Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Cinema’s Foundational Frissons
- 2 The Affective Synthesis of Reality by Digital Images
- 3 ‘A Digital Frontier to Reshape the Human Condition’: Virtual Border Spaces and Affective Embodiment in Tron and Enter the Void
- 4 Dynamic Digital Spaces, Bodies, and Forces
- 5 Reality Sutures, Simulation, and Digital Realism
- 6 A Digital Nihilism: Ethical Reflections
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Cinema’s Foundational Frissons
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Cinema’s Foundational Frissons
- 2 The Affective Synthesis of Reality by Digital Images
- 3 ‘A Digital Frontier to Reshape the Human Condition’: Virtual Border Spaces and Affective Embodiment in Tron and Enter the Void
- 4 Dynamic Digital Spaces, Bodies, and Forces
- 5 Reality Sutures, Simulation, and Digital Realism
- 6 A Digital Nihilism: Ethical Reflections
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This introduction lays out the coordinates of the book's main philosophical contention – that the world is perceived and felt to be different under a general condition of digitality as a form of ‘digi-thinking’. It establish a synergy between digital visual media and theoretical physics and suggest that current screen culture, rather than being only orientated to spectacle, actually equips us with new skills in perception for a world of experience which is increasingly virtualised. The chapter refers to a set of embodied effects specific to the digital image; of flying, floating, swarming, morphing, and glitching, within the context of recent cinematic content such as INTERSTELLAR (2014) to set the scene of a contemporary digital imaginary.
Keywords: Post-Cinema, Futurism, Cinema of Attractions, Deleuze, Heidegger, Ontology
The transition from the diegesis of the film to the social realm of the multiplex, even the emergence from video or DVD viewing to the familial space of the living room, is not without a certain frisson. The border state too has its significance, especially in the diminution of intensity coupled with a heightened alertness to whatever quirky events might occur outside the theatre. An aura of wholeness persists, fading, as you make your way home. (Cubitt, 2005, p. 269)
The Arrival of the Digital Image at the Station
As many accounts would have it, the first screening of the Lumière brothers’ film L’ARRIVÉE D’UN TRAIN EN GARE DE LA CIOTAT in 1895 had quite the impact on the audience. Indeed, it has been called cinema's founding myth, that the audience, overwhelmed by the apparent reality of a full-size train rolling towards them, screamed and ran to the back of the room. In many ways, one can easily imagine this naïve group of ordinary people, whose prior knowledge of reality could only be accounted for by natural perception, suddenly confronted by a large image which they simply could not appropriate into their understanding of the way the world works. This ‘virtual’ reality of cinema, apparently indiscernible from the real, thus induced shock, astonishment, and panic as they scrambled to get away from the massive moving object that would surely crush them. We can see that their reality, in this moment, was fundamentally challenged and changed.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Digital Image and RealityAffect, Metaphysics and Post-Cinema, pp. 9 - 40Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019