Digital Film Essay

While studying the impact of the digital, it is helpful to distinguish between the continuities of cultural forms and discourses and their divergence across various media platforms. It is not just a simple shift in technologies but a wider framework of ‘continuities and transformation’ (Lister 2000: 322).

In the field of digital documentaries, Craig Hight delineates two broad dynamics at play (Craig Hight, 2008). First there is the integration of digital technologies within conventional documentary practice. The second, the appropriation by digital platforms of aspects of documentary’s discourse and aesthetics. This spectrum of continuities and transformation offers an interesting area of study. These developments draw upon wider trends within

Going by this, cinema can be characterized as a new media both in construction and characteristic.6. It is evident that cinema today is a digital creation, an embodiment of the ‘digital’. It is created, stored, distributed, and viewed using digital technologies which have made handy the production, manipulation, distribution, reception and reproduction phases besides ushering in the concepts of networking, interactivity, hybrid nature and variability. Therefore, based on these aspects, digital films can be considered as different from traditional films. It is true that all media forms including cinema is received and experienced in different ways in different cultures and different groups. Yet, it is a widely accepted fact throughout all cultures and societies that cinema has changed in a number of ways. Some of these changes are attributed to the technological development, while others can be related to societal changes in terms of economics, politics, culture etc. Nonetheless, it can be seen that a considerable amount of cinematic elements remain unchanged or co-exist with the changes resulted from the digital

Rodowick defines a medium as "nothing more or less than a set of potentialities from which creative acts may unfold. These potentialities, the powers of the medium as it were, are conditioned by multiple elements or components that can be material, instrumental, and/or formal." 7.This dissertation also tries to focus on the development of the Indian documentary scenario in the digital age. Any discussion on this will have to be conducted in a wider perspective pertaining to the advancement in cinema as a whole. In his book, The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich poses some questions: "How does computerization affect our very concept of moving images? Does it offer new possibilities for film language? Has it led to the development of totally new forms of cinema?"10 . This dissertation tries to apply these issues in the context of Indian documentary films. The Language of New Media also speaks of two vectors representing the relationship between cinema and new media. One of these employs the history and theory of cinema to detail the logic of the technical and stylistic developments of new media while the other one examines how the logic of new media affects the cinema. So we have to thinks of two aspects-technological and