J. Hoberman: Trapped in the Total Cinema

In short, whether as a source of visual data or as a delivery system, computer-generated imagery has introduced a radical impurity into a motion picture apparatus that, save for the introduction of synchronous sound, remained markedly consistent for a hundred years. Thus, The Matrix (1999), written and directed by the brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski, represents a landmark hybrid in its combination of live action with frame-by-frame digital manipulation. No previous animated film had so naturalistically represented the physical world. “Once you have seen a movie like The Matrix, you can’t unsee it,” a Los Angeles exhibitor told the New York Times in 2002, referring to the ways in which CGI had altered the action film, in part by allowing serious actors to perform impossible stunts. The Matrix, as film critic David Edelstein would note the following year, “changed not only the way we look at movies but movies themselves.” The Matrix “cut us loose from the laws of physics in ways that no live-action film had ever done, exploding our ideas of time and space on screen.”

Mein Blog befasst sich in einem umfassenden Sinn mit dem Verhältnis von Wissen, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. Ein besonderes Augenmerk richte ich dabei auf die Aktivitäten des Medien- und Dienstleistungskonzern Bertelsmann und der Bertelsmann Stiftung.