The Transparency of Spectacle: Meditations on the Moving Image (SUNY series in Postmodern Culture) - Hardcover

Dixon, Wheeler Winston

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0791437817 ISBN 13: 9780791437810

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 1998

Synopsis

Considers the ephemeral nature of the cinematic experience as we now apprehend it, and examines the ways in which technological advances in film and moving image production have changed this experience over the course of the last thirty-odd years.

While agreeing that the "digitization" of the cinema is inevitable, and even a necessary adjustment to the economic realities of end-of-the-millennium cinema production, Dixon argues that it represents a fundamental representational shift in the relationship between the spectator and the image-production apparatus of the cinematograph. More than ever all visual input is merely raw material which is then subjected to digital "polishing" and "tweaking" until it attains a sheen of artificial splendor that is utterly removed from the photographic reproduction of the object and/or person originally photographed.

About this title

About the Author

Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies, coeditor in chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and chairperson of the Film Studies Program at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. His many books include The Second Century of Cinema: The Past and Future of the Moving Image; The Films of Jean-Luc Godard; and The Transparency of Spectacle: Meditations on the Moving Image, all published by SUNY Press; and Collected Interviews: Voices from Twentieth-Century Cinema.

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0791437817
• ISBN 13: 9780791437810
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 223