UC Irvine

Defining what makes cinema a unique artistic medium has been a central theoretical tendency dating back to its earliest years. Already an unsettled question throughout film’s century-plus existence as an analog format, the introduction of digital carriers has only complicated the debate. Cinema—a medium so connected to its traditional physical carrier that it is often referred to as “film”—exemplifies the difficulties of essentializing any medium in the age of digital convergence.

Refusing to accept that all digital media are homogeneous or that cinema is “dead,” I approach the question of medium specificity by tracing an ecology of cinema. One that considers cinema’s joint cultural and technical constitution. From preservation to protocols, marketing to moire, fears of cinema’s death to hopes for greater immediacy through raw data, cinema, as I argue, can only be defined through its larger shifting web of relations. As such, I examine the current state of computational film broadly, paying equal attention to marketing tactics, technological shifts, legal battles, distribution strategies, and preservation best practices alike.

Central to this ecological understanding is the reality that changes in one node of this meshwork resonate through each other often with dramatic results. While working towards unveiling a broader picture of cinema in its current state, each chapter of this dissertation also meditates on conflicting determinations of quality at varying nodes in this ecology and examines how such determinations come to influence film’s circulation and preservation. Quality, in relation to cinema, functions simultaneously as (among other things) a marketing tool, a means of controlling access, a production goal, a fuzzy technological standard, and a staple of archival practice. Quality is a term deployed in wholly different ways to drastically different ends, each influencing the overall “essence” of cinema and each carrying its own increasingly concerning ramifications for the future of the seventh art.