title: New medium specificities
title: toward a politics and a poetics of digital cinema
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Denison, Alex
Publisher: name: University of Iowa
Year: 2023
Subjects: Digital Cinema
Film Theory
Media Theory
public abstract
Critical Theory

description: This dissertation engages with the concept of medium specificity in order to illustrate its continued relevance for film and media studies despite frequent claims of its obsolescence in the age of media convergence. Theories of convergence generally argue that medium specificity no longer holds weight after the supposed “digital revolution” in which distinctions between media like television, video games, and cinema become blurred because they can be accessed on the same devices such as laptops or smartphones. Yet cinema in particular has been a hybrid medium since its inception and classical film theory from the 1930s to the 1960s often attests to this fact even as it sought to define the unique properties of this new art form. Recent theories of convergence occlude this historical fact and frequently function as little more than capitulations to media conglomerates that have the most to gain from such theories.
description: I argue that medium specificity is still a valid framework for film studies precisely because digitality has called cinema’s autonomy into question. As many contemporary scholars have noted, digital cinema certainly constitutes a rupture with previous conceptions of cinema in the analog age. Yet this rupture is also accompanied by many contiguities with the past. One example is the concept of filmic indexicality (i.e. cinema’s inherent connection with physical reality). While some theorists posit that this concept is specific to analog processes while digitality is defined by the opposite concept of manipulation, I maintain that digital documentaries about social and political issues reveal that indexicality continues to be an integral part of the moving image regardless of its technological base. Medium specificity, I argue, can help to discover both the profound changes that digital cinema has wrought in the history of film as well as the persistence of many aspects that have defined cinema since its emergence in the late 19th century.
description: My dissertation is organized into four chapters that explore my argument for the relevance of medium specificity from various standpoints. Chapter One (“Media Convergence as Medium Specificity in Classical Film Theory”) looks to canonical writers like Rudolf Arnheim and André Bazin who defined cinema’s specificity via its crosspollination with other art forms like painting and theater. Chapter Two (“Celluloid Base/Pixelated Trace: Profilmic Digitality in Analog Cinema”) argues for a social rather than technological determination of a medium like cinema and shows how many films can be categorized as digital cinema even as they continue to rely on film stock as their technological base. Chapter Three (“Analog Begets the Digital, from SD to HD”) looks to filmmakers like Agnès Varda and Pedro Costa who made the switch from analog to digital production, taking advantage of the new possibilities in digital image capture while simultaneously maintaining the political and social convictions present in their analog work. And Chapter Four (“Digital Materialism and Materiality in Experimental Cinema”) focuses on experimental filmmakers who use digital technology to comment on the environmental impact of that very same technology.