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

qxn_1987UID: 2610437

7# 中原527

加油！！

敛寒影UID: 2613052

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).

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.

“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.

Bluntly坦率地，率直地 put, something is happening before our eyes.


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

It is because the movies and our experience of them has changed so radically根本上，以激进的方式 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.


Comment:


I am firmly assent with the auther that no matter what huge changes in moving-image entertainment,what attract us most is the acenario in the film or the emotion it conweys,the teconology is just an instrument or bi-product to make the movie affluent.Like the author said we are too busy with the story to pay much mind on the digital artifact causing profonding changes in film.Moreover,
the new types of image consumption and digital technologies have complicated our understanding of cinema.As to myself,I like the simple story inspired or moved me most,no matter what luxurious look it wears.

Regarding the problem “The Decay of Cinema”,I think it is more shaking watching movie on movie theater than on the notebook without the happiness bring by share.I think more people would like to watching movie on notebook,the one way make our modern generation prone to undertake something lonely without shareing each other,which is one of the reason people take precautions against each other during intercourse.

jinziqiUID: 2387034

The 24-Hour Movie now streams instead of unspools(没查到这个词...), filling our screens with images that, more and more, have been created algorithmically rather than photographically.

When it was over, people broke into enthusiastic applause and, unusually, many stayed to watch the credits, as if to linger in the movie.
(I did linger in cinema for many times watching the credits or waiting for the name of background music...)

That’s particularly true after a decade when watching movies became an increasingly solitary affair, something between you and your laptop.
(I did enjoy a lot of movies with my cute laptop...)

ferociously (marked by extreme and violent energy)
implications 可能的影响
fervently (with passionate fervor)
radically 根本地
obsession 痴迷
spatially 空间地
theatrical 戏剧的
mutating 变异

I thought it was a passage about Avatar, which I expect to watch in the cinema with the 3-D glasses. I have watched a 3-D movie before named UP, which is also a simple one, but meaningful and touched. But when I finished reading the whole passages, it talked about technology used in making movies. It reminds me of 2012, a disaster movie, spending more than 0.2 billion dollars. Those effects such as the breakup of the ground and the eruption of the volcano seem so real that draw a quantity of people's attention to experience the movie in cinema.

In my point of view, I don't like commercial movie. In contrast, I like those movie telling a meaningful story and help people to see the society clearly. Also, those romantic movies are beautiful which are easy to bring the common feeling among people. So, the technology is not such significant for me. Even those action movies such as Mary and Max and Up are great with simple scenes.

adammaksimUID: 2675466

unspool   screen with a film

cryptic  adj. having or seeming to have a hidden or ambiguous meaning

vitascope 放映机

statesman  n.is usually a politician or other notable public figure who has had a long and respected career in politics or government at the national and international level. As a term of respect, it is usually left to supporters or commentators to use the term. When politicians retire, they are often referred to as elder statesmen. 就是高级政客喽~

fast-forward v.快进   这个动词够生动

rig out  装扮

jumping-off point  出发点

for starters  = to begin with

Fetishist  拜物的人
fetish an object believed to have supernatural powers, or in particular, a man-made object that has power over others.

bleeding-edge  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.

paperback  平装本

cine-circle  电影圈

cinephilia  影痴

art-house film   实验性的，不公开放映的电影

genie a magic spirit believed to have human form and serve the person who calls it

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.

comments:
To be honest, I cannot figure out whether this article is a obscure advertisement about Avatar or just a personal emotion revealing of a nostalgic author. Yet no matter what the truth is, what certain for me is I will go to enjoy Avatar in a cinema with a 3-D glasses. As a movie-lover, if not a cinephilia, I have to admit for a long time, I fail to persuade myself to get a ticket. The same is true for most people. Maybe not only the film, but also the movie, as a entertainment industry, is dying.
What is a movie supposed to be? As my old-fashioned idea, a good movie is always meant to tell a good story, and no matter what its form, chemical or electronic, is. Spectacular images maybe a perfect opening remark, however, what finally lead the audience into the world created by the director is the story itself. Image is just a carrier for a movie, as paper for a book. When I was watching the film "Schindler's list", I seldom realized whether the screen is Black and White or colored during the nearly three-hour's heart-stunning journey. The plot bound me tightly on my seat until the credit was over.
Movie is a art deserving our admiration with our soul.

prettywraithUID: 197049

5# pluka


呵呵，本以为是介绍电影的，娱乐一下，没想句子还是晦涩了点。

关于if我理解的和你们差不多。我查了韦氏给出相对比较标准的解释，如下：

1if 1    n.

Pronunciation:	'if, əf
Function:	conjunction
Etymology:	Middle English, from Old English gif; akin to Old High German ibu if
Date:	before 12th century

1 a : in the event that b : allowing that c : on the assumption that d : on condition that
2 : WHETHER <asked if the mail had come> <I doubt if I'll pass the course>
3 ― used as a function word to introduce an exclamation expressing a wish <if it would only rain>
4 : even though : although perhaps <an interesting if untenable argument尽管站不住脚但是一篇有趣的文章>  作名词if有这个意思，就是“尽管...但是”
5 : and perhaps not even <few if any changes are expected> ― often used with not <difficult if not impossible>

豆腐店的86UID: 2512956

Film
Floating in the Digital Experience
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: December 30, 2009
生词
读多遍才懂的句子
好句子，好表达法
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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（fill 用得好！） — 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. （“享受”的好表达！）

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.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
unspools
algorithmically
proprietor
solitary
jumping-off point
techno-fetishists
fervently
thwart
cinephiles
flopped
contemplate
preproduction
projection
agility
---------------------------------------------------------
comments

Digital techniques bring the world a whole new impression on movies. While we can still recall those days of watching film in black and white, 3-D is prevailing all around the globe. Thanks to the progress we made all these years on movie industry that now can enjoy a wonderful Hollywood movie within a few mouse clicks. I not a fan of cinema movie, instead, I prefer watching high quality films on my laptop. It is true that the experience of blurry edge, as mentioned in the article, can’t be provided by watching AVATAR in my laptop, but we have reason to believe that that day is not that far from us.

prettywraithUID: 197049

12# 123runfordream


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）  我理解是“但是她（上一句话的teenager）喜欢这种东西（Iphone），或者这类能够表达电影深刻内涵的叙事策略和视觉样式东西”

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…）

我理解是“阿凡达给我们展现了一个未来，在这个未来，电影将会邀请我们进一步融入他们（指互动，虚拟现实类的东西）；甚至可能，让我们不仅可以选择故事中英雄的人生命运，而且也是我们自己的”----这里可能要看过阿凡达才能理解，3d电影效果逼真，比较像虚拟现实东西；而阿凡达里面有这样的情节，人类的男主人公坐在轮椅上通过自己的意识控制另外一种生物的他（虚拟现实技术的一种）；所以我理解这里作者这里说这话有这两层意思。

plukaUID: 2721764

And if it looks like a duck (in widescreen) and quacks like a duck (in stereo), nothing has changed, right?是不是举例？只要看上去像只鸭子，叫起来也像鸭子，那观众才不会管到底是从一只真鸭子拍摄到的影像还是一只数码制作的鸭子。

But she is enjoying something like it, something that because of its narrative strategies and visual style carries the deep imprint of cinema.
它（iphone或MP4播放的影片）的叙事性和观赏性都带着电影的烙印，而她因此十分享受这样的乐趣。

qxn_1987UID: 2610437

22# prettywraith

我的理解是：做了一个比喻

鸭子（大屏幕的电影）和呷呷的叫的鸭子（立体声的电影），实际上都是鸭子
也就是说，不管采取什么样的途径看电影（后面说的，TV，vitascope,iphone或者是前面的3-D），其实都是在看电影。因此后面作者举例有：

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.

也不知道说没说明白。。不知道对不对。。

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

Comment:

What a wonderful experience do we have through the amazing development of visual presentation. Thanks to the existence of film, television, video tape, computer and digital camera, numerous original works such as paintings and historical documents are available to everyone. Not only do they create a brand new world, but they also enable anyone-not just scholars-to have access to these works. To illustrate this point of view clearly, here’s a good example. Li, a Chinese student who has never been abroad before, could drone on for hours about the dramatic moment that God breathes life into Adam by the magical touch in the magnificent fresco of the Sistine Chapel in Italy. The reason why he has an exhaustive knowledge of this art works comes from a documentary film about the famous art works all over the world and the satisfactory Internet search engine.

Of course, anxiety and apprehension have occurred when a trend forces mankind to accept something new. In this case, it refers to the rise of visual novelty which aims at altering mankind’s life gradually and completely. Most of the 30s and above have witnessed the earth-shaking change especially since the invention of computer and the wide spread of Internet. The original fear that books are meant to be replaced by the computer is eliminated when man recognize the drying up of imagination which should be fired by books. So the current trend is that books and computers would coexist for quite a long time.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

Questions：

1.True, everyone was wearing 3-D glasses, which makes it difficult to check your cellphone obsessively, but they also seemed captivated.
这句没看懂，为什么是转折关系啊？

2.Although much has been made of the technologies used in “Avatar,” its beauty and nominal politics, ....
这个nominal politics 指的是什么啊？

3.On April 14, 1896, The New York Times ran an article with the exciting if cryptic headline “Edison’s Latest Triumph.”
好奇怪的用法：run an artical ?

prettywraithUID: 197049

24# qxn_1987

对

prettywraithUID: 197049

26# zhengchangdian

回答正常点疑问：

1.True, everyone was wearing 3-D glasses, which makes it difficult to check your cellphone obsessively, but they also seemed captivated.
这句没看懂，为什么是转折关系啊？ ——就是说“可能是因为带着3-d眼镜不方便总接电话（不得不聚精会神的看这些电影），但是这些3-d电影实际上还是很吸引人的”

2.Although much has been made of the technologies used in “Avatar,” its beauty and nominal politics, ....
这个nominal politics 指的是什么啊？——补充用在Avatar的技术，可以理解为美丽的，没有太多内容的场面

3.On April 14, 1896, The New York Times ran an article with the exciting if cryptic headline “Edison’s Latest Triumph.”
好奇怪的用法：run an artical ? ——查一下字典吧，run的用法很丰富的

tequilawineUID: 2702008

Algorithmically



An algorithm is a series of mathematical steps, especially in a computer program, which will give you the answer to a particular kind of problem or question.
Algorithmica 算法的
规则的
系统的
Proprietor
所有人 业主
Cryptic
私密的隐秘的
Ferociously

A ferocious animal, person, or action is very fierce and violent.

A ferocious war, argument, or other form of conflict involves a great deal of anger, bitterness, and determination.

If you describe actions or feelings as ferocious, you mean that they are intense and determined.

Lindbergh was startled at the ferocious depth of anti-British feeling.
exclusive

If you describe something as exclusive, you mean that it is limited to people who have a lot of money or who belong to a high social class, and is therefore not available to everyone.

He is already a member of Britain's most exclusive club...

The City was criticised for being too exclusive and uncompetitive.
fast-forward n 快进
nominal 名义上的 有名无实的
communal 公共的 共有的
jumping-off point 出发点
state of affairs 事态 形式
changeover （生产方法
装备等的）完全转变
（方针的）转变

         
A changeover is a change from one activity or system to another.

He again called for a faster changeover to a market economy...

Right now we are in the changeover period between autumn and winter.
Bluntly 坦率地 帅直地
Batter 连续猛击
Thwart 阻挠 阻止
Threadbare 穿旧的 陈旧的
Paperback 平装书
Cine 电影 电影院
Decay衰败 衰落
Bask 对··感到兴趣 晒太阳
Genie 神怪 妖怪 （阿拉伯故事中的）
fall under 受到··影响 被归入

1 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.
2 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 最先进的 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.
3 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. 自问自答
4 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.
5 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. 怎么翻译呀？


Comment

As technology has permeated into every corner of our world, film is also profoundly changing-something that moviegoers may not know. Yet, because the visual evidence of this changeover has become literally hard to see, and the implications are difficult to grasp, it is understandable why the shift to digital hasn’t attracted much attention to analyze outside film and media studies.

As a film fun, maybe a little far from a cinephile, I have to say I don’t care about how does this movie was made. Maybe the new type of image consumption and digital technologies have complicated our understanding of cinema, however bring in luxurious look and warmth of film, I fervently hope that we still can use both of the technologies to give us a amusing movie experience.

dingyi0311UID: 2627919

but the genie was already out of the bottle, or, rather, the movies were out of the theater.
You can get lost in a movie, or so it seems, and melt into its world.
But she is enjoying something like it, something that because of its narrative strategies and visual style carries the deep imprint of cinema.
And if it looks like a duck (in widescreen) and quacks like a duck (in stereo), nothing has changed, right?
But first I want to fast-forward to a recent night when
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.
When it was over, people broke into enthusiastic applause and, unusually, many stayed to watch the credits, as if to linger in the movie.

obsessively过分的
Quintessent精髓的
quintessentially
Paperback平装书
repertory仓库，全部目录
preproduction前期制作
flopped 跳动坐下on the floor
bleeding-edge尖端
Vitascope投影机
Actuate 驱动
jumping-off point转折点




My comments
This article is about the feeling of the author after finish watching a movie called “ avatar” that on show latterly. This movie used new technology-3 D projection. This movie make the scene on the screen are more vivid and lively. It obviously grasp the heart of the audience since people stay in their seats as if get lost in the movie.
This technology remind author the technology that happened years before.-The digital technology was applied in the movie. Contrary to recent application of 3D technology, digital technology had caused little attention. This may becaue the audience are too busy with the story in the movie and could not notice the difference.
However, the author confirmed the changes the digital technology bring to us. He is optimistc at recent 3D movies and hopes that 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.