From Light to Byte: Toward an Ethics of Digital Cinema
Markos Hadjioannou
Abstract
Cinema has been undergoing a profound technological shift: celluloid film is being replaced by digital media in the production, distribution, and reception of moving images. Concerned with the debate surrounding digital cinema’s ontology and the interrelationship between cinema cultures, this book investigates the very idea of change as it is expressed in the current technological transition. The text asks what is different in the way digital movies depict the world and engage with the individual and how we might best address the technological shift within media archaeologies. The book turns t ... More
Cinema has been undergoing a profound technological shift: celluloid film is being replaced by digital media in the production, distribution, and reception of moving images. Concerned with the debate surrounding digital cinema’s ontology and the interrelationship between cinema cultures, this book investigates the very idea of change as it is expressed in the current technological transition. The text asks what is different in the way digital movies depict the world and engage with the individual and how we might best address the technological shift within media archaeologies. The book turns to the technical basis of the image as its first point of departure, considering the creative and perceptual activities of moviemakers and viewers. Grounded in film history, film theory, and philosophy, it explores how the digital configures its engagement with reality and the individual while simultaneously replaying and destabilizing celluloid’s own structures. It observes that, where film’s photographic foundation encourages an existential association between individual and reality, digital representations are graphic renditions of mathematical codes whose causal relations are more difficult to trace.
Keywords:
cinema,
celluloid film,
digital media,
moving images,
cinema cultures,
technological transition,
media archaeologies,
film history,
film theory
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2012 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780816677610 |
| Published to Minnesota Scholarship Online: August 2015 |
DOI:10.5749/minnesota/9780816677610.001.0001 |
