Sørenssen, Bjørn. “Digital Video and Alexandre Astruc’s Caméra-Stylo: The New Avant-Garde in Documentary Realized?” Studies in Documentary Film 2.1 (2008): 47–59. EBSCOhost. Web. 19 Sept. 2013.

In Histories of Film Theory there was a reading in which they called cinema “the seventh art”. The German philosopher Hegel (born 1770), wrote Lectures on Aesthetics, and is credited with having defined the five ancient arts (architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry). Canudo added dance, modernised poetry as literature and added cinema as the seventh art. In that case, I would argue that the eighth art could be something like digital media, or the internet. But I’m not a philosopher or academic, so moving on.

I love technology a lot, and really enjoy reading about new technologies and how they change people’s perceptions and the industry.

 By developing new media technology there is also created a new and changed pattern of production and distribution and, subsequently, a new aesthetics.”

Something that’s even cooler is people predicting the future! Astruc in 1948 had some spot-on predictions for over half a century later than his time. I also enjoyed what he cited Patricia Zimmermann saying that niche cultures develop around the amateur film formats offered by producers of photographic film. I think that we’re now looking back nostalgically on older forms of film – films such as Super 8 and The Blair Witch Project utilise older forms of technology and are romanticised. VHS (once the domain of the “merry multitudes of video amateurs”) is now lo-fi enough to be cool (grainy filters on Instagram, sun-kissed childhood tapes a la (500) Days of Summer, etc).

And our old friend Habermas pops up again with discussion about the public sphere.  

Sobchack, Vivian. “Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of QuickTime.” Mille 34.Fall (1999).

I loved this! To be honest, I hate Quicktime for exactly the reason Sobchack seems to love it. When I open multiple video files in VLC, it automatically puts them in a queue. Quicktime just opens up an assload of files, and quitting the application doesn’t work, because all of them just show up again when you open up the application again. That means you need to close every single window individually. My objections to Quicktime are purely practical though.

I’m impressed with the way Sobchack made Quicktime sound so romantic.