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

doodaUID: 2712643

先看看大家的宝作

emteddybearUID: 2699606

interesting topic

emteddybearUID: 2699606

cryptic：神秘的
Vitascope：电影放映机
agility：灵巧
exclusive rights ：专利权
ferociously：野蛮地，残忍地
fast-forward ：快进
bleeding-edge：尖端
quintessentially：典型的，精髓的
spate：大批，大量
obsession：困扰
visionary：幻想的




good sentences:
1.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).
2.When it was over, people broke into enthusiastic applause and, unusually, many stayed to watch the credits, as if to linger in the movie.
3.“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.
4.Film captures moments in time, preserving them spatially in images we can root around in, get lost in.
5.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.
6.You can get lost in a movie, or so it seems, and melt into its world.

MY COMMENTS:
I think this topic is quite interesting for most of us. Maybe sometimes film is one of the most important entertainments in our daily life, especially for us generation. This report is introduced by the film “Avatar” which is made by the new digital technology (3D). And I am expecting that too. But it’s pity that there is no Imax room in CD. So sad. I hope there is an Imax room quickly, and we can enjoy the 3D films made latter.
AS for the new technology, I think it’s important and meaningful. Maybe sometimes you can’t perceive the change immediately, but undoubtedly it is changing better and better. In other words, film can’t be changed from Edison’s vitascope over one night, it experiences a long time to improve, and it depends on the development of social technology. Maybe audience doesn’t care about what advanced technology involved in the film. What they care a lot is only the feeling and the relaxation.

AdelineShenUID: 2630498

Comments：
Science and technology has changed this world dramatically. 24-hour online  
has been the life of many teenagers today. Now we cannot live without  
computers, which provide all kinds of information everyday and every time.  
Moving-image entertainment changes our way of entertainment a lot. Now we  
do not need to go to the cinema specifically to watch a movie. All we have to do  
is sitting in the comfortable sofa and watch it in front of our personal computer. I  
love watching films in my bed in such cold days recently. Of course, cinema is  
still a good place of entertainment, especially for some special occasions and  
special films. For example, the film 2012 is better to be watched before a large  
screen with 3-D facility, which can bring out something amazing. In the near  
future, our house might be filled with digital facilities. The wall might become a  
three-dimensional screen covering all the rooms and we can enjoy life from all  
around the world even without walking out of our house. There are beautiful  
sunlight near the beach, snow cover on top of the mountain, bumper harvest in  
the field and clean air in the thick forest. What an amazing world!~

However, while floating in the digital experience, there are other things we  
should consider about besides the enjoyment. Because of the wide-spread of  
personal computers, we are becoming more and more independent. The  
frequency of face-to-face Interaction between people are dropping  
dramatically, which lead to apathy between people. Another problem is that  
people tend to stay at home and the activities outdoors are less and less,  
which threaten the health of people.

All in all, the development of digital technology is a double-edged sword. We  
should take the advantages of it and try our best to avoid the disadvantages.

错字：
Occasion
Three-dimensional

中原527UID: 2707367

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

本帖最后由 prettywraith 于 2010-1-2 09:59 编辑 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（正巧，正如） 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 outof 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.(很好的比喻~) 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 westill 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,(可作为issue例子) “appear to stand forth from the canvas, and move with great facility and agility, as though actuated by separate impulses.” (上文提到过) 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.（层层递进！） 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 throughthe story, but also our own. 链接：http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/movies/03dargis.html?8dpc

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
melt into
融入，使软化，使感动

algorithmically
来源于
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
Vitascope
n.老式放映机
the exciting if cryptic headline
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”(来源韦氏) 感谢prettywraith提供，我不是很懂if在此句中的含义但我也没想到要查韦氏….
Ferociously
来源于ferocious
1 : exhibiting or given to extreme fierceness and unrestrained violence and brutality <a ferocious predator>
2 : extremely intense <ferocious heat>
exclusive rights
专营权利，专有权
Obsessively
强迫性地，分神地
来源于obsessive
1 a : tending to cause obsession b : excessive often to an unreasonable degree
2 : of, relating to, or characterized by obsession : deriving from obsession
Nominal
adj.
名义上的, 有名无实的, 名字的, [语]名词性的
Jumping-off
n.
<美>边远地区,文明终结,世界尽头,起点
Release
n.
版本, 发布
Fetishist
n.
物神崇拜者
intense
adj.
强烈的, 剧烈的, 热切的, 热情的, 激烈的
Bluntly
adv坦率地，率直地
fervently
adv.
热心地, 热诚地
thwart
adj.
横放的
vt.
反对, 阻碍, 横过
adv.
prep.横过
n.
[船]横坐板
radically
adv.
根本上, 以激进的方式
Rapidly
Spate
n．大水
vigorous
adj.
精力旺盛的, 有力的, 健壮的
staple
n.
钉书钉, 钉, 主要产品(或商品), 原材料, 主要成分, 来源
adj.
主要的, 常用的, 大宗生产的
v.
把...分类, 把...分级
Obsession
n.
迷住, 困扰
mutate
v.变异
exotic
adj.
异国情调的, 外来的, 奇异的
Sway
v.
摇摆, 摇动
Spectacular
adj.
引人入胜的, 壮观的
From the article, the recent edition of 3-D’s film “avatar”, which will be on view in the imax lately, means the new era of the cinema coming in. as we know , the latest triumph of Edison was the vitascope, which change our enjoyment of theater in the past. The early generation also remembered the vitascope, a old 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.”But the invention’s television computer and MP4 and so on made decreasing people going into the cinema. With the developing of digital technology, the 3D film let the large number of people return to the movie theater. In addition, “avatar” makes us blurt the edge of screen, and we can close the space between us and the screen even more.

番茄斗斗UID: 2720914

1.The24-Hour Movie now streams instead of unspools（？？）, filling our screens withimages that, more and more, have been created algorithmically(算法) ratherthan photographically.

2.Vitascope：老式放映机

3.That’s particularlytrue after a decade when watching movies became an increasinglysolitary affair, something between you and your laptop. “Avatar”affirms the deep pleasures of the communal, and it does so byexploiting a technology (3-D), which appears to invite you into themovie even as it also forces you to remain attentively in your seat.

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

5.techno-fetishists（科技研究癖）

6.because the visibleevidence of this changeover has become literally hard to see, andbecause the implications are difficult to grasp, it is alsounderstandable why the shift to digital has not attracted more intenseanalysis outside film and media studies.

7.battered prints and bad projection havehelped thwart（阻扰） the ideal experience.

8.Sontag’s essay inspired a spate of similarly themedif often less vigorous examinations（？？）: Google the words “death ofcinema,” and you get more than 2.5 million hits.

9.Few Americans owned sets in the 1930s, but thegenie was already out of the bottle, or, rather, the movies were out ofthe theater.
As televisions began to fill postwar American homes — from an estimated20,000 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 arevenue source.) Generations of cinephiles fell in love with the objectof their obsession while flopped on the floor, basking in the glow ofthe family television.

10.And if it looks like a duck (inwidescreen) and quacks like a duck (in stereo)（？？）, nothing has changed,right?

11.if the movie is successful and you fall under its sway（统治）

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

COMMENT：
By illustrating a current issue "Avatar", the author reminds us that film is changing along with the development of high-tech, as well as the fact that film is dead.
Enjoying its portability and convenience, techno devices today, took place of the cinema and become the optimum choice for moviegoers, especially teenagers. We keep blaming the pirate technology, at the same time,producing the high-tech to attract the audience into the cinema, without retrospecting the essence of film. Film is indeed a storyteller rather than pure moving images; and a storyteller can be everywhere. When "Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel‘ questioned Hollywood on its boundless special effect by simply telling a time travel event, i suddenly found how many times i have lost in the spectacular scene and stumble outside the cinema without a clear idea.
As this is the case, High-techno brings out luxury looks of movies, it none the less leaves some blind spots as well. As a result,Movie maker ,which stunned by the box office as well as the high-techno, instead of improving its story telling skill,  rushes into the high-tech.

miki7catUID: 2533330

Film
Floating in the Digital Experience
Zo&euml; Saldana and Sam Worthington in James Cameron’s “Avatar,” which pushes the 3-D envelope.
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: December 30, 2009
pushes the 3-D envelope【If someone pushes the envelope, they do something to a greater degree or in a more extreme way than it has ever been done before.】
1. HOW much our world of moving-image【动态图像】 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【遥控】 (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.

2. And yet how little our world of moving-image entertainment has changed! On April 14, 1896, The New York Times ran an article with【When newspapers or magazines run a particular item or story or if it runs, it is published or printed.】 the exciting if cryptic
【神秘的】headline “Edison’s Latest Triumph.” The triumph was the Vitascope, a machine that “projects upon【If you project a film or picture onto a screen or wall, you make it appear there.】 a large area of canvas groups that appear to stand forth from the canvas, and move with great facility and agility【灵活性】, as though actuated【If a person is actuated by an emotion, that emotion makes them act in a certain way. If something actuates a device, the device starts working.】 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.”

3. 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【紧紧抓住】 their exclusive【Something that is exclusive is used or owned by only one person or group, and not shared with anyone else.】 rights ferociously【If you describe actions or feelings as ferocious, you mean that they are intense and determined.】. 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【If someone's behaviour is obsessive, they cannot stop doing a particular thing or behaving in a particular way.】, but they also seemed captivated【If you are captivated by someone or something, you find them fascinating and attractive.】.

4. 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.

5. “Avatar” serves as a nice jumping-off point to【A jumping-off point or a jumping-off place is a place, situation, or occasion which you use as the starting point for something.】 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【可能性】 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【科技研究癖】 like Michael Mann and David Fincher, who used bleeding-edge【尖端】 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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【电影界Cine is used to refer to things that are used in or connected with the making or showing of films.】 with an essay, “The Decay of Cinema,” which could have been titled the death of specialized cinephilia, one centered on【If something centers or is centered on a particular thing or person, that thing or person is the main subject of attention.】 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.

9. 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【television set?】 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.

10. 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【If you root around or root about in something, you look for something there, moving things around as you search. (in BRIT, also use root about)】, 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【变异】 for some time. The new types of image consumption and digital technologies have complicated our understanding of cinema.

11. 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.

12. 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.”

13. 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.

My comment
In recent years, people seem to be back to the cinema rather than watching movies on televisions or computers. I make an inference that there would be two reasons. The one is living standards have risen these years, so that the cost of going to the cinema, even if frequently, has not been unaffordable. The other is that people now are becoming more and more to urge on and to pursue a feast for the eyes, instead of being satisfied with viewing a new released movie. The 3-D technology exactly performs this vision enjoyment so attractively that it is conceivable how "Avatar", which pushes the 3-D envelope,
will be successful in catching the moviegoers' eyes.

kulewy531UID: 2603031

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 of 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(所有者) 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(野蛮地). 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(物神崇拜者) 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 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(阻止…的发生) the ideal experience. Theater 80 St. Marks, a downtown Manhattan repertory house where I spent a lot of time in the 1970s, showed threadbare(俗套的) 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

Comments:
Though “Avatar” seems to be the most successful film in history, I have not seen it yet. But I get to know it more or less from my friends.
In this movie, the director Cameron, who is renowned for his strict standards for stuff and the large profits he has made by each of his movies, creates a totally imaginative world like Star War. To fulfill it, the most advanced 3D technologies are put into use which opens up a new area of movie-making. Through this movie, we may possibly predict that the entire movie would be made totally digitally in the future and probably there would be no need for actors.