[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][01.02]

prettywraithUID：197049

关于REBORN FROM THE ASHES组COMMENTS活动的说明&汇总
https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1042733-1-2.html

========================================================
文章摘自The New York Times
链接：http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/movies/03dargis.html?8dpc

Film
Floating in the Digital Experience
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: December 30, 2009

HOW much our world of moving-image entertainment has changed in the past decade! We now live in a world of the 24-Hour Movie, one that plays anytime and anywhere you want (and sometimes whether you want it to or not). It’s a movie we can access at home by pressing a few buttons on the remote (and agreeing to pay more for it than you might at the local video store) or with a few clicks of the mouse. The 24-Hour Movie now streams instead of unspools, filling our screens with images that, more and more, have been created algorithmically rather than photographically.

And yet how little our world of moving-image entertainment has changed! On April 14, 1896, The New York Times ran an article with the exciting if cryptic headline “Edison’s Latest Triumph.” The triumph was the Vitascope, a machine that “projects upon a large area of canvas groups that appear to stand forth from the canvas, and move with great facility and agility, as though actuated by separate impulses.” A proprietor of the music hall where the Vitascope was shown off said this machine would reproduce “scenes from various successful plays and operas of the season, and well-known statesmen and celebrities,” adding, “No other manager in this city will have the right to exhibit the Vitascope.”

Today, even when digital, our movies are still filled with celebrities and scenes from successful plays (and books and comics), and the owners of image technologies continue to hold on to their exclusive rights ferociously. Edison didn’t invent the Vitascope, but that’s another story. The story I want to tell here does involve him. But first I want to fast-forward to a recent night when, at a movie theater rigged for 3-D projection, I saw James Cameron’s “Avatar” with an audience that watched the screen with the kind of fixed attention that has become rare at the movies. True, everyone was wearing 3-D glasses, which makes it difficult to check your cellphone obsessively, but they also seemed captivated.

When it was over, people broke into enthusiastic applause and, unusually, many stayed to watch the credits, as if to linger in the movie. Although much has been made of the technologies used in “Avatar,” its beauty and nominal politics, it is the social experience of the movie — as an event that needs to be enjoyed with other people for maximum impact — which is more interesting. That’s particularly true after a decade when watching movies became an increasingly solitary affair, something between you and your laptop. “Avatar” affirms the deep pleasures of the communal, and it does so by exploiting a technology (3-D), which appears to invite you into the movie even as it also forces you to remain attentively in your seat.

“Avatar” serves as a nice jumping-off point to revisit how movies and our experience of them have changed. For starters, when a critic calls a new release “a film” these days, there’s a chance that what she (and you) are looking at wasn’t made with film processes but was created, from pre-visualization to final credits, with digital technologies. Yet, unless a director or distributor calls attention to the technologies used — as do techno-fetishists like Michael Mann and David Fincher, who used bleeding-edge digital cameras to make “Collateral” (2004) and “Zodiac” (2007) — it’s also probable that most reviewers won’t mention if a movie was even shot in digital, because they haven’t noticed or don’t care.

This seems like a strange state of affairs. Film is profoundly changing — or, if you believe some theorists and historians, is already dead — something that most moviegoers don’t know. Yet, because the visible evidence of this changeover has become literally hard to see, and because the implications are difficult to grasp, it is also understandable why the shift to digital has not attracted more intense analysis outside film and media studies. Bluntly put, something is happening before our eyes. We might see an occasional digital artifact (usually, a bit of unintentional data) when a director shoots digital in bright light — look for a pattern of squares or a yellowish tint — but we’re usually too busy with the story to pay much mind.

Should you care? I honestly don’t know, because I’m not sure what to think about this brave new image world we have entered. I love the luxurious look and warmth of film, and I fervently hope it never disappears. And yet many of us who grew up watching movies in the predigital era have rarely experienced the ones in, and shown on, film in all their visual glory: battered prints and bad projection have helped thwart the ideal experience. Theater 80 St. Marks, a downtown Manhattan repertory house where I spent a lot of time in the 1970s, showed threadbare prints of classic and not-so-classic movies in rear projection, which meant they often looked worse on screen than they did on my television back home.

It is because the movies and our experience of them has changed so radically in recent years — we can pull a movie out of our pocket now, much as earlier generations pulled out a paperback — that makes it difficult to grasp what is happening. In 1996, Susan Sontag set off a storm in cine-circles with an essay, “The Decay of Cinema,” which could have been titled the death of specialized cinephilia, one centered on art-house film (“quintessentially modern”), from Dziga Vertov to Jean-Luc Godard, and experienced inside a movie theater, “ideally the third-row center.” Sontag’s essay inspired a spate of similarly themed if often less vigorous examinations: Google the words “death of cinema,” and you get more than 2.5 million hits.

In one sense the beginning of the end of cinema as we tend to understand it can be traced to 1933, the year that a feature-length film — a 1932 detective tale called “The Crooked Circle” — was first shown on television. Few Americans owned sets in the 1930s, but the genie was already out of the bottle, or, rather, the movies were out of the theater. As televisions began to fill postwar American homes — from an estimated 20,000 in 1946 to 30.5 million in 1955 — so did the movies, which, despite Hollywood’s initial anxiety, became a crucial television staple. (The studios soon learned that television was a revenue source.) Generations of cinephiles fell in love with the object of their obsession while flopped on the floor, basking in the glow of the family television.

In “The Virtual Life of Film,” an elegant 2007 inquiry into the past, present and future of film, the theorist D. N. Rodowick writes, “All that was chemical and photographic is disappearing into the electronic and digital.” Film captures moments in time, preserving them spatially in images we can root around in, get lost in. Digital delivers data, zeroes and ones that are transformed into images, and this is a difference to contemplate. The truth is that the film object has already changed, from preproduction to projection. And the traditional theatrical experience that shaped how viewers looked at film and, by extension, the world, has been mutating for some time. The new types of image consumption and digital technologies have complicated our understanding of cinema.

And yet we still watch movies. And if it looks like a duck (in widescreen) and quacks like a duck (in stereo), nothing has changed, right? It has and it hasn’t, as we will only understand as film continues to disappear. These days instead of falling in love with the movies at home in front of the television, new generations fall in love with movies they watch on hand-held devices that, however small, play images that are larger than those Edison showed to customers before the invention of the Vitascope. A teenager watching a movie on her iPhone might not be looking at an actual film. But she is enjoying something like it, something that because of its narrative strategies and visual style carries the deep imprint of cinema.

It’s also a good bet that this teenager also watches movies in theaters. If she goes to “Avatar,” she will see a movie that, despite its exotic beauty, seems familiar, even in 3-D. Narrative cinema employs devices, from camera placement to editing, that direct your attention and, if the movie is successful and you fall under its sway, lock you into the story. Mr. Cameron might be a visionary of a type, but he’s an old-fashioned (and canny) storyteller and he locks you in tightly. The 3-D images are often spectacular, and his characters, like the figures in that 1896 Edison film, “appear to stand forth from the canvas, and move with great facility and agility, as though actuated by separate impulses.”

You can get lost in a movie, or so it seems, and melt into its world. But even when seated third row center and occupying two mental spaces, you understand that you and the movie inhabit separate realms. When I watched “The Dark Knight” in Imax, I felt that I was at the very edge of the screen. “Avatar,” in 3-D, by contrast, blurs that edge, closing the space between you and the screen even more. Like a video game designer, Mr. Cameron seems to want to invite you into the digital world he has created even if, like a film director, he wants to determine your route. Perched between film and digital, “Avatar” shows us a future in which movies will invite us further into them and perhaps even allow us to choose not just the hero’s journey through the story, but also our own.

链接：http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/movies/03dargis.html?8dpc

fancywwUID：2583671

words and expressions:
We now live in a world of the 24-Hour Movie, one that plays anytime and anywhere you want. (同位语从句)
The 24-Hour Movie now streams instead of unspools（to execute or present artfully or gracefully）
algorithmically:    algorithm  a procedure for solving a mathematical problem (as of finding the greatest common divisor) in a finite number of steps that frequently involves repetition of an operation;  broadly   : a step-by-step procedure for solving a problem or accomplishing some end especially by a computer
with the exciting if cryptic headline:SECRET, OCCULT
proprietor : a person who has the legal right or exclusive title to something  : OWNER
ferociously: ferocious:1 : exhibiting or given to extreme fierceness and unrestrained violence and brutality  *a ferocious predator*  2 : extremely intense  *ferocious heat*
synonyms see FIERCE

obsessively:痴迷地
techno-fetishists：fetishists：有...癖者
Bluntly put：直接地说
fervently:exhibiting or marked by great intensity of feeling  : ZEALOUS
threadbare: having the nap worn off so that the thread shows  : SHABBY
cinephile: a devotee of motion pictures
quintessentially ： the most typical example or representative
a spate of ：a large number or amount
despite Hollywood’s initial anxiety, became a crucial television staple：主要产品
Generations of cinephiles fell in love with the object of their obsession while flopped on the floor, basking in the glow of the family television. 很形象的比喻



Comment:

After reading the article and inspecting my own life, I am exactly the case discussed by the author. I used to be a movie fan when I was in 10s, watching 3 to 4 movies per week in the theatre, because my aunt worked there. I think it was one of the main reasons that I could get in the cinema without paying a ticket. More important is that the large space of cinema and its huge screen give me a totally different feeling from sitting in front of the TV in my own room.

However, in recent years the number of movies I watch per year can be count by one hand. One main reason is that the easy and convenient access to the movies on the net. So watching movies becomes a solitary affair. But occasionally when I go to the cinema, I can still tell the difference. For example, last month I went to see 2012. After the movie was over, along with many other people, I stayed to watch the credits. Although I barely knew the name on the screen, it seemed a way to show my respect to those who made such a great movie, and some time to calm down after a exciting experience. I think some movies are still attractive and magnificent enough for us to go to the cinema and enjoy.

Just like the article says, as a viewer, I seldom care whether the movie is made with film process or digital created. Maybe some people are worried and unhappy about this transition, such as some arts students, but to me it is naturally acceptable. And even the author does not know whether should we care. I wonder for those who born after 1990s, the movies they see more or less have been processed digitally. But one thing I'm clear is that I will never watch a movie on iphone, or any other hand-held devices. And I'm going to the cinema for Avatar.  

qisaimanUID：2703629

moving-image entertaiment
spool 卷轴
cryptic 隐秘的
agility 机敏
ferocious 口语，非常地
fixed attention
captivated 吸引
imprint 印记 特征

the passage expresses the feeling of the author toward movie , from the film-made one to the digital and the 3-D. despite some one claims that the movie is dead, the author prefers the digital technology. audience can still be attracted and locked into the story , moreover, another possibility is presented that liking a video game , the watcher can even particapate the movie and interact with it in the future. I myself embrace the digital movie more than the old film one. the movies are produced for various function , largely aiming at the market and perusing a record box office, that is commercial movie. still some show concerns of the producer about the society, the people who suffer from unfairness, or just a personal expression. the barrier of making a "movie " has be lowered by the prevailing digital camera and cellar phone. nearly every one can produce a short video and share it on the internet. this is a breakthrough
of the say power, especially in china.

rodgoodUID：2619326

Useful words and expressions:

move with great facility and agility

proprietor业主

ferociously野蛮地，残忍地

fast-forward to快进到

rig装备

obsessively着迷地，obsession困扰，痴迷

people broke into enthusiastic applause

in your seat

jumping-off point出发点

For starters首先(可以和firstly或first of all 替换)

pre-visualization to final credits演职员名单

techno-fetishists技术恋物癖者

bleeding-edge digital camera尖端科技的数字摄像机

moviegoer常看电影的人

the visible evidence of this changeover

threadbare磨破的

a spate of一系列的，大量的

staple主要产品

be disappearing into

traditional theatrical experience传统的影院感受

by extension

hand-held devices

You fall under its sway.

get lost in a movie, melt into its world.

Perched between film and digital

The 24-Hour Movie now streams instead of unspools上映, filling our screens with images that, more and more, have been created algorithmically rather than photographically.

The New York Times ran an article with the exciting if cryptic headline “Edison’s Latest Triumph.”

Bluntly put, something is happening before our eyes.坦率地说，不客气地说

I love the luxurious look and warmth of film, and I fervently hope it never disappears.

But the genie was already out of the bottle.事实已经开始

Film captures moments in time, preserving them spatially in images we can root around in, get lost in. 心神俱入，心醉神迷。


My comments:

While we are enjoying magnificent images in a movie, falling into exciting plot of it, and losing ourselves, few of us are aware that we are gradually getting used to, as the writer of this article says, images that have been created algorithmically rather than photographically. The writer, as a cinephile, expresses his helplessness and pity to this trend that maybe never get back.

People are always complaining that movies in recent years are released with more visional images but worse plots. Moreover, delicate pictures in movies are disappeared into mendacious ones that make some audiences uncomfortable. I think it has its own deep-seated reasons. For starters, with increasing demand of movies in market, movie industry has become much more developed than ever before, leading to a result of streamline production of movies, which makes the emphasis mainly on quantity rather than quality. In such a fast process of production, of course, it is much easier to make fascinating pictures with computers than to figure out attractive plots. Furthermore, it also reflects impetuosity of society. People's life is becoming much faster. Everything, including movie, is like snack that needs being taken away and finished immediately without retrospection.

It is said that James Cameron’s “Avatar” has been brewed for 14 years. If back to 14 years ago, without such technologies for images, will the movie be so concerned? Maybe, or maybe not.

plukaUID：2721764

NOTE
The 24-Hour Movie now streams（涌出） instead of unspools, filling our screens with images that, more and more, have been created algorithmically（算法地，计算规则地） rather than photographically.
[unspool：transitive verb  1 : to unwind from a spool  *unspool the cable* 2 : to execute or present artfully or gracefully  *unspooled a jump shot*  *unspooling an intricate tale* intransitive verb   : to be presented or revealed on or as if on a motion-picture screen]

an article with the exciting if cryptic headline “Edison’s Latest Triumph.”这个搭配该怎么理解？

ferociously（野蛮地残忍地）.

a movie theater rigged（配备，装备） for 3-D projection
When it was over, people broke into enthusiastic applause and, unusually, many stayed to watch the credits（(戏剧电影等)对原作者以及其他有贡献者的谢启或姓名表）, as if to linger in the movie.
“Avatar” serves as a nice jumping-off（<美>边远地区,文明终结,世界尽头,起点） point to revisit how movies and our experience of them have changed.
techno-fetishist（技术的信徒-fetishist）
but we’re usually too busy with the story to pay much mind. 

Sontag’s essay inspired a spate（引发争论） of similarly themed if often less vigorous examinations（又出现了，这个if结构……到底是啥意思）: Google the words “death of cinema,” and you get more than 2.5 million hits. 

feature-length（长篇的，（电影）达到正片长度的） film
the genie（妖怪） was already out of the bottle（事情已然开始）
Generations of cinephiles fell in love with the object of their obsession while flopped on the floor, basking in the glow of the family television. 恋影人窝在房间地板上，沐浴着家庭电视机的光辉，为他们的爱物神魂颠倒= =|||
Film captures moments in time, preserving them spatially in images we can root around in, get lost in.心神俱入，心醉神迷。
It’s also a good bet that...
Narrative cinema employs devices, from camera placement to editing, that direct your attention and, if the movie is successful and you fall under its sway, lock you into the story.
you and the movie inhabit separate realms. 

COMMENT

I am far from a cinephile, or even, I can hardly describe myself as a film fan. Words--however printed or digital--suit my palate more than videos---however photographical or algorithmical. Yet it does not mean that those floating images bother me, rather, I choose words because sometimes I 'see' more vivid and touching scenes and images within. Surely there're some that I prefer watching to reading--all depends on which option brings more enjoyment. The type of forms, in fact, matters less as much than the emotion the contents arouse in me and the picture it creates in my head. 

So I guess this goes the same for photographical or digital films. Barely one enters the cinema, seats himself and, instead of enjoying the story, scrutinize digital or 'fake' spots. He might more likely to say, "give me good time, and all is OK. " And that's the consensus of film makers, too. 

Therefore frankly, I don't concern much about the 'film is dead' issue: we will always have good things to watch, so just let alone those distant theoretical dispute. And for those traditional-film lovers, though old golden age have been far away, there is not without light: perhaps one day, they will find that despite the high-tech and digital design, the theme of the most brilliant movies, however, will always remains the same.

qxn_1987UID：2610437

5# pluka

我的理解是：“exciting” 和“cryptic”都是修饰“headline”：可能模糊但令人兴奋的标题（不晓得对不对。。。）

中原527UID：2707367

2# fancyww
我也想看...
找不到人陪...
只好带自家弟弟...

windandrain2004UID：2597690

占楼~~

rodgoodUID：2619326

5# pluka
感觉这里的if并列连接前后两部分，前者是作者的确定的感受，后者是作者不确定的想法。有“或者说，或许”的意思。
如果不对请指正。:)

qxn_1987UID：2610437

HOW much our world of moving-image entertainment has changed in the past decade! We now live in a world of the 24-Hour Movie, one that plays anytime and anywhere you want (and sometimes whether you want it to or not). It’s a movie we can access at home by pressing a few buttons on the remote (and agreeing to pay more for it than you might at the local video store) or with a few clicks of the mouse. The 24-Hour Movie now streams instead of unspools, filling our screens with images that, more and more, have been created algorithmically rather than photographically.

And yet how little our world of moving-image entertainment has changed! On April 14, 1896, The New York Times ran an article with the exciting if cryptic headline “Edison’s Latest Triumph.” The triumph was the Vitascope（老式放映机）, a machine that “projects upon a large area of canvas groups that appear to stand forth from the canvas, and move with great facility and agility, as though actuated by separate impulses.” A proprietor of the music hall（杂耍戏院）where the Vitascope was shown off said this machine would reproduce “scenes from various successful plays and operas of the season, and well-known statesmen and celebrities,” adding, “No other manager in this city will have the right to exhibit the Vitascope.”

Today, even when digital, our movies are still filled with celebrities and scenes from successful plays (and books and comics), and the owners of image technologies continue to hold on to their exclusive rights（专有权，专营权利）
ferociously. Edison didn’t invent the Vitascope, but that’s another story. The story I want to tell here does involve him. But first I want to fast-forward to a recent night when, at a movie theater rigged（作弊的，非法操纵的） for 3-D projection, I saw James Cameron’s “Avatar” with an audience that watched the screen with the kind of fixed attention that has become rare at the movies. True, everyone was wearing 3-D glasses, which makes it difficult to check your cellphone obsessively, but they also seemed captivated.

When it was over, people broke into enthusiastic applause and, unusually, many stayed to watch the credits（呃，终于理解-----影视节目中列出的、参与制作的人员名单）, as if to linger in the movie. Although much has been made of the technologies used in “Avatar,” its beauty and nominal politics, it is the social experience of the movie — as an event that needs to be enjoyed with other people for maximum impact — which is more interesting. That’s particularly true after a decade when watching movies became an increasingly solitary affair, something between you and your laptop. “Avatar” affirms the deep pleasures of the communal, and it does so by exploiting a technology (3-D), which appears to invite you into the movie even as it also forces you to remain attentively in your seat.

“Avatar” serves as a nice jumping-off point（起点，出发点） to revisit how movies and our experience of them have changed. For starters, when a critic calls a new release “a film” these days, there’s a chance that what she (and you) are looking at wasn’t made with film processes but was created, from pre-visualization to final credits, with digital technologies. 【Yet, unless a director or distributor（发行人） calls attention to the technologies used — as do techno-fetishists like Michael Mann and David Fincher, who used bleeding-edge digital cameras to make “Collateral” (2004) and “Zodiac” (2007) — it’s also probable that most reviewers won’t mention if a movie was even shot in digital, because they haven’t noticed or don’t care.】

This seems like a strange state of affairs. Film is profoundly changing — or, if you believe some theorists and historians, is already dead— something that most moviegoers（常看电影的人） don’t know. Yet, because the visible evidence of this changeover has become literally hard to see, and because the implications are difficult to grasp, it is also understandable why the shift to digital has not attracted more intense analysis outside film and media studies. Bluntly put, something is happening before our eyes. 【We might see an occasional digital artifact (usually, a bit of unintentional data) when a director shoots digital in bright light — look for a pattern of squares or a yellowish（微黄的） tint — but we’re usually too busy with the story to pay much mind.】

Should you care? I honestly don’t know, because I’m not sure what to think about this brave new image world we have entered. I love the luxurious look and warmth of film, and I fervently hope it never disappears. And yet many of us who grew up watching movies in the predigital era have rarely experienced the ones in, and shown on, film in all their visual glory: battered（打扁了的，敲碎的） prints and bad projection have helped thwart the ideal experience. Theater 80 St. Marks, a downtown Manhattan repertory house where I spent a lot of time in the 1970s, showed threadbare prints of classic and not-so-classic movies in rear projection, which meant they often looked worse on screen than they did on my television back home.

It is because the movies and our experience of them has changed so radically
in recent years — we can pull a movie out of our pocket now, much as earlier generations pulled out a paperback— that makes it difficult to grasp what is happening. 【In 1996, Susan Sontag set off a storm in cine-circles with an essay, “The Decay of Cinema,” which could have been titled the death of specialized cinephilia, one centered on art-house film (“quintessentially（精粹地，精髓地 a.quintessential）modern”), from Dziga Vertov to Jean-Luc Godard, and experienced inside a movie theater, “ideally the third-row center.” Sontag’s essay inspired a spate of similarly themed if often less vigorous examinations: Google the words “death of cinema,” and you get more than 2.5 million hits. 】

In one sense the beginning of the end of cinema as we tend to understand it can be traced to 1933, the year that a feature-length film — a 1932 detective tale called “The Crooked Circle” — was first shown on television. Few Americans owned sets in the 1930s, but the genie was already out of the bottle, or, rather, the movies were out of the theater. As televisions began to fill postwar（战后的） American homes — from an estimated 20,000 in 1946 to 30.5 million in 1955 — so did the movies, which, despite Hollywood’s initial anxiety, became a crucial television staple. (The studios soon learned that television was a revenue source.) Generations of cinephiles（电影爱好者，影迷） fell in love with the object of their obsession while flopped on the floor, basking in the glow of the family television.

In “The Virtual Life of Film,” an elegant 2007 inquiry into the past, present and future of film, the theorist D. N. Rodowick writes, “All that was chemical and photographic is disappearing into the electronic and digital.” Film captures moments in time, preserving them spatially in images we can root around in, get lost in. Digital delivers data, zeroes and ones that are transformed into images, and this is a difference to contemplate. The truth is that the film object has already changed, from preproduction to projection. And the traditional theatrical experience that shaped how viewers looked at film and, by extension, the world, has been mutating for some time. The new types of image consumption and digital technologies have complicated our understanding of cinema.

It’s also a good bet that this teenager also watches movies in theaters. If she goes to “Avatar,” she will see a movie that, despite its exotic beauty, seems familiar, even in 3-D. Narrative cinema employs devices, from camera placement to editing, that direct your attention and, if the movie is successful and you fall under（受到（影响等），被归入） its sway, lock you into the story. Mr. Cameron might be a visionary of a type, but he’s an old-fashioned (and canny) storyteller and he locks you in tightly. The 3-D images are often spectacular, and his characters, like the figures in that 1896 Edison film, “appear to stand forth from the canvas, and move with great facility and agility, as though actuated by separate impulses.”


Comments:

As the technology develops dramatically, our patterns of life also change radically. Digital technology is one of the examples, such as 3-D images.

Obviously, a lot of us adores movies, and many are cinephiles. Even though, bruntly put, most people don’t grasp that fim is profoundly changing, including moviegoers. There are several reasons account for this phenomenon, as far as I’m concerned.

Frist, we pay more attention to the content of the movie, instead of technology used in the movie; we are usually too busy with the story to pay much mind. Second, there are numerous ways and implements to watch a movie as the development of high-tech, such as laptop, TV, and hand-held devices---MP4, PSP. Last but not least, our understanding of cinema have been complicated by the new types of image consumption and digital technologies.

Anyhow, watch a movie in a theater will be a wonderful, spectacular and completely different experience.

海王泪UID：2673613

My Sum-Up
Floating in the Digital Experience
1.Our world of moving-image entertainment has changed significantly in the technology of making images more and more algorithmically than photographically.
2.And yet moving-image entertainment has changed little in the projector and content.
3.But today movies with new technology (3-D) results in fixed attention that has become rare at the past movies
4.People are greatly captivated not only by new-tech beauty but also the communal experience of pleasure with other people.
5.“Avatar” serves as a nice jumping-off point to revisit how movies and our experience of them have changed. Unless a maker calls attention to the technologies uses, reviewers won’t mention it.
6.Film is profoundly changing and reviewers haven’t noticed or don’t care..
7.People in predigital era have rarely experienced the past threadbare image world in cinema.
8.The movies and our experience of them has changed so radically in recent years and cinema has been decaying.
9.The shift of movies medium: The end of cinema may be due to the development of television.
10.The new types of image consumption and digital technologies have complicated our understanding of cinema.
11.And yet we still watch movies though people enjoy them in different ways
12.Movies need the spectacular 3-D images instead of only camera for more success in locking audience into story.
13.The 3-D images close the space between us and the screen. It also shows us a bright future.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Sentences and Phrases
Useful Expressions
And yet how little our world of moving-image entertainment has changed!
And yet=however=but
I saw James Cameron’s “Avatar” with an audience that watched the screen with the kind of fixed attention that has become rare at the movies.
But they also seemed captivated.
Yet, unless a director or distributor calls attention to the technologies used — as do techno-fetishists like Michael Mann and David Fincher.
Do something with fixed attention=be captivated by something=be called attention to
Do away with all fetishes and superstitions.
Fetish of money/a Fetish of luxury goods
Fetish=obsession=addiction=infatuation=mania
It is because the movies and our experience of them has changed so radically in recent years
(Something change) radically=significantly=drastic
That’s particularly true after a decade when watching movies became an increasingly solitary affair, something between you and your laptop.
Solitary affair=Individual business
“Avatar” serves as a nice jumping-off point to revisit how movies and our experience of them have changed.
A jumping-off point=start <->end=termination
The movie is successful and you fall under its sway, lock you into the story.
Fall under someone’s sway=be under control of someone
I love the luxurious look and warmth of film, and I fervently hope it never disappears.
Fervently hope=be eager to hope=strongly hope
So did the movies, which, despite Hollywood’s initial anxiety, became a crucial television staple.
Crucial=vital=critical=central<->peripheral
Staple=chief=main=principal

Unfamiliar Words
Cryptic, proprietor, ferociously, rigged, Avatar, techno-fetishists, Bluntly, fervently, fervently, threadbare, exotic, cinephilia, perched

Materials
Ideas
【The Mechanism of Social/Community Event】
People may not only enjoy the new tech of movie individually but also other experience. It is the social experience of the movie — as an event that needs to be enjoyed with other people for maximum impact — which is more interesting.
【Something Develop in unnoticeable Progress】
Yet, because the visible evidence of this changeover has become literally hard to see, and because the implications are difficult to grasp, it is also understandable why the shift to digital has not attracted more intense analysis outside film and media studies.
Literally=actually=indeed
It is also understandable why=It is easy to understand why
The visible evidence of …is literally hard to see
The implications of … is difficult to grasp.
【Parenthesis - Signal about Details to a Whole Picture】
And the traditional theatrical experience that shaped how viewers looked at film and, by extension, the world, has been mutating for some time.
Mutate=transform=change->changeover

Examples
【More and more Active Selection—From TV to Internet】
It’s a movie we can access at home by pressing a few buttons on the remote or with a few clicks of the mouse.
【Description about the Audience for an excellent Speech/Film/Show】
When it was over, people broke into enthusiastic applause and, unusually, many stayed to watch the credits, as if to linger in the movie.
【The Development of Images(camera, movies, photo,etc)】
“All that was chemical and photographic is disappearing into the electronic and digital.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Reference
Vitascope--“Edison’s Latest Triumph.”
Vitascope is an early film projector first demonstrated in 1895 by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat. The pair publicly demonstrated an image projection device at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia which they called the Phantoscope. This prototype of modern film projectors cast images onto a wall or screen for a moderately large audience. The inventors, heady with the scent of success, became at odds with one another and began fighting over credit for the invention.
Armat, armed with legal authority, independently sold the Phantoscope to The Kinetoscope Company. The company realized that their Kinetoscope would soon be a thing of the past with the rapidly advancing proliferation of early cinematic engineering. They were very interested in this newest magic lantern and approached Thomas Edison to finance the manufacture of the instrument.
Edison agreed to the deal on one condition: in classic Edison style, he would henceforth be credited with the invention of the machine that he renamed the "Vitascope". [1]
Edison's involvement soon extended to film production for the projector in the new Edison movie studio, Edison's Black Maria.

Michael Mann and David Fincher, who used bleeding-edge digital cameras to make “Collateral” (2004) and “Zodiac” (2007)
Bleeding edge is a term that refers to technology that is so new (and thus, presumably, not perfected) that the user is required to risk reductions in stability and productivity in order to use it[1]. It also refers to the tendency of the latest technology to be extremely expensive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_edge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiac_(film)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_(film)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(2009_film)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
My Comment
Floating in the Digital Experience, from the New York Times, talks about the current digital technology used and thus the transformation in movies. It build a scene that how our world of moving-image entertainment gradually and profoundly mutate without our notice.

This is good details (movies) we can use to show the benefits of technology (digital life). Lower cost, visual glory, fantastic experience, and convenience for spread make available our better experience of image entertainment than before.

Luckily, not only I got ideas about the development of technology but also realize the power of art. The article enlightens my experience about stories and I realize one of the crucial functions of art.
That is, effectively access to kinds of social belief and value.

As far as I am concerned, the experience of art is an echo of shared ideas, beliefs and values that permeate in our mind. For evidence, we can see “It is the social experience of the movie — as an event that needs to be enjoyed with other people for maximum impact — which is more interesting.” By accepting particular philosophy, we could develop self-identity. Allow me to cite a cliche here, human is social animal.

I also realize that how art effectively help the inherence of belief and value generation after generation. Only words may not works; images with sound can create impressive scene for people in mind and urge them to share with others. In order to save spirit heritage, in the past people use rituals with singing and dancing, or tell vivid stories and simultaneously draw some pictures in cavern or on bark; nowadays, we have director and distributer who do excellent works - flowing, vivid images with grace of voice and music – for locking audience into stories.

Moreover, I find relationship in technology and arts, that people create some techniques for more effectively transferring ideas through art. Take “Avatar” as illustration, “…the 3-D, by contrast, blurs that edge, closing the space between you and the screen even more.” It inevitably creates unbelievable experience by personally into the scene. And again, the echo of particular ideas, beliefs and values permeate in our mind, to an astonishing degree, that we are eager to share with others.

123runfordreamUID：2697608

HOW much our world of moving-image entertainment has changed in the past decade! We now live in a world of the 24-Hour Movie, one that plays anytime and anywhere you want (and sometimes whether you want it to or not). It’s a movie we can access at home by pressing a few buttons on the remote (and agreeing to pay more for it than you might at the local video store) or with a few clicks of the mouse. The 24-Hour Movie now streams instead of unspools, filling our screens with images that, more and more, have been created algorithmically (adv. 在算法上) rather than photographically (adv. 摄影般地, 逼真地).

And yet how little our world of moving-image entertainment has changed! On April 14, 1896, The New York Times ran an article with the exciting if cryptic (marked by an often perplexing brevity) headline “Edison’s Latest Triumph.” The triumph was the Vitascope, a machine that “projects upon a large area of canvas groups that appear to stand forth from the canvas, and move with great facility and agility, as though actuated by separate impulses.” A proprietor of the music hall where the Vitascope was shown off said this machine would reproduce “scenes from various successful plays and operas of the season, and well-known statesmen and celebrities,” adding, “No other manager in this city will have the right to exhibit the Vitascope.”

Today, even when digital, our movies are still filled with celebrities and scenes from successful plays (and books and comics), and the owners of image technologies continue to hold on to their exclusive rights ferociously (extremely intense). Edison didn’t invent the Vitascope, but that’s another story. The story I want to tell here does involve him. But first I want to fast-forward to a recent night when, at a movie theater rigged for 3-D projection, I saw James Cameron’s “Avatar” with an audience that watched the screen with
the kind of fixed attention that has become rare at the movies. True, everyone was wearing 3-D glasses, which makes it difficult to check your cellphone obsessively, but they also seemed captivated.

When it was over, people broke into enthusiastic applause and, unusually, many stayed to watch the credits (recognition by name of a person contributing to a performance (as a film or telecast))
, as if to linger in the movie. Although much has been made of the technologies used in “Avatar,” its beauty and nominal politics, it is the social experience of the movie — as an event that needs to be enjoyed with other people for maximum impact — which is more interesting. That’s particularly true after a decade when watching movies became an increasingly solitary affair, something between you and your laptop. “Avatar” affirms the deep pleasures of the communal, and it does so by exploiting a technology (3-D), which appears to invite you into the movie even as it also forces you to remain attentively in your seat.

“Avatar” serves as a nice jumping-off point to revisit how movies and our experience of them have changed. For starters, when a critic calls a new release “a film” these days, there’s a chance that what she (and you) are looking at wasn’t made with film processes but was created, from pre-visualization to final credits, with digital technologies. Yet, unless a director or distributor calls attention to the technologies used — as do techno-fetishists like Michael Mann and David Fincher, who used bleeding-edge (the most advanced)digital cameras to make “Collateral” (2004) and “Zodiac” (2007) — it’s also probable that most reviewers won’t mention if a movie was even shot in digital, because they haven’t noticed or don’t care.

This seems like a strange state of affairs. Film is profoundly changing — or, if you believe some theorists and historians, is already dead — something that most moviegoers don’t know. Yet, because the visible evidence of this changeover has become literally hard to see, and because the implications are difficult to grasp, it is also understandable why the shift to digital has not attracted more intense analysis outside film and media studies. Bluntly put (speaking in a direct honest way that sometimes upsets people), something is happening before our eyes. We might see an occasional digital artifact (usually, a bit of unintentional data) when a director shoots digital in bright light — look for a pattern of squares or a yellowish (slightly yellow)tint — but we’re usually too busy with the story to pay much mind.

Should you care? I honestly don’t know, because I’m not sure what to think about this brave new image world we have entered. I love the luxurious look and warmth of film, and I fervently hope it never disappears. And yet many of us who grew up watching movies in the predigital era have rarely experienced the ones in, and shown on, film in all their visual glory: battered prints and bad projection have helped thwart the ideal experience. Theater 80 St. Marks, a downtown Manhattan repertory house where I spent a lot of time in the 1970s, showed threadbare prints of classic and not-so-classic movies in rear projection, which meant they often looked worse on screen than they did on my television back home.

It is because the movies and our experience of them has changed so radically in recent years — we can pull a movie out of our pocket now, much as earlier generations pulled out a paperback — that makes it difficult to grasp what is happening. In 1996, Susan Sontag set off a storm in cine-circles with an essay, “The Decay of Cinema,” which could have been titled the death of specialized cinephilia, one centered on art-house film (“quintessentially modern”), from Dziga Vertov to Jean-Luc Godard, and experienced inside a movie theater, “ideally the third-row center.” Sontag’s essay inspired a spate of (a large number or amount) similarly themed if often less vigorous examinations: Google the words “death of cinema,” and you get more than 2.5 million hits.

In one sense the beginning of the end of cinema as we tend to understand it can be traced to 1933, the year that a feature-length film — a 1932 detective tale called “The Crooked Circle” — was first shown on television. Few Americans owned sets in the 1930s, but the genie was already out of the bottle, or, rather, the movies were out of the theater. As televisions began to fill postwar American homes — from an estimated 20,000 in 1946 to 30.5 million in 1955 — so did the movies, which, despite Hollywood’s initial anxiety, became a crucial television staple. (The studios soon learned that television was a revenue source.) Generations of cinephiles fell in love with the object of their obsession while flopped on the floor, basking in the glow of the family television.

In “The Virtual Life of Film,” an elegant 2007 inquiry into the past, present and future of film, the theorist D. N. Rodowick writes, “All that was chemical and photographic is disappearing into the electronic and digital.” Film captures moments in time, preserving them spatially (adv.空间地; 占有空间地; 存在于空间地)in images we can root around in, get lost in. Digital delivers data, zeroes and ones that are transformed into images, and this is a difference to contemplate. The truth is that the film object has already changed, from preproduction to projection. And the traditional theatrical experience that shaped how viewers looked at film and, by extension, the world, has been mutating for some time. The new types of image consumption and digital technologies have complicated our understanding of cinema.

And yet we still watch movies. And if it looks like a duck (in widescreen) and quacks like a duck (in stereo), nothing has changed, right? （意思是电影屏幕和剧本都没有改变？）It has and it hasn’t, as we will only understand as film continues to disappear. These days instead of falling in love with the movies at home in front of the television, new generations fall in love with movies they watch on hand-held devices that, however small, play images that are larger than those Edison showed to customers before the invention of the Vitascope. A teenager watching a movie on her iPhone might not be looking at an actual film. But she is enjoying something like it, something that because of its narrative strategies and visual style carries the deep imprint of cinema.（翻译不出来）

It’s also a good bet that this teenager also watches movies in theaters. If she goes to “Avatar,” she will see a movie that, despite its exotic beauty, seems familiar, even in 3-D. Narrative cinema employs devices, from camera placement to editing, that direct your attention and, if the movie is successful and you fall under its sway, lock you into the story. Mr. Cameron might be a visionary of a type, but he’s an old-fashioned (and canny) storyteller and he locks you in tightly. The 3-D images are often spectacular, and his characters, like the figures in that 1896 Edison film, “appear to stand forth from the canvas, and move with great facility and agility, as though actuated by separate impulses.”

You can get lost in a movie, or so it seems, and melt into its world. But even when seated third row center and occupying two mental spaces, you understand that you and the movie inhabit separate realms. When I watched “The Dark Knight” in Imax, I felt that I was at the very edge of the screen . “Avatar,” in 3-D, by contrast, blurs that edge, closing the space between you and the screen even more. Like a video game designer, Mr. Cameron seems to want to invite you into the digital world he has created even if, like a film director, he wants to determine your route.
Perched(to place on a perch, a height, or a precarious spot) between film and digital, “Avatar” shows us a future in which movies will invite us further into them and perhaps even allow us to choose not just the hero’s journey through the story, but also our own.（这句话理解不了…）


Comment:
I guess the author must be enlightened a lot by the movie of Avatar, which interests me much more then before since I’ve heard it is a film that changes your idea of what movie is.
Back to this article, the author has discussed the reform of movie from, as he advises, the preproduction to the projection. Indeed, also the ways we enjoy it have been changed rapidly with the developing of technology involved in it. We might feel lucky for having such bleeding-edge tech device to show us the virtual image so reality that it seems we are being through them. And there may have an unpredicted future on movie industry for we have no idea about what the technology would bring us and the human being’s wisdom, too. It is a trend for film to abandon the old ways to find new ones to content the need of customers. We’ll see.

plukaUID：2721764

and perhaps even allow us to choose not just the hero’s journey through the story, but also our own.（这句话理解不了…）
123runfordream 发表于 2010-1-2 21:44

是说不一定要跟着电影里主角们的步伐，而自己去开辟故事情节吧，就好像角色扮演游戏一样？

splendidsunUID：2723757

1-2
Actually，I'm fervently anticipate the release of "Avatar". Because a spate of highly evaluations have been spread out. Contrast to the worries from the author, I found that the market of cinema in China recovers from the recession these days. When I was still in the middle school, I heard a piece of news that reported the poor conditions of cinemas in China. At that time, people tended to watch VCD or DVD of movies at home because of the low costs. Almost half of the cinemas couldn't meet the end and have to close. As the spread of computers and Internet, watching movies online seems to be a fashion. Sometimes we could watch the latest ones online before the movies unspool in the mainland of China. Also, we could choose the most valuable and highly-praised movies and watch them in cinema. Although we have more methods to watch movies, the best way to appreciate a good movie is still watching it in cinema taking the quality of graphic and acoustic effect into consideration. And the high-tech which is widely used in the movies attracts more audiences to enjoy the visual pleasures in the cinema. And the prices of movies could be accepted nowadays which gives access to the rank and file to enter the cinema and share the happiness with others. Thus, in my viewpoint, the prosperousness of the movie market will remain in recent years. Because it could fill people's lives with entertainment which satisfied modern people in such a competitive society.

错字
Prosperousity----prosperousness 繁荣 bloom
Competitive---competitive 竞争的

好词
cryptic 神秘的
triumph 凯旋，胜利
vitascope 老式放映机
agility灵活，敏捷
actuate驱动
exclusive right 专有权
ferociously野蛮的
rig操纵，装配
obsessively 痴痴地，着迷地
captivate迷住，吸引
break into enthusiastic applause突然给予热情的掌声
credits演职员名单
linger 消磨，缓慢度过，徘徊
solitary 孤独的，独居的
communal 公共的
jumping-off point出发点，起点
for starters首先，从……开始=as a starter
profound深深的
bleeding-edge =cutting-edge
shot
moviegoer常看电影的人
changeover逆转，转变
bluntly坦率的
bright light 强光
fervently诚心的
battered 磨损的
thwart阻碍
repertory全部剧目，仓库
threadbare磨破的
rear projection背面投影
radically根本上的
decay衰退
quintessentially标准地，典型地
a spate of 一阵
cinephile影迷
spatially空间上的
contemplate冥思苦想
hand-held devices手提式的设备
bet 打赌
placement人员配置
fall under one's sway受到……的影响
Perch位于，栖息

Useful sentences
1. But first I want to fast-forward to a recent night when, at a movie theater rigged for 3-D projection, I saw James Cameron’s “Avatar” with an audience that watched the screen with the kind of fixed attention that has become rare at the movies.

2.“Avatar” affirms the deep pleasures of the communal, and it does so by exploiting a technology (3-D), which appears to invite you into the movie even as it also forces you to remain attentively in your seat.

3.“Avatar” serves as a nice jumping-off point to revisit how movies and our experience of them have changed.

4. Bluntly put, something is happening before our eyes.
5. Sontag’s essay inspired a spate of similarly themed if often less vigorous examinations: Google the words “death of cinema,” and you get more than 2.5 million hits.

6. Generations of cinephiles fell in love with the object of their obsession while flopped on the floor, basking in the glow of the family television.

prettywraithUID：197049

Comments (2010-01-02):

At first glance, I was attracted by the Avatar's glorious photos. Avatar recently arouses a new trend after the 2012 screened in the cinemas. By the dreamy 3-D images, Avatar easily earned 700 million dollars in 12 days. Moreover, a vast majority people are waiting for its showing in China, as they anticipated the Terminator Salvation, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, 2012 or Twilight. Obviously, comparing with the Godfather (1972), Forrest Gump (1994) or The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Avatar is not counted as one fascinating story. Of course, the audiences who enter the cinema also do not expect it will be great science fiction film. Accurately, wonderful images, dazzling technology, tight scenarios, and exotic creatures make Avatar more similar Visual Reality than one charming film.

Because Avatar does not publish in China, later, I only see its preview on the internet. At last, I begin to read this passage. Instead of captivated by Avatar, this passage pull me back to the history of movies and give me a nice jump-off point to revisit my experience of them. As a movie fans, I have seen numerous films from video tapes to DVDs. But I rarely notice which is digital movie, which is old-fashioned movie. Reminded by the author's comments, I realize movies have changed a lot in past decade and digital techniques have brought us into new movies' era. With the development of science and technology, directors can really make unimaginable images in the films, which are hardly discriminated by human eyes. Today, people could enjoy the fresh experience brought by the digital movies, and see the animation characters completely melt into the real world in the movies. People could make any images, only you can imagine. I very appreciate the last sentence of the passage, "movies will allow us to choose not just the hero's journey through the story, but also our own". Movie makers have open a new gate of digital experience.

Good sentences:

Yet, unless a director or distributor calls attention to the technologies used — as do techno-fetishists like Michael Mann and David Fincher, who used bleeding-edge digital cameras to make “Collateral” (2004) and “Zodiac” (2007) — it’s also probable that most reviewers won’t mention if a movie was even shot in digital, because they haven’t noticed or don’t care.

Perched between film and digital, “Avatar” shows us a future in which movies will invite us further into them and perhaps even allow us to choose not just the hero’s journey through the story, but also our own.