The Orientation of Future Cinema Technology, Aesthetics, Spectacle

by Isaacs, Bruce

• ISBN13: 9781628924312
• ISBN10: 1628924314
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2014-08-28
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

What is the fate of cinema in an age of new technologies, new aesthetic styles, new modes of cultural production and consumption? What becomes of cinema and a century-long history of the moving image when the theatre is outmoded as a social and aesthetic space, as celluloid gives over to digital technology, as the art-house and multiplex are overtaken by a proliferation of home entertainment systems?
The Orientation of Future Cinema offers an ambitious and compelling argument for the continued life of cinema as image, narrative and experience. Commencing with Lumière's Arrival of a Train at a Station, Bruce Isaacs confronts the threat of contemporary digital technologies and processes by returning to cinema's complex history as a technological and industrial phenomenon. The technology of moving images has profoundly changed; and yet cinema materialises ever more forcefully in digital capture and augmentation, 3-D perception and affect, High Frame Rate cinema, and the evolution of spectacle as the dominant aesthetic mode in contemporary studio production.

Author Biography

Bruce Isaacs is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. He has published widely on film history and theory.

Table of Contents

Part 1: The Age of Late Cinema
Chapter 1: What is Cinema?
Chapter 2: The Question of Cinema Art: The Legitimacy of Film Style
Chapter 3: The Effect of the Screen
- The Synthetic Narrative
- The Synthetic Image
Part 2: High Concept Cinema: Image, Effect, Spectacle
Chapter 4: Historicizing Concept Cinema: A Crisis in the Image
Chapter 5: The Industrial Context of High Concept Production: Continuities and Discontinuities
Chapter 6: Classical High Concept Aesthetics
- A Case Study of Steven Spielberg and James Cameron
- Incorporating Cinema: The Commoditization of the Image
Part 3: Beyond Cinema: Reflections on a Future
Chapter 7: New Technologies of the Image
Chapter 8: The New Wave
- Christopher Nolan
- Michael Bay
- Roland Emmerich
Chapter 9: Future Modalities of the Image (The Paradox of High Concept 3-D Cinema)
Chapter 10: The Orientation of Future Cinema