18. dubna proběhla v Kabinetu přednáška:
William Boddy
“One Hundred Years of Electronic Cinema”
“One Hundred Years of Electronic Cinema”
The prospect of the electronic
distribution and exhibition of theatrical motion pictures has provoked
fearful, even apocalyptic, warnings from some in the contemporary
Hollywood industry. While the immediate prospects for, and consequences
of, the end of celluloid-based exhibition are unclear, it is productive
to consider the ways in which the shift to digital cinema has already
complicated some of the fundamental business models, industry
practices, and power relations within the film and television
industries. Digital exhibition has inspired some filmmakers and
industry observers to imagine an industry less dominated by the major
studios, with new untraditional venues for exhibition, and new
opportunities for exhibitors to contract directly with filmmakers and
develop alternative programming and uses for traditional public
cinemas, including sporting events, music concerts, business
conferencing, and video gaming. Electronic cinema has encouraged the
growth of in-cinema advertising and has threatened the long-established
practice of staggered release dates across the theatrical and domestic
exhibition markets. Furthermore, some in the motion picture industry
worry that electronic cinema will collapse the aesthetic distinctions
and audience practices between domestic television and public
cinema-going. Electronic cinema’s prospective confounding of
traditionally distinct business models, textual forms, and viewing
protocols has not been fully taken aboard by media scholars, and should
provoke reconsideration of some of the foundational distinctions
between media forms, economic models, and reception sites and practices
that have prevailed in the study of television and cinema. The current
proliferation of technological platforms, business models, and viewing
practices related to the consumption of moving images beyond the
domestic space of traditional television will have profound
implications for the objects and methods of study in our discipline.
William Boddy is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College and in the Certificate Program in Film Studies at the Graduate Center, both of the City University of New York. He is the author of Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics and New Media and Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television, and Digital Media in the United States. His current research involves the archeology of electronic cinema and the impact of digital exhibition upon the theatrical film industry.