From IBM to MGM: Cinema at the Dawn of the Digital Age

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Description

Andrew Utterson's unique study charts the beginnings of digital cinema, addressing both how filmmakers used new digital technologies and how attitudes and anxieties about the rise of the computer were represented in films such as Lang's Desk Set, Godard's Alphaville, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Crichton's Westworld.

Reviews

...a stimulating and very engaging read -- Illuminations
Utterson adroitly draws out the tensions between "technophobic" film portrayals of computers and an avant-garde of digital utopians engaged in computer-aided art (spare a thought for the sad fate of the "lightpen"), who tempted directors to adopt their technology, as with Westworld's pixellated point-of-view shots. Quirky techno-anecdotes abound: the hacking of scavenged second-world-war ballistics computers; the origin of ASCII art; talk of a computer that makes a "Freudian slip"; and even an evocative appeal to "robotic ontology". Is it time to watch The Matrix again yet' -- The Guardian

Author Bio

ANDREW UTTERSON Senior Lecturer in Film and Digital Media at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. He is the editor of Technology and Culture: The Film Reader (2005) and co-editor of Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies (2004).