The Virtual Life of Film

Synopsis

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.

Copyright:

2007

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

Book Size:

198 Pages

ISBN-13:

9780674266773

Related ISBNs:

9780674026681, 9780674026988

Publisher:

Harvard University Press

Date of Addition:

05/26/21

Copyrighted By:

the President and Fellows of Harvard College

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Entertainment, Nonfiction, Art and Architecture, Social Studies

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.