Digital Image and Cinema

Abstract

The new Hollywood digital cinema centered in spectacularity on the basis of computer graphics, has driven the filmmakers to work with tecnoscientific teams concentrating in the total control of the image and it is exactly the predominance of the image that tends to simplify the cinematographic plots. This simplification seems to reject the old idea that cinema is “about telling stories through images”, instead emancipating the narrative image. This goes side by side with a new sensibility that disregards the narrative and centers itself in entertainment, in despite of intellectuals’ complaints. Thus, the new digital spectacular cinema reopens under new conditions a fundamental poetological polemic that had already a background in the debate about abstract painting and figurative painting: what are the specific possibilities of each media?