Cinema 3.0: How Digital and Computer Technologies are Changing Cinema Kristen M. Daly Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2008 UMI Number: 3305212 INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. ® UMI UMI Microform 3305212 Copyright 2008 by ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 E. Eisenhower Parkway PO Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ©2008 Kristen M. Daly All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Cinema 3.0: How Digital and Computer Technologies are Changing Cinema Kristen M. Daly Digital and computer technologies and the networks of Web 2.0 are changing cinema. Cinema is morphing from an industrial art to an electronic art and increasingly a tele- cultural form in the interstices of art and information. This dissertation examines this break in order to determine what is new about how we create, experience, and communicate with moving images. I take both an intrinsic and extrinsic method to ask how cinema has become digital. Intrinsically, this dissertation builds on the work of media theorists like Walter Benjamin, Marshal McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler and Lev Manovich to examine how the automatisms of both the hardware and software of digital cinema technologies encourage new forms, contents and participants. From an extrinsic standpoint, I use both popular literature of cinema and technology as well as theorists like Sherry Turkle in exploring how computer and digital technologies have helped to train new producers and users ready to create and experience cinema in new ways. Also on this tack, I use the work of media historians like Tom Gunning and Jonathan Crary who have demonstrated the role of the interplay of technologies in shaping ways of seeing and expectations of cinema. The title, Cinema 3.0, merges Gilles Deleuze and Wired Magazine and expresses the attempt to define a new form of cinema. By examining five different aspects of cinema, I map out some promising potentials. I examine the experience of cinema working from Walter Benjamin's concept of aura; the emerging processes of production, exhibition and distribution of cinema; the new aesthetics and style afforded by digital cinema technologies; the potential for new narrative forms enabled by a digitally literate viewer; and the social aspects of who is making movies and to what purpose. Cinema 3.0 is increasingly mutable, hypertextual and interactive. The dissertation examines how these aspects can be empowering and democratizing, allowing more people into the rich media conversation, but also how the ubiquity and decontextualization of digital moving images can be immersive and paralyzing, encouraging distracted remediation rather than meaningful communication. Table of Contents I. Introduction 1 Use of Terms 2 Included Works 4 Methods 6 Why Cinema? 11 Looking Ahead 12 II. How Digital Technologies Have Changed the Experience of Cinema: From a Ritual Art Object, Cinema Takes on a Tele-Cultural Form 15 1. The Original Nostalgia Variability and the Difficulty in Determining a Definitive Original The Role of the Viewer Moving Image Literacy, Communication and Exchange 2. How Cinema Takes Place Cinematic Ritual Multiple Screens Perpendicular Cinema Ubiquity and Art 3. The Dissipating Aura of the Cinematic Art Object 16 17 21 27 31 34 35 37 39 43 45 III. How Cinema is Digital: How Cinema Technologies are Changing How Movies Are Produced, Distributed and Exhibited 46 4. Production 47 All Movies are Digital 49 Cost, Mobility, Ease 51 l Machinima Post-Production: Editing Post-Production: Special Effects 5. Distribution Smaller Scale Distribution DVD Distribution Online Distribution Download Niche Marketing Finding Audiences and Subscription Fans Piracy 6. Exhibition International Adoption Alternative Programming Wireless Delivery, Microcinema, Ideological Exhibition Proliferating Festivals Movies in Every Size and Shape Cinephilia 7. Communities and Cooperation 55 59 61 65 67 68 70 72 75 76 80 87 89 91 93 96 99 100 101 IV. New Mode of Cinema: How Aesthetics and Style are Changing Under Conditions of Digitality 104 Medium Specificity 108 Shooting Digital for Film 110 Aura of Film: Digital Detractors 113 8. Camera-Stylo 116 Sponteneity, Flexibility, Unobtrusiveness, Intimacy 116 Hierarchies, Acting and Continuity 120 9. Montage and Mise-En-Scene 124 n The Long Take Computer-Camera as Collaborator Web Browser Aesthetic 10. Hybrid Cinema Cyborg Actors The Virtual Moving Image The Unfilmic: Video Games, Anime, Graphic Novels Virtual Cinema for the Masses Reaction Against: Alternate Indexicality 11. The Snowflake and the Black Box 124 128 131 136 139 142 145 148 152 155 V. Cinema 3.0: The Interactive-Image Narrative Norms - Continuities - Fan Mode 161 12. The Project: Movie as Artifact 165 13. Database Cinema 171 Remix and Modular Cinema 174 Soduko Cinema 176 14. Novelesque Cinema 180 Interacting Levels of Diagesis 182 Multi-Bodied Characters 184 15. Digital Literacy, Complexity, Causality 186 Digital Literacy: Cause and Effect 190 16. Viewser: Privilege or Punishment 193 VI. Radical Potential: Social Aspects of Cinema 3.0 17. Amateur Filmmakers, Rich Media Literacy, and Power Negotiations 201 DIY Zombie and Shark Movies 201 The Accidental Auteur 204 Rich Media Literacy 208 m 18. Activism and Terrorism Activism Terrorist Auteur 19. A-Iiteracy, Decontextualization and the Unmediated Real Web Video Banality and Feedback Loops Immediacy and Decontextualization Remediations of Violence 20. Revolution or Reality Show? VII. Conclusion Final Thoughts Filmography Bibliography Appendix I 209 209 212 215 215 217 221 222 226 231 228 236 248 263 IV Illustrations Anthology Film Archives in Joseph Papp's Theater 35 Times Square, March 28, 2007, 8:30pm 39 Still Doug Aitken's Sleepwalkers, MoMA, New York, February 7, 2007 43 Still The French Democracy (2005) Machinima 57 Linked to http://www.machinima.com/films.php?id=1407 Still Four Eyed Monsters (2005) 78 Linked to http://fourevedmonsters.com/watch Still 28 Days Later (2002) 118 Linked to http://www.voutube.com/watch?v=6JxYNPEXAX4 Still Time Code (2000) 133 New Line Production Photos Gollum 2004 140-1 Still 300 (2006) and panel from Frank Miller's graphic novel 300 148 Production Stills A Scanner Darkly (2006) 149 Still Renaissance (2006) 150 Cinematic Diagram of Scenes in Ten (2002) 156 Page Rank Equation by Larry Page 157 Soduko Example 177 Snatch (2000) Graph by Ayolt de Roos 191 Google Page Rank full equation 195-6 Still Open Water (2004) 203 Stop Snitchin' DVD Cover 205 Link to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWSsQ-CzSEM Still insurgent video of missing soldiers' effects, June 4, 2007. 212 Link to http://www.voutube.com/watch?v=kj8j7MFS3zw Still Salam Pax Vlog 216 Linkhttp://www.journevman.tv/?lid=56445 Still Numa Numa web video 218 Link to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60og9gwKh1o Still Justin TV 220 Link to http://www.justin.tv/iustin v [...]... how digital technologies are affecting cinema: • The first section examines the experience of cinema and how that is morphing as digital technologies change both our reception of and use for cinema I take Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and examine how cinema is only now, with the infiltration of digital technologies, fulfilling Benjamin's expectations and. .. universal literacy of the moving image, and how this radical potential is playing out This chapter will examine who is making movies, what they are making, and to what purpose This chapter asks and examines what are the potentials and dangers of universal literacy of the moving image Through these five perspectives of how digital and computer technologies are changing cinema, I hope to diagram new spectator/spectacle,... examine how our everyday experience with digital and computer technologies shapes both our experience of and the very capacity and form of cinema For example, how cinematic narrative adapts to better represent our navigation of space and information on the computer In this, I borrow from contemporary media theorists such as Nicholas Negroponte and Sherry Turkle who have shown how people's use of computers,... trajectories, audiovisual technologies and computing technologies, then cinema can increasingly be characterized as a new media both in construction and characteristic.6 Cinema today, as I will demonstrate, is created, stored, distributed, and viewed primarily with computers and digital technologies and has increasingly taken on the characteristics of digital creations Cinema in digital form can be radically... hybrid, variable, and dispersive, thus differing greatly from traditional cinema and transforming into a new media I will primarily use the term "Cinema 3.0" instead of "digital cinema. " "Digital cinema, " as a term, can be limiting, implying that the images were created, distributed and exhibited digitally or at least forcing one to define what percentage of digitalness makes a movie "digital cinema. " Some... forms like video games and computer interface The camera as a computer has enabled a more cooperative relationship with the filmmaker The fourth postulates how the digital viewer is enabling a new narrative form that is complex, interactive, and intertextual and based on spatial and stochastic contingencies, mimicking the shocks and economies of the digital everyday Digital and computer logics have changed... late James Carey, I need to explore the social and cultural implications, not leaving the subject completely posthuman as Kittler would like As Carey has said, "to enter given technological worlds is to enter actual social relations," and therefore, "technologies are cultures."14 Thus, I also examine how people are experiencing cinema, what they are doing with the new technology and how they are communicating... hardware and apparatus, to software theory, which would work from the bottom up, from protocol and codes and interfaces, herein I will attempt to apply both.11 I will look both at how the digital camera, small, mobile and cheap, with different requirements for lighting and recording material, can bring new methods of production, new modes and new content, but also how certain functions of the camera /computer. .. in that the potentials have not yet been fulfilled and numerous paths are still possible, the advantage of being in this liminal zone is that we can see in both directions and the changes remain strange enough to be identifiable Use of Terms Digital technologies are changing the possibilities of cinema Cinema is no longer sufficiently described by a ninety-minute movie in a theater Digital computer technology... This chapter will focus on our experience of cinema as it changes from a ritual art object to an interactive and variable means of communication • The second section will examine how cinema is digital - how digital and computer technologies have penetrated into all aspects of production, distribution and exhibition This will be a survey of the current landscape of moviemaking, 17 David Norman Rodowick, . 21 27 31 34 35 37 39 43 45 III. How Cinema is Digital: How Cinema Technologies are Changing How Movies Are Produced, Distributed and Exhibited. Computer Technologies are Changing Cinema Kristen M. Daly Digital and computer technologies and the networks of Web 2.0 are changing cinema. Cinema is morphing