Cinema and Technology – serie

This volume takes a fresh look at the various aesthetics emerging globally in the early sound film era, with a focus on the films’ fundamentally experimental and inventive character. By considering films and production contexts often neglected in film studies, it strives to counter the still dominant view of the transitional period as a time of yet-to-be-perfected forerunners of ‘classical’ sound film. Instead, authors highlight the sense of ‘fruitful uncertainty’ in this period of media change and transformation. Subjects covered include visual and auditory style; the uses of speech, music, and noises; aesthetic conceptions in sound film theory; and intermedial aesthetics. The volume’s scope is decidedly international, covering production and reception contexts in the Soviet Union, Japan, the USA, Germany, France, Italy, the UK, and Switzerland.

With machines mediating most of our cultural practices, and innovations, obsolescence and revivals constantly transforming our relation with images and sounds, media feel more unstable than ever. But was there ever a 'stable' moment in media history? Inventing Cinema proposes to approach this question through an archaeology and epistemology of media machines. The archaeology analyses them as archives of users' gestures, as well as of modes of perception. The epistemology reconstructs the problems that the machines' designers and users have strived to solve, and the network of concepts they have elaborated to understand these problems. Drawing on the philosophy of technology and anthropology, Inventing Cinema argues that networks of gestures, problems, perception and concepts are inscribed in vision machines, from the camera obscura to the stereoscope, the Cinématographe, and digital cinema. The invention of cinema is ultimately seen as an ongoing process irreducible to a single moment in history.

Since the very first days of cinema, audiences have marveled at the special effects imagery presented on movie screens. While long relegated to the margins of film studies, special effects have recently become the object of a burgeoning field of scholarship. With the emergence of a digital cinema, and the development of computerized visual effects, film theorists and historians have been reconsidering the traditional accounts of cinematic representation, recognising the important role of special effects. Understood as a constituent part of the cinema, special effects are a major technical but also aesthetic component of filmmaking and an important part of the experience for the audience. In this volume, new directions are charted for the exploration of this indispensable aspect of the cinematic experience. Each of the essays in this collection offers new insight into the theoretical and historical study of special effects. The contributors address the many aspects of special effects, from a variety of perspectives, considering them as a conceptual problem, recounting the history of specific special effects techniques, and analysing notable effects films.

Tracing the recent changes to the technology of film editing, this book offers an account of the aesthetics of digital montage. It is commonly argued that the changes to the technical apparatus of editing, the emergence of new systems for digital editing, have altered the basic identity or ontology of the cinema as an art. Such claims, it is argued in this book, are based on a misunderstanding of the relation between technology and technique, and more generally between the technical and the aesthetic. Applying recent theories of art, and employing specific concepts from philosophical aesthetics, an account of cinematic art is offered that can better accommodate the kinds of technical changes that have occurred in recent decades, with the advent of computer technology in the cinema. An aesthetics of digital montage is presented as part of a more general proposal for a theory of technical change in the cinema.

'States of Immersion Across Media' invites readers to slow down and reflect on immersive practices, both new and old, their impact on our bodies, the affective attunements they evoke, the disruptions they afford, and the creative encounters they generate.

Since the very first days of cinema, audiences have marveled at the special effects imagery presented on movie screens. While long relegated to the margins of film studies, special effects have recently become the object of a burgeoning field of scholarship. With the emergence of a digital cinema, and the development of computerized visual effects, film theorists and historians have been reconsidering the traditional accounts of cinematic representation, recognising the important role of special effects. Understood as a constituent part of the cinema, special effects are a major technical but also aesthetic component of filmmaking and an important part of the experience for the audience. In this volume, new directions are charted for the exploration of this indispensable aspect of the cinematic experience. Each of the essays in this collection offers new insight into the theoretical and historical study of special effects. The contributors address the many aspects of special effects, from a variety of perspectives, considering them as a conceptual problem, recounting the history of specific special effects techniques, and analysing notable effects films.

Tracing the recent changes to the technology of film editing, this book offers an account of the aesthetics of digital montage. It is commonly argued that the changes to the technical apparatus of editing, the emergence of new systems for digital editing, have altered the basic identity or ontology of the cinema as an art. Such claims, it is argued in this book, are based on a misunderstanding of the relation between technology and technique, and more generally between the technical and the aesthetic. Applying recent theories of art, and employing specific concepts from philosophical aesthetics, an account of cinematic art is offered that can better accommodate the kinds of technical changes that have occurred in recent decades, with the advent of computer technology in the cinema. An aesthetics of digital montage is presented as part of a more general proposal for a theory of technical change in the cinema.

With machines mediating most of our cultural practices, and innovations, obsolescence and revivals constantly transforming our relation with images and sounds, media feel more unstable than ever. But was there ever a 'stable' moment in media history? This book approaches this question through an archaeology and epistemology of media machines.