Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies by Ariel Rogers (review)

In his 2014 feature Adieu au langage, Jean-Luc Godard uses a comparison with impressionist painting to explain digital 3-D. Borrowing a phrase from Marcel Proust, he suggests that each art is like painting “that which is not seen.” Godard’s point turns on the commonly understood disjuncture between reality and representation and the mediation introduced by representational technologies and the artist’s hand. Impressionism and 3-D, he suggests, involve further mediation—the modes of seeing they both create cannot be apprehended in the moment of their creation. That perceptual challenge extends to the spectator’s role in generating the images, whether from dabs of paint or dissimilar pictures directed at the left and right eyes. For Godard, that challenge highlights film’s ability to activate dialectical tensions—and a way of thinking that he hastens to associate with 3-D’s binary form—between seen and unseen and known and unknown.

Godard’s appeal to an earlier visual technology to explain a newer one is a common strategy long used by new technologies’ purveyors and their commentators. Old ways of selling what was new then might still make good ways of selling what’s new now. Substitute “analyzing” for “selling” and you get an academic method. Ariel Rogers’s Cinematic Appeals uses such a method to analyze today’s moving-image novelties—digital cinema and digital 3-D—by comparing them with the technologies that reshaped postwar American film: widescreen and analog 3-D. She rightly complicates this approach by insisting on historical differences in how technologies are experienced. Just because the promoters of new technologies borrowed their predecessors’ rhetoric doesn’t mean viewers believed it. Instead, Rogers argues, the kinds of “appeals” offered by widescreen, digital, and 3-D have changed with time and reflect the changing concerns of their times.

To draw out these technologies’ distinct appeals, Rogers focuses on their debuts and the discourses that emerged around them. Her analyses point to the value of studying technologies in their moments of “newness,” or as what media scholars have described as “media in transition.” Such moments, as Carolyn Marvin, Lisa Gitelman, and others have demonstrated, put the defining features and meanings of technologies in distinct relief. Cinematic Appeals aims to enrich our understanding of two transitional moments and their perceived meanings by focusing on how new movie technologies stimulated “anxieties” about the film spectator’s body. Rogers examines these anxieties using promotional materials, trade and popular press reports, and extended film analyses. In the case of digital cinema, for instance, she argues that two competing ideas about its potential effects, both centered on the body, dominated popular discourse in the late 1990s. Many critics argued that digital cinema—especially the type seen in big-budget films like Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (George Lucas, 1999)—contributed to the disembodiment and human isolation associated with digital communication more generally. Other observers, in contrast, highlighted the potential that the smaller, more mobile digital cameras used to make films such as The Cruise (Bennett Miller, 1998) and The Celebration (Thomas Vinterberg, 1998) might have to immerse spectators in film worlds whose “authenticity” was guaranteed by a grainy, “amateur” quality that challenged Hollywood’s glossy digital aesthetic.

Rogers’s more general point is that the digital had “heterogeneous appeal,” not any single meaning. Here she joins other film scholars—such as Kristen Whissel, whose Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema (2014) would make good companion reading—who have begun to examine cinema’s recent technological developments using the finegrained readings made possible by greater historical distance. Film scholars will appreciate this contextualization and may enjoy Rogers’s detailed film analyses. Some will also benefit from her extensive engagement with the secondary literature (some of this is well-trodden ground), a strength that becomes a weakness, at times, when other voices threaten to drown out the book’s own arguments.

Historians of technology likely will wish...