Digital Cinema and New Media

Digital cinema and new media study how the shift from photochemical film to digital tools, distribution, and platforms has transformed cinema's production, aesthetics, ontology, and place within a wider media ecology.

Definition

The study of cinema's transition to digital technologies and its relation to new media, addressing changes in production, aesthetics, the photographic basis of film, and distribution.

Scope

This topic covers the digital transformation of the moving image. It examines digital capture and projection, computer-generated imagery and the relation to animation, the consequences of digitization for film's photographic ontology, and questions of distribution, streaming, and convergence. It draws on new-media theory to situate cinema among interactive, networked, and database forms, and considers debates about whether we have entered a 'post-cinematic' era.

Core questions

• How has digitization changed how films are made and shown?
• What happens to film's photographic ontology in the digital era?
• How does cinema relate to interactive, networked, and database media?
• Are we in a 'post-cinematic' age, and what would that mean?

Key theories

Principles of new media

Manovich's account of new media through principles such as numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding, repositioning cinema within computational culture.

The virtual life of film

Rodowick's analysis of how the loss of film's photochemical, indexical basis in digital capture transforms the ontology and experience of cinema.

Remediation

Bolter and Grusin's thesis that new media refashion older media through the twin logics of immediacy and hypermediacy, a framework for situating digital cinema among other forms.

History

Digital tools entered filmmaking through computer-generated imagery and nonlinear editing in the 1980s and 1990s, and digital capture and projection largely displaced celluloid by the 2010s. New-media theory, led by Manovich's 2001 study, framed these changes within computational culture, while Rodowick and others debated their consequences for film's photographic ontology. Streaming platforms and convergence subsequently reshaped distribution and viewing, fueling 'post-cinema' discourse.

Debates

Does digital end cinema as we knew it?

Theorists dispute whether the loss of the photochemical index and the rise of computational and networked media mark a fundamental break with cinema or a continuation of it by other means.

Key figures

• Lev Manovich
• D. N. Rodowick
• Jay David Bolter
• Richard Grusin

Seminal works

• manovich2001
• rodowick2007
• boltergrusin1999

Frequently asked questions

How did digital technology change cinema?

Digital tools transformed every stage of filmmaking, from capture and computer-generated imagery to editing, projection, and streaming distribution, and raised questions about the medium's photographic basis and its boundaries with other media.

What does 'post-cinema' mean?

Post-cinema is a contested term for the idea that digital, networked, and computational media have so transformed the moving image that it can no longer be understood through the categories of traditional, photochemical cinema.