[In English] What will film studies be? Film caught between the television revolution and the digital revolution (original) (raw)
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.
Film for the Future (journal issue introduction)
Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 2021
If the canon has too long been dominated by white, male, cishet auteurs and their on-again/off-again relationship with big Hollywood industry, the death of film has created space for collective voices, different perspectives, wayward formats, greater accessibility, and activist mobilizations. This is the story of the future of film, which is mischievously unfolding before our very eyes.
This review essay examines three new titles -Shadow Economies of Cinema, Digital Disruption, and Screen Dynamics -that add to the canon of work on how the digitalisation of film and the plethora of new technologies and associated innovations have impacted on the discipline of film studies. What the three titles demonstrate well is the current fluctuation occurring within film studies, as scholars attempt to articulate and make sense of the changes occurring within the discipline in this contemporary era of media convergence.
Cinema: past, present and future of a communicative medium
Cinema has constantly evolved to meet the challenges of economic and technological developments, and, even at the time of the Covid pandemic, has so far managed to survive and thrive even in the face of dramatic changes, which seemed to endanger both its financial and economic value and its social and cultural functions. What is the present state-of-the art? How will new production, distribution and reception trends impact on viewing habits? What changes have taken place in film language use? And what new opportunities are opened up by digital technologies and the Internet?
Cinema and Visual Studies in the Digital Era Blue
Kinema: A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media, 2008
WITHIN the variegated domain of media studies, convergence seems to be one of the buzzwords of the day. Forms that were previously discrete entities merge into new constellations, in the process uprooting the entire ecosystem of the media. Business conglomerates merge, on the cultural horizon new technologies continuously emerge, and the different artistic practices flow seamlessly into each other to produce works that are thoroughly hybrid and transaesthetic. The landscape of the arts and the media already looks radically different from what it did less than a decade ago. Coinciding with all these changes is another and-in Europe, at least-perhaps less heralded kind of convergence, which is first and foremost institutional and disciplinary in nature. This is the relatively recent appearance of the field of visual studies, also sometimes referred to as visual culture or visual culture studies, a budding but still very much contested amalgamation of art history, film studies, anthropology, feminism, and cultural studies whose provenance dates back to the early 1990s and the interdisciplinary experiments that were undertaken at some American universities at the time. Currently there are signs that visual studies programs are being introduced across European institutions as well, typically nested within media studies or art history departments. The question that I would like to delve into in this paper is this: what will become of cinema in an age of not only aesthetic but also disciplinary convergence? Is the discipline we all know as cinema studies going to be integrated as part of a new mother discipline known as visual studies, or perhaps a general Bildwissenschaft in Horst Bredekamp's sense? Or, given the efflorescent rise of computer games and other new media among the younger generations, will cinema take its place alongside art history as an archaeological and mostly obsolescent medium, presided over by curators and archivists only? What are the challenges vis-à-vis teaching cinema studies in the context of a broader history of visuality? When film has become something that is available to us in a multitude of formats, does this spell the final parting of the ways of film and cinema? Is the particular sensibility known as cinephilia compatible with the notion of watching movies on your mobile phone? Finally, what are the prospects for film theory in this new era of digital convergence and visual studies?
New Cinema and new media: Hopes for resurrection
South Asian Popular Culture, 2019
This article conducts empirical research on the use of new media by the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC). It critically engages with its DVD campaign launched under the Cinemas of India (COI) label in 2012. This is done with a larger view to assess the afterlife of New Cinema and map the creation of an alternative archive. The digitally restored NFDC films constitute valuable empirical tools for film studies; the DVDs have made the text 'attainable' in the hands of a film scholar. However, the article does not seek to textually analyse the content of the films restored, nor is it a technical study of DVDs, instead the DVDs are assessed on their archival potential to study New Cinemai.e., (Hindi) films that were made and supported by the Corporation during the 1970s to early 1990s. In the end, the article tries to hint towards the challenges of doing film history in a digital age.
Impact of Digital Technologies on the Development of Modern Film Production and Television
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2021
The popularity of streaming services has been steadily growing over the past 5 years, and the number of subscribers is increasing. This study was conducted to find out how the popularisation of streaming services affects filmmaking. The history of cinema is inextricably linked with the development of technology. It should be noted that each new page in the history of the film industry began with the invention of new innovations. During the digital age, a rapid leap forward in the television and film industry was also inevitable. Digital cinema is a format that has virtually left film and analogue cinema technology behind. Each revolution in the film industry has been a new step towards providing audiences with a new experience and an even more vivid film experience. Streaming services are one of the innovations that have emerged thanks to the development of digital technologies. They allow viewers to receive content for a fixed price. Streaming guarantees quality and availability wi...
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
The Routledge Companion to Historical Theory (edited by Chiel van den Akker), 2021
This chapter traces some ways that film and new television portray the past and "think" about history and historiography. Tracing elements of the ontology and phenomenology involved in these media, the chapter also explores some particular instances of how the past has been portrayed in these media recently, especially in, on one hand, the recent work of Quentin Tarantino, and on the other hand, the emergence of what has been termed new television.