Cinema 3.0: How digital and computer technologies are changing cinema

Abstract

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 telecultural 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.