Bleeding Pixels

This chapter examines the aesthetic properties and phenomenological effects of compression glitches—blocky image distortions that momentarily deform digitally compressed video. As visible expressions of the invisible processes of digital video compression, compression glitches offer unprecedented encounters with the technological production of cinematic motion. Two distinct consequences of these encounters are explored in this chapter. First, because compression glitches are more likely to occur when the compression algorithm is overworked by large volumes of onscreen movement, the ubiquity of compression glitches has yielded a spectatorial sensitivity to the magnitude of movement on screen. Second, because compression glitches extract movement itself (i.e., algorithmic motion instructions) from its original visual context, the visual qualities of such glitches heighten our attention to the formal qualities of movement as distinct from the actions and events that such movements comprise. Taken together, these two spectatorial effects of the compression glitch illuminate new orientations toward cinematic motion in the digital era. Describing these orientations, the chapter argues, can model a form of inquiry that bridges the gap between technologically oriented and phenomenologically oriented accounts of “digital cinema.”

The Effects of Digital Technologies on Expanded Cinema in the Age of Liquid Modernity: Drowning and Surfacing in the Expanded Seas of the Digital Cinema

<p>This thesis is submitted as one part of a three-part Masters program: it is accompanied by two creative praxis: a short film and video installation. The thesis itself mirrors the creative elements of the praxis and should be read in that light. It consists of writing and formatting style not usually found in academic writing. The font and formatting changes are designed to facilitate the reader’s experience and recognition of various points of view personified within. ...</p>

The Effects of Digital Technologies on Expanded Cinema in the Age of Liquid Modernity: Drowning and Surfacing in the Expanded Seas of the Digital Cinema

<p>This thesis is submitted as one part of a three-part Masters program: it is accompanied by two creative praxis: a short film and video installation. The thesis itself mirrors the creative elements of the praxis and should be read in that light. It consists of writing and formatting style not usually found in academic writing. The font and formatting changes are designed to facilitate the reader’s experience and recognition of various points of view personified within. ...</p>

Sublime Pixels: Exploring the Audience Experience in Digital Special Effects Cinema

<p>When exploring the audience perception of digital special effects cinema and the staggering success it has enjoyed, the explorer will often be left with a sense of confusion. They may ask: What is it that the audience is looking for or at when confronted with these pixilated illusions? This thesis attempts to answer that question. It starts with the basic assumption that what the audience is hoping to achieve when 'touched' by the phenomenal spectacle of the digital image is the very best feeling achievable, or the truly sublime. To do this, the thesis unravels the philosophical and theoretical quandaries that surround audience perception theory. It then examines digital special effects and digital cinema to understand, not only its attraction, but also its power over the viewer lost in its awesome potential. By exploring the governing theories behind the sublime and audience perception, the thesis is able to contend that the digital special effects image becomes carnally real or 'alive'. Through the examination of a number of seminal digital special effects movies the thesis tries not only to de-mystify the digital image, but to also create an aesthetic, situational 'map' to the feeling of the sublime.</p>

Sublime Pixels: Exploring the Audience Experience in Digital Special Effects Cinema

<p>When exploring the audience perception of digital special effects cinema and the staggering success it has enjoyed, the explorer will often be left with a sense of confusion. They may ask: What is it that the audience is looking for or at when confronted with these pixilated illusions? This thesis attempts to answer that question. It starts with the basic assumption that what the audience is hoping to achieve when 'touched' by the phenomenal spectacle of the digital image is the very best feeling achievable, or the truly sublime. To do this, the thesis unravels the philosophical and theoretical quandaries that surround audience perception theory. It then examines digital special effects and digital cinema to understand, not only its attraction, but also its power over the viewer lost in its awesome potential. By exploring the governing theories behind the sublime and audience perception, the thesis is able to contend that the digital special effects image becomes carnally real or 'alive'. Through the examination of a number of seminal digital special effects movies the thesis tries not only to de-mystify the digital image, but to also create an aesthetic, situational 'map' to the feeling of the sublime.</p>

The Cinematic Milieu

To what extent are media technologies autonomous forces that reorganize the environment around them to accommodate their own technological needs? In what ways are these technologies responsive to the milieu they grow within? A central theme of comparative media examines how media enter into reciprocal exchange with the broader cultural, social, and economic formations in which they emerge and which differ from place to place and over time. This article draws on the concept of milieu in order to analyze the evolution of digital cinema infrastructures in contemporary Nigeria.

Recursive Reflections

This chapter casts a critical eye on various classifications of reflexivity that have been proposed by film and media scholars over a number of decades. These center on the reflexive content of films, their self-referential communicative structures and functions, and intended effects of reflexiveness on spectators. In this context it differentiates between (self-)reflexivity and related terms/concepts—metafiction; metacinema, mise en abîme, allusion and intertextuality, self-conscious style and narration—from a twenty-first century standpoint; and outlines an alternative classification of reflexive forms in celluloid and digital cinema. The latter are distinct from specific reflexive devices (e.g., the film within the film, direct address, display of the cinematographic “apparatus”) and general modes (e.g., political, formal, ludic). As illustrated through concrete examples, the five transmedial forms posited—environmental; trans-art and intermedial; generic; creator-centered; performance-based—typically occur in complex combinations. Their identification, and the new conception of cinematic reflexivity this typology represents, aids in the analysis and interpretation of reflexive and metacinematic films and styles.

Holy Motors

Holy Motors (2012, dir. Leos Carax) is a film that poses many challenges for the viewer. It proceeds without any narrative logic, embraces a fragmented and disorienting structure, provides unmotivated character behavior, and produces epistemological confusion. This chapter argues that Carax’s film should be understood primarily as a metacinematic work about both the death of cinema and its concurrent rebirth, and that it represents and complicates cultural and critical anxieties about the impact of new technologies on cinema’s development in the twenty-first century. Holy Motors is used as a rich case study for evaluating the merits and limitations of mourning cinema’s passing era in the midst of the technological revolution. The film, it is argued, invites us to re-evaluate today the early rhetoric of crisis, death, and rupture, prevalent in the early days of digital cinema, and to trace not only what has been arguably lost in the transition, but also what could be ultimately gained from it.