The book The Effect of Technology on Cinematic Expression written by Paul Schrader, the famous author of the script of Taxi Driver, is a journey into the heart of the history of cinema and a review of its technical achievements from the beginning to the present day. Be with us by introducing this new book from Gilgamesh Publishing.
It seems that narrating the history of cinema (this magical-technological achievement) without considering the technical issues is a half-baked or at least boring narrative. Let me put your mind at ease; None of the seven arts, like cinema, came about through the inventions and playfulness of its inventors. It is as if the starting point of the history of cinema was laid with the playfulness of the Lumière brothers, Edison and Maybridge. Unconditional recording of movement (and not its reconstruction). Yes, cinema was not only discovered by artists. This emerging branch of art was the toy of scientists and playful boys like Maybridge. The glorious history of cinema owes to their playfulness. not interesting?
The publication of Gilgamesh, an article titled “Beyond the silver screen”, which was published in “Off screen” magazine, with the translation Ali Ameri Mahabadi and Title The impact of technology on cinematic expression It has been published in Iran. This book (article) is the result of lectures given by Paul Schrader at Columbia University. If you are interested in cinema, you definitely know him. The writer of films such as Taxi Driver and Raging Cow, as well as the director of works such as First Reformed and The Card Counter. In these lectures, Schrader tries to look at the history of cinema from a simpler and more positive perspective, relying on his own and his contemporaries’ knowledge and experiences. A window that looks at the cinema with the eyes of a toy and at its fathers with the eyes of a fearless and playful child. His attempt is to sample the history of cinema and demythologize it.
After reviewing the experience of the firsts in the history of cinema (the first close and open shots, the first fast lenses, the first camera movements and the first editing attempts to add narrative to the cinema), he goes to his personal experiences of filmmaking and grappling with this. The magic car says. How to deal with “a toy called Flatbed and its replacement by Moviola (from the first editing tool) and gaining a little skill is sitting behind the editing table and despite the recommendations of some editor, he makes different views tight!
Schrader also discusses the digital age and its aesthetic developments in image recording (filming at night) and editing, and mentions multi-line editing in editing software as the most important achievement of editing in cinema. He even talks about video games. Games like Red Dead Redemption.
Recently, I saw a presentation made by the experts of Rockstar Games, who previously made the game Redemption of the Dead Indian. They told me that the technology related to this field is completely produced and directed by computer experts and at some stage someone from another field will be found and make the game universal. They hoped that one day all computer game productions would become global. Because we have not yet reached that stage and this field is still in the hands of computer experts.
When I reached this part of the book, I no longer saw him as an old professor! Personally, I saw reading this book as an intensive journey in the history of cinema. A trip on foot. And I’d rather recommend it to anyone who takes cinema a little more seriously or dreams of making a film. We have to use our toys in our own way! Now, if I want to summarize the extract of this book in one paragraph, the following quote is telling:
Usually, the first people to discard theories are the ones who invented them. Imitators stick to the theory and try to make something useful out of it; But the artist passes this stage and reaches something newer.
