Domizio, Ricardo (2024) Digital cinema and affect. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.
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Abstract
This study attempts to reconceptualise digital cinema at a time when the ubiquity of digital objects and methods means that it is taken for granted. Rather than the commonly studied areas of special effects and CGI, I focus instead at the way in which certain films deploy a ‘digital Idea’ containing themes and aesthetics that produce a specific type of ‘pure’ affect, defined as pre-subjective and pre-linguistic. Derived from properly digital characteristics such as abstraction, discreteness, recursion, incorporeality and transmutability, I find this type of affect most prominently displayed in, and produced by, a set of films made after the first wave of digital film texts in the 1980s and 90s, but before the current cinema of seamless digital productions. To acknowledge the ‘in-betweenness’ I call this the cinema of the digital interregnum where the film’s digitality is not borne by flashy graphics or pristine imagery but rather displaced onto orthogonal ideational spaces and transversal architectonics. Methodologically, I discount materialist and phenomenological approaches due to their failure to address the incorporeal implications of the digital domain, and turn instead to Deleuze and Guattari for their more capacious and applicable concepts based on machinicmolecular approaches and a metaphysics of the virtual that is inherently creative. I proceed by analysing a set of case studies from a wide range of genres and national cinemas, looking at three important dimensions of contemporary life: politics, the body, and time. Whilst there is a humanistic bias against the digital as a whole, I find an affirmative rationale for digital cinema in the potentialities it creates and in a distinctive modulation of an ethical zone which ultimately creates the conditions for a renewed ‘belief-in-the-world’.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Thesis |
|---|---|
| Copyright Holders: | The copyright of this thesis rests with the author, who asserts his/her right to be known as such according to the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. No dealing with the thesis contrary to the copyright or moral rights of the author is permitted. |
| Depositing User: | Acquisitions And Metadata |
| Date Deposited: | 22 Jul 2024 15:03 |
| Last Modified: | 23 Jul 2024 09:32 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/53872 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.18743/PUB.00053872 |
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