Cinema and Radio - Abel Gance (original) (raw)
Related papers
Film in the Post-Media Age (ed. by Ágnes Pethő, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012)
Ever since the centenary of cinema there have been intense discussions in the field of film studies about the imminent demise of the cinematic medium, endless articles championing the spirit of genuine cinephilia have proclaimed the death of classical cinema and mourned the end of an era, while new currents in media studies introduced such buzzwords into the discussions as “remediation” (Bolter and Grusin), “media convergence” (Jenkins), “post-media aesthetics” (Manovich) or “the virtual life of film” (Rodowick). By the turn of the millennium, the whole “ecosystem” of media had been radically altered through processes of hybridization and media convergence. Some theorists even claim that now that the term “medium” has triumphed in the discussions around contemporary art and culture, the actual media have already deceased, as digitized imagery absorbs all media. Moving images have entered the art galleries and new forms of inter-art relationships have been forged. They have also moved into the streets and our everyday life as a domesticated medium at everybody’s reach, into new private and public environments (and into a fusion of both via the Internet). Consequently, should we speak of an all pervasive “cinematic experience” instead of a cinematic medium? What really happens to film once its traditional medium has shape shifted into various digital forms and once its traditional locations, institutions and usages have been uprooted? What do these re-locations and re-configurations really entail? What are the most important new genres in post-media moving pictures? Is it the web video, is it 3D cinema, is it the computer game that operates with moving image narratives, is it the new “vernacular” database, the DVD, or the good old television adjusted to all these new forms? How does theatrical cinema itself adapt to or reflect on these new image forms and technologies? How can we interpret the convergence of older cinematic forms with an emerging digital aesthetics traceable in typical post-media “hosts” of moving images? These are only some of the major questions that the theoretical investigation and in-depth analyses in this volume try to answer in an attempt at exploring not the disappearance of cinema but the blooming post-media life of film.
Cinematicity in Media History - paperback
Table of Contents Introduction: Cinematicity and Comparative Media Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau Part 1 - Cinematicity Before Cinema 1 Dickensian ‘Dissolving Views’: The Magic Lantern, Visual Story Telling, and the Victorian Technological Imagination Joss Marsh 2 ‘Never Has One Seen Reality Enveloped in Such a Phantasmagoria’: Watching Spectacular Transformations, 1860-1889 Kristian Moen 3 Moving-Picture Media and Modernity: Taking Intermediate and Ephemeral Forms Seriously Ian Christie Part 2 - Transitions: Early Cinema and Cinematicity 4 Reading in the Age of Edison: The Cinematicity of ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’ Karin Littau 5 Time and Motion Studies: Joycean Cinematicity in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Keith B. Williams 6 Nature Caught in the Act: On the Transformation of an Idea of Art in Early Cinema Nico Baumbach Part 3 – Cinematicity in the ‘Classic’ Cinema Age 7 Cinematicity of Speech and Visibility of Literature: The Poetics of Soviet Film Scripts of the Early Sound Film Era Anke Hennig 8 Making America Global: Cinematicity and the Aerial View Jeffrey Geiger 9 Invisible Cities, Visible Cinema: Illuminating Shadows in Late Film Noir Tom Gunning Part 4 - Digital Cinematicity 10 Cinema, Video, Game: Astonishing Aesthetics and the Cinematic ‘Future’ of Computer Graphics’ Past Leon Gurevitch 11 Miniature Pleasures: On Watching Films on an iPhone Martine Beugnet 12 Kino-Eye in Reverse: Visualizing Cinema Lev Manovich
Although America's film critics had mixed reviews of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, many agreed in their assessment of the film's editing, singling out the rapid cutting pace and using terms such as 'frenetic', 'radical' even 'hallucinatory'. Some argued that the film stood as proof of the corrosive impact of television advertising and video clip culture, evidence that their formal strategies were leaching into the cinematic mainstream. It sounded very promising indeed! At the time of the film's American premiere, I was in the Netherlands, carefully tracking the reviews and counting the weeks until the Dutch release of the film. The big day arrived, and I vividly recall sitting through the usual block of product advertisements, previews and instructional messages, only to find the opening salvo of Stone's film a bit, well, … plodding. In fact, with a few glorious exceptions, the pace of the entire film failed to evoke the descriptions issuing fourth from American reviewers. The reason for the discrepancy was clear: most reviewers saw their films in special press screenings, free from the distractions of the popcorn-eating crowd, and cut loose from the larger enveloping context of previews and ancillary material (pre-film advertisements were in any case not yet common in US cinemas). By contrast, my viewing of the film in Utrecht was preceded by fifteen minutes of visual material (including some ads also run on television) dominated by bursts of one and two second long shots. Stone's film was certainly more quickly paced than those of his Hollywood contemporaries, but compared to the ads and previews that prefaced my viewing, it felt much closer to standard cinematic fare.
Television and Video Screens in Filmic Narratives: Medium Specificity, Noise and Frame-Work
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies
The paper discusses pertinent aspects of the screen as a device of framing and re-ordering. Television and video screens introduced in filmic diegesis are attributed three main functions (spatial, temporal, and topical re-ordering) and are related to the relationships Gerard Genette establishes between first-order narrative and metadiegetic levels (1987), as well as to Lars Elleström’s extracommunicational and intracommunicational actual and virtual spheres (2018). The visibility through noise of the televisual and of the video media is theorized based on Sybille Krämer’s media theory (2015) and three pre-digital arthouse films: Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1984), Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996), and Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997).1
Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema is an excellent edited 5 collection that contributes to the expanding field of screen studies in the context of cinema's relocations and transformations. The book is very appropriately dedicated to one of the great film scholars of our times, Miriam Hansen, whose study on Max Ophuls in relation to cinema and its publicness is posthumously included in the collection. Each of the twelve 10 essays offers an original perspective on what or – as most contributors prefer to posit – where cinema is today, as it is no longer confined and defined by the film auditorium or, more broadly, the dispositif that has shaped the film experience for most of its history. As a collection, the essays challenge the notion of unqualified (that is, absolute or atemporal) 15 borders, and help us to rethink them in light of their historical and theoretical contingency. Recognizing the ubiquity of the moving image in a multiplicity of screening devices and locations, this volume does not simply examine the present spaces and practices of cinema, but frames the most recent screen dynamics into a much broader historical perspective, 20 which also encompasses film's complex relationship with photography as well as the shifting of spectatorship and film aesthetics. Originating from a conference, Screen Dynamics is more focused and narrow than regular conference proceedings, yet is not quite an edited volume conforming to a specific cohesive theme or critical angle. Rather, 25 the volume broadly engages with some concerns pertaining to changed screen dynamics in the digital age. Such concerns include, but are not limited to: the relationship between cinema and other media and spaces (theatre, museum, art gallery, television, internet); the old and newly developed forms of spectatorship (in terms of reconceptualizations of 30 viewing attention and distraction); and the challenges that the digital brings to film ontology and film aesthetics (in particular realism and indexicality). Rather than framing the broad range of issues addressed in the essays into a shared theoretical premiss or a common critical angle, in their short 35 preface the editors highlight the multiplicity of viewpoints on offer and leave the reader to uncover their internal dialogues, and their overlapping and divergent theoretical perspectives. Yet the volume is not just a random collection of perceptive explorations of 'the terrain mapped out by the term cinema today' (p. 6), but is intelligently organized into four sections 40 ('Past and Present', 'Theory Matters', 'Other Spaces/Other Media' and 'States of the Image') that effectively develop an organic (non-taxonomic) discussion of cinema's shifting borders. While space constraints preclude a critical summary of each of the essays, it may be useful to outline some of the internal dialogues and 45 Screen 54:1 Spring 2013