The Future Of Cinema

The Future of Cinema course attends to a shift from traditional cinema to its possible future in image storytelling across a wide range of new and experimental practices. Accompanied by recent technological progress and the changing media landscape, the future cinema transforms itself from simply viewing a movie to `touching?, `listening', `participating', `engaging', `performing', and `sharing' the image content, which create an alternative sensory mode. The future cinema also indicates an exit of a movie theater to different places -- computer screens, gallery exhibitions, immersive theaters, concert halls, VR goggles, any public place, and even your own living room - which in turn determines the social relation of viewing communities. The evolution of moving image storytelling changes ways of seeing and living. Students are encouraged to become active as researchers to investigate the future of moving images. All students will leave the class with their finished projects, which are collaborative efforts as a science lab of the Cinema of the Future. A range of possible formats of the future cinema - desktop documentary, essay film, filmic art, sound art, vertical cinema - are given as exercises in probing the unstable yet promising media ecology surrounding us. Students will be encouraged to explore the poetics of images through both theoretical reflection and practical experiments in post-contemporary cinema. Drawing upon a broad range of scholarships, including film theory, communication studies, cultural studies, and new media theory, the course will consider how cinema shapes our future life, translates the spectacle to the truth, and transforms the reel into the real.