Passaggi del cinema: trasformazione di linguaggi, testi e contesti

The motion-picture industry is actually going through a very important passage. The digital technologies are transforming the ways through which films are produced, released and enjoyed. The oscillation is between analogical (chemical-optical) systems and digital (numerical) systems; this brings to a progressive dematerialization of the film text. In this sense the support (the film hit and modified by the light) is progressively changing; it loses its consistence, becomes intangible, immaterial - the image consisting of pixel. The post-production operations (editing, mixing, special effects) are by now definitively realised by the computers, and the production itself of the images (the shooting) is moving in this direction. But they are not simple operations and, up till now, the quality of the images and the related costs are the greatest difficulties. In this situation of unquestionable superiority of the analogical systems, the stronger and stronger use of the new technologies is already transforming the ways the films are released and enjoyed. In addition to the traditional cinema (whose form has however been revised and renovated - multiple rooms, multiplex, etc.), there are new spaces for the vision and, consequently, new forms of audience. After the home video, the Pay TV and all what concerning the thematic TV channels, the DVD has strongly come into the market, an extremely compacted support that has redefined the space of the cinema and the vision of the watcher-user. At the same time the motion-picture industry is taking room in the Web. The potentialities of the Internet user are most high and more and more films and festivals are released only on the telematic stream. It is a new dimension of audience that is in opposition to the cinema (a space that gathers bodies). The oscillation of both film creation and experimentation is between materiality and inconsistency of the text.;

Elena Cardillo, Passaggi del cinema: trasformazione di linguaggi, testi e contesti in "SOCIOLOGIA DELLA COMUNICAZIONE " 32/2001, pp , DOI: