The Transparency of Spectacle: Meditations on the Moving Image

by Wheeler Winston Dixon

The Transparency of Spectacle considers the ephemeral nature of the cinematic experience as we now apprehend it, and examines the ways in which technological advances in film and moving image production have changed this experience over the course of the last thirty-odd years.

While agreeing that the "digitization" of the cinema is inevitable, and even a necessary adjustment to the economic realities of end-of-the-millennium cinema production, Dixon argues that it represents a basic representational shift in the relationship between the spectator and the image-production apparatus of the cinematograph.

More than ever all visual input is merely raw material which is then subjected to digital "polishing" and "tweaking" until it attains a sheen of artificial splendor that is utterly removed from the photographic reproduction of the object and/or person originally photographed.

223 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1998

About the author

Wheeler Winston Dixon is an American filmmaker, scholar and author, and an expert on film history, theory and criticism.

His scholarship has particular emphasis on François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, American experimental cinema and horror films. He has written extensively on numerous aspects of film, including his books A Short History of Film and A History of Horror. From 1999 through the end of 2014, he was co-editor of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. He is regarded as a top reviewer of films. In addition, he is notable as an experimental American filmmaker with films made over several decades, and the Museum of Modern Art exhibited his works in 2003. He has taught at a number of schools of higher learning.