On Digital Cinema, Visual Effects, and CGI Studies

Faking it? Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) in Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)

Happy New Year, dear readers! A truly chilled out Film Studies For Free is back from vacation, and raring to go with a pretty impressive (if it says so itself) entry of direct links to openly accessible scholarly work on digital cinema and computer generated imagery studies.

The post was inspired by news of the availability as a free download of 'Digital Bodies' - a chapter, translated into English, from esteemed scholar Barbara Flueckiger's 2008 German-language book Visual Effects. Filmbilder aus dem Computer.

Flueckiger, Associate Professor at the University of Zurich's Institute of Cinema Studies, has also just published her great database on the history of CGI, VFX, and computer animation online.  

Vielen Dank, Barbara! Thanks also to all the scholars listed below for choosing to publish their work in freely accessible venues online! 

Finally, in case you hadn't yet heard of the best website for regular, informed discussions of special and visual effects in the cinema, do check out film scholar Dan North's awe-inspiring blog Spectacular Attractions!

• Joseph D. Anderson, 'Scene and Surface in the Cinema : Implications for Realism', Cinémas : revue d'études cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, vol. 12, n° 2, 2002, p. 61-73

• Torben Holm Antonsen, Sublime Pixels: Exploring the Audience Experience in Digital Special Effects Cinema, PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2008

• James Aston, 'Terrorist Attack!: The Spectacle of Evil in the Blended Horror of Cloverfield', Scope, no. 16, 2010

• Karyn Becker, 'Comments on Tom Gunning’s and Vivian Sobchack’s presentations', Digital Aesthetics, Special Issue of Nordicom Review: The 16th Nordic Conference on Media and Communication Research, Kristiansand, 15-17 August 2003

• Lee-Jane Bennion-Nixon, 'We (Still) Need a Woman for the Job: The Warrior Woman, Feminism and Cinema in the Digital Age', Senses of Cinema, Issue 57, 2010

• Jay David Bolter, 'Transference and Transparency: Digital Technology and the Remediation of Cinema', Intermédialités, n 6 automne 2005

• Jay David Bolter, 'Digital Media and Cinematic Point of View', Heinz Heise, Hannover, 1997

• Marianne van den Boomen et al (eds), Digital Material (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009)

• Celluloid Liberation Front, 'World on a Wire: Reality is Colder than Fiction', Senses of Cinema, Issue 56, 2010

• Melanie Chan, 'Virtually Real and Really Virtual: Baudrillard’s Procession of Simulacrum and The Matrix', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 5, Number 2 (July, 2008)

• Patrick Crogan, 'Oshii’s ‘Avalon’ (2001) and Military-Entertainment Technoculture', Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian, and Central European New Media, Issue 4, 2010
  

• Sean Cubitt, 'Making Space', Senses of Cinema, Issue 57, 2010

• Arild Fetveit, 'Comments on Vivian Sobchack’s and Tom Gunning’s presentations', Digital Aesthetics, Special Issue of Nordicom Review: The 16th Nordic Conference on Media and Communication Research, Kristiansand, 15-17 August 2003

• Mary Flanagan , 'Mobile Identities, Digital Stars, and Post-Cinematic Selves', Wide Angle, 1999

• Barbara Flückiger, 'Digital Bodies', English translation of chapter in Visual Effects. Filmbilder aus dem Computer (Marburg: Schüren, 2008)

• Vincent M. Gaine, '‘We’re on Flashdrive or CD-ROM’: Disassembly and Deletion in the Digital Noir of Collateral', Networking Knowledge, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2009

• Vincent M. Gaine, Re-Mediated Mann:The Re-Mediation of Public Figures and Events in The Insider and Ali', Networking Knowledge, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2010

• Paul Grainge (ed.), Memory and Popular Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003) See especially Part 3: 'Mediating memory:'‘Mortgaged to music’: new retro movies in 1990s Hollywood cinema' by Philip Drake; 'Colouring the past: Pleasantville and the textuality of media memory' by Paul Grainge; 'Memory, history and digital imagery in contemporary film' by Robert Burgoyne; 'Postcinema/Postmemory' by Jeffrey Pence)

• Catherine Grant, 'A Cinematic World? On Jean Baudrillard and Film Studies', Film Studies For Free, September 2, 2010

• Richard Grusin, 'Dvds, video games, and the cinema of interactions', Ilha do Desterro A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, Vol. 0, No 51 (2006)

• Tom Gunning, 'What’s the Point of an Index? or, Faking Photographs', Digital Aesthetics, Special Issue of Nordicom Review: The 16th Nordic Conference on Media and Communication Research, Kristiansand, 15-17 August 2003

• Leon Gurevitch, 'The Cinemas of Interactions: Cinematics and the ‘Game Effect’ in the Age of Digital Attractions', Senses of Cinema, Issue 57, 2010

• Davin Heckman, 'Unraveling Identity: Watching the Posthuman Bildungsroman', CTHeory.net, 2008

• Jae Hyung Ryu, 'The Cinema of Special Effects Attractions and Its Representation of Reality: The Comparison between the Early Tricks and Digital Effects', Georgia State University, Georgia, 2004, (Thanhouser.org)

• Wijnand Ijsselsteijn, 'Presence in the Past: what can we learn from Media History?', in Being There: Concepts, effects and measurement of user presence in synthetic environments G. Riva, F. Davide, W.A IJsselsteijn (eds.) ( Amsterdam: Ios Press, 2003)

• Tim Iles, 'The Matrix and the Subversion of Wu xia: Reasserting the Hollywood Ideological Hegemony', Scope, Issue 8, June 2007

• Bruce Isaacs, 'The Cinematic Real: Aesthetics and Spectacle', Sydney Studies in English, Vol. 33, 2007

• Bruce Isaacs, 'Film Cool: Towards a New Film Aesthetic', PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2006

• Frank Kessler, 'What you get is what you see: Digital images and the claim on the real', Digital Material, Edited by Marianne van den Boomen, Sybille Lammes, Ann-Sophie Lehmann, Joost Raessens, and Mirko Tobias Schäfer (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009) Scroll to p. 187

• Ji-hoon Kim, 'David Claerbout’s Digital Pensive Images', Screening the Past, Issue 29, 2010.

• Gérard Kraus, 'Deadly Game along the Wistula: East European Imagery in Oshii’s ‘Avalon’ (2001)', Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian, and Central European New Media, Issue 4, 2010

• Adi Kuntsman, 'Online Memories, Digital Conflicts and the Cybertouch of War', Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian, and Central European New Media, Issue 4, 2010

• Ohad Landesman, 'In and out of this world: digital video and the aesthetics of realism in the new hybrid documentary', Studies in Documentary Film, Volume 2, Number 1, 2008

• David Lavery, 'From Cinespace to Cyberspace: Zionists and Agents, Realists and Gamers in The Matrix and eXistenZ', The Journal of Popular Film and Television, 28 (2001): 150-58

• Thomas Y. Levin, 'Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of “Real Time”', In CTRL[SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, eds. Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Fronhe and Peter Weibel, 578-93. Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM Center for Art and Media; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002

• Lev Manovich, 'What is Digital Cinema?', Manovich.net, 1995

• Lev Manovich, 'Cinema and Digital Media', in Jeffrey Shaw and Hans Peter Schwartz (eds), Perspectives of Media Art (1996)

• Lev Manovich, 'Moving Image Culture after Computerisation: an outline', 2003

• Allison Maplesden, 'Pixie Dust: Gender, Embodiment and Consumer Identities in disney.go.com/fairies and Pixie Hollow MMOG, Senses of Cinema, Issue 57, 2010

• Michael Nitsche, 'Film live: And Excursion into Machinima' in: Developing Interactive Narrative Content: sagas_sagasnet_reader, ed. by Brunhild Bushoff (Munich: High Text, 2005), 210-243

• Anna Notaro, 'Reality is in the performance’: Issues of Digital Technology, Simulation and Artificial Acting in S1mOne', Refractory, Vol. 15, 2009

• Ian Alan Paul, 'Desiring-Machines in American Cinema: What Inception tells us about our experience of reality and film', Senses of Cinema,  Issue 56, 2010

• Stephen Prince, 'The Emergence of Filmic Artifacts: Cinema and Cinematography in the Digital Era', Film Quarterly, Vol. no. 57, Issue no. 3, pages 24-33

• Nicholas Rombes, 'Avant Garde Realism',  C-Theory.net, January 2005

• Steven Shaviro, 'Emotion Capture: Affect in Digital Film', Projections, Volume 1, Issue 2, Winter 2007: 63-82

• Steven Shaviro, 'The Cinematic Body Redux', originally published in Parallax 14:1 (February 2008), 48-54, The Pinocchio Theory

• Vivian Sobchack, 'Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of QuickTime', Millennium Film Journal No. 34 (Fall 1999): The Digital

• Jason Sperb, 'Time Passing in the Simulacrum of Videodrome', Intertheory, Vol. 3, 2006

• David Surman, 'CGI Animation: Pseudorealism, Perception and Possible Worlds', Gamasutra Education Online, 2003/4

• Lara Thompson, 'Monochrome Now: Digital Black and White Cinema and the Photographic Past, Screening the Past, Issue 29, 2010

• Giovanni Tiso, Impossible Recollections: the Troubled Imaginary of Mediated Memory, PhD Thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2006

• Deborah Tudor, Light Bouncing: digital processes illuminate the cultural past', Jump Cut, No. 52, Summer 2010

• Aylish Wood, 'Proliferating Connections and Communicating Convergence', Fibreculture, Issue 13, 2008

• Anja Zagorac, '"A Splinter in Your Mind": Subjectivity, Hyperreality, and Religion in The Matrix', Masters thesis,  University of Vienna/Wien, May 2009