Future Cinema

The category of the future played a central role in practical and operational terms within the construction of the Star Wars brand universe. In this world the future is configured as the interstitial terrain in which the dimension of the story is welded with the technical one of staging. In particular cinema, using some elements of science fiction and myth, actives an anticipatory function that allows history to be configured as potentially open, and technical innovations to be experimented in a new way.

La crisis en el modelo de producción cinematográfica, con su cambio de paradigma hacia el cine digital, parece implicar también una revolución estética. En la presente investigación cuantitativa se indaga sobre la interrelación entre exposición como valor estético y la implementación del internegativo y capturas digitales, para determinar criterios cuantitativos relativos a la adopción de estas tecnologías. Para ello se ha extraído un fotograma cada 14 segundos de 264 largometrajes producidos en Hollywood y se han monitorizado sus niveles de iluminación medios y de iluminación en el rango de bajas luces. Con esta información, se busca relacionar la respuesta a la luz de los diferentes métodos de captación y tratamiento de la imagen. Además, se estudia su adopción en la industria de Hollywood, en la que la reproducción de las sombras se considera un factor crucial. The crisis affecting film production models and its paradigm shift towards digital seems to also imply an esthetic revol...

Pertaining to my research about the future cinema, especially the change of the visual dramaturgy in context of 'new' technologies like 3D, full dome, VR, HFR and so on, I will outline the importance of visual narration. Full dome by its nature allows many different viewpoints. For example, it is important to understand how the viewer moves their head during each shot and to know what is achievable. In two full dome studies (Leicester Nov. 2016, Denver Feb. 2017) I was able to consider habituation, feelings/perception, perception of focus, quality and rhythm, also presence and immersion. This paper shows some results of the studies and how HFR can support spatial films in their dramaturgy. Also, I will outline the change of the visual dramaturgy in the dome - how the 'domography' should be made to fascinate the audience. It is important to consider these aspects because we need a qualitative use of the new technologies – not for a 'cinema of attraction' (Gunning 1990) but to attract the audience with a cinema of qualitative and attractive narration.

In contemporary culture questions of authorship keep recurring. The music industry has for a long time been battling the ubiquity of authorship and using techniques of sampling and re-mixing. New media has accelerated the effect and the possibility of sampling not just from music but from many other digital sources such as images, videos, texts, source codes, software etc. Today, in many cases, it is difficult to clearly identify an author. Rather, we see emerging a system of multiple, hybridized, collective authorship. New technology demands new knowledge and skills from the traditional authors; the Artist, the Architect, the Scientist, the ‘Master’ Film-Maker and encourages them to work in an interdisciplinary multimedia context. By considering, among others, the latest trends emerging on the fringe of mainstream Hollywood (Hollywood 2.0) and the most experimental cinematic expressions (Internet cinema, the ‘Future Cinema’ exhibition), this paper investigates whether a new model of co-authorship which (inter)actively involves the audience is surfacing or whether, conversely, we are witnessing an ‘illusion of authorship’, while the aura of authorship (albeit under new semblances) is firmly reaffirmed right at a time when it is most challenged

An introductory speculation, Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle is a consideration of the epistemological, ontological and metaphysical downfalls of film theory’s understandings of the spectator and the spectacle; with particular emphasis directed towards the neurobiological implications of the spectator’s body.

The thesis will argue that these shortcomings are representative of wider ranging issues of complacency engulfing the film industry and film exhibition as a whole. Furthermore, the fundamental disruptions of the digital upgrade of cinema, and the expanding means through which film content can be experienced, will be explored in relation to the pressing need for film theory to reassess itself.

Drawing on a plethora of empirical and non-empirical research, this dissertation is a highly progressive expression of how film experience has always been about transcendence and, as a result of its digital re-birth and diversifications, it is now becoming even more so.