Introduction: Moving Machines -- "Smothered In Baked Alaska" The Anxious Appeal of Widescreen Cinema -- East of Eden in Cinemascope: Intimacy Writ Large -- DIgital Cinema's Heterogeneous Appeal: Debates on Embodiment, Intersubjectivity, and Immediacy -- Awe and Aggression: The Experience of Erasure in The Phantom Menace and The Celebration -- Points of Convergence: Conceptualizing the Appeal of 3D Cinema Then and Now
Summary
Cinematic Appeals follows the effect of technological innovation on the cinema experience, specifically the introduction of widescreen and stereoscopic 3D systems in the 1950s, the rise of digital cinema in the 1990s, and the transition to digital 3D since 2005. Widescreen films drew the spectator into the world of the screen, enabling larger-than-life close-ups of already larger-than-life actors. The technology fostered the illusion of physically entering a film, enhancing the semblance of realism. Alternatively, the digital era was less concerned with manipulating the viewer's physical ..
