Home

By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it had become abundantly clear that digital methods of cinematography and distribution had eclipsed the analogue in the mainstream cinema industry. Much of the discourse surrounding this technological shift was steeped in hyperbole, such as George Lucas’ comment on the release of his 2002 feature Attack of the Clones: “Digital is a much more malleable medium than film, by far; you can make it do whatever you want it to do, and you can design the technology to do whatever you want to do. This whole field is really going to ramp up in the next 10 or 20 years”1. Soon after the release of Lucas’ feature – the first wide-release movie to have been shot entirely digitally – trade magazines such as Entertainment Weekly, Variety and American Cinematographer were reporting that it wouldn’t be long before all Hollywood features would be constructed using the format, a prediction largely based on the many economic and practical advantages of shooting on the medium. In opposition to this optimism was a substantial scepticism which considered digital modes of filmmaking inherently inferior to celluloid, and an aesthetic imposition employed by the major studios for economic reasons rather than artistic ones. At the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, Quentin Tarantino publicly lamented the loss of celluloid in mainstream film culture: “digital projection is just television in cinema […] I’m hoping that while this generation is quite hopeless, that the next one will demand the real thing”2. As Wheeler Winston Dixon observes, major contemporary commercial filmmakers such as James Gray, Christopher Nolan and Tarantino have been distinguished by their resistance to digital technologies, retreating to the physicality of celluloid because they believe it offers a warmer, more material set of visual values3.

The history of Western cinema abounds with stories of technological advances that were, at the time, met with resistance, such as colourisation and synchronised sound, and most of the discourse that has surrounded the digital revolution focuses on what is being lost, rather than what is being gained. A key scene in Leos Carax’s Holy Motors (2012) encapsulates this sense of melancholy fostered by the de-materialised nature of digital cinematography. About halfway through the movie, an unnamed character played by Michel Piccoli speaks with the protagonist, Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant). They talk about the ways in which the process of acting has changed within a digitised cinema landscape, with a particular focus on how cameras have grown smaller over time. Oscar confesses that he no longer enjoys his work as much as he used to, due to the lack of physicality on set. “I miss the cameras”, he laments. “They used to be heavier than us”. Oscar’s melancholia is emblematic of the sense of mourning which has characterised much cinema scholarship as it has grappled with the cultural shift from celluloid to digital. As Laura Mulvey observes, the convergence between the new millennium and the advent of digital technologies has created in cinema scholarship a split between the old and the new, creating a complex dialectic between celluloid and the digital: “…everyone knows that celluloid consists of a series of still frames that have been, by and large, inaccessible to the film spectator throughout its history. Digital technology enables a spectator to still film in a way that evokes the ghostly presence of the individual celluloid frame”4. The sense of being haunted by celluloid’s “ghostly presence” infuses the tone of Holy Motors, a feature that ends with a character sadly musing that “the age of visible machines is over”.

A large part of the discourse surrounding the technology has focused on the ontological issues that arise when the digital image is invoked. D.N. Rodowick, in his comprehensive study of the ontological properties of digital cinematography, observes that shooting on celluloid concerns the impression of light values onto the fixed, physical surface of analogue film, thereby creating a direct transcription of a pro-filmic event; yet digital photography involves a camera responding to a pro-filmic event by transforming light values into a set of meta-pictorial mathematical data. Therefore, celluloid images have a deep indexical link to a pro-filmic time and place which digital footage lacks5. Nicholas Rombes, expanding on these points, argues that the unmooring of cinema from a stable indexical reference has lead to the widespread opinion that cinema has been rendered disposable, inhuman and weightless 6.

Cosmopolis
However, relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which digital cinematography holds the potential to craft a new form of cinematic aesthetic, significantly different to that of celluloid, with its own distinctive codes and pictorial properties. Calum Marsh considers the potential, if often unrealised, value in digital films when he argues: “The gulf which divides the analogue from the digital is inherently unbridgeable, no matter how close an approximation seems to bring us”7. Reflecting on the literal transition from 35mm to DV footage at the midpoint of Godard’s In Praise of Love, Marsh continues: “Godard’s midfilm introduction of deliberately low-grade and otherwise heavily modified mini-DV footage appears to tear the very fabric of the film apart: its digital essence isn’t remotely repressed or effaced, the image instead relished for exactly those qualities which distinguish it from the 35mm footage it disrupts”8. To explore whether or not this potential is realised, I will examine what I consider to be a fundamental shift in aesthetic experience brought about by digital cinematography. In particular I wish to focus on the way in which filmmakers have explored new haptic effects that have profound implications for the audience experience in the cinema and hence counteract the perceived loss of materiality from the digital image.

Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis thematises this transition in the infrastructure of American filmmaking and hence draws connections between the abstraction of financial processes and digital cinema, and the feeling of lack they both foster. Writing for MUBI Notebook, The Celluloid Liberation Front makes an explicit link between the de-materialisation of both digital cinema and of finance capital: “In a process not dissimilar from that of financial markets; meaning/value (in digital cinema) is produced without passing through flesh/material goods”9. In Cosmopolis, Cronenberg’s adaptation of DeLillo’s novel draws parallels between digital filmmaking and abstract finance, thematising this transition in the infrastructure of contemporary filmmaking and drawing connections between the abstraction of financial processes and digital cinema. The emphasis on these analogs  foster a sensation of lack related to the loss of the physical which finds expression through the character of Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), a young Wall Street stockbroker. Packer conducts his business from the interior of his stretch limo, a modernised work environment filled with screens of various sizes constantly relaying data about international stock markets which allow him to monitor the electronic movement of immaterial money.

Traditional forms of capitalism were based on the production and exchange of material goods, therefore granting each commodity a stable economic value. In a post-Fordist capitalist system, the material element is removed. Instead, existing capital is directly converted into a greater sum of wealth 10. Usually, this abstract form of capitalism takes place within Western companies, while physical production is largely outsourced to other countries, producing an essential alienation within the Western consumer. Packer is a product of this alienation. From inside his sound-proofed limo, Packer can firmly immerse himself within the realm of the cyber-kinetic, and can maintain a lifestyle fundamentally removed from the physicality of the outside world. To compound this, the vehicle has been modified so as to have extremely smooth movements; it feels as if the limo is floating in the air more than physically driving on the street. An early speech by his assistant, Shiner (Jay Baruchel), explicitly verbalises the sense of lack both characters feel because of the removal of the commodity from their working milieu. He first speaks of his satisfaction that “people sleep in the shadow of what [they] do”, and then mourns the fact that “I put out my hand and what do I feel?” As Randy Laist observes, the limo functions as a space which “effaces the difference between spatial motion and stasis”, allowing Packer to perpetuate “the fiction of his own phenomenological dispersal through the system and to avoid any engagement with the materiality of the world”11. Packer feels completely protected within the vehicle, an insular digital sensorium, allowing him to drift through the many sights of the city without hearing it or experiencing it in a concrete way. The lack of interface between Packer and the many screens that surround him creates the illusion that he is fully immersing himself within the realm of cyber-space. The images themselves are constructed so that they evoke an atmosphere of deadened unreality, plunging the viewer into Packer’s subjectivity by denying them both visceral thrills and emotional engagement, in a manner faintly reminiscent of Antonioni’s cinema of alienation. Like Antonioni, Cronenberg formally communicates a sense of dissatisfaction and existential malaise in his protagonist without explicitly verbalising it, and then connects this alienation to the abstract forces of modernity rampant in the environment that surrounds them. Kinski (Samantha Morton), Packer’s “Chief of Theory”, verbalises a central theme of the film when she predicts that in the future, machines such as cameras and computers as “distinct units” will be increasingly rare, and will instead melt into the texture of everyday life”. Kinski outlines a vision of the future based on two principles: acceleration and disappearance. She predicts that, increasingly, people will be absorbed into the realm of the cyber-kinetic, just as money has. She imagines a person’s consciousness being downloaded onto a disc, and enabled to live forever in intangible form. Packer’s philosophy neglects the present moment in favour of imagining an idyllc future, which takes the integration of technology into the fabric of everyday life to its most insane logical extreme – for all forms of labour to be re-located to the abstract realm of computerised work.

Cosmopolis

The structure of Packer’s lifestyle ensures that he remains wilfully blind to the damage that his risky investments wreak on those of a lower economic standing. Packer makes his fortune by borrowing the yuan at low interest rates, in the hopes that this will allow him to purchase stocks that will result in high returns. This form of market trading is known as speculative vulture capitalism; he plays against the market, and hopes that the Japanese economy will falter so that he can personally benefit. The toxic self-absorption that such a working method requires and fosters is expressed through Packer’s narcissism, entitlement and copious consumption in his private life. In an early scene, Packer talks to his art dealer Didi (Juliette Binoche) about his desire to buy the Rothko Chapel, despite her insistence that “the chapel belongs to the world” and “people need to see it”. Packer responds “let them buy it. Let them outbid me. It’s mine if I buy it”. Packer’s shockingly cavalier attitude and desperation for the ownership of public landmarks reveals his belief in privatisation.

As Cosmopolis suggests, if the fictions of finance capital have seeped into everyday life, then nobody can escape the hyperreality created by an urban landscape overrun by corporate capitalism. In the book How We Became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles argues that, for the post-human “there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology and human goals”12. Increasingly, humanity lives electronically, as spatio-temporal bodies. This relocates work and experience from the physical world of labour to the purely abstract one of the mind and the digital. For Packer, this involves constantly communicating with the sphere of electronic data (strings of binary code which function as a stand-in for real money). Packer has a remarkable ability to observe and absorb information, and therefore detect patterns within it, which he can then use to predict future outcomes. He therefore lead a life suspended between the material and the immaterial.

The de-materialised nature of digital image construction marks a vast break from the indexical quality of cinema championed by many early film scholars, who perceived filmmaking as the foremost medium through which reality could be accurately captured, thereby revealing the true nature of the pro-filmic event. Andre Bazin, in his highly influential study of cinematic practice, described film as representing a “true realism, which is a need to present a substantial expression to the world, its essence and its tangibility” 13. According to Bazin, the celluloid image “is the object itself […] of equal value to the original model” – cinema provided a concrete and tangible link with the outside world, and was therefore able to achieve “the very identification with the object” 14. As the digital image is abstracted, so its value does not lie in its fidelity to the constraints of reality; rather it is a wholly virtual image that is expressive the director’s creative ambitions, as the completed footage is subject to a huge range of advanced visual technologies that can vastly manipulate the recorded footage. “The manual construction of images in digital cinema represents a return to nineteenth century pre-cinematic practices, when images were hand-painted and hand-animated”, Lev Manovich observes, and therefore, “it is no longer an indexical media technology but, rather, a sub-genre of painting”15. During the digitised post-production process, footage is subject to a high degree of computerised mediation, yet this mediation tends to not call attention to itself, thereby creating a photorealistic virtual world which approximates “a sense of distance-through proximity”16.

Manovich argues that filmmakers mobilise these technologies as a means to efface the constructed nature of the digital image, so the hyper-mediated image is lent the illusion of ontological realism. Manovich places emphasis on Hollywood blockbusters such as The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004), which employ a combination of real-world locations and post-production CGI effects, yet combine them in such a way as to render the boundaries between the natural and the computer-generated invisible. In other words, the virtual world crafted by computer data is constructed so as to encourage the spectator to become absorbed in the coherent, diegetic world, rather than to become aware of the artificial, non-indexical nature of the imagery they are observing. Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, on the other hand, seeks to foreground the cognitive dissonance inherent in digital cinematography. This is evident in an early scene which sees Packer talking to his financial adviser. Both characters are captured in deep-focus medium close-ups, and the sequence is edited largely according to a shot-reverse-shot pattern. The frame is divided into three, clearly delineated planes of vision. The foreground is filled with the faces of the actors while the middle-ground is filled with the artificial limo set. This is achieved through a combination of pro-filmic material construction and computer-generated effects such as colour grading to lend the hues of the interior a hyperrealistic pallet and three-dimensional extensions to add a multitude of futuristic screens. The background is occupied by digitally constructed rear-projection, as these scenes were shot in front of a green screen. The motion of the passing landscape is deliberately flattened and removed of material sensation, robbing the image of kineticism. Although, as Manovich explains, mainstream cinema tends to manipulate these varied visual signs to create the illusion of a full and coherent simulated world, Cosmopolis highlights the fact that its aesthetic is formed from a series of malleable, abstracted elements. It is, by nature of its digital basis, a copy without an indexical source, suggesting a fundamental gulf between its source and its representation. Rather than hiding the image’s mediation, Cronenberg’s mise-en-scène deliberately reinforces doubt regarding its images by making them referentially unrealistic through digital immediates. As Daniel Kasman observes, the “digital artificiality” of the images “remove almost all semblance to even a partially realistic mise-en-scène”, thus creating an aesthetic which keeps the action “at a distant, intangible remove”17.

Cosmopolis

The melancholic tone of the film is therefore informed by a sense of mourning for the physicality of the materiality of celluloid equally as much as it is by the loss of the material from the post-industrial economy. Sigmund Freud perceives mourning as “the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal and so on”18.  To properly mourn, a person needs to recognise and become aware of this loss. In contrast, melancholia is rooted in a “loss of a more ideal kind, (a loss withdrawn from consciousness in that) one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost…and what he has lost in him”19. Drawing on Freud, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok argue that melancholia is the result of “a trauma whose very occurrence and devastating emotional consequences are entombed and thereby consigned to internal silence, albeit, unwittingly, by the sufferers themselves”20. In DeLillo’s novel, this feeling of melancholia is only tied to internalised weight regarding the loss of the material from his work environment. Cronenberg, in transposing the narrative to the screen, utilises a visual aesthetic designed to evoke a sense of mourning for the absence of the physical within a digitised visual culture. Laura Mulvey writes that, in addition to the indexical nature of analogue photography, celluloid prints are distinguished by a unique texture, which incorporates “film grain, scratches on the negative or print, age and wear, and discoloration”21. The digital screen lacks such a sense of tactility, as emphasised by Marsh, “where film grain is inherently random and constantly in flux, even from one frame to the next, digital capture flattens the difference by fixing light to a static pixel grid”, therefore creating “the somewhat eerie sensation of stillness one sometimes feels when watching a digital presentation”22. This feeling of mourning is emphasised through the opening sequence. Suggestively, this brief sequence occurs before the narrative begins proper – as such, this opening may be viewed as a metaphorical frame for how we might interpret Cosmopolis’ thematisation of physical and immaterial art as a whole. The credits are layered over what is at first a blank brown screen, resembling an ancient scroll, but which gradually becomes filled with abstract blotches of colour like paint strokes on a canvas. As the extended pan goes on, our vision rests as we are encouraged to contemplate the surface texture that is displayed before us. The canvas appears aged, worn, and covered in scratches. It serves as a reminder of the material foundation of physical art. Cronenberg then abruptly cuts to a shot of a parked limo. This shift jolts the senses from a response that is haptic to one that is distanced and optical. In this cut, Cronenberg formally sets up a binary opposition between digital and analogue media; the digital image is cleansed of the visible signs off imperfection that mark a piece of physical art. In providing the viewer a reminder of the textural properties of visual media, Cronenberg renders the shift to the hyper-mediacy of his digital images shocking – the physical properties of material art therefore haunt the rest of the film like a lost ideal.
The tenor of the film greatly changes in the second half, as Packer’s investment against the yuan proves to have been ill-advised. The value of the yuan rises and his private fortune is drained. This shift in value was pre-figured by many of Packer’s financial advisers, who warned him against betting against the yuan. As Packer’s Chief of Finance, Jane Melman (Emily Hampshire), tells him, consumer spending has unexpectedly fallen, and “the rank of China left interest rates unchanged”. Despite this overwhelming evidence, which Jane as gathered from first-hand phone calls to Shanghai, Packer refuses to pull his investment, instead re-iterating that his predictions – based on rigorously researched, abstract data – have convinced him that “the yuan can’t get any higher”. Packer evidently doesn’t believe in mistakes or flukes, and thinks is convinced that the yen fluctuation is regulated by a market behavioural law no one has yet detected. This narrative structure calls into question the validity of abstract financial data and the viability of the financial markets. Eric is “convinced that the yen fluctuation is regulated by a market behavioural law no one has yet detected”, as De Marco observes, and therefore, “Packer is attempting to fix such pattern and to articulate it in terms of the numerical symbols and diagrams which codify the market’s inner functioning”23. This concept is evocative of the film’s symbolism of Packer’s asymmetrical prostate. Initially a cause of great confusion and worry, Packer is ultimately re-assured that the condition is merely “a harmless variation. Nothing to worry about.” This parallels Packer’s desire to predict the fluctuations of currency through pure abstract mathematical data, without considering “the importance of the lopsided, the thing that’s skewed a little”.

Cronenberg also underlines the fact that Packer is a slave to his own, base physical impulses. Throughout the film, Packer is repeatedly shown eating, urinating and exercising in his vehicle, which is designed to allow him to fulfil all his bodily needs as easily as possible. Around half an hour into the film, Packer receives a prostate exam in his limo, as he sits across from one of his advisors, Jane. Packer is terrified of something going wrong with his body, which is an inscrutable entity to him, so he has a doctor’s appointment every day. He needs for a doctor to draw up a report, and therefore transform his body’s mysteries into objective data. Although this situation may sound like a humiliating one for Packer, he turns it around so he ends up in the position of power by talking Jane into an orgasm without touching her. By transforming his sexual urges into an abstract verbal activity, Packer denies the importance of the physical. He doesn’t need to feel these sensations, merely to narrate them. He relocates sex from the context of physical contact to the realm of the immaterial verbal communication. This is paralleled in a later scene, in which Packer has sex with his bodyguard, Kendra. After the act, Packer lies, unsatisfied with the experience, and asks for Kendra to shock him with her taser, urging her to “show me something I don’t know”. It’s implied here that Packer has grown bored with the physical experience of conventional sex, and desires a more intense form of physical sensation.

Cosmopolis

Mulvey and Marsh describe the eerie sense of bodily displacement caused in the spectator while watching a hyper-mediated digital production. The narrative focus on de-materialisation in Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis foregrounds this cognitive dissonance, resulting in a sensation of distance from the screen content, which is further heightened by the deliberately alienating mise-en-scène. This enables the viewer to encounter a feeling of lack that mirrors the mourning Packer experiences as a result of his estrangement from physical labour. The movie therefore draws a fundamental connection between a post-industrial economy and a post-celluloid cinema landscape. As it gained popularity over the late 90s and early 00s, digitisation promised to revitalise moving image culture by producing a new ease in producing, archiving, and distributing, motion pictures. Images could now be stored and circulated without a loss in picture quality. Such promises, however, were accompanied by substantial anxieties regarding the inhuman perfection of the digital image, the unmooring of indexical reference points for artistic representations and the rapidity with which celluloid become perceived in the industry as an obsolete medium. Leo Enticknap perceptively observes that, as a reaction, many of the features shot digitally over the past 2 decades have been distinguished by a sense of a “secret recognition of the wonder and terror of the digital”24, a sense of being haunted by the materiality and imperfections of analogue imagery. Many filmmakers, as Marsh notes, sought to naturalise the ontological properties of the digital image for the average spectator by using DV cameras to simply replicate the appearance of celluloid, often going as far as to add artificial grain in post-production and colour grading the footage to create the illusion of slight wear common to 35mm analogue footage 25. This served the purpose of taking what many scholars noted had been paradoxical and disquieting about digital cinema and transforming them into a more manageable and easy-to-digest form.

As Mulvey reminds us, film theorists of the 1920s explored how the “mechanical eye of cinema” could be used by filmmakers as a material expression of the ways in which human perception had been altered by the technologies of modernity. Now, as digitisation has become dominant in moving image culture, the ontological transition has similarly caused a sensation in spectators that Mulvey refers to as the “technological uncanny” 26 – the experience of disorientation that is aroused by the integration of a new technology. Because all cinematic images can be translated into binary code it removes the relation between the cinematic image and the material base traditionally associated with it; in its place, other ontological properties begin to emerge. Digitisation, with its removal of the cinematic image from its traditional indexical and mechanical grounding, affects not only the spectator’s perception of the outside world, but also the dominant modes of perception traditionally tied to cinematic art.

A significant portion of contemporary cinema has sought not to efface the ontological properties unique to digital cinematography, but to foreground them and explore the issues the transition has raised. Let me in closing emphasise how deeply Cosmopolis works to embody and explore the contradictions of the digital image. Cronenberg views digital cinematography not as a tool to replicate the appearance of film, but a medium which holds its own artistic values. The introduction of digital promises the possibility to create a new cinematic image, one completely separate and distinct from the appearance of celluloid; Cosmopolis simultaneously embraces this mode of digital production and thematises the ontological consequences of doing so. As such, Cosmopolis reaches towards an aesthetic of the purely digital, which makes the loss of celluloid immediately apparent and felt. Through the formal combination of contemporary and historical elements, the feature carves out a theoretical dimension which reflects on the modern transitional phase in which both forms exist simultaneously. In this sense, the films express a desire to carry the mechanical cinematic image forward into an immaterial, multi-media future.

 

Endnotes

  1. Ron Magid. ‘George Lucas discusses his ongoing effort to shape the future of digital cinema’.American Cinematographer September 2002 (https://theasc.com/magazine/sep02/exploring/) Accessed 10th March 2017.
  2. Nigel M. Smith,‘Quentin Tarantino Blasts Digital Projection at Cannes’. Indiewire  http://www.indiewire.com/2014/05/quentin-tarantino-blasts-digital-projection-at-cannes-its-the-death-of-cinema-26176/. Accessed March 2nd 2017
  3. Wheeler Winston Dixon, ‘The Celluloid Backlash: Film Versus Digital Once More’. Quarterly Review of Film and Video. (January 2016, 33:3), p.122
  4. Ibid.
  5. D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.15
  6. Nicholas Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age. (New York: Wallflower Press, 2012), p.6.
  7. Marsh, Calum, ‘Blown Out: Michael Mann’s Miami Vice’. Reverse Shot April 2013. (http://reverseshot.org/archive/entry/552/miami_vice) Accessed 3rd March 2017.
  8. Ibid
  9. Celluloid Liberation Front. “LOL (Letting Out Less)”. MUBI Notebook January 2013. (https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/lol-letting-out-less). Accessed 9th March 2017
  10. Alessandra De Marco, Living “in the glow of the cyber-capital”: Finance Capital in Don DeLillo’s Fiction. Doctoral thesis (DPhil), University of Sussex, 2010. p.7
  11. Randy Laist, Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo’s Novels. (Frankfurt: Peter Lang Publishing Inc, 2009), p.159
  12. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) p.3
  13. Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema? Vol. 1. (California: University of California Press, 2004), p.14.
  14. Ibid p.16
  15. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), p.37
  16. Jay David Bolter, Blair MacIntyre, Maribeth Gandy, and Petra Schweitzer, ‘New Media and the Permanent Crisis of Aura’ in Abstract Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 12.1 (February 2006), p.28
  17. Daniel Kasman, ‘Cannes 2012: David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis’ in MUBI Notebook (https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/notebook-reviews-david-cronenbergs-cosmopolis). Accessed April 5.
  18. Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XIV, ed. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), p.255.
  19. Ibid.
  20. Nicolas Abraham, Maria Torok, ‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation’ in The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Volume 1 (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1994), p.130.
  21. Laura Mulvey, Ibid p.26.
  22. Calum Marsh Ibid.
  23. Ibid, p.189.
  24. Leo Enticknap, Moving Image Technology – from Zoetrope to Digital (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2005), p.34.
  25. Calum Marsh Ibid.
  26. Laura Mulvey, Ibid p.28.

About The Author

James Slaymaker is a freelance critic and filmmaker from Dorset, UK. He has written for a number of online and print film publications such as MUBI Notebook, Film international, Bright Lights Film Journal, Little White Lies, Vague Visages, Alternate Takes, Popmatters, The Vulgar Cinema, Mcsweeney’s.net and Sound on Sight. He’s also a contributor to the book Hard to Get: The Films and Female Characters of Howard Hawks. He is the the author of the upcoming books Time is Luck: The Life and Cinema of Michael Mann (2019) and No Comment: Jean-Luc Godard and Post-Cinema (2021).

Related Posts