Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Cinema in the Digital Age
    Cinema in the Digital Age
    Cinema in the Digital Age
    Ebook288 pages5 hours

    Cinema in the Digital Age

    By Nicholas Rombes

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Does the digital era spell the death of cinema as we know it? Or is it merely heralding its rebirth? Are we witnessing the emergence of something entirely new? Cinema in the Digital Age examines the fate of cinema in this new era, paying special attention to the technologies that are reshaping film and their cultural impact. Examining Festen (1998), The Blair Witch Project (1999), Timecode (2000), Russian Ark (2002), The Ring (2002), among others, this volume explores how these films are haunted by their analogue past and suggests that their signature element are their deliberate imperfections, whether those take the form of blurry or pixilated images, shakey camera work, or other elements reminding viewers of the human hand guiding the camera. Weaving together a rich variety of sources, Cinema in the Digital Age provides a deeply humanistic look at the meaning of cinematic images in the era of digital perfection.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWallFlower Press
    Release dateAug 7, 2012
    ISBN9780231501484
    Cinema in the Digital Age

    Related to Cinema in the Digital Age

    Related ebooks

    Performing Arts For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Apt Pupil

      Jun 29, 2018

      Apt Pupil
      12 min read

    • Article

      For A Cinema Of Bombardment

      Sep 20, 2019

      For A Cinema Of Bombardment
      11 min read

    • Article

      Other People’s Diaries

      Sep 9, 2018

      Other People’s Diaries
      10 min read

    • Article

      The Motern Method

      Sep 12, 2022

      The Motern Method
      10 min read

    • Article

      Do the Hustle

      Sep 14, 2021

      Do the Hustle
      13 min read

    • Article

      Paul Thomas Anderson

      Sep 16, 2018

      Paul Thomas Anderson
      23 min read

    • Article

      STRANGE Frequencies

      Dec 7, 2023

      STRANGE Frequencies
      6 min read

    • Article

      Flux Gourmet

      Mar 28, 2022

      Flux Gourmet
      5 min read

    • Article

      Céline Sciamma

      Nov 10, 2021

      Céline Sciamma
      3 min read

    • Article

      Light Industry

      Mar 3, 2020

      Light Industry
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Act of Living

      Sep 14, 2020

      The Act of Living
      18 min read

    • Article

      Workingman’s Death

      Sep 15, 2023

      Workingman’s Death
      21 min read

    • Article

      Eo

      Jun 27, 2022

      Eo
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Importance of Not Being an Auteur

      Dec 30, 2020

      Teaching an online course on Agnes Varda at the School of the Art Institute this fall for 39 students has put me in regular touch with Criterion’s superb 15-disc Blu-ray box set The Complete Films of Agnès Varda every week. The packaging reminds me i

      15 min read

    • Article

      Tori Et Lokita

      Mar 27, 2023

      Tori Et Lokita
      5 min read

    • Article

      In The Best Movies Of 2019, The Definition Of Independent Is Blurrier Than Ever

      Dec 12, 2019

      I have been writing under the umbrella of "Indie Focus" for The Times for more than 10 years now and throughout that time, the definition of what it means to be an independent filmmaker has remained elusive and pliable. Yes, there is the strict defin

      5 min read

    • Article

      Modern Vision

      Jun 5, 2018

      Modern Vision
      5 min read

    • Article

      Next Stop Eternity

      Sep 14, 2021

      Next Stop Eternity
      16 min read

    • Article

      Looking for Transcendence

      Dec 10, 2019

      Looking for Transcendence
      7 min read

    • Article

      Attached To Strings: Puppetry Proves Lasting In The Age Of Screens

      Nov 4, 2019

      Theater and craftsmanship are part of the enduring appeal of puppets, 3D entertainment that is not just for kids.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Field Of Vision

      May 3, 2019

      Field Of Vision
      14 min read

    • Article

      Films Of The Decade

      Aug 23, 2019

      Films Of The Decade
      11 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Cinema in the Digital Age

    5/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Cinema in the Digital Age - Nicholas Rombes

      The Adorno Paradox

      [Theodor Adorno]

      In 1938, under the growing shadow of Nazism, the philosopher Theodor Adorno left Europe for the US, where he began an intense collaboration with Max Horkheimer. In his essay ‘Culture and Administration’ Adorno wrote: ‘The film, above all, because of the scope of costs which can be met only through investment, is dependent upon a type of planning analogous to that of public administration’ (1991a: 121). Writing from within an administered cultural apparatus that suppressed chance and spontaneity, Adorno recognised that the Hollywood film industry largely excluded ‘arbitrariness in favour of an objectively regulated process … But it is precisely art which gives voice to the seemingly individual and coincidental which is now to be the subject of total aesthetic prohibition’ (1991a: 122). This arbitrariness, this chance, is the revenge of reality in the face of digital coding. And yet, paradoxically, Adorno’s writing style appears highly ordered and consistent; there is almost a fatalism, a determinism that seems closed off to chance. In ‘Transparencies on Film’ he wrote that ‘the consumers are made to remain what they are: consumers. That is why the culture industry is not the art of the consumer but rather the will of those in control onto their victims’ (1991b: 185). There is a victory to those words that is both inspiring and defeating. Cinema, for Adorno, was not only a massively closed read-only system, but also the catalyst for his beautifully pessimistic writing. Without film’s closed system, there would be no need for Adorno’s assaultive writing. Hollywood cinema helped to make possible the very form of critique Adorno claimed was impossible. His writing proves the lie to the very claims it makes. It is paradoxical how completely the tables have turned: for now it is film theory which has become domesticated, safe and predictable, while digital cinema makes possible new and potentially radical ways of storytelling, and introduces interface systems that suggest a form of theory and critique. The challenge today is to write about digital cinema in ways that are as spontaneous and humanistic as cinema itself.

      Against Method

      [punk, Orson Welles]

      In 1975, the year before punk broke, the philosopher Paul Feyerabend, in Against Method, wrote about how science needs and depends upon irrationality if it is to advance. Defending how science must in fact even return to older theories before the prevailing status quo can be overturned, he noted that ‘This backward movement isn’t just an accident; it has a definite function; it is essential if we want to overtake the status quo, for it gives us the time and the freedom that are needed for developing the main view in detail’ (1988: 114). Both punk, in its 1970s incarnation, and early digital cinema, were ‘primitive’ in the sense that they rejected the very excesses that made them possible in the first place. How far is it from Feyerabend’s ‘against method’ to Dogme 95’s rejection of ‘aesthetic considerations’? Well, twenty years, and the transformation of the punk aesthetic into a subversive mistakist shadow in the clean digital code. What Feyerabend recognised in 1975 – and what shortly thereafter was confirmed by punk and then later rearticulated by the early digital avant-gardists – was that ‘mistakes’ (in the form of playing instruments badly, or noise feedback, or shaky, hand-held camera shots, or irrationality in science) were preconditions for advancement. Simon Frith, in describing early punk rock, has noted that the ‘punk vanguard turned such musical reference into artistic purpose: they queried the naturalness of musical language. Beginning with the assumption that all music is constructed, they sought to strip it down to its foundations’ (1981: 162). The return to basics – a sort of primitivism – that was punk’s early signature was also digital cinema’s early signature, especially in the first films of the Dogme 95 movement, and in The Blair Witch Project, which offered a cinematic vision that was as incoherent and hysterical and shaky as its characters. In a sense, the do-it-yourself ethos of digital cinema and desktop moviemaking was a ‘correction’ to the overblown, overbudgeted movies of the 1980s and 1990s. But digital cinema differed from the indie film movement (that is, Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape, the films of Jim Jarmusch and so forth) in its unmannerliness and its anti-art ethos. There is a raw ugliness to films like The Idiots or julien donkey-boy that is more akin to early punk than to the artful, well-intentioned indie movies associated with the Sundance Film Festival in the 1980s and 1990s.

      My copy of Against Method is stamped ‘From the Library of Angela & Johann Klaassen’. I have no idea who these people are, yet I hold a book that belonged to them in my hands. I read passages that they underlined. I try to decipher doodles. On the title page, someone has written, in beautiful lettering, KLAASSEN 525. Is this a numbering system, indicating # 525 in the family library? There is a sort of randomness at work that has lead to the printing of the name KLAASSEN in this book, Cinema in the Digital Age, that you are now holding in your hands. I will likely not ever correspond with or meet with them, any more than I will meet with you. And yet, here we are, together, briefly, the product of a momentary abandonment of the methods that have guided other parts of this book. And that personal touch, that almost sentimental humanism, is precisely what punk and what do-it-yourself digital cinema sought to re-establish: a personal connection achieved by stripping away the inherited artifice of generations.

      For what was the classical era of film, other than an exercise in method, of which a film like Citizen Kane is but a point-by-point example, professional and flawless despite Welles’ reputation as an unpredictable ‘outsider’? The paradox is that the entire ‘invisible editing’ aesthetic of the classical era was, in fact, an elaborate method of the most visible sort. For the self-consciousness of films like Citizen Kane and Sunset Blvd. only served to highlight the supposed invisibility of other Hollywood studio films. And, as any good cynic would correctly point out, the ‘return to basics’ of digital movements like Dogme 95 was just as much a method. But there is a crucial difference: in foregrounding and publicising their ‘method’, the Dogme 95 directors (most notably Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg) effectively rendered it pointless. Near the opening of Festen (The Celebration) as Christian is walking along a country road bordered by golden wheat, he says that ‘I’m looking across the fields. At the land of my father. It’s beautiful.’ He could be talking, really, about his father’s fields, or he could be talking (in secret code, to us) about the sort of beautiful film that was a staple of the classical era, that someone of his father’s era would have made. This is a sorrowful recognition: that the degradation of the Dogme films is only possible against the beauty of the classical-era films of Welles, Douglas Sirk, William Wyler, Alfred Hitchcock and others who exploited the classical method to create surfaces so smooth they were positively disruptive, and signalled an invitation for future filmmakers. The gentle ironies of Sirk and Welles – the stylistic recognition in their films that their characters were just characters – was transformed in the Dogme films into a sort of brutal overexposure: in The Celebration and The Idiots the characters are so sincere that the only way to see them is through irony. And thus seeing them, you are

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1