Elastic Cinema

Abstract

This essay examines the use of high-tech imagery in cinema with regard to how cinema introduces digital technologies into the visual and narrative styles of film. Science fiction films in particular take advantage of new technologies and create new special effects that are incorporated into dystopian views on the relationship between man/woman and machine that fuses to create hybrid characters. The merger of cinema and computer, with its expanded representation of motion and space comparable to virtual reality settings, together with the characterisation of machines as evil, characterise the two dominant strategies of cinema's response to new media. In a discussion of two films which at the time of their respective releases highlighted this double approach - Terminator 2 and The Matrix - I suggest that the struggle about space in both films transgresses the generic tradition of science fiction and responds to general disturbances in the temporal- spatial order in electronic culture. However, where the earlier Terminator 2 offers discourse, the later The Matrix turns entropic and regressive.