Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age

by William Brown

Drawing on a variety of popular films, including Avatar, Enter the Void, Fight Club, The Matrix, Speed Racer, X-Men and War of the Worlds , Supercinema studies the ways in which digital special effects and editing techniques require a new theoretical framework in order to be properly understood. Here William Brown proposes that while analogue cinema often tried to hide the technological limitations of its creation through ingenious methods, digital cinema hides its technological omnipotence through the use of continued conventions more suited to analogue cinema, in a way that is analogous to that of Superman hiding his powers behind the persona of Clark Kent. Locating itself on the cusp of film theory, film-philosophy and cognitive approaches to cinema, Supercinema also looks at the relationship between the spectator and film that utilizes digital technology to maximum, ‘supercinematic’ effect.

Genres: Film

196 pages, Library Binding

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Librarian Note: There are more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Steen Ledet · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important book about what happens when cinema becomes digital. Philisophically informed, Brown draws on a wide array of films to suggest four core characteristics of supercinema: space overcome by the digital, the nonanthropocentric nature of the digital, time overcome by the digital, and the dynamic interaction between film, spectator, and world. Yet I can't help but feel slightly frustrated that some concepts are underdeveloped or underargued. It remains unclear to me why one would not simply combine time and space into timespaces as Brown references other critics do. Also, while I agree that supercinema is nonanthropocentric, why exactly call it posthuman or inhuman instead of simply nonhuman? Yet I am wary of my own criticisms, as I work in a similar field and feel that much of my response boils down to "why didn't he do it the way that I do it?" For that reason, I will say that this is a book that truly takes the new nature of cinema seriously, while never losing track of the way that some of these things have occurred earlier in cinema's history.