Reality Ends Here:Cinematie Arts In The Age Of Digitalization

Classical film theory,such as Bazin's long-take theory,Kracauer's notion of the redemption of physical reality,and Christian Metz's studies of signs,is based entirely on cinema being a medium that its sound and images are recorded on celluloid film.Since its birth,cinema's photography-based indexical and analog nature had always been a definitive quality attached to it until the rise of digital technology in the late 1970 s.Several decades after its inauguration,digital technology has swept across the whole spectrum of filmmaking,from production to distribution,and from exhibition to a variety of display platforms.It is not an exaggeration to say that the whole film industry has completed its inevitable and irreversible process of transformation toward digitalization.In addition to revolutionizing filmmaking,digital technology has also rekindled some “old” image-making technologies,such as virtual reality,augmented reality,and hologram,which has transformed people's thinking of cinema and brought such notion as “expanded cinema” into discussion.Combined,these technologies have given birth to a new environment in which cinematic images(moving and unmoving)have been able to pervasively occupy every corner of physical reality.In this new environment,celluloid film has given way to digital production and storage,camera given way to computer,human actor given way to digital face and body,and place given way to virtual space.The overall effect of these transformations has been arguably the exhaustion of physical reality and a constructed landscape of simulacra.If in the analog age the close relationship between image and reality was still traceable,then in the digital age this closeness is often beyond reach,replaced by constellations of nonindexical signifiers.From the perspective of cultural criticism,therefore,digitalization(in film and elsewhere)intensifies and accelerates contemporary society's march toward spectaclization,visualization,screenization,vitualization,and ultimately the condition of postmodenity.It is reified in a series of cultural symptoms,such as physical reality being reduced to virtual reality,depth being replaced by surface,and freedom being exchanged to surveillance screens.This dissertation,while fully aware of the overall effect of digitalization,does not intend to analyze in detail how digital images differ from analog images in production of meaning.Instead,informed by French critic Guy Debord's notion of “society of the spectacle” and American film scholar Jonathan Beller's theory of “cinematic mode of production,” the dissertation focuses on the analysis of a series of pioneering practices in digital filmmaking(or image making)led by Hollywood commercial cinema,and reflects on the change relationship between film/cinematic arts and physical reality.The author argues that,whereas some classical theories had already hinted the distance between image and reality in the analog age(such as the notion of the “imaginary signifier” and the arbitrary nature between signifier and signified),filmmaking/imagemaking has reversed this relationship in the digital age,acquiring the ability to “reconstruct” and “re-produce” a reality of its own.To a large extent,at the time that digital technology announces the end of celluloid film,it also “ends” the reality as we commonly understand it.