Favorite Books on Cinema - Part 3

I came across The Language of New Media in a film theory course I took when I was working toward my Ph.D. It is not a book exclusively on cinema, but there are a lot of great sections on the intersection of film and new media.

 

 

When I teach digital media, the first thing I ask students is what makes new media new? Manovich takes up this question in the beginning of his book. For Manovich, how new media became new is binary code (0s and 1s), "all existing media into numerical data accessible through computers (20). His answer may seem simple, but it has a major role in his overall argument, particularly for the history of cinema.

One of his claims is that cinema, now more than ever, is a painterly medium due to the digital tools at filmmaker’s disposal. He sees live action filmmaking as raw material that will later be digitally manipulated. Just to give you an idea of what he means, check out this VFX video for The Wolf of Wall Street--

 

But Manovich notes that cinema was a painterly medium from the start, which can be traced to the silent short films of Georges Méliès, such as A Trip to the Moon.

 

Another topic he takes up is photorealism: “The ability to simulate any object in such a way that its computer image is indistinguishable from a photograph” (184). He argues that computer graphics are too real and need imperfections.

For Manovich, the computer is NOT trying to mimic our "bodily experience of reality" but "reality as seen by the camera lens." It is not a "faked reality" the computer generates but "a film-based image" (200).

This was a significant point for me which I explored in my book Capturing Digital Media. I went further with this notion to explore it psychical effects, looking at purposely and unconsciously inserted imperfections into the moving image.

There are lots of interesting sections in The Language of New Media, such as his reading of interactivity and database narratives. I highly recommend it for those interested in both digital media studies and film theory.

 

Favorite Books on Cinema - Part 2

Looking Awry is one I always go to when I'm working with Lacanian concepts. 

 

Looking Awry was significant for me when I wrote Cinema of Confinement. I recommend it if you want to learn more about the intersection of psychoanalytic theory and cinema.

There are lots of great examples from movies and books to help understand these complex concepts. Žižek is not suggesting that using examples from popular culture avoids the complexity of theory. Rather, it is a way of exploring theoretical concepts, but looking at them from a different perspective--thus looking awry.

One example that stuck with me is Patricia Highsmith's "The Black House," a story about a group of men who get together at a bar and reminisce about an old house in the town that is associated with nostalgia and memories. A young engineer, who just moved into town, hears about the myth of the old house and decides to visit it. Finding nothing mysterious about it, he tells the men that it is just an old, filthy ruined house. The men freak out and attack the young engineer and windup killing him.

 

As Žižek explains, the young intruder reduced their fantasy space to an everyday, common reality. "He annulled the difference between reality and fantasy space, depriving the men of the place in which they were able to articulate their desires” (9). 

The old house is an empty screen for the men to project their nostalgic desires and memories upon, which was then reduced to nothing by the engineer. Here, Žižek draws our attention to the fantasy screen, the protective screen from the Lacanian Real, the "thing" that haunts and disrupts the symbolic order. A point Žižek makes over and over is that if you remove the fantasy screen, you don't get "reality." Instead, you get a nightmarish form of reality. The fantasy screen provides a sense of reality, keeping the Real at a distance. In the case of the engineer, he unplugs the men's fantasy screen.

In Cinema of Confinement, I discuss the ending of Rope (1948), how the penthouse becomes a strange and distorted space after Rupert (James Stewart) discovers the corpse Brandon (John Dall) and Phillip (Farley Granger) had hidden throughout the dinner party. 

The big window acts as a sort of fantasy screen for Brandon and Phillip, which keeps danger at a distance. But when their secret is exposed, Rupert opens the window and fires a gun, calling attention to the authorities. The space then becomes flooded with lights from a nearby neon sign, the sounds of the city amplify. The characters movements are suddenly protracted and creaturely. The orderliness of space becomes distorted as an the fantasy screen collapses.

 

There are lots of great examples in Looking Awry from cinema and worth checking out. Also see Enjoy Your Symptom and Žižek's book on Krzysztof Kieslowski. Of course, there is his collection of essays on Alfred Hitchcock. I also recommend Matthew Flisfeder's excellent book on Žižek's work on film. 

 

 

Favorite Books on Cinema - Part 1

I'm current writing a new article and was returning to some of the books that had the most impact on me. Not a top ten list - just some books I often find myself citing and thought I would share.

The one I always keep returning to is Laura Mulvey's Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006).

 

 

I discovered this book when researching my MA thesis on Abbas Kiarostami. Then I was assigned to read it for a film theory course I took when I was working toward my Ph.D. 

Mulvey is mostly know for her article on the male gaze in Narrative Cinema and Visual Pleasure. There are some great chapters in that book. But 24x is the one that I constantly return to. 

I love the chapter on Roland Barthes and Andre Bazin, where she compares their writings on photography and film, respectively. The last two chapters on the possessive and pensive spectator are also really good and provide some very interesting insights into new technologies and cinema. 

I think one of the key points of her book is that cinema has a ghostly secret - the still frame. Digital media has changed our relationship to cinema because we now have the technologies to halt the flow of images which "opens a space for consciousness" (186).