CIN270Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 21: Viewfinder
11 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Tuesday, March 29, 2018
CIN270Y1
CLASS 2.18
Weightless Digital Effects? Hollywood’s Global “Attractions”
*** Think about the context these films are made in
American Popular Film: End of an Era
• Is American “Cinema” moribund?
• Most films today are conceived and made as they have been since the 1930s
• Assembled with digital editing software, composed of CG images, etc. (Ex. Gravity)
• Until they use familiar generic conventions, templates and traditions
• Is Gravity so different except for its tech novelties?
• Although ‘cellular structure’ has changed, the cinema continues to LOOK and SOUND
familiar
• We shouldn't pronounce its DEATH
• Yet a part of the old cinematic experience IS Dying
• The Digital has caused projection to mutate
The Powers of Projection
• How do films encounter their publics?
• Traditionally, one went to the cinema
• A projectionist would send large, luminous images to the screen
• The theatre’s architectural space was a key to this visual experience “One looks up at the
cinema, but down on TV” - Godard
American Popular “Movies”
• The projector/screen is an apparatus of “concentration”
• It demands concentration, but it also concentrates an experience
• New screens: a dispersive visual experience
• TVs, computers, tablets, mobile devices, “radiate light emitted by vibrating pixels”
• They reflect nothing; they offer no reflection
“Films” vs. “Movies”
• Films remain the same, but Movies are changing dramatically
• “Films exist in the absence of projection”
• Movies come to life ONLY in projection (That public environment)
• They take shape “in the mind of each spectator” and address a public
Screen Movies
• Magnitude of the theatrical experience
• The theatre is voluminous
• But the screen also has magnitude
• “It’s not a movie unless the people on the screen are larger than those who watch it”
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