star wars shift from film to digital techniques

In describing the current cinematic moment in this fashion, I do not mean to suggest that film will disappear, but that it will continue increasingly to be engaged with the social, technological, and aesthetic forms and practices of digital media.

Rather than considering the possibility of digital cinema as constituting a radical break or rupture with the cinema of the twentieth century, we need to understand how the emerging forms and practices of digital media provide us with a perspective from which the entire history of cinema up to this point can be seen as an extension of “early cinema.” Borrowing from the idea that electronic textuality marks what has been called the late age of print, I argue that digital cinema marks us as inhabiting the late age of early cinema (or perhaps phrased differently, the late age of celluloid film). Some industry executives claimed that because Attack of the Clones was produced entirely without the use of celluloid film it “heralded the future of Hollywood and the death of actual ‘film’ making” (Healey and Huffstutter).Įlsewhere I have discussed the significance of the digital production and screening of Attack of the Clones in relation to the early history of cinema (“Remediation”). The digital production, distribution, and screening of Attack of the Clones was heralded in the popular media as marking a watershed moment in the history of film, “a milestone of cinema technology” along the lines of The Jazz Singer (McKernan). In the intervening years most people have probably forgotten the hype that attended the film’s release. On May 16, 2002, my son Sam and I attended one of the opening-day digital screenings of Star Wars: Episode II-Attack of the Clones at the Star Southfield Theatre, the only theater in the Detroit metropolitan area (and one of only two in Michigan) equipped to project the film in the digital format in which George Lucas wanted us to see it.

Star wars shift from film to digital techniques