Question for today (Elssesser’s article)
Elssesser theorizes that new technologies would expand notions or “pillars” that made of cinema. One of the “pillars” include ‘discovery’ of persistence of vision which can be interpreted as the nature of moving images itself. However, cinema at its current stage has an end point: featured length cinema runs up to 95 min to 2 hours etc etc. What Lev Manovich proposes in “Soft Cinema: database narrative” are “films” that are edited in real time from footage in a database and should run forever. This new kind of digital “film” not only disrupt the dynamic of spectatorship and authorship, it also redefine the concept of “persistence of vision”—from what I can understand as the moving images should be never ending. Without the constraints of time, the structure that defines narrativee and flow no longer exists, does that give rise to a new form of cinema or is it no longer cinema?