Digitisation has revolutionised the way we make, watch and think about movies and TV. Cinematic digitalization is reshaping film and television in the 21st century, continuing what Shane Denson and Julia Leyda term an “indeterminate historical transition” (263) in ‘Perspectives on Post-Cinema’: They describe how technology — as in the introduction of digital cameras, computer-generated images and non-linear editing software — has completely replaced its analog predecessor, the 35mm film-based mechanical editing table, and how production methods have been forever changed. In ‘Digital Audiovisual Media: New Aesthetics and Practices’, this digitalization is connected to a new “mixing board aesthetic,” one in which content creators can mix and match film, television, and online video, as new platforms like streaming services and YouTube open up their rules.

A prime example of this fusion of past and present is Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018). The film fuses old-school comic book — scratchy lines, colors at different depths, a certain grease — with cutting-edge digital animation technology to create something muscular and artful, a stylized world that wouldn’t have been possible without the standard tools of filmmaking. The digital and matrixing tools afford the filmmakers to escape the limitations of photographic realism to create a visual experience that is simultaneously novel and familiar—something that could only be made on the basis of the hybridism of digital techniques. The film’s stunning amalgamation of 3D computer animation with 2D comic book techniques epitomizes Lev Manovich’s notion of the “Kino-Brush,” in which digital technology becomes a series of creative tools that filmmakers can use to expand the horizons of traditional cinema into entirely new, fantastical worlds.

But not everyone welcomes these changes. The transition from analog toward digital film has ruptured the “indexicality” of cinema —that is, the genuine connection between image and reality that analog-era technology allowed, David Rodowick proposes. Both of them exploit digital manipulation, which Rodowick says weakens cinema’s power to represent reality, because what we’re seeing now is a product of algorithms rather than mattering images. By contrast, Lev Manovich sees digital technology as liberating, likening it to a “Kino-Brush” that allows filmmakers to craft wholly new worlds, outside the bounds of photographic realism.

In this “post-cinema” age, they note, we are increasingly seeing a hybridization of media, a mingling of cinema and other forms, and a blurring of the lines between film and television. Denson and Leyda argue instead that post-cinema is less a wholesale replacement for the past than a dialogue between media, old and new. This new level of flexibility alters the audiences’ experience of screen content, transforming it into something more interactive, immersive, and multi-dimensional. This is exemplified in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which delights in combining comic book language with the language of more advanced filmmaking post-cinema; something that post-cinema, in a sense, thrives off of.

References

– Denson, Shane, and Julia Leyda. ‘Perspectives on Post-Cinema: An Introduction’, ‘Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st Century Film’, 1–19.  

– Manovich, Lev. 2002. ‘What is New Media’. ‘The Language of New Media, 18–61.  

– Rodowick, David N. 2015. ‘What Was Cinema?’ ‘The Virtual Life of Film’, 25–88.  

– Lecture Slides: ‘Digital Audiovisual Media: New Aesthetics and Practices.

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