Já está completamente consolidada nas cadeias de produção cinematográfica uma esperada \"transição para o digital\". Porém a exibição propriamente dita de filmes na forma digital nas salas de cinema só foi padronizada em 2005, e a mudança ganhou força somente na década de 2010. Essa digitalização da exibição cinematográfica foi incorporada de forma transparente para a maioria dos espectadores de cinema, apesar de suas intricadas especificações técnicas e arranjos econômicos de viabilização das trocas dos equipamentos. Ao mesmo tempo, as tecnologias digitais também proporcionam cada vez mais facilidade para que filmes possam ser assistidos fora das salas de cinema, colocando-as de fato em cheque quando olha-se para o futuro. Este trabalho discute o processo de digitalização da exibição e distribuição cinematográficas, traçando algumas perspectivas sobre por que, mesmo com a digitalização, permanecerão existindo as salas de cinema. É particularmente interessante que, em meio a essa desmaterialização do suporte da cópia, sobressaia exatamente a materialidade que sobrou, a do próprio espaço e disposição da exibição, o espectador na sala de cinema. Essa permanência é apoiada em dois eixos principais. Inicialmente, o fundamental papel econômico das salas nas receitas que movimentam todas as diferentes camadas da produção de filmes. O segundo eixo é do caráter bastante único da imersão presente na sala de cinema. Esta imersão especial, por sua vez, está fundamentada nas características físicas e técnicas dos equipamentos nas salas, que evoluíram para aproveitar diferentes aspectos da percepção humana em seu âmbito individual e coletivo. Combino características tecnológicas dos padrões adotados, elementos da economia do cinema, estudos da percepção e intenções do espectador e resultados recentes da psicologia experimental que corroboram o caráter bastante particular da experiência de assistir a um filme na sala de cinema e indicam sua continuidade. / The long foretold \"transition to digital cinema\" is already running full steam as far as the acquisition and post-production chains are concerned. However, for digital film exhibition, there has only recently, in 2005, been an agreed upon standard, decided by the major distributors, and the actual upgrades only gained momentum in the early 2010s The digitization and change of materiality of cinema exhibition and distribution, although of great interest to professionals, academics and critics, has been incorporated in a more or less transparent way for the majority of moviegoers, despite their intricate technical specifications and economic arrangements between the various economic parties that enabled equipment to be purchased. It is particularly interesting that, in the midst of this dematerialization of the film\'s physical form, what stands out is precisely the remaining tangibles, the very space and disposition for the exhibition, and the spectator in the theater. This work examines the digitalization of cinema exhibition and distribution technologies, tracing some future perspectives on what remains in a digital cinema. I combine technical specifications of the standards imposed by distributors, some elements of the economy of cinema, without which any speculation becomes exclusively theoretical; and some data from audience and spectator studies focusing on their perception, wishes and intentions, the puzzlingly often-forgotten part of the film studies, for there is no cinema without a spectator. In order to do so I present some recent results of experimental psychology that endorse the rather unique aspects of watching a movie in the movie theater, and its importance beyond the historical.

This paper addresses many concepts and concerns related to the previously underexplored topic of CGI and narrative in Hollywood children’s films. Through an analysis of scenes from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Golden Compass, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and Inkheart it demonstrates that CGI spectacle does not exist in opposition to narrative progression as some scholars have suggested. Instead, by drawing on theorists like Lefebvre and Furstenau (2002), this investigation asserts that belief in fictional realism is paramount to spectatorship. It is shown that CGI can be used in a way that respects realism in the Bazin tradition and continuity editing in order to allow the spectator to believe in the fictional reality of narrative events. This belief is then connected to the emotional engagement of the spectator by drawing on ideas from Smith’s (1994) structure of sympathy. The ultimate goal of this paper is to present a conceptualization of CGI that creates a stronger distinction between reality and film realism than previous literature has suggested.

Testament is a feature film serving as part of Tim Ritter's thesis requirements for earning a Master of Fine Arts in the Entrepreneurial Digital Cinema program at the University of Central Florida. The film follows a bitter former follower of a marginally popular social-justice movement who must keep the movement alive after its mysterious leader is killed violently and publicly. The drama, set in an fictional land known as The Commonwealth, presents a modern-day retelling of the life of St. Peter in the years after the death of Jesus, creating a new context for familiar Biblical tales and morals while also examining the high personal costs of changing the world. Testament has been produced for well under $50,000 as part of the microbudget requirements of the UCF Film program. In creating an epic with minimal resources, innovation has filled the void left by most films' higher budgets, with the crew recycling a small number of locations to serve as several different locations and using a large cast sparingly to avoid becoming overly reliant on many actors who aren't getting paid. This document details the theories and methodology behind the preparation and planned production of the film, as well as the approach planned for its distribution.

This paper provides a look at the making of a microbudget feature film. It seeks to explain my growth as a filmmaker and an artist, through the challenges, both narrative and practical, that I encountered, as well as provide documentation following the process. Hope for a Thorn: The Making of a Microbudget Digital Feature Film includes elements from each phase of filmmaking, from script and preproduction to the marketing plan. This document shows the tremendous amount of preparation and planning that goes into the making of a microbudget digital feature film.

My thesis focuses on the perceptive afflictions caused by alteration of the normal biological functioning of sight and memory. These afflictions are related to the redefinition and disgregation of the classical and postclassical cinematographic characters, and affect cinematographic language, establishing a dialectical relation with the filmic image that contaminates our spectatorial perception. In the first chapter I propose a different reading of a few moments in film history, turning points in which a modification of the ordinary sensorial patterns has been introduced. From the German Expressionism to the late authorial experiments of the 60s, there is a sort of hidden history of film that passes through the continuous redefinition of the audience sensory activity. The different perspective upon broadly studied topics leads to the analysis of contemporary cinema: my thesis tries to investigate the reasons that led cinema to continually increase the representation of perceptive afflictions during the last years, and theses “affected” narratives of afflictions and dysfunctions have interesting effects upon so called “normal” perception of the reality surrounding us. The chapters 2 and 3 respectively analyze memory disorders and different dysfunctions of sight: these elements determine alterations in the ‘normal’ and ‘sensory’ perception of reality. They work as narrative factors changing the visual filmic instruments and redefining the role of the subject (and his/her uncertain definition of identity) in contemporary narratives that show how new technologies are profoundly transforming (and enhancing) the perceptive mechanisms involved in our spectatorial activity. In this work I analyze those films that are mostly committed to a clear and readable narration. My study primarily concentrates on American cinema of the last 30 years – with particular attention to popular Hollywood productions – because Hollywood has become the privileged ‘laboratory’ for the negotiation of gaze and images in the contemporary mediascape, while during the classical era experimental and avant-garde cinema were the “place” in which audience experienced the most important redefinitions of the boundaries between different types of mediated perception.

"What is cinema? The emergent digital era poses this question in a new and interesting way because for the first time in the history of film theory the photographic processes is challenged as the basis of cinematic representation. If the discipline of cinema studies is anchored to a specific material object a real conundrum emerges with the arrival of digital technologies as a dominant aesthetic and social force" (D.N. Rodowick 2007: 9). Over the past twenty-five years or more there has been a paradigm shift occurring in the manner in which moving images are conceived, acquired, produced, disseminated and consumed. This transformation of the modus operandi of production can be attributed to the overwhelming expansion and rapid advance of digital technologies. Through both critical reflection and creative practice this thesis will explore the extent to which there might be a discontinuity between analogue and digital cinematography; whether cinema itself and the basis of photographic representation have been changed, as Rodowick infers. It will draw on debates of realism, the index, and of the medium in relation to the seminal theories of new media. The thesis will introduce the term Digital Fluidity. This is the central concept that has emerged out of my research that describes how technologies utilised in production and post-production function together to enable a fluid process or mode of filmmaking, based on a logic of hybridity and technological convergence. Digital Fluidity engages with two key arguments in new media theory, namely that of ‘re-mediation’ (Bolter and Grusin, 2000), and the ‘computerisation of culture’ (Manovich, 2001). The thesis comprises of a 30 000 word dissertation and a portfolio of practical work of three films. Firstly there are two documentary shorts Grasp the Words Which Sing (2010), and Picnic Pilgrimage (2012), which deal with themes such as the perception of art in the case of the former and the mobility of both the camera and the subject in the latter. In the documentary productions the reflective focus is concentrated on the digital camera as capture device, re-appropriation of technology, and continuity with analogue production techniques. The films are produced on a modified DSLR camera with 35mm lenses and demonstrate a progression in visual style from a static camera in the case of the first film to a necessarily more mobile camera in the second and third. A longer dramatic production Not For Human Consumption (2013) is a tragic love story that explores the emotive social issue of legal high substance misuse. This film uses improvisation and experimental camera systems as well as some conventions that hold their lineage in the silent era, such as the long take and frontal framing. Here the theoretical analysis explores the integration of analogue and digital techniques and equipment by looking at the processes involved and relating these practices with the concept of Digital Fluidity. The improvised narrative was created as the film was in production – a choice that was facilitated largely by the decision to shoot digitally. The three films, although very different, are related by the connection between the processes of filmmaking undergone in each case and the thesis’ core definition of Digital Fluidity. The central research question poised within this thesis will therefore be: ‘Do digital technologies offer the filmmaker enhanced opportunity for creating new cinematic language and a more fluid mode of production than previous forms?

Critical discourses on contemporary digital cinema tend to be either overtly negative, framed within a rhetoric of loss or disenfranchisement, or unilaterally positive, celebrating the user agency and freedom digital technologies enable. Both these conceptual positions are unhelpful because they either focus on what contemporary digital cinema fails to do or what it should do, without examining more closely how it actually functions. What is needed is a third, neutral approach which takes both sides into consideration but is also aware of their limitations and weaknesses. This thesis takes as its impetus Giles Deleuze’s suggestion that, just like the cinemas of the movement-image and the time-image before it, contemporary digital cinema needs a basic will to art – a new aesthetic principle, a new function of the image, a new politics, a new representational potential distinct from those that have come before it. The aim of this thesis is therefore to establish this will to art and explore its ramifications for and manifestations in contemporary digital cinema. Taking into consideration a variety of filmic texts from the 1980s to the present day which prominently feature diegetically recorded footage, as well as amateur film-making practices from the home movies of the 1960s to the video clips now uploaded to online media sharing platforms, the increasing relevance of home media in the reception of contemporary digital cinema, and most crucially the process of convergence inherent in digital media, this thesis argues that the will to art of contemporary digital cinema is intimacy.

A recorrência, no cinema experimental contemporâneo, de obras que enfatizam a instabilidade material da película - tal como Decasia, de Bill Morrison e Materia Obscura, de Jürgen Reble e Thomas Köner - vem sendo apontada por alguns autores como um retorno às questões da materialidade cinematográfica (outrora empregada pelo Cinema Estrutural) na era da passagem do analógico ao digital. Tal ênfase material se dá, em obras como essas, através do emprego de imagens degradadas, por vezes permeado de um caráter nostálgico e mórbido, que põe em cena a perda do corpo orgânico da película a partir de sua obsolescência. Ao se voltarem ao corpo analógico na era digital, essas obras tensionam, assim, imaginários associados a ambas tecnologias, criando cruzamentos que ultrapassam a mera associação do digital com o imaterial e com a película enquanto fixadora do real, numa \"alquimia de mídias\" como caracteriza Giuliana Bruno (2014). Cruzando noções de \"velho\" e \"novo\", num engajamento direto com o aparato e suporte das imagens, aproximamos essas obras das discussões de arqueologia das mídias em Thomas Elsaesser (2016) e Jussi Parikka (2015), bem como avaliamos seus procedimentos estéticos e investimento sensorial nas imagens, a partir de suas afinidades com a questão do informe nas artes e na visualidade háptica, como propõe Laura U. Marks (2002). Assim, esta pesquisa abordará a passagem, por esses trabalhos, da materialidade da película à materialidade do digital, a partir da análise de obras-chave do cinema experimental contemporâneo, de forma a destacar os fenômenos sensíveis de \"tensão superficial\" evocados nas texturas ruidosas dessas obras, que, em suas existências híbridas e fragmentadas, surgem como ruínas, entre obsolescência e renovação. Buscamos, enfim, atribuir à passagem do cinema analógico para o digital esse lugar paradoxal da ruína que, em sua complexa materialidade, oscila entre o material e o imaterial - e que, tal como dessas imagens em dissolução, instiga considerações acerca de um reconhecimento da efemeridade do mundo (e cultura), seja em modo melancólico ou afirmativo (como observaremos em Buci-Glucksmann), permitindo observar as mudanças tecnológicas do cinema sob um eixo de transmutações e passagens. / The recurrence, in contemporary experimental cinema, of works that emphasize the material instability of film - such as Decasia, by Bill Morrison, and Materia Obscura by Jürgen Reble and Thomas Köner - has been pointed by certain authors as a return to issues regarding the materiality of cinema (once a resource of Structural Film) in an era of passages between analog and digital media. Such material emphasis occurs, in these works, through the use of degraded images, often marked by a morbid and nostalgic character, that sets in scene the loss of the organic body of analog film in its obsolescence. By turning to this analog body in the digital age, these works put into friction the imaginary associated with each set of technologies, establishing intersections that go beyond the mere association of digital with the imaterial and film as \"fixer of the real\", in a form of \"media alchemy\", as put forth by Giuliana Bruno (2014). Crossing over notions of \"old\" and \"new\", in direct engagement with the apparatuses and the physical substrata of images, we relate these works through discussions of media archeology of Thomas Elsaesser (2016) and Jussi Parikka (2015) and approach their aesthetic processes and sensorial engagement through their affinities with the question of the formless and of haptic visuality in art, as discussed by Laura U. Marks (2002). This research, then, observes the passage from the materiality of film to the materiality of digital, through the analysis of key works in recent experimental cinema, highlighting the sensible phenomena of \"surface tension\" evoked in the noisy textures of these works, which, in their hybrid and fragmented existences, emerge as ruins between obsolescence and renovation. We search, finally, to attribute to this passing of film to digital media this paradoxical space of the ruin, which, in its complex materiality, oscillates between the material and the virtual - such as these images in dissolution, it instigates reflections on the ephemerality of the world (and our culture), be it in a melancholic or affirmative mode (as we learn from Buci-Glucksmann), allowing for a particular way of observing the technological change in cinema, in this axis of transmutation and transit.

A recorrência, no cinema experimental contemporâneo, de obras que enfatizam a instabilidade material da película - tal como Decasia, de Bill Morrison e Materia Obscura, de Jürgen Reble e Thomas Köner - vem sendo apontada por alguns autores como um retorno às questões da materialidade cinematográfica (outrora empregada pelo Cinema Estrutural) na era da passagem do analógico ao digital. Tal ênfase material se dá, em obras como essas, através do emprego de imagens degradadas, por vezes permeado de um caráter nostálgico e mórbido, que põe em cena a perda do corpo orgânico da película a partir de sua obsolescência. Ao se voltarem ao corpo analógico na era digital, essas obras tensionam, assim, imaginários associados a ambas tecnologias, criando cruzamentos que ultrapassam a mera associação do digital com o imaterial e com a película enquanto fixadora do real, numa \"alquimia de mídias\" como caracteriza Giuliana Bruno (2014). Cruzando noções de \"velho\" e \"novo\", num engajamento direto com o aparato e suporte das imagens, aproximamos essas obras das discussões de arqueologia das mídias em Thomas Elsaesser (2016) e Jussi Parikka (2015), bem como avaliamos seus procedimentos estéticos e investimento sensorial nas imagens, a partir de suas afinidades com a questão do informe nas artes e na visualidade háptica, como propõe Laura U. Marks (2002). Assim, esta pesquisa abordará a passagem, por esses trabalhos, da materialidade da película à materialidade do digital, a partir da análise de obras-chave do cinema experimental contemporâneo, de forma a destacar os fenômenos sensíveis de \"tensão superficial\" evocados nas texturas ruidosas dessas obras, que, em suas existências híbridas e fragmentadas, surgem como ruínas, entre obsolescência e renovação. Buscamos, enfim, atribuir à passagem do cinema analógico para o digital esse lugar paradoxal da ruína que, em sua complexa materialidade, oscila entre o material e o imaterial - e que, tal como dessas imagens em dissolução, instiga considerações acerca de um reconhecimento da efemeridade do mundo (e cultura), seja em modo melancólico ou afirmativo (como observaremos em Buci-Glucksmann), permitindo observar as mudanças tecnológicas do cinema sob um eixo de transmutações e passagens. / The recurrence, in contemporary experimental cinema, of works that emphasize the material instability of film - such as Decasia, by Bill Morrison, and Materia Obscura by Jürgen Reble and Thomas Köner - has been pointed by certain authors as a return to issues regarding the materiality of cinema (once a resource of Structural Film) in an era of passages between analog and digital media. Such material emphasis occurs, in these works, through the use of degraded images, often marked by a morbid and nostalgic character, that sets in scene the loss of the organic body of analog film in its obsolescence. By turning to this analog body in the digital age, these works put into friction the imaginary associated with each set of technologies, establishing intersections that go beyond the mere association of digital with the imaterial and film as \"fixer of the real\", in a form of \"media alchemy\", as put forth by Giuliana Bruno (2014). Crossing over notions of \"old\" and \"new\", in direct engagement with the apparatuses and the physical substrata of images, we relate these works through discussions of media archeology of Thomas Elsaesser (2016) and Jussi Parikka (2015) and approach their aesthetic processes and sensorial engagement through their affinities with the question of the formless and of haptic visuality in art, as discussed by Laura U. Marks (2002). This research, then, observes the passage from the materiality of film to the materiality of digital, through the analysis of key works in recent experimental cinema, highlighting the sensible phenomena of \"surface tension\" evoked in the noisy textures of these works, which, in their hybrid and fragmented existences, emerge as ruins between obsolescence and renovation. We search, finally, to attribute to this passing of film to digital media this paradoxical space of the ruin, which, in its complex materiality, oscillates between the material and the virtual - such as these images in dissolution, it instigates reflections on the ephemerality of the world (and our culture), be it in a melancholic or affirmative mode (as we learn from Buci-Glucksmann), allowing for a particular way of observing the technological change in cinema, in this axis of transmutation and transit.

As in physics, one faces a three-body problem in film studies. Similarly, neither logic has a general solution. There are bodies on screen as representation, bodies before the screen as audiences, and supposedly film’s body as a quasi-subject that perceives and expresses through the screen. However, no scholarship has addressed the central question of the body’s medium specificity in determining how the story on screen is told in a socio-historical context. Using phenomenology and media studies, Corporeal Modernism: Transnational Body Cinema Since 1968 fills the gap by articulating how the body’s metaphysical and physical conditions are the foundation of narrative cinema. I showcase how the medium specificity of the body is deployed to flesh out social and political conflicts from European political modernism through Asian New Waves to the latest Hollywood digital blockbusters. Corporeal Modernism considers the body as a medium—not as mere representation in cinema—to examine the relationship between the bodies on screen and before the screen. Using phenomenology and media studies, my research illustrates how the body on screen, without manifesting its corporeal qualities, operates as vehicle to deliver a character in narrative. Only when the body of a character is hurt or incapacitated, the audience is made aware of how the body is a formal issue as well. My research demonstrates how cinema presents the body and the world on screen. Corporeal modernism is the technical awareness of the body-image located in the history of cinema.