Just some more comments on this.... (should think on this and add to
blog notes so comments most appreciated.)
> QUOTE: --- we're talking about deep ontological and phenomenological
> shifts that are transforming a medium.
> END QUOTE.
Working with digital video on a netbook (albeit dual core multimedia)
Vertok comes easily to mind. The collage (or montage; after Eisenstein's
film sense) potential is there. So are we to believe history is
repeating itself and digital cinema has taken us back to early 20th
century film poetics and aesthetics?
The very traditional poetics and narrative structure of films like The
Matrix, based on a situation - action - altered situation, may certainly
appear to back this up, since Matrix claims to be the paradigm this new
digital cinema. Really, it just another boring old Hollywood action film
with Hollywood A list stars. (Eisenstein's film sense may have invented
this form, but repetition becomes rather boring.)
There have been historic changes to film aesthetics and poetics since
Vertov, after World War 2, but any discussion of digital cinema seems
reluctant to engage with this new cinema. This reluctance is further
entrenched if one where to believe in the software design of digital
editing software and follow the example laid out by this design.
Digital video does provide an easily available technology that can work
with and continue these changing and potentially novel cinema poetics.
But that is all. Digital can hardly be claimed as a complete
transformation of a medium.
Practical editing is another matter. Because video editing on a netbook
does not easily allow real time editing, the separation of the sound
track and sound image from the visual image becomes almost mandatory.
So, recording the sound track and laying it down first becomes the
easiest way out of this technical limit, when working with digital
video. This way of working also opens the way to a video production
which is capable of producing novel poetics and aesthetics. But film has
already invented this... not digital media. A poetics of digital media
has yet to be invented.
(A failure to understand Warhol's poetics opens up a grave danger for
the opening claim. But then the acutely critical aspects of Warhol are
an embarrassment to such a claim which would feel better if it did not
have face any critical undertaking.)
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