10 Anxiety Expressed in the Age of Digital Cinema
Michael Sherman
Communication in Cinema and Cinema as Communication
Michael Sherman
With a bevy of digital tools in the form of increasingly small cameras, fast computers, and robust software programs, filmmakers have never had more freedom and power than they currently do. Yet, these affordances should not be considered ends unto themselves. This paper will examine how these affordances self-reflexively address the socially and psychologically draining effects of the tools themselves.
Predating the origins of cinema to one of the medium’s forebears, theater, the act of communication between actors has been central to how audiences perceive not just the performance but also the narrative. Still, communication being an integral component of acting was not inherently pertinent to the early history of film as it was not yet evident that acting would necessarily be a part of the cinematic experience. In spite of the link between these two mediums not being connected intrinsically, cinema is a communicative medium of ideas per se. These unique properties that emerge in cinema are entirely facilitated by the technological innovations dubiously attributed to Muybridge, Edison, the Lumiere’s, and others. Occurring concurrently with technological advances in the moving image, a number of inventors and groups begin working on building another means of communication, the telephone. Obviously, this advent was more invested in solving the pragmatic problem of transmitting auditory messages over long distances. Although a cursory reading of history would present these two events as only being tangentially related, Tom Gunning’s revelatory analysis in the seminal text The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde effectively demonstrates that these two advancements offered the same novelty to contemporary consumers, technological fascination. But the intersection of interest in these two nascent forms only continues to provide more intrigue as time progresses after 1906 and narrative cinema becomes the primary output of the film industry. Even at this preliminary stage, phones were appearing within the stories being told by filmmakers. One of the eminent silent comedians of this period, Buster Keaton, produced an example of this phenomenon with The Cameraman (Keaton, 1928). In Keaton’s Cameraman, he uses the telephone as a vehicle for telling jokes with physical comedy. Examining where this humor comes from offers an insight into the budding relationship that people were having with the technology. Knowing that this type of analysis yields these insights, this paper will perform that level of analysis on modern depictions of technological communication in film. Building further on this, rather than focusing on the technological affordances on an abstract level like Gunning with the idea of cinema of attractions, this paper will focus on the narrative possibilities afforded by depicting