As a millennial, I didn’t live through the days of black and white TVs or the days when you needed to buy cassette tapes to play games. From the moment I was born, I was introduced to colourful digital television and the need to wear 3D glasses to watch 3D movies, the so-called post-cinema digital era.

Steven Shaviro suggests that “post-cinema” refers to a shift in motion picture practices and film culture. It encompasses shifts in the capture, manipulation, distribution, display and online consumption of digital images. It provides a conceptual framework for such practices in relation to the broader context of film and motion picture production (Card, 2016). Post-cinema is a particular type of summative or generalised concept that allows for, if not encourages, internal diversity. At the same time post-cinema has to be thought of not only in terms of new media in terms of novelty, but also in terms of ongoing, uneven and uncertain historical shifts (DENSON & LEYDA, 2016).

Contemporary cinema, from blockbusters to independent and auteur avant-garde films, uses digital cameras and editing techniques that incorporate technologies such as gaming, webcams, surveillance video, social media, and smartphones to achieve aesthetic effects (DENSON & LEYDA, 2016). From the creation of hazy psychedelic landscapes to the elaborate hallucinatory worlds of modern blockbusters, computerised three-dimensional compositing (CGI) plays an important role. I believe that watching a film is a grand hallucinatory experience in itself, and the creation of cool-like illusions in cinema has always been a sought-after “viewing experience” regardless of the time of year. Between 2008 and 2018, CGI, 3D, and animated films in the United States have grossed a staggering $5.87 billion at the box office, proving to audiences that CGI films have become one of the dominant film categories in the film industry (Statista Research Department, 2019). However, the popularity of CGI is also gradually making the audience start to think that this technology was born to aid in the betterment of the story, but is that really the case?

Marvel is one of the good examples to explain all this, and I am not an avid Marvel fan. There’s no denying that Marvel’s CGI is gorgeous and attention-grabbing, but Marvel’s digital location gimmicks rarely serve the story. The primary goal of most large-scale visual displays is to leave the audience in awe. It is a show that takes the story out of the centre and makes it a fancy show (McCoy, 2023). The film Doctor Strange: Madness of the Multiverse was the first Marvel movie I watched, and I marvelled at the acting of the actors while remembering more of the magnificent special effects generated by CGI. So much so that when my friends asked me film related questions, all I could answer was that the special effects were just amazing.

Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War contains over 2,700 shots, only 80 of which are non-visual effects shots. This means that only 3% of the film’s shots were not influenced by the film’s massive global visual effects team (Industrial Light & Magic, 2023). This is an amazing number. It is also a reflection of the fact that it is hard to imagine what modern cinema would be like without CGI.

All in all the rapid development of CGI has been indispensable in that the aesthetics of contemporary cinema not only mimics the environments created by digital technologies and media, but more radically disrupts the power geometries and cultural logics of twentieth-century cinema (DENSON & LEYDA, 2016).

Thank you for your patience and I’ll see you on the next blog.

Autor: Xinyu Ge

Idea base on Week 2: Post Cinematic Affect and Sensation/Audiovisual Video Essays & Week 3: Post Cinematic Form, Post Continuity, and the New Structure of Feeling

Bibliography:

Card, W. (2016) ‘Special effects and uncanny affect: CGI and the post-cinematic uncanny’, Ubiquity: The Journal of Pervasive Media, 5(1), pp. 75–88. doi:10.1386/ubiq.5.1.75_1.

DENSON, S. and LEYDA, J. (2016) Perspectives on post-cinema: An introduction, Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film. Available at: https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/introduction/.

Industrial Light & Magic. (2023) Avengers: Infinity War, Industrial Light & Magic. Available at: https://www.ilm.com/vfx/avengers-infinity-war-part-1/.

McCoy, J.K. (2023) Marvel’s CGI isn’t bad, it’s just getting old, Game Rant. Available at: https://gamerant.com/marvel-cgi-overdone/.

SHAVIRO, S. 1.2 Post-Continuity: An Introduction. Available at: https://mediarep.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/e7932b2e-1961-4181-9d55-ff504026206c/content.

Statista Research Department (2019) CGI, 3D and animated movie box office revenue in the U.S. 2018, Statista. Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1020938/cgi-animated-movie-revenue-us/