Compact Cinematics: The Moving Image in the Age of Bit-Sized Media

Description

Compact Cinematics challenges the dominant understanding of cinema to focus on the various compact, short, miniature, pocket-sized forms of cinematics that have existed from even before its standardization in theatrical form, and in recent years have multiplied and proliferated, taking up an increasingly important part of our everyday multimedia environment. Short films or micro-narratives, cinematic pieces or units re-assembled into image archives and looping themes, challenge the concepts that have traditionally been used to understand cinematic experience, like linear causality, sequentiality, and closure, and call attention to complex and modular forms of cinematic expression and perception. Such forms, in turn, seem to meet the requirements of digital convergence, which has pushed the development of more compact and mobile hardware for the display and use of audiovisual content on laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Meanwhile, contemporary economies of digital content acquisition, filing, and sharing equally require the shrinking of cinematic content for it to be recorded, played, projected, distributed, and installed with ease and speed. In this process, cinematic experience is shortened and condensed as well, so as to fit the late-capitalist attention economy. The essays in this volume ask what this changed technical, socio-economic and political situation entails for the aesthetics and experience of contemporary cinematics, and call attention to different concepts, theories and tools at our disposal to analyze these changes. Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgments About the Authors Introduction: Screen | Capture | Attention Screen Attention Capture Notes Part One [Short] Minimal Narratives Chapter 1 Countdown to Zero: Compressing Cinema Time A compressed history of cinematic time Can avant-garde films deal with narrative time? Count down to zero Chapter 2 On Conflict in Short Film Storytelling Introduction Definitions Two arguments E. M. Forster’s model Conflict and performance On the variability of character performance On the variability of filmmaker performance Conclusions Short films cited Chapter 3 Accelerated Gestures: Play Time in Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 (Not) a mise en abyme for Cléo’s transformation Calculated rupture Films cited Chapter 4 Lynch on the Run: The Proximity of Trauma in the Short Film The virtues of brevity A chronic illness The perils of alphabetic order Growing a relative An amputated structure Notes Part Two [Condensed] Polyphonic Archives Chapter 5 The Ethics of Repair: Reanimating the Archive Chapter 6 Long Story Short Introduction Popular media and poverty: The entrepreneurial self Multiplicity Long Story Short Notes Chapter 7 Skip Intro? Short Intro Videos as a Reflexive Threshold in the Interactive Documentary Introduction Prelude: An aural threshold to the in/visible  Preamble: Planet Galata—a dramaturgy of units Coda: Traversing adventitious detours Notes Chapter 8 The Viewser as Curator: The Online Film Festival Platform Part Three [Compressed] Pleasure & Productivity Chapter 9 The Contingent Spectator Chapter 10 Speed Watching, Efficiency, and the New Temporalities of Digital Spectatorship The paradoxes of digital speed For a “too-perfect cinema” Chapter 11 Visual Pleasure and GIFs1 Chapter 12 Solitary Screens: On the Recurrence and Consumption of Images Part Four [Miniature] Mobile Cinematics Chapter 13 Archaeology of Mobile Film: Blink, Bluevend, and the Pocket Shorts Introduction Third generation mobile phones Blink and Pocket Shorts Bluevend Conclusion Notes Chapter 14 Children’s Little Thumb Films or “Films-Poucets” Chapter 15 Of Flipbooks and Funny Animals: Chris Ware’s Quimby the Mouse Flipping images A pocket-sized memory palace Conclusion Notes Chapter 16 Mobile Cinematics VR films The figural and the panoramic The VR cinema of attractions Aura and mobile cinematics Notes Part Five [Compacted] Urban Ecologies Chapter 17 Screening Smart Cities: Managing Data, Views, and Vertigo Chapter 18 Of Compactness: Life with Media Façade Screens A screen transcoding milieux A screen patterning across territories and individual perceptive worlds A screen texturing transindividual and transterritorial affectivity A pixellated environmental screen Chapter 19 Codified Space: Cinematic Recodings of Urban Reality Introduction The car park as functional structure The urban ecological mesh Sounding the territory Conclusion Bibliography Index