The Orientation of Future Cinema: Technology, Aesthetics, Spectacle

About the Book

What is the fate of cinema in an age of new technologies, new aesthetic styles, new modes of cultural production and consumption? What becomes of cinema and a century-long history of the moving image when the theatre is outmoded as a social and aesthetic space, as celluloid gives over to digital technology, as the art-house and multiplex are overtaken by a proliferation of home entertainment systems?

The Orientation of Future Cinema offers an ambitious and compelling argument for the continued life of cinema as image, narrative and experience. Commencing with Lumière’s Arrival of a Train at a Station, Bruce Isaacs confronts the threat of contemporary digital technologies and processes by returning to cinema’s complex history as a technological and industrial phenomenon. The technology of moving images has profoundly changed; and yet cinema materialises ever more forcefully in digital capture and augmentation, 3-D perception and affect, High Frame Rate cinema, and the evolution of spectacle as the dominant aesthetic mode in contemporary studio production.

Table of Contents:

Part 1: The Age of Late Cinema
Chapter 1: What is Cinema?
Chapter 2: The Question of Cinema Art: The Legitimacy of Film Style
Chapter 3: The Effect of the Screen
- The Synthetic Narrative
- The Synthetic Image
Part 2: High Concept Cinema: Image, Effect, Spectacle
Chapter 4: Historicizing Concept Cinema: A Crisis in the Image
Chapter 5: The Industrial Context of High Concept Production: Continuities and Discontinuities
Chapter 6: Classical High Concept Aesthetics
- A Case Study of Steven Spielberg and James Cameron
- Incorporating Cinema: The Commoditization of the Image
Part 3: Beyond Cinema: Reflections on a Future
Chapter 7: New Technologies of the Image
Chapter 8: The New Wave
- Christopher Nolan
- Michael Bay
- Roland Emmerich
Chapter 9: Future Modalities of the Image (The Paradox of High Concept 3-D Cinema)
Chapter 10: The Orientation of Future Cinema

About the Author :
Bruce Isaacs is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. He has published widely on film history and theory.

Review :
The Orientation of Future Cinema offers a lucid, theoretically grounded aesthetic justification for the new media including popular ‘high concept' cinema of spectacle and 3-D. Claiming that the digital image is understood as affective experience rather than representation, Bruce Isaacs takes a much-needed step toward providing a critical language for a media culture readily appreciated, manipulated and disseminated by today’s generation. The Orientation of Future Cinema is an elegantly written, provocative, richly illustrated, historically informed book that breaks new ground in cinema and media studies. Isaacs’s book does much more than explore the shifting, tenuous relationship between the spectator and the image. Instead, his book actually models a fresh, surprising way of writing about the film image in an era when the idea of film itself is undergoing a revolution that opens up new possibilities for accounting for the continued lure of the film spectacle. There are so many powerful, insightful moments in the book; in fact, Isaacs’s extended discussion of the complex relationship between sound and image in Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Conversation or Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are worth the price of admission alone. The Orientation of Future Cinema is essential reading for anyone interested in the fate of the image in the digital era. Film theory and criticism have often fixated on a single aspect of cinema, to the detriment of all else: space or time, movement or stillness, action or contemplation, sensuality or intellection, classical or modern, fun or philosophy … Bruce Isaac’s The Orientation of Future Cinema is an attempt to keep all the paths open, to synthesize different analytical tools, and to embrace the totality of film – from art cinema to blockbusters, from yesterday’s silent movies to today’s digital formats. Accepting cinema equally as both an ‘itinerary of the image’ and a narrative art, Isaacs aims at no less than a new, integrated aesthetics of the film medium as a synthetic form, both realistic and artificial, emotive and reflective – but always, at its best, absorbing and astonishing.