Cinema in the Digital Age: A Rebuttal to Lev Manovich (original) (raw)
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This paper presents a rebuttal to Lev Manovich's assertions regarding the identity and indexical nature of digital cinema. It critiques Manovich's argument that digital cinema signifies a devolution towards mere animation, asserting instead that digital cinema can maintain an indexical relationship with reality, and argues that indexicality is not an ontological requirement for defining cinema. The analysis ultimately concludes that cinema has not undergone a fundamental transformation and retains its essence despite the advancements in digital technology.
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Filmmaking has traditionally been a very structured, expensive, and hierarchical process. Digital technologies open up new mechanisms and processes, which can offer alternatives to the stable systems of production, distribution, and exhibition. There has been a paradigm shift as digital and computer technologies are changing the parameters for how movies are made, distributed, and seen. Acting as a survey of the current landscape, this chapter examines the process of moviemaking and what methods, producers, cooperations, and communities are enabled by the influx of digital technologies. It explores how digital technologies are altering the nature of moviemaking, some of the affordances provided, and the ways in which they are already being exploited by creative and often amateur moviemakers.
Since the 1970s, movies have become increasingly dependent on digital technologies. This course explores a range of issues related to the digitization of cinema's production, distribution, and exhibition, including the cultural contexts and aesthetic practices surrounding these technological shifts as well as their experiential and political dimensions. In particular, we will explore such topics as digital cinematography's relation to cinematic realism, emerging trends in editing practices, the political implications of digital special effects, the representation of social media and digital devices in recent films, and the ways that other digital media influence cinematic techniques. Course Standards This course is a 4-credit course, which means that in addition to scheduled discussions, students are expected to do at least 9.5 hours of course-related work or activity each week during the semester. This includes scheduled class lecture/ discussion meeting times as well as time spent completing assigned readings, watching films and video lectures, studying for tests and examinations, preparing written assignments, and other course-related tasks. Readings: All readings are available via Blackboard.
One Hundred Years Apart : Cinema and Digital Cinema
I As we celebrate one hundred years of filmmaking since the release of Raja Harishchandra in 1913, the Indian film industry seems to be in a déjà vu of sorts. Just as cinema during Phalke was breaking fresh technological grounds, cinema today appears to be breaking newer grounds with a new technology of digital cinema. One is likely to observe many parallels between Phalke's times and now, with similar dilemmas, similar despairs and also similar possibilities and exuberances. The arrival of digital cinematography, in more than one way changes the way cinema responds to society and produces and circulates culture, just as once the arrival of the technology of cinema changed the Indian viewing culture. The change in technology that the digital cinema brings about produces some major changes in the kind of cinema that gets made and viewed and accordingly also interact and partake in the constitution and the politics of the society in which it is made and watched. The aim of the present paper is to understand the major changes in the viewer politics which the digital cinema is likely propagate.
What the Film Archive Can Tell Us About Technology in the Post-digital Era
Design Issues, 2005
The kinetograph and the cinématograph were not the works of individual genius, but emerged from the popular imagination that converged on a raft of concerns, ranging from the deeply philosophical to the outright flippant, that gave a particular meaning to hundreds of little pre-cinematic devices both invented and rediscovered in the nineteenth century. From what we know of it, that imagination has once again found a dynamic moment in the disorganized turbulence of an ill-defined and confused apparatus-gathered together under the rubric of electronic digital media-ranging from the networked home computer to microwave telephone technology, and "Bluetooth" interspecie communication. Yet, as digital media reaches for infinity and beyond (to quote Buzz Light Year) the cinematic imagination of the twentieth century shows no sign of running out of economic steam in the twentieth-first as, for example, the first Lord of the Rings film grossed £560 million plus, and the franchise is expected to generate around £3 billion in twenty years. The cinema, the flagship of the analogue era, has not simply survived, it has prospered in the digital revolution and, arguably, even set the economic and aesthetic agenda for how that technology is exploited as entertainment. So far, so good for cinephiles, but what of the cinema history? Worrying about the archive may seem a dull preoccupation when the barricades appear to be crumbling, but if we avoid the question, it is possible that, in the not too distant future, understanding the latest turns in film and cinema history will be incomplete if we do not preserve evidence of the technological trace of the imagination that has helped shape the reinvented cinema of today. If the intrusion into history of digital cinema has done anything, it has forced a consideration that the emphasis of the archive has shifted from the films themselves to the cinematic imagination in all its manifestations.
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