posted on 2022-11-02, 13:05authored byNoel Gerard O'Shea
The discourse surrounding digital technology in popular film has usually focused on
computer-generated imagery (CGI), overlooking the method of image-capture
involving digital cameras. I argue that the replacement of film cameras with digital
ones introduces a paradigm shift in viewer engagement. Concentrating on the horror
and crime genres, this thesis makes the case that found footage horror and the digital
crime films of Michael Mann, as the only genre categories of mainstream cinema
which place a primacy on the digital aesthetic over the traditional filmic “look,”
provide unique “testing sites” for the contemporary, culturally-aware genre fan.
While such representative films as The Blair Witch Project, Trollhunter,
Collateral and Miami Vice still retain links with classical cinema in terms of narrative
tropes and certain similarities of style, the dominant position of narrative is
nonetheless challenged by the new cinematic spaces of these digital films. Organised
around the central, controlling position of the diegetic camera, and allowing the viewer
a more phenomenologically-inflected encounter with the film’s media-driven digital
aesthetic, the spatial zones of the found footage horror film give the viewer scope to
contemplate the extra-narrative cues delivered by the film, inviting a sensuous, rather
than an intellectual, engagement. Moreover, by mapping their own real-world
experience of contemporary information culture onto the digital aesthetic of the films,
viewers can discover a site of enquiry to engage in totally new ways with such
contemporary problems as national identity under the threat of globalisation. Mann’s
crime films, on the other hand, predicated on hyperreal, digitally rendered
environments containing masculinities in crisis, encode a culturally-shaped subjective
experience into their digital aesthetic and offer another site of phenomenological
engagement for the viewer. The very act of locating these sites signals a transformation
in viewer engagement with genre cinema and indicates a new way of seeing.
History
Degree
Doctoral
First supervisor
Couglan, David
Second supervisor
Kelly, Michael G.
Note
peer-reviewed
Language
English
Department or School
Scoil na Gaeilge, an Bhéarla, agus na Cumarsáide | School of English, Irish, and Communication