The Remediation of Cinema

As it is has become clear from Alexandra’s presentation, remediation is mainly concerned with the refashioning and the restructuring of form, so as to fit the demands on today’s market. The traditional is no longer the fashion and this is also valid for the film industry, where the new media is the new challenge, as revealed by Jay David Bolter:

Remediation can be thought of as a process of transfer, in which the definition of the real or the authentic is transferred from one form to another. The transference is always a translation in the sense that the authentic or the real is redefined in terms appropriate to the remediating media form. (Bolter Transference, 14)

A special case is that of the animated film, which incorporates digital visual technology in the traditional film, as well as myths, stories and legends, so that in the end, Jay David Bolter  and Richard Grusin explain, it “cannibalizes and refashions everything it touches with a ferocity that is itself mediated and excused because the genre is not ‘serious’ and is supposed to speak to children” (147). 

The possibility of film to exploit the graphic power of digital media enables it to “create visually convincing worlds, without the troubling notion that the user must be in control of these new worlds” (149). The ultimate achievement in specific area of film-making is that “in being able finally to compete with the ‘realism’ of the Hollywood style, the animated film has also become increasingly aware of and confident of its own status as mediation” (150).

Alexandra gave an outline of the main concepts involved in remediation, immediacy and hypermediacy and I should like to note that it is the interplay of the two, which mainly results into special effects, that makes today’s films attractive. Having the “experience of trompe l’oeil before realizing that it is a trompe l’oeil” (158) creates amazement and eventually satisfies the principles of remediation.  

In the case of the remediation of the videogame aesthethics, for instance, alternative narrative structures are being produced and film of this type does more than integrate spectacle within the narrative, but fashions it as a plot in which the characters become immortal. Cinema today is “interactive cinema”, with a virtual reality promising “immediate two-way communication” and “authenticity of representation in narrative film” (Bolter Transference, 23). 

- A genuine video game film - 

Works cited:

Bolter, J. David, and Richard A. Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1999

Bolter, J. David. Transference and Transparency: Digital Technology and the Remediation of Cinema. http://cri.histart.umontreal.ca/cri/fr/intermedialites/p6/pdfs/p6_bolter_text.pdf

Article Author: Cristina Milea