Reverse Shot Revolutions
When it comes to cinematic technological advances, the question is always how we use the tools we've been gifted or cursed with.
Target would eventually find its way on the Internet, where its charmingly unrefined style helped it fit in with the plethora of amateur video diaries, but it crucially exists within and beyond its particular early-to-mid-’90s moment.
The palette used throughout often reflects the muted shades of English fine china and porcelain popular during the Napoleonic era. Although the bulkiness of the Technicolor camera limited the dynamism that had marked Mamoulian’s previous work, his playfulness with color in Becky Sharp exudes the energy of a kid trying out a new toy.
The history of these tools and the concurrent development of new animation techniques demonstrate how closely artistic concerns and technical logistics are married in filmmaking. The multiplane camera is also an effective synecdoche for the system Walt Disney molded his studio into.
David Fincher’s work, inclusive of his time in television advertising and music videos in the ’80s and ’90s, illustrates a director’s desire at first to uphold and then transcend the strictures of the camera itself.
In the face of constant pro-AI propaganda, it is tempting to fall back on flimsy sentimentality. The romantic critic’s impulse is to wax poetic on some ineffably “human” quality to art.
For this new symposium, we asked our contributors to pitch an idea for an essay centered around a film that somehow utilized or enabled a technology (relatively new or more widely available at the time of its making) that was indivisible from the experience, meaning, or aesthetics of the film itself.
Harnessing the imperfections in the digital cameras’ image-rendering capabilities and rudimentary audio fidelity, Godard confronts the crisis in neoliberalism, the ascendence of digital cinema, and the extinguished dreams of socialism and celluloid from the previous century.
It suggests a unique cinematic aspiration from a time before the film industry dedicated its energies almost entirely to narrative, and when the question of what was to become of cinema was undetermined.