From the Essays

“Today, however, theory is confronted with the object of its critique, as more and more films, previously available only in museums or film festival circuits, make their way to the affordable DVD home viewing format, thus challenging decades of theory that depended for its authority on the obscurity and impermanence of the films it was critiquing.” — Nick Rombes

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Essays

Prefatory Note

The vision for the BRAINTRUSTdv essays is outlined in this brief prefatory note from the essays editor.

Theory

The Work of Theory in the Age of Digital Transformation
Henry Jenkins	"Writing the history of digital media will be much more like writing the history of a transitory medium, like early radio or vaudeville, than like documenting the evolution of a textual medium, like the printing press or the cinema."

Self-Theorizing Media
Nick Rombes	"In short, the theorist-professor is disappearing because media today theorizes its own ideology in fairly explicit ways, in terms of both form and content. And nowhere is this more evident than in the contradictory uses to which DV filmmaking is being put."

Video Theory
Scott McQuire	"[A]s much as video offers a new kind of object for theory, it is also part of a profound transformation of the social and cultural conditions within which theory is produced."

Video History

Back to the Future: Reflections on the Brief History of Video Moviemaking
Russ Alsobrook, ASC	"By now everyone is familiar with the famous and often repeated 1955 Daily Variety headline proclaiming 'Film Is Dead' on the news that Ampex had introduced the first videotape recording machine."

The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall and Rise of Video
Alejandro Adams	"Video emerged from its chrysalis overnight and sprouted wings strong enough to keep itself aloft in the typhoon-force winds of feature filmmaking—something it had been unable to do for decades in its analog incarnations."

Ignorance or Arrogance: What Hollywood Has to Learn from the Extinction of the Incan Empire
Jason Berry	"If [studios] make the same mistake their recording industry cohorts did and ignore the digerati's extended hand, Microsoft will undoubtedly become a movie studio the same way Apple has become a record label..."

Digital Cinema

Introduction to Digital Cinema
Michael Karagosian	The author suggests a simple definition of digital cinema and looks at the recent history of digital projection systems.

What Is Digital Cinema?
Lev Manovich	"Digital cinema is a particular case of animation which uses live action footage as one of its many elements."

Web-hosted Cinema

Preliminary Notes on Web-hosted Cinema
Alejandro Adams	"As Hollywood encumbers the less astute—and less committed—with the discreet fly paper of perpetual upgrading, those who are most sincerely interested in pursuing their art beyond the aroma of wealth and fame will be satisfied using the distribution channel of a simple FTP program."

The Greater Cinematic Context

Perspective
Ron Steinman	The author, an award-winning television producer, warns against haphazard tendencies in digital filmmaking.

Circadian Cinema: A Working Model
John Fucile	The author proposes a narrative production model intended exclusively for implementation in the medium of digital video.

To Lie and To Act: Potemkin's Villages, Cinema, and Telepresence
Lev Manovich	"If classical cinematic montage creates an illusion of a coherent space and hides its own work, electronic montage openly presents the viewer with an apparent clash of different spaces."

A Cinema Exploded: Notes on the Development of Some Post-Cinematic Forms
Matthew Clayfield	"[T]he vast majority of filmmakers who work with digital video are essentially making and distributing cinema with post-cinematic technologies."

The Digital Image

The Instrumentalization of the Senses (English) La Instrumentalizacion de los Sentidos (Español)
Andres Tapia-Urzua	"The truth is that we have reconditioned our imagination to the algorithmic equation of new technologies of the image..."

Image Future
Lev Manovich	"There are good reasons to assume that the future images would be photograph-like. Like a virus, a photograph turned out to be an incredibly resilient representational code: it survived waves of technological change, including computerization of all stages of cultural production and distribution."

Mechanical I: Camera Technology and Our Visual Language
Mike Jones	"In the twenty-first century, the indelible images of key world events...have been recorded into our minds not by professional TV crews and equipment, but by shaky, poorly shot, hand-held footage taken by amateurs. Moreover, the off-the-cuff commentary of the operator becomes a part of the framed experience as well."

Culture

Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture
Henry Jenkins	"We are witnessing the transformation of amateur film culture from a focus on home movies toward a focus on public movies, from a focus on local audiences toward a focus on a potential global audience, from a focus on mastering the technology toward a focus on mastering the mechanisms for publicity and promotion..."