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This thesis explores the historical, theoretical and philosophical development of cinematic media as a collective form of technological perception and consciousness. Central to my inquiry is the philosophical notion that with the invention of cinema emerges a cyborg vision, a new modern mechanics of thinking that extends the phenomenological and epistemological experience of human perception and knowledge into hitherto unknown realms of thinking, sensation and being. Drawing on some of the key cultural thinkers and philosophers of the twentieth century, including Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, as well as contemporary philosophers of media such as Jonathan Beller, Sean Cubitt, D.N. Rodowick and Mark B. Hansen, my research into the philosophy of cinema and digital media articulates a branch of media theory that reads the political economy of the moving image through an amalgam of continental philosophy, marxist theory and film studies. Coterminous with the investigation into the philosophical object of cinematic or media consciousness, the thesis also endeavors to map the historical genealogy of the moving image as it evolves from the industrial mechanics of cinematic technologies to the virtual informatics of digital culture. Central to this inquiry is the idea that the history of cinematic and visual media is inextricably connected with the rise, towards the end of the twentieth century, of postmodern consumer culture and the global information society. The transition from a modern industrial economy to a postmodern information economy that reorganises the logic of production according to the 'variables' of scientific knowledge, communication and informational technologies, parallels a metamorphosis in our media consciousness as the representational ontology of cinematic moving image is transformed by the virtual ontology of the digital image. The first part of my thesis looks at the period of industrial cinema, focusing on Soviet constructivism and the films of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein. In this section I trace the origins of cinema as a mode of communication for the commodity, examining how the modern cinematic imaginary opens up new economies of vision and sensation for capital. Following this investigation into what Jonathan Beller calls the cinematic mode of production, the second part of my thesis proceeds to investigate how cinematic consciousness is transformed from the industrial to the post-industrial era. Taking Deleuze's historiographical demarcation of cinema into the two regimes of the 'movement-image' and the 'time-image' as a philosophical frame, the second section of my thesis investigates how in the post-war films of the Italian neorealists and Michelengelo Antonioni our cinematic consciousness develops a new way of thinking the ontology of time and space. This analysis leads into my discussion of how in the age of digital special effects and the Hollywood blockbuster, cinematic consciousness is further expanded with the time-consciousness of the 'virtual' as our bodies attempt to accommodate the heightened flows of information that bombard our senses in the interfaces of digital culture.

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Cinema, as a complex social and cultural phenomenon, has been recently challenged by digital media cultures and aesthetics since the 1990s. In this study, Hong Kong cinematic productions, blending the West and the East, and flexibly manoeuvring production and post-production with limited resources, are used to demonstrate the advent of new digital cinematic aesthetics and productions in the era of globalization and digitalization. The production culture and aesthetics of local cinema has been, to a great extent, internally modified by the impacts of digital media cultures and technologies, especially digital effects and computer animation of unprecedented imaginary spaces and perspectives for creative productions. The increasing complexity of digital cinematic productions and the rapidly changing cultural production systems bring in newcomers of alternative modes/choices of thoughts and interpretations, thus facilitating production/product differentiation and de-differentiation to cater for the increasing and changing demands of active audiences. The vigorous struggle for cultural representations in digital cinematic aesthetics by producers and consumers of disparate repertoires is the focus of analysis in this research. Empirical evidences suggest a new paradigmatic model to study cultural representations of digital cinematic aesthetics within contemporary creative systems of production and consumption. / The findings generally support the advent of the ten new aesthetics of digital cinema as a global trend as well as a new glocalism in the Hong Kong cases. While most interviewed producers and audiences articulate the new characteristics of digital cinematic aesthetics, many audiences show disjunctive judgments toward those local filmmakers' treatments to cross-fertilize video game with their cinematic productions. This reveals the inevitability of internal modifications of organization cultures and representational practices to create new digital cinematic aesthetics and productions within new dynamics of digital media cultures and technologies in the fast changing media ecology. Hong Kong filmmakers and computer animators show their strength and flexibility to glocalize digital cinematic aesthetics and productions by integrating digital visual effects with local film and production cultures, especially in comedic and martial arts cinematic productions. However, it seems that there are larger discrepancies concerning the tastes and aesthetic judgments toward cultural representations in digital cinematic aesthetics by cross-fertilization with video game between general audiences and professionals. This study reflects that the rigid, director-oriented Hong Kong film production system is too demanding on the film director's independent ability of coordination and greatly influences the development of cultural representations in digital cinema by collective imaginative inputs of increasing complexity and flexibility. Producers and consumers of disparate repertoires of cultural practices contribute to the meaning construction of multiple layers of digital effects and computer animation by systematic coordination and collaboration. In other words, the "spectrum of cultural representations", as a framework, helps us understand the complexity and creativity of the new digital cinematic aesthetics from production to consumption practices. / This study is a multidimensional investigation of the moments of creativity and struggles over organization cultures and representational practices by both cultural producers and audiences. There are case studies of the general trend of digital cinematic productions in Hollywood and the specific development of digital cinema in Hong Kong, as well as in China. From these empirical analyses, ten new characteristics of digital cinematic aesthetics are generalized. They include (l) amplification, (2) free referencing, (3) seamlessness and believability, (4) multiple-layered composition, (5) patterning, (6) imaginary perspectives, (7) collective imaginative inputs, (8) cross-fertilization with comic, (9) cross-fertilization with video game, and (10) cross-cultural, cross-historical, cross-genre production. Such inductive findings are also deployed to study the social functions of both producers and audiences in the meaning construction of digital cinematic aesthetics and productions within the dynamics of digitalization and globalization. Eighteen in-depth interviews of production insiders, five focus groups of disparate generations of movie audiences and amateurs, and eleven case studies of Hong Kong digital cinematic productions have been examined. The empirical validity about the ten new forms of digital cinematic aesthetics and their production and consumption is investigated, and also achieved by intensive and interactive case studies, production studies and audience studies, combining textual and discourse analyses and production and reception analyses. / Lam, Sui Kwong Sunny. / Advisers: Anthony Y. H. Fung; Eric K. W. Ma. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-06, Section: A, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 536-562). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese.