence of 3D offers a reconsideration of the claims made in the previous chapters, since it appears to simply repackage digitally a format that was often associated with widescreen in the 1950s. In particular, since both widescreen and stereoscopic 3D were, at that time, widely conceived as formats that aggressively addressed the viewers' bodies, the recent popularity of digital 3D might be seen as either a contradiction or simply a solution to the concerns about disembodiment that have been voiced in conjunction with the concept of digital cinema.Less

Going Digital: Cinema’s New Age

Markos Hadjioannou

in From Light to Byte: Toward an Ethics of Digital Cinema

This book explores the relationship between celluloid modes and digital practices in the creation and perception of cinema’s images, as well as the implications of this technological transition for ... More

This book explores the relationship between celluloid modes and digital practices in the creation and perception of cinema’s images, as well as the implications of this technological transition for our relationship with the movie screen and with the models of recording, creating, and interacting with movies that have now become available. It considers the digital media’s distinct modes of production, projection, and reception, as it reconfigures rather than replaces celluloid modes of creation and interaction. As such, it focuses on digital cinema in search of those forms of expression and perception that present a new ontology of the cinematic—that is, as they change the existential relations between the movie image and the world it presents and with which it interacts. It also discusses the debate of digital cinema’s ontology, and the interrelationship between old and new media that is revealed in cinema cultures, as well as the way digital movies depict the world and engage with the individual. Finally, the book explains how we may go about addressing the question of technological change within media archaeologies.Less

Digital Realisms

Igor Krstić

in Slums on Screen: World Cinema and the Planet of Slums

The chapter looks at contemporary depictions of slums in digital cinema. Joining recent scholarship (Nagib, Elsaesser, Rombes) that argues for a correlation between the advent of DV and a renewed ... More

The chapter looks at contemporary depictions of slums in digital cinema. Joining recent scholarship (Nagib, Elsaesser, Rombes) that argues for a correlation between the advent of DV and a renewed return to realism in world cinema, the author rejects the notion that the advent of digital technologies marks a ‘loss of indexicality’, as claimed by some (Rodowick; Manovich, Grusin). Instead, the author argues that today’s independent (festival, art or new wave) cinemas (e.g. Dogme 95) enter into a post-postmodern phase since they attempt to re-materialise the filmic signifiers, precisely by refashioning the filmmaking practices and principles of earlier movements such as Italian neorealism or cinéma vérité. To illustrate this, the chapter looks at how Manila’s slums have been represented by the filmmakers of the ‘Philippine New Wave’ (e.g. Mendoza) and at Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas Trilogy, which depicts a slum once located on the outskirts of Lisbon. The chapter concludes that these filmmakers use digital technologies, albeit very differently, to reanimate a political kind of cinema that has been declared dead, turning their films into acts of resistance to the digital confections of today’s entertainment industries as well as to the blatant social inequalities of our ‘planet of slums’.Less

The Downside of Digital: A German media critic plays devil's advocate

Tilman Baumgärtel

in Southeast Asian Independent Cinema

This article was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer in September 2006, and caused such uproar in the local film scene, that the newspaper felt obliged to print a number of statements by ... More

This article was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer in September 2006, and caused such uproar in the local film scene, that the newspaper felt obliged to print a number of statements by directors and producers in consecutive issues, that are documented in extracts here.Less

Introduction: Moving Machines

Ariel Rogers

in Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies

This book examines how the concepts used to describe and evaluate cinematic experience, such as realism and embodiment, were mobilized in conjunction with the coming of widescreen and stereoscopic 3D ... More

This book examines how the concepts used to describe and evaluate cinematic experience, such as realism and embodiment, were mobilized in conjunction with the coming of widescreen and stereoscopic 3D in the 1950s, the emergence of digital cinema in the 1990s and early 2000s, and the diffusion of digital 3D since 2005. It locates cinematic experience in the interplay among the movie on the screen, the viewer, and the social and material structures that change how this encounter is understood and felt. Addressing how cinema appeals to viewers, especially during periods of major technological changes, also requires consideration of films and modes of representation that conspire to structure the viewers' encounters with cinema. Thus, the book also explores how the films themselves manifest and anticipate the technological changes.Less

Four Manifestos

Khavn de la Cruz

in Southeast Asian Independent Cinema

Four Manifestos by Filipino Independent Director Khavn de la Cruz

Prologue

Ray Zone

in Stereoscopic Cinema & the Origins of 3-D Film, 1838–1952

This introductory chapter discusses the four general periods through which the “grammar” of stereographic narrative has evolved. The four periods discussed are the Novelty Period, the Era of ... More

This introductory chapter discusses the four general periods through which the “grammar” of stereographic narrative has evolved. The four periods discussed are the Novelty Period, the Era of Convergence, the Immersive Era, and the era of Digital 3-D Cinema. It also states the main purposes of this book, one of which is to demonstrate the fundamental importance of stereography to the development of motion picture technology.Less

Imagined Communities, Imagined Worlds: Independent Film From Southeast Asia in the Global Mediascape

Tilman Baumgärtel

in Southeast Asian Independent Cinema

The article gives an overview of the recent upsurge of independent cinema in Southeast Asia. I argue that these films are examples of a new transnational cinema forthe lack of alternative: as the ... More

The article gives an overview of the recent upsurge of independent cinema in Southeast Asia. I argue that these films are examples of a new transnational cinema forthe lack of alternative: as the political and social situation in the countries where they have been made does not allow for their inclusion into the mainstream of the national cinema, they have turned to an international market to find an audience. I argue that a new generation of film-makers has been empowered by the easy and cheap access to digital video. Thanks to digital cinema technology, film-makersfrom South East Asia have the opportunity to produce their alternative and often very personal works. Using Arjun Appadurai's influential essay ‘Disjuncture and Difference’ (1996) as a theoretical framework, I discuss some of the specific traits of recent independent films from Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Singapore and the Philippines, and point out their genuinely transnational nature with regard to distribution and reception.Less

Threshold of the Future

Ray Zone

in 3-D Revolution: The History of Modern Stereoscopic Cinema

The historical basis in fact for the beginnings of digital 3D cinema are traced along with its first announcement to the motion picture industry in 2005. Artistic possibilities and technical issues ... More

The historical basis in fact for the beginnings of digital 3D cinema are traced along with its first announcement to the motion picture industry in 2005. Artistic possibilities and technical issues of quality 3D presentation in digital cinema are surveyed.Less

Prologue: The Epochs of 3-D

Ray Zone

in 3-D Revolution: The History of Modern Stereoscopic Cinema

The introductory Prologue defines four separate eras for the evolution of stereoscopic cinema. A prior volume examined the Novelty Period for 3D films. The present volume considers the three ... More

The introductory Prologue defines four separate eras for the evolution of stereoscopic cinema. A prior volume examined the Novelty Period for 3D films. The present volume considers the three subsequent epochs of stereo cinema with 1) the Era of Convergence, 2) the Age of Immersion and 3) Digital 3D cinema.Less

Intermedial Détrompe l’Oeil and Contemporary Polish Narrative Cinema

Gabriel Laverdière

in Caught In-Between: Intermediality in Contemporary Eastern European and Russian Cinema

New technologies have deeply informed the ways to think about cinema, film and video. If digital cinema is often understood as a break with past film aesthetics, this chapter rather sees continuity. ... More

New technologies have deeply informed the ways to think about cinema, film and video. If digital cinema is often understood as a break with past film aesthetics, this chapter rather sees continuity. Digital culture also preserves and prolongs video culture. This chapter examines the use of video and digital images in the context of minor national cinemas, and takes the view that digital filmmaking is a continuation not only of argentic cinema but also of video aesthetics. It suggests that certain Polish films use analogue and digital video cameras in ways that can be considered as strategies of unveilment, which assist the critical discourse that these works engage in regarding the social reality they depict.Less

“Digital is liberation theology”: Interview with Lav Diaz

Tilman Baumgärtel

in Southeast Asian Independent Cinema

Interview with Lav Diaz

Black Suns and a Bright Planet: Melancholia

Thomas Elsaesser

in Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier

This chapter uses Melancholia as a case study for two related issues. First, it aligns a typically European “sense of an ending”—about the sustainability of a certain way of life—with epochal shifts ... More

This chapter uses Melancholia as a case study for two related issues. First, it aligns a typically European “sense of an ending”—about the sustainability of a certain way of life—with epochal shifts in the cinema’s self-understanding as a realist medium, now “in collision” with the cold and lunar images of digital cinema. Second, the chapter tries to show how this crisis nonetheless gives rise to a sense of hope, insofar as an altered status is proposed for European cinema, namely that of a “thought experiment.” At once speculative and self-reflexive, von Trier’s cinema as thought experiment invites and accommodates a variety of hermeneutic approaches. It permits one to “think the unthinkable” while adhering to systemic constraints and sets up rules that redefine what we understand by “realism” and “reference.”Less

Seriality, Subjectivity and New Media: Consuming the Saw Series

Mark Bernard

in Selling the Splat Pack: The DVD Revolution and the American Horror Film

This chapter examines the Saw films as they appear on DVD and how they differ from other horror films. American journalists often included the creative minds of the Saw series — James Wan, Leigh ... More

This chapter examines the Saw films as they appear on DVD and how they differ from other horror films. American journalists often included the creative minds of the Saw series — James Wan, Leigh Whannell and Darren Lynn Bousman — in the Splat Pack. Any analysis of the Splat Pack and its relation to media industries would be incomplete without a consideration of the Saw films because, out of all the films in the Splat Pack cycle, they are the most concerned with media. The Saw films are designed to resemble interactive, new media products that encourage audience interaction, employing storytelling techniques shaped by new media. Yet these films are uniquely suited for the DVD platform, where their cyberintimations are given full digital expression. The chapter considers how the Saw films are plugged into two new media iterations of Tom Gunning's idea of a ‘cinema of attractions’: the DVD as ‘digital theme park’ and YouTube as a digital cinema of attractions.Less

Miniature Pleasures: On Watching Films on an iPhone

Martine Beugnet

in Cinematicity in Media History

This chapter, written by Martine Beugnet, responds to the common complaint that watching movies on a smartphone is ‘uncinematic’, and investigates precisely the cinematicity particular to such ... More

This chapter, written by Martine Beugnet, responds to the common complaint that watching movies on a smartphone is ‘uncinematic’, and investigates precisely the cinematicity particular to such devices. While, for instance, the tiny screen of an iPhone is paradigmatic of spectatorial habits in the digital age, it is equally redolent of the kinetoscope’s peephole apparatus prior to the emergence of the film theatre. Although the very antithesis of the collective viewing practices of cinema audiences, the iPhone as a screening device envelops these practices within a broader and more individuated experience of cinematicity. Beugnet proposes to leave the debate about ‘proper’ ways of screening films to one side, and to concentrate instead on the specific characteristics of watching films on very small screens and with sound-isolating devices. Drawing on haptic theories of visuality as well as on the history and aesthetics of miniature art forms and the curio, the chapter examines issues of mobility, manipulability and distracted-versus-attentive viewing, before focusing on the effect of miniaturization on the film image itself.Less