On May 16, 2002, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones made its theatrical debut. Set ten years after the events of the first Star Wars prequel film The Phantom Menace, the latest project from the visionary mind of George Lucas was all anybody talked about that summer. One firm predicted that companies would lose more than $320 million in productivity because so many employees would call in sick in order to attend a screening. That year, Attack of the Clones generated $310.7 million in the U.S. (which currently ranks 81st on the all-time domestic box office list) and $653.8 million globally (which currently ranks 141st).

Whether you were a vocal opponent of the prequels or a staunch defender of the franchise’s new direction, you were part of the Star Wars mania that gripped the early 2000s.

But beyond the Stars Wars hysteria that had overtaken movie culture for the first time in almost 20 years, there was something truly significant, potently groundbreaking, undeniably revolutionary about the release of Attack of the Clones that most people didn’t realize: it was one of the first movies ever shot completely on digital filmmaking equipment.

Now that might not sound that crazy right up front—but this high-definition digital 24-frame system completely upended the art of making movies. The way movies were shot, the way movies were edited, the way movies looked on screen. After an entire century of shooting on celluloid, the film industry was suddenly presented with a digital version of it all.

There were plenty of staunch celluloid defenders like Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan, but George Lucas was one of the few who wanted to make the digital leap. And while there were a few other films that had already made the digital transition—such as Robert Rodriguez’s Once Upon a Time in Mexico and Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark—Lucas’s Attack of the Clones marked new territory: the biggest movie franchise ever was officially endorsing the new age of filmmaking.

Just seven years later, Slumdog Millionaire would win Best Picture at the Academy Awards and Avatar would become the highest-grossing movie of all time—and both of those movies would be shot on digital. If there was any marker in time that the film industry had officially begun the transition away from celluloid, it was when Lucas decided to make the jump.

And seventeen-and-a-half years after Attack of the Clones—to be exact, December 20, 2019—that embracement of digital filmmaking gave way to the next phase of storytelling in movies. This time it stretched beyond the use of digital equipment, beyond the way movies were physically shot and edited; this time it marked a significant moment for the way cinematic stories were told, the way narratives unfolded in a visual format; this time it went from a storytelling trend to an unshakeable reality of modern film.

This was post-cinema—a term used by film scholars and theorists to describe the movie industry’s shift from the 20th to the 21st century.

Author：Travis is co-founder of Colossus. He writes about the impact of art on his life and the world around us.

Available at: https://filmcolossus.com/welcome-to-post-cinema-movies-will-never-be-the-same-again/

Jiayu Cao Student ID：33757013