Date of Award

2012

Degree Type

Open Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Cultural Studies, PhD

Program

School of Arts and Humanities

Advisor/Supervisor/Committee Chair

Henry Krips

Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member

Eve Oishi

Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member

James Morrison

Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member

Dana Polan

Terms of Use & License Information

Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2012 Thomas J. Connelly

Keywords

Cinema, Culture, Digitalization, speed, Television, Temporality

Subject Categories

Communication Technology and New Media | Film and Media Studies | Mass Communication

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to understand the impact of speed on the interrelation and the overlapping of the production and consumption of cinematic and televisual texts. It explores the immediacy of digital media and new economic processes, and how they are informing structures of perception, as well as lending themselves to new and different ways of seeing the moving image in the digital age. These visual expressions are evident in the changing perception of the long take; the increasing use of video gaming aesthetics and database narratives; new and variant forms of narrative and visual styles in television; and the speed of new media technology on new voices and avant-garde expressions in independent and DIY cinema (such as the Internet, personal camcorder, mobile screens, and desktop editing). Conversely, VCR, DVD, DVR devices (as well as online streaming and DVD and Blu-Ray rental sites) have transformed the consumption of the moving image. Time-shifting devices allow for halting and controlling the flow of passing time, permitting for greater textual analysis. And, reciprocally, these new perceptions of the moving image inform expressions of filmic time and space. The speed of digital media and new economic formations raise concerns about lived reality and the attenuation of time, place, and community. It brings forth questions of the waning of pastness and memory, the diminishing of critical distance, and the vanishing of slow time. I argue, however, these shifts that are occurring in cinema and television illustrate that processes of speed are not the prime determinant in the production and consumption of moving images. Rather, they are based on a contingent and open-ended model of articulation--sites where disparate elements are temporary combined, unified, and thus, practiced and lived under the ever-changing conditions of existence.

DOI

10.5642/cguetd/50

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