The Cinema Effect

Cubitt, Seán

doi:10.7551/mitpress/1832.001.0001

Cited by 154 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…A novelization can no longer be seen as a text that adapts a previous work from a different medium (this would be the syntagmatic view of novelization as belonging to a chain of successive adaptations). Instead, novelization counts as something that is part of a "universe" (for instance, the Star Wars universe or the Star Trek universe) presented simultaneously in as many media as determined by the industrial strategy of the group behind the project (this is the paradigmatic view of the work as the copresence of a "world" across media; see Cubbitt 2004).…”

Section: Technologymentioning

confidence: 98%

Expanding the Field of Constraint: Novelization as an Example of Multiply Constrained Writing

Baetens¹

2010

Poetics Today

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This essay deals with the question of the multiple constraints that determine the production of highly commercialized literature, namely, novelization. As a literary genre, novelization is easy to define: it is the novelistic adaptation of an original film or, more specifically, of the screenplay of this film. As a cultural practice, however, novelization is hardly known, given its lack of prestige, therefore its near-absence in the scholarly field (novelizations seem so "bad" that nobody thinks they deserve any serious interest). Culturally and institutionally speaking, novelizations are blatant examples of commercial literature, that is, literature not written on the initiative of an individual author eager to give a personal form to certain ideas or feelings but ordered by a publisher to fulfill certain commercial needs. Despite all the prejudices against the genre, however, novelization is a fascinating literary practice which can helpfully be studied via the notion of constraint. At the same time, the notion of constraint can be usefully enriched by the example of novelization, which brings to the fore aspects that are less clearly seen when one focuses on high or elite literature. The essay presents, first, some aspects of the genre, which is less simple or homogeneous than may appear. Second, it discusses a seminal article that has opened the mainly form-oriented domain of constrained writing to the broader field of cultural and institutional constraints: R. A. Peterson's "Five Constraints on the Production of Culture: Law, Technology, Market, Organizational Structure, and Occupational Careers" (1982). Third, the essay offers a comparative analysis of the novelization genre in various cultural environments, reusing Peterson's set of institutional and cultural constraints. The case study of novelization demonstrates that constrained writing is not simply a matter of obeying internal formal constraints,

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Section: Technologymentioning

confidence: 98%

Expanding the Field of Constraint: Novelization as an Example of Multiply Constrained Writing

Baetens¹

2010

Poetics Today

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“…27 In this sense, Sean Cubitt interprets the film Source Code as a "rendition" of digital time. 28 In fact, the same film is analysed by Buckland 29 to demonstrate the influence of video-game logic on post-classical cinema. (5) However, our interest here is not the fractured narrative resulting from the direct influence of other media, but the intersection between that potential influence and the spread of digital culture as a recurring theme in the story-lines of Black Mirror.…”

Section: The Potential Influence Of New Technologies On Fractured Narmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unreliable Narrators for Troubled Times: The Menacing “Digitalisation of Subjectivity” in Black Mirror

Romero¹,

Errando

Felici³

2020

Quarterly Review of Film and Video

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This article offers an examination of the television series Black Mirror (2011-) using a theoretical framework for studying post-classical narrative complexity. Its basic proposition is that narrative fracturing and misleading points of view are used in Black Mirror to offer a critique of the excessive confidence in digital technology and social networks as regulators of human subjectivity. While a mission historically attributed to science fiction is the exploration of a particular contemporary issue by expressing it in fiction form, Black Mirror offers an innovative twist on this objective by incorporating the narrative complexity of the mind-game film through the perspective of distorted subjectivities. In nearly every episode, the conflict that arises highlights the dangers inherent to the naturalisation of technological devices that virtually become appendages of the human body. Most episodes explore the negative consequences of the unrestrained use of new technologies to control memories, regulate personal relationships or reduce all human experience to data. The absence of any debate questioning their value results in a completely alienated society that feeds on the fictionalisation of politics and private life, in which individuals are incapable of distinguishing between reality and fiction, or even between what is happening outside and inside their own minds.

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“…1. A few recent book collections detailing the expansion of animation include Suzanne Buchan's Pervasive Animation (2013) and Karen Beckman's Animating Film Theory (2014) Manovich (2001), Cholodenko (1991), LaMarre (2009), Cubitt (2004), and Gunning (2007). 3.…”

Section: Fundingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Politics of Animation and the Animation of Politics

Herhuth

2016

Animation

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This article demonstrates how political inquiry can guide the study of animation. It proceeds by investigating animation's minor status within film and media studies and then the expansion of its definition and conceptual associations. This expansion has philosophical implications, which are explored in this article through the work of Jeff Malpas and Bruno Latour. By examining how these philosophers discuss animation and animated examples -puppets, in particular -this article demonstrates a shift from thinking of animation as expressing mastery and illusion to thinking of animation as expressing transformation, heterogeneous action, and distributed agency. This shift challenges philosophy's opposition to rhetoric, poetics, and technology, and in turn challenges modern binaries between nature and culture, science and politics, reality and artifice, facts and fetishes, and it presents the world as animated. The author argues that this idea need not obfuscate the many different moving-image technologies that have been designated animation or cinema, and contends that some of these, such as animated cartoons, directly engage the confusion about animation caused by modern binaries. This argument proposes studying animation through multiple modes or lenses in order to prevent dominant realist modes of inquiry from stifling the uncertainty and pluralism that are central to animation's capacity for political expression.

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The Cinema Effect

Cited by 154 publications

References 0 publications

Expanding the Field of Constraint: Novelization as an Example of Multiply Constrained Writing

Expanding the Field of Constraint: Novelization as an Example of Multiply Constrained Writing

Unreliable Narrators for Troubled Times: The Menacing “Digitalisation of Subjectivity” in Black Mirror

The Politics of Animation and the Animation of Politics

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