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Virtual Life of Film
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Book Presentation:
As almost (or, truly, virtually) every aspect of making and viewing movies is replaced by digital technologies, even the notion of “watching a film” is fast becoming an anachronism. With the likely disappearance of celluloid film stock as a medium, and the emergence of new media competing for an audience, what will happen to cinema―and to cinema studies? In the first of two books exploring this question, D. N. Rodowick considers the fate of film and its role in the aesthetics and culture of moviemaking and viewing in the twenty-first century.
Here Rodowick proposes and examines three different critical responses to the disappearance of film in relation to other time-based media, and to the study of contemporary visual culture. Film, he suggests, occupies a special place in the genealogy of the arts of the virtual: while film disappears, cinema persists―at least in the narrative forms imagined by Hollywood since 1915. Rodowick also observes that most so-called “new media” are fashioned upon a cinematic metaphor. His book helps us see how digital technologies are serving, like television and video before them, to perpetuate the cinematic as the mature audiovisual culture of the twentieth century―and, at the same time, how they are preparing the emergence of a new audiovisual culture whose broad outlines we are only just beginning to distinguish.
See the publisher website: Harvard University Press
> From the same author:
The Difficulty of Difference (2015)
Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference and Film Theory
Subject: Sociology
The Crisis of Political Modernism (1995)
Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Criticism
Subject: Film Analysis
> On a related topic:
Taking Fiction Film Seriously (2025)
A Philosophical Approach to Cinema Studies
by Mario Slugan
Subject: Theory
The Attractions of the Moving Image (2025)
Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde
by Tom Gunning
Subject: Theory
Cinema of/for the Anthropocene (2025)
Affect, Ecology, and More-Than-Human Kinship
Dir. Katarzyna Paszkiewicz and Andrea Ruthven
Subject: Theory
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