Digital Cinema: Delivery, Event, Time
Abstract
Elsaesser reflects on the changes triggered by the appearance of digital image. Most critics are sure that we have to do with a radical change of ontological status. In Elsaesser’s view, digital recording functions as a „cultural metaphor” of crisis and transformation rather than technology itself. As far as the cinema is concerned, it seems to him that what’s essential is a change of forms of distribution and reception. It has commercial consequences but, for the time being, the position of the Hollywood-styled traditional motion pictures remains unchallenged. The character of digital image is not so much reproductive as expressive, and, like painting, it bears marks of the style of an artist who has produced it. The emotion-stirring is the issue of the reliability of digital image. Elsaesser claims that what seems more important is a challenge of the reliability of television as a medium, the dilution of criteria of genuineness, media manipulation for political and short-term purposes. Elsaesser points to institutional changes in the cinema, caused by competition of television and video, and at last discusses interactive cinema’s potential.
- The text is a translation of the chapter Digital Cinema: Delivery, Event, Time by Thomas Elsaesser from edited volume Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable?: The Screen Arts in the Digital Age, ed. Kay Hoffmann, Thomas Elsaesser, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 1998. © 1998 by Amsterdam University Press.
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Keywords:
digital image, digital recording, interactive cinemaReferences
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Authors
Thomas Elsaesserkwartalnik.filmowy@ispan.pl
University of Amsterdam Netherlands
Urodzony w Berlinie, ukończył University of Sussex (Wielka Brytania), wykładowca w dziedzinie badań nad mediami Uniwersytetu w Amsterdamie, Uniwersytetu w Bergen w Norwegii oraz Hochschule für Gestaltung w Karlsruhe. Autor publikacji z dziedziny teorii filmu, gatunków filmowych, historii filmu i telewizji, tłumaczonych na wiele języków. Wydał m.in. książki: New German Cinema: A History (1989), Early Cinema: Space – Frame – Narrative (1990), Writing for the Medium: Television in Transition (1994), Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject (1996). Przygotowuje książkę Weimar Cinema and After: The Historical Imaginary. Publikuje m.in. w „Screen”, „Sight and Sound”, „October”, „American Film”, „Positif’, „Hors Cadre”.
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