The virtual life of film / D.N. Rodowick.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rodowick, David Norman.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Photography--Digital techniques.

Photography.

Digital cinematography.

Physical Description:

x, 193 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2007.

Summary:

As almost (or, truly, virtually) every aspect of making and viewing movies is replaced by digital technologies, even the notion of "watching a film" is fast becoming an anachronism. With the likely disappearance of celluloid film stock as a medium, and the emergence of new media competing for an audience, what will happen to cinema-and to cinema studies? In the first of two books exploring this question, D. N. Rodowick considers the fate of film and its role in the aesthetics and culture of moviemaking and viewing in the twenty-first century.

Here Rodowick proposes and examines three different critical responses to the disappearance of film in relation to other time-based media, and to the study of contemporary visual culture. Film, he suggests, occupies a special place in the genealogy of the arts of the virtual: while film disappears, cinema persists-at least in the narrative forms imagined by Hollywood since 1915. Rodowick also observes that most so-called "new media" are fashioned upon a cinematic metaphor. His book helps us see how digital technologies are serving, like television and video before them, to perpetuate the cinematic as the mature audiovisual culture of the twentieth century-and, at the same time, how they are preparing the emergence of a new audiovisual culture whose broad outlines we are only just beginning to distinguish.

Contents:

I The Virtual Life of Film

1 Futureworld 2

2 The Incredible Shrinking Medium 3

3 Back to the Future 9

II What was Cinema?

4 Film Begets Video 26

5 The Death of Cinema and the Birth of Film Studies 28

6 A Medium in All Things 31

7 Automatisms and Art 41

8 Automatism and Photography 46

9 Succession and the Film Strip 52

10 Ways of Worldmaking 54

11 A World Past 62

12 An Ethics of Time 73

III A New Landscape (Without Image)

13 An Elegy for Film 90

14 The New "Media" 93

15 Paradoxes of Perceptual Realism 99

16 Real Is as Real Does 107

17 Lost in Translation: Analogy and Index Revisited 110

18 Simulation, or Automatism as Algorithm 124

19 An Image That Is Not "One" 131

20 Two Futures for Electronic Images, or What Comes after Photography? 141

21 The Digital Event 163

22 Transcoded Ontologies, or "A Guess at the Riddle" 174

23 Old and New, or the (Virtual) Renascence of Cinema Studies 181.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

9780674026681

0674026683

9780674026988

0674026985

OCLC:

123284771