Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies

by Ariel Rogers

Overview

Cinematic Appeals follows the effect of technological innovation on the cinema experience, specifically the introduction of widescreen and stereoscopic 3D systems in the 1950s, the rise of digital cinema in the 1990s, and the transition to digital 3D since 2005. Widescreen cinema promised to draw the viewer into the world of the screen, enabling larger-than-life close-ups of already larger-than-life actors. This technology fostered the illusion of physically entering a film, enhancing the semblance of realism. Alternatively, the digital era was less concerned with the viewer's physical response and more with information flow, awe, and the reevaluation of spatiality and embodiment. This study ultimately shows how cinematic technology and the human experience shape and respond to each other over time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231159173
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	11/19/2013
Series:	Film and Culture Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ariel Rogers is assistant professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Moving Machines
1. "Smothered in Baked Alaska": The Anxious Appeal of Widescreen Cinema
2. East of Eden in CinemaScope: Intimacy Writ Large
3. Digital Cinema's Heterogeneous Appeal: Debates on Embodiment, Intersubjectivity, and Immediacy
4. Awe and Aggression: The Experience of Erasure in The Phantom Menace and The Celebration
5. Points of Convergence: Conceptualizing the Appeal of 3D Cinema Then and Now
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Tom Gunning

Today films are shown on iPhones, IMAX screens with massive 3D images emerging, and personal computers. With consummate research and critical insight, Rogers's book shows this is nothing new. Cinema has often introduced novelties in its image: CinemaScope in the 1950s; digital images in the 1980s; and 3D with its long history. This book makes us recognize the variety of things cinema has been, is now, and will be.

Laura Marks

Rogers shifts attention from the more theoretically glamorous aspects of new digital media, instead focusing this well-grounded historical study on how digital cinema has changed industrial practice and audience experience.

Editorial Reviews

Cinematic Appeals offers readers a concise exploration of new cinema formats and the claims and debates that surround their introduction... a wealth of interesting historical material and engaging and informative case studies featuring fine-grained analysis of individual films.

Projections

Timely and provocative. A well written and highly engaging text, Cinematic Appeals will interest anyone contemplating the nature of cinema in today's mediatized environment, as well as anyone interested in the history of film technology or film spectatorship.

Film and History

Ariel Rogers leads us into a fascinating journey full of information, which is theoretically robust...

Cinéma & Cie

Ariel Rogers leads us into a fascinating journey full of information, which is theoretically robust...

Cinema Cie

Ariel Rogers's fascinating book looks at the affective addresses of technologically-innovative periods in film history to explore the different notions of spectatorial embodiment these technologies provide, from the immersive participation of the widescreen era to the relative disembodiment of the fragmented and alienated spectator in the digital era. She has made an important intervention in the ongoing discussions of spectatorship and embodiment in the cinema that will determine the direction of future scholarship in those fields.

John Belton

Ariel Rogers leads us into a fascinating journey full of information, which is theoretically robust...

Cinéma & Cie