Post cinema combines real image and imaginary image of someone’s mind and memory, exploring the 21^st century media, helping us to understand, share and reflect new forms of sensibility. As “film-making has been transformed” (Shaviro, 2010b), post-cinema is another technique of producing effect, and is both continuation and a break from the past, intertwining between traditional and modern. As technology evolved, it resulted in mainstream Hollywood cinema to no longer follow the rules of continuity, which we call post-continuity, or chaos cinema. After 1980s, the formula of combining shots, taking setting in believable space and time, creating sets to make the movie believable slowly changed to rapid camera movements, reframing, shaking the frame, and rapid editing to intensify sequence in films.

These kinds of new techniques generated new forms of sensibility through “radically changed conditions of viewing, and new ways in which films address their spectators.” (Denson and Leyda, 2016) The new structure of feelings can be categorized through affect and emotion, emotion being the consequence of affect. Creating affect based on target audience, new sets of technique in film editing generated new emotions to the audience.

In James Cameron’s film, “Avatar”, he creates a new planet in another galaxy through CGI. To create this, he has waited until the technology evolved enough for this to be possible. While consisting classical elements of cinema before 1980s, the camera movement, frames and edits are much closer to post-cinema or chaos cinema. For instance, when Jake Suli is passing the test to become a real warrior, the angles and edits are not quite continuing as well as unrealistic.

Despite of the unrealistic elements, developed techniques help the audience’s mind to accept the images without any disturbance, changing the conditions of viewing. With creating a world with imagination, Cameron combined elements of real world and imagination to guide the audience to generate new form of viewpoint.

Citation

Avatar. (2009). 20th Century Studios.

Denson, S. and Leyda, J. (2016). Post-cinema : theorizing 21st-century film. Falmer: REFRAME Books.

Shaviro, S. (2010b). Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales. Film-Philosophy, 14(1), pp.1–102. doi:https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2010.0001.

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