SUNY series in Postmodern Culture
2 total works
While agreeing that the "digitization" of the cinema is inevitable, and even a necessary adjustment to the economic realities of end-of-the-millennium cinema production, Dixon argues that it represents a fundamental representational shift in the relationship between the spectator and the image-production apparatus of the cinematograph. More than ever all visual input is merely raw material which is then subjected to digital "polishing" and "tweaking" until it attains a sheen of artificial splendor that is utterly removed from the photographic reproduction of the object and/or person originally photographed.
This book is a study of one of the most insidious and pervasive phenomena in the study and reception of cinema: the "returned gaze" from the screen, in which the audience is actually surveilled by the film being projected on the screen. Rather than the usual process of watching a film, in those films which return the gaze of the viewer, the film looks at us, confronting our voyeur's embrace of the spectacle it presents. The book cites examples as diverse as Andy Warhol's Vinyl, Laurel and Hardy two-reel comedies, the films of Jean-Marie Straub, Jean-Luc Godard, Roberto Rossellini, and Wesley E. Barry's Creation of the Humanoids. It also discusses the history of the returned gaze in video, pornography, surveillance systems, and the related plastic arts.