LECTURE SERIES

CELLULOID NO MORE | Lecture 1: The Digital Revolution: Attack of the Pixels

 

MON 2 MARCH, 19:30
Lumière Cinema, Bassin 88, Maastricht

Hugo Emmerzael
Film Critic & Journalist

 

At the beginning of the 21st century, George Lucas had devious plans. While making his second Star Wars prequel, Attack of the Clones (2002), he invited leading film directors to a meeting about the digital revolution in cinema. Among those who gathered at Skywalker Ranch to discuss film as a digital medium were Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Michael Mann. Oliver Stone is said to have remarked at the time: “You’ll be known as the man who killed cinema.”

Attack of the Clones was the first major film to be shot entirely on digital cameras. By 2009, Lucas’s envisioned digital revolution was complete when James Cameron’s Avatar forced movie theatres around the world to replace their 35mm film projectors with digital projection. Now that digital film has become the norm, and films shot and projected on celluloid have become the artistic exception, a pressing question emerges: what does this material shift mean for the nature of this art form? How can we think about cinema as a digital medium?

Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, this first lecture delves into the physicality and ontology of cinema. It traces the history of film through its materiality—from its earliest developments to the digital art form it has become today.

 

The individual lectures:

1. The Digital Revolution: Attack of the Pixels (2 Mar)
2. Endless Possibilities: The New Frontier of Digital Cinema (9 Mar)
3. Unfriended: Cinema’s Tense Relationship with the Internet (16 Mar)
4. Framing Globalism and Capitalism through Cinema: TIME IS LUCK (23 Mar)

Cost of the whole series / individual lectures
UM students: €8 / €2.50
UM employees and students from other schools: €20 / €6.25
Others €40 / €12.50

In conjunction with this lecture series, we are presenting one screening of Miami Vice, on Wednesday 25 March, along with a video introduction by Hugo Emmerzael. Tickets for the screening are available through www.lumiere.nl. Those attending the lecture series get a reduction.