Digital Cinema : Opportunities and Challenges

This paper considers how the film industry might effect the transition from film to digital product. Using public sources to predict the eventual technological solutions which will prevail is problematic as no independent academic analysis appears to have been carried out. Technology companies are clearly wedded to their own solutions, pointing out flaws in competing technologies while downplaying the shortcomings of their own. Industry wide bodies that have been set up to promote d-cinema or establish standards, understandably tend to avoid taking sides and promote all solutions equally[i]. Rather than contributing further to the debate about the qualities of competing technologies or the creative merits or demerits of digital product, this paper will focus on the search for new business models in an industry wedded for over one hundred years to an analogue process. In the sections which follow it will consider- the strategies of the companies at the forefront of the technology; the financial implications associated with change; and how different territories might adapt in order to accommodate this transition. [i] Anna Wilde Mathews, Digital cinema's time is nearing. Detailed specifications are supposed to be ready early next year. The Wall Street Journal, May 25 2003

Optical network technologies for future digital cinema

Digital technology has transformed the information flow and support infrastructure for numerous application domains, such as cellular communications. Cinematography, traditionally, a film based medium, has embraced digital technology leading to innovative transformations in its work flow. Digital cinema supports transmission of high resolution content enabled by the latest advancements in optical communications and video compression. In this paper we provide a survey of the optical network technologies for supporting this bandwidth intensive traffic class. We also highlight the significance and benefits of the state of the art in optical technologies that support the digital cinema work flow

E-topia: Utopia after the Mediated Body

open access journalA custom-made media installation, diplorasis, will be used to explore the body in digital media. This mediated body attempts to re-think how the Deleuzian time-image is translated from its cinematic confinement to the space of new media. In diplorasis the digitized time-image becomes more directly incorporated with-in the bodily schema. Consequently, the thinking of the virtual and actual space of the body in diplorasis enables a questioning of bodily space-time, and particularly the relation between self and digitized self-image. It is thus crucial to re-frame how this digitized mediated body is distinct from a conventional notion of a metric and habitual space—one that is reinforced by, for example, the medium of linear perspective. The articulation of the mediated body will be used to in-form and extend Elizabeth Grosz’s paradoxical reading of embodiment and utopia, by revisiting the notions of utopia as eu-topic/ou-topic. The spatio-temporality of the topos must be re-considered before utopia. Foucault’s analogy of the mirror will then serve to superimpose the dual and slippery relations between utopia and the heterotopic. The digitized mediated body will thus seek to explore emerging ways by which to consider the utopic by conflating embodiment, time and space within an electronic topos. It is argued that as the sensing and cognitive body becomes increasingly pliable in relation to technological mediations, our very understanding of space-time is changing

They Survived the Conversion from 35mm to Digital, so Now What? The Future of America’s Small-Town Art House Theaters

This paper explores the vital role art house movie theaters play in their communities, particularly in bringing film culture to small towns. I argue that art house theaters have a symbiotic relationship with their communities (particularly small towns) in which the art houses play a vital role in bringing culture to their downtown communities, and these communities are ardent supporters of art house theaters, helping them convert from 35mm to digital and continue to thrive. I explore two art house movie theaters in great detail as case studies, the County theater in Doylestown, PA and Gettysburg\u27s Majestic theater, to prove that art houses are staples of small towns and play a cultural role so vital that they have overcome major changes in technology and appear to have a bright future

Sex in the city: the rise of soft-erotic film culture in Cinema Leopold, Ghent, 1945-1954

Since the 1990s, film studies saw a disciplinary shift from approaches favoring a textual and ideological analysis of films to a broader understanding of the socio-cultural history of cinema under the banner of new cinema history. This turn not only allowed for ‘niche’ research domains to flourish such as film economics or cinema memory research, or for new empirical and critical methodologies to be applied to film and cinema history. This change in researching and writing film/cinema history also shed light on previously marginalized, neglected or uncharted film cultures and histories, burgeoning scholarship in for instance (s)exploitation cinema. This contribution examines a peculiar part of post-war local film culture in the Belgian city of Ghent, more precisely the one around the city-center soft-erotic cinema Cinema Leopold (1945-54). The research is based on a programming and box-office database compiled from archival sources and contextualized by other data (internal and external correspondence, posters,…) coming from the business archive of Octave Bonnevalle, Cinema Leopold’s founding pater familias (material kept in the State Archives of Belgium; RAB/B70/1928-1977). The database now contains information on 625 film titles shown between 1945 and 1954, out of which 233 were unidentified (due to lack of information). Although the database is at times crippled by source inconsistencies, it is extremely rich in documenting the everyday practices of a cinema that gradually turned into a soft-erotic movie theater. The database allows for some remarkable findings concerning shifts in the origin of films, their production years, genres, censorship and popularity. The key finding is that Cinema Leopold started out after the Second World War with a child-friendly, mainstream Hollywood-oriented film program, as did most cinemas in Ghent, but its profile slowly tilted towards more mature audiences and provocative film genres. These included French ‘risqué’ feature films containing some forms of nudity like Perfectionist/Un Grand Patron (Ciampi, 1951) and documentaries on venereal diseases like the successful Austrian Creeping Poison/Schleichendes Gift (Wallbrück, 1946), but also auteur movies such as Bergman’s Port of Call/Hamnstad (1948) were shown. It is interesting how Leopold walked a fine line between innovative, bold European art-house cinema, soft-erotic ‘didactic’ movies and flat-out commercial soft-porn. By 1954, Leopold had gathered a loyal crowd, which kept the cinema alive until 1981 despite the several law suits and trials. This micro-history offers a remarkable example of the post-war flourishing of alternative, yet profit-driven cinema circuits, riddled with media controversies and censorship

Cracks in the Glass: The Emergence of a New Image Typology from the Spatio-temporal Schisms of the 'Filmic' Virtual Reality Panorama

Virtual Reality Panoramas have fascinated me for some time; their interactive nature affording a spectatorial engagement not evident within other forms of painting or digital imagery. This interactivity is not generally linear as is evident in animation or film, nor is the engagement with the image reduced to the physical or visual border of the image, as its limit is never visible to the viewer in its entirety. Further, the time taken to interact and navigate across the Virtual Reality panorama’s surface is not reflected or recorded within the observed image. The procedural construction of the Virtual Reality panorama creates an a-temporal image event that denies the durée of its own index and creation. This is particularly evident in the cinematic experiments conducted by Jeffrey Shaw in the 1990s that ‘spatialised’ time and image through the fusion of the formal typology of the Panorama together with the cinematic moving-image, creating a new kind of image technology. The incorporation of the space enclosed by the panorama’s drum, into the conception and execution of the cinematic event, reveals an interesting conceptual paradox. Space and time infinitely and autonomously repeat upon each other as the linear trajectory of the singular cinematic shot is interrupted by a ‘time schism’ on the surface of the panorama. This paper explores what this conceptual paradox means to the evolution of emerging image-technologies and how Shaw’s ‘mixed-reality’ installation reveals a wholly new image typology that presents techniques and concepts though which to record, interrogate, and represent time and space in Architecture

Help I'm surrounded

A dimly lit auditorium, the smell of popcorn and hot-dogs accompanied by the sound of fizzy drinks slurped through straws; the lights dim and a hush of expectation descends, sound fades in from all around, drawing the audience into the illusion of another reality. This is the world of the cinema, but is it possible to recreate this cinematic surround sound experience in the home? In order to address this question it is necessary to understand what is meant by "cinematic" surround sound and to consider some of the challenges faced by those seeking to translate it to the home environment. This article examines these issues through an exploration of the development of surround sound in the cinema and its transference to the home and concludes with a tentative look towards possible future developments