Moving machines: The experience of new technologies from widescreen to digital cinema.

摘要

This dissertation examines the ways in which technological changes have been understood to transform the experience of cinema. It looks closely at two instances of such change: the move to widescreen systems in the early to mid-1950s and the coming of digital cinema in the late 1990s and early 2000s. While the dissertation's attention to these moments gives it a historical focus, the project is framed theoretically around debates on spectatorship. Although cinematic experience arises in the unique encounter among specific viewers, movies, and viewing contexts, I claim, we can gain insight into that experience by examining the films and discursive regimes that, together, give it shape at particular historical junctures. Moreover, paying close attention to how the relationships among texts, technologies, viewers, and contexts have been presented at these moments of upheaval makes it possible to trace shifts in the terms according to which cinematic experience itself has been conceptualized.;Chapter one contends that widescreen appealed to moviegoers by offering them a new experience of the human body, emblematized by Marilyn Monroe's role in the marketing of CinemaScope. Looking closely at the CinemaScope film East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955), chapter two argues that the new massive screens transformed the ways stylistic devices such as close framing addressed viewers. Shifting focus to digital cinema, chapter three brings together discussions of Hollywood special effects and independent filmmaking in order to highlight the disparate ways these discourses approached the shared feeling that digital technology had altered the relationship between self and world. Chapter four considers two very different instances of digital cinema, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (George Lucas, 1999) and Festen (The Celebration, Thomas Vinterberg, 1998), suggesting that both "films" utilize digital technology to blur the boundaries between figure and space, although to divergent affective and political ends. By thus grounding ontological questions about each format and theoretical accounts of affective engagement in a discussion of how widescreen and digital cinema have been conceived and used by critics and filmmakers, this dissertation argues that cinema's means for moving its viewers continue to evolve.