Have digital technologies transformed cinema into a new art, or do they simply replicate and mimic analogue, film-based cinema? Newly revised and expanded to take the latest developments into account, Cinema in the Digital Age examines the fate of cinema in the wake of the digital revolution. Nicholas Rombes considers Festen (1998), The Blair Witch Project (1999), Timecode (2000), Russian Ark (2002), and The Ring (2002), among others. Haunted by their analogue pasts, these films are interested not in digital purity but rather in imperfection and mistakes—blurry or pixilated images, shaky camera work, and other elements that remind viewers of the human behind the camera.
With a new introduction and new material, this updated edition takes a fresh look at the historical and contemporary state of digital cinema. It pays special attention to the ways in which nostalgia for the look and feel of analogue disrupts the aesthetics of the digital image, as well as how recent films such as The Social Network (2010) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)—both shot digitally—have disguised and erased their digital foundations. The book also explores new possibilities for writing about and theorizing film, such as randomization.
Acknowledgments
Preface to the Revised Edition
Preface
1. Accelerationism
2. The Adorno Paradox
3. Against Method
4. Analog/Digital Splice
5. Blood, Simple
6. Boredom and Analog Nostalgia
7. The Digital Spectacular
8. Disposable Aesthetics
9. DV Humanism
10. Filmless Films
11. Frame Dragging
12. The Ideology of the Long Take
13. Image/Text
14. Incompleteness
15. Interfaces
16. iPod Experiment
17. Ironic Mode
18. Looking at Yourself Looking: Avatar as Spectator
19. The Lost Underground
20. Love in the Time of Fragments
21. Media as Its Own Theory
22. Mobile Viewing
23. Moving Space in the Frame, and a Note on Film Theory
24. Natural Time
25. Nonlinear
26. Paranormal Activity 2
27. Pausing
28. Punk
29. Realism
30. Real Time
31. The Real You
32. The Reality Industrial Complex
33. Remainders
34. Sampling
35. Secondary Becomes Primary
36. Self-Deconstructing Narratives
37. Shaky Camera
38. Shoot!
39. Simultaneous Cinema
40. Small Screens
41. Target Video
42. Time, Memory
43. Time-Shifting
44. Timesis: Skimming and Skipping
45. Undirected Films
46. Viewer Participation
47. Virtual Humanism: Part 1
48. Virtual Humanism: Part 2
49. Visible Language, Spring 1977
50. Interpreting Film Images Through Randomized Constraint: The Blue Velvet Project
Filmography
Bibliography