Film and Culture
2 total works
Today, in a world of smartphones, tablets, and computers, screens are a pervasive part of daily life. Yet a multiplicity of screens has been integral to the media landscape since cinema’s golden age. In On the Screen, Ariel Rogers rethinks the history of moving images by exploring how experiments with screen technologies in and around the 1930s changed the way films were produced, exhibited, and experienced.
Marshalling extensive archival research, Rogers reveals the role screens played at the height of the era of “classical” Hollywood cinema. She shows how filmmakers, technicians, architects, and exhibitors employed a variety of screens within diverse spaces, including studio soundstages, theaters, homes, stores, and train stations. Far from inert, screens served as means of structuring mediated space and time, contributing to the transformations of modern culture. On the Screen demonstrates how particular approaches to the use of screens traversed production and exhibition, theatrical and extratheatrical practice, mainstream and avant-garde modes, and even cinema and television. Rogers’s history challenges conventional narratives about the novelty of the twenty-first-century multiscreen environment, showing how attention to the variety of historical screen practices opens up new ways to understand contemporary media.
Marshalling extensive archival research, Rogers reveals the role screens played at the height of the era of “classical” Hollywood cinema. She shows how filmmakers, technicians, architects, and exhibitors employed a variety of screens within diverse spaces, including studio soundstages, theaters, homes, stores, and train stations. Far from inert, screens served as means of structuring mediated space and time, contributing to the transformations of modern culture. On the Screen demonstrates how particular approaches to the use of screens traversed production and exhibition, theatrical and extratheatrical practice, mainstream and avant-garde modes, and even cinema and television. Rogers’s history challenges conventional narratives about the novelty of the twenty-first-century multiscreen environment, showing how attention to the variety of historical screen practices opens up new ways to understand contemporary media.
Cinematic Appeals follows the effect of technological innovation on the cinema experience, specifically the introduction of widescreen and stereoscopic 3D systems in the 1950s, the rise of digital cinema in the 1990s, and the transition to digital 3D since 2005. Widescreen films drew the spectator into the world of the screen, enabling larger-than-life close-ups of already larger-than-life actors. The technology fostered the illusion of physically entering a film, enhancing the semblance of realism. Alternatively, the digital era was less concerned with manipulating the viewer's physical response and more with generating information flow, awe, disorientation, and the disintegration of spatial boundaries. This study ultimately shows how cinematic technology and the human experience shape and respond to each other over time. Films discussed include Elia Kazan's East of Eden (1955), Star Wars: Phantom Menace (1999), The Matrix (1999), and Thomas Vinterberg's Dogme film Celebration (1995).