Commercial Cinema Research Articles

Shiri and the transformation of division films in South Korea’s Post-Cold War era

ABSTRACT With the advent of South Korea’s first liberal regime in 1998, division films transitioned from propaganda to commercial cinema, epitomized by the blockbuster Shiri (1999). Blending melodrama and action, Shiri reflects the evolving inter-Korean relations of the post-Cold War era, particularly under the Sunshine Policy. This article analyzes how Shiri uses genre conventions to depict the complex realities of North–South tensions, while also exploring the film’s cultural impact as a symbol of changing political dynamics. Through a mixed-genre approach, the study argues that Shiri marks a significant shift in South Korean cinema, balancing historical realism with melodramatic fantasy. The film's success highlights a new era of freedom in South Korean media, where the portrayal of national division could be both commercially viable and ideologically nuanced.

El jefe político: genre crossover and thematic originality in a restored French film

ABSTRACT In 2021, the restoration of the long-lost French film El jefe político (‘The Political Boss’, released as La Réponse du destin in France) was finally completed. Directed by André Hugon between 1924 and 1925 and based on the homonymous novel by the Spanish writer José María Carretero, alias ‘El Caballero Audaz’ (‘The Audacious Gentleman’), it is a most remarkable melodrama set against the backdrop of the turbulent political climate that prevailed in Spain in the early 1920s. Its revival has meant rescuing two subjects from oblivion: André Hugon, a French filmmaker with one of the most prolific careers who directed more than 80 films between the 1910s and 1950s; and the film itself, a stark portrait of an upstart embroiled in political corruption. The author aims to analyse El jefe político as a film in which the most representative genres of the French commercial cinema of the time come together. This analysis will demonstrate Hugon’s personal approach to these genres as well as his originality when adapting Carretero’s novel, to which he adds two striking themes: an epidemic outbreak and the socio-political struggle to introduce the eight-hour working day.

La Virgen y la Faraona. Estrellato y representación de la raza en el cine del franquismo: los casos de Carmen Sevilla y Lola Flores en los años 50

In the 1950s, the need to open up Spanish cinema to the international market caused a series of mutations in the Andalusian folk musical genre: the projection of the gypsy as the epitome of Hispanicity was articulated through actresses who, while representing Francoism’ ideological values ⁣⁣regarding race, also had the ability to transgress them. This article studies the cases of Carmen Sevilla and Lola Flores and their respective representations of the white gypsy and the racialized gypsy. Focusing on the narrative trajectories of their characters, we will analyze the interaction between the racial aspect of its star persona construction and the essentially conservative stories in which they starred. Through our analysis, we suggest a consideration of Spanish female stardom as a projection of a value system that, through commercial cinema, has both cultural and political implications.

An Analysis of the Marketing Mode of Modern Chinese Commercial Movies

China's movie market has continued to grow over the past few years and is now the world's second-largest box office market. Commercial movies are undoubtedly the fastest-growing category of films. This paper will systematically discuss the specific subcategory of Chinese commercial films from various aspects and explore the marketing model of Chinese commercial movies as a complex and diversified systematic project. First, this study analyzes the characteristics of the Chinese film market, the marketing mode of modern Chinese commercial films, and the types and needs of Chinese film audiences; secondly, it aims to discuss the drawbacks and challenges Chinese commercial films face under the characteristics of such an environment and marketing methods. By analyzing the market trends, industry models, and marketing strategies, the paper will delve into the development of Chinese commercial cinema as an industry and provide some suggestions on how to succeed in the highly competitive film industry.

Commemorating the Great War on Film: Veterans, Pilgrimages and Amateur Filmmaking

This article explores the work of four amateur filmmakers from the Canterbury area, between the late 1920s and early 1970s focusing on the films relating to the battlefield visits of First World War veterans and their families. It argues that film provides a fascinating insight into veteran behaviour and culture. Of particular interest is the manner in which the films reveal the continuities and developments in the behaviour of ex-servicemen. The films of the late 1920s and 1930s reveal a highly masculine culture which remained closely aligned with military ceremonial and codes of conduct, whereas the later, post-1945, films show the veterans with wives and family members engaging in a wider range of activities. The article also sets the films within the culture of amateur filmmaking of the time discussing equipment, techniques and exhibition, thus engaging with an element of film history which remains under-explored compared with the degree of research commercial cinema has attracted. The article is supplemented by a short film providing excerpts from all films discussed.

When State-Endorsed Cinema Meets Marvel: A Study of Wolf Warrior II’s Global Superhero Vernacular

Chinese state-endorsed films have transformed in the past decade. These films make up the “new mainstream”, a genre defined by its ability to match strides with Hollywood commercial cinema. But, what exactly comprises Hollywood’s impact on official Chinese media? How does it manifest onscreen? Exploring the relationship between state-endorsed blockbusters and Hollywood, this article analyzes a pioneer of the “new mainstream”, Wolf Warrior II (2017). This film stands out as the inaugural collaboration between Chinese media conglomerates and Marvel Cinematic Universe directors. From this collaboration emerges the film’s protagonist, Leng Feng, an ex-soldier who saves civilians from rebel forces in Africa. As Leng enacts justice at home and abroad, however, affective portrayals of his feats foreground ambiguity over coherence and unresolvable impulses over a singular agendum. These melodramatic sites of contradiction, I argue, culminate in the film’s own “global superhero vernacular”. Such a vernacular aligns with transnationally circulating serial franchise logics, pushing the film’s connection with Marvel beyond local–global and state–market binaries. Ultimately, my analysis complicates the smooth thread that links together the superhuman individual, nationalist sovereign power, and international order, thereby re-evaluating state-endorsed cinema’s role within Chinese media cultures and social fields.

In Pursuit Of Transcendence In Cınema: The Cinema Of Eternal Now

The issue of time, which is one of the central themes of all arts, has quickly become the focus of cinema as well. Cinema shapes and reflects time in different ways. This leads to debates about slow and commercial cinema. Slow cinema is stagnant, slow, and uses long shots. Commercial cinema is fast, smooth, and uses close-ups.
 This study aims to reveal that this type of cinema tries to relate its central scenes to transcendence. This kind of search for transcendence is called eternal now or everlasting present in traditional thought. Therefore, this study generally seeks the equivalent of eternal now as a search for transcendence in cinema.. The moments in these scenes break away from all contexts, including the plot of the film, and directly contact the transcendent. This study proposes to conceptualize this search for transcendence, which is found in different films by different directors and genres, as the cinema of eternal now. The cinema of eternal now brings the audience into contact with the infinity within the moment and takes them to the intersection point of the mortal and the immortal, thus elevating them to the level of the transcendent and giving them a metaphysical experience.

Representation of Older Characters in Hindi Commercial Cinema

Films can have a big impact on the audience and hence in the early decades after independence, they were used for development purposes in India. Films can be used to give positive messages to the audience as well as negative messages. Films can stereotype groups such as minorities, age groups, race, gender, etc. This study was conducted to understand, how old age people (60+) are depicted in Hindi commercial cinema. It is a visual study; the researcher has used semiotic analysis to study the depiction of old characters. The character traits, objects, and the setting were observed. It was found that the depictions of older characters in the selected films were similar but due to the narrative, each one had some distinct characteristics of their own.

THEATRICAL THEMES IN THE CINEMATOGRAPHY OF THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA (1980-2010)

The article studies the evolution of theatrical themes and imagery in the cinema of the People's Republic of China since the beginning of the reforms in the 1980s. It is emphasized that the democratization of public life and the rejection of the reformist doctrine of the “cultural revolution” inspired the “fifth generation” filmmakers to use the symbolism of the traditional Chinese shadow theatre and musical drama. The directors of the “sixth generation” of Chinese cinema in the 1990s turned to the lives of representatives of the avant-garde theatre. The subject of the article is theatrical themes in the cinematography of the People's Republic of China (1980-2010).The research methodology is based on search, system-historical, analytical, and comparative methods, which made it possible to achieve a comprehensive artistic analysis of theatrical themes and imagery in the cinema of the People's Republic of China 1980-2010.Conclusions.Thus, in the early 2000s, in connection with the commercialization of performing arts in the PRC, the interpretation of theatre is changing: it appears as a spectacular form that extends to social life and captures it, creating a space for simulations and manipulations.Keywords: Chinese cinema of the 20th and 21st centuries, theatrical themes, directors of the fifth and sixth generations of Chinese cinema, commercial cinema in the PRC.

Back into Focus: Women Filmmakers, the Amateur Trade Press and 1960s British Amateur Cinema

AbstractWhile recent scholarship has helped uncover specific stories of women in different commercial cinema industries, there remains a lacuna around the role of amateur women filmmakers within national amateur contexts. Where male amateur filmmaking has often been linked to a range of solitary or group‐based leisure pursuits, we cannot make the same assumption about women amateur filmmaker’s involvement in social groups, not least due to the gendered nature of domestic and non‐work activities in the post‐war era. This article considers the representation of women's creative labour across the 1960s within a dominant and patriarchal trade journal, Britain's Amateur Cine World. Combining feminist and digital humanities approaches allows us to analyse data from this magazine to reveal recurring debates and tensions around women's amateur creativity, with particular concerns around domesticity, leisure and the gendered nature of technology.

Character Change in Mainstream Movies: Structures of Moral Development

Character change is an essential component of Hollywood storytelling, yet little has been written about how it is typically structured. This paper addresses that deficit. Through close formal analysis of a small but narratively diverse group of films—Casablanca (1942), The Apartment (1960), About a Boy (2002) and Wild (2014)—evidence is presented for the existence of a common schema, one that is used to organize the ethical development of morally-flawed protagonists. While this represents only one type of character change, specifying its structural dynamics productively extends our knowledge of commercial cinema's narrative norms as they have persisted in history. It also provides a basis for challenging the view, most fully developed by Carroll (1984), Smith (1995) and Plantinga (2018), that sympathy with or allegiance to characters is a matter of general moral assessment. I argue that because the schema requires a protagonist to repeatedly fall short of an ideal morality, one that is always clearly delineated in the narrative, then allegiance to them cannot be the result of moral approval or their ethical development would be meaningless. My solution is to propose a pluralist account of allegiance, one which emphasizes the role of viewer concern for flawed protagonists who, in all of my examples, suffer sustained emotional and psychological distress.

Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony by Rochona Majumdar

Reviewed by: Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony by Rochona Majumdar Lakshmi Padmanabhan (bio) Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony by Rochona Majumdar. Columbia University Press. 2021. 320 pages. $140.00 hardcover; $35.00 paperback; also available in e-book. Rochona Majumdar's Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony is a history of the art cinema movement in India in the immediate aftermath of decolonization and an argument for reading Indian art cinema, particularly the work of Bengali filmmakers Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, and Satyajit Ray, as forms of historiographic thinking, which provide conceptual insights into the postcolonial present. Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures charts the cultural history of the art cinema movement in India, focusing on the 1950s to the 1980s, a period that saw the rise of state support for independent filmmaking fueled by an optimistic vision of the newly formed nation-state's role in cultural life and the subsequent decline of these institutions and the disillusionment that followed the intense political upheavals of the 1970s. The book, which is divided into two parts, is structured by the historical break between the optimistic political atmosphere of the early decades following Indian independence and the political disillusionment of the 1970s and after. Majumdar opens by connecting the rise of art cinema or "good films" with the pedagogical project of the newly formed nation-state to produce "good citizens."1 It is worth noting here that throughout the text, Majumdar [End Page 213] highlights the difficulty of limiting the boundary or unifying characteristics of art cinema as a category, precisely because of the ongoing disagreements about what constituted "good films" and "good citizens." Across the first section of the text, she utilizes the term interchangeably with quality films (chapter 1), new cinema (chapter 2), radical cinema (chapter 3), and several other terms emerging from the archival sources, including parallel cinema and the Indian New Wave. Rather than providing art cinema with a specific aesthetic or political approach, Majumdar isolates the aspirational quality of the category. In Majumdar's narration, art cinema emerged through the productive intersection of elite interests in advocating for cinema as a medium of art (in contrast to the commercial cinema emerging from the well-funded studios in Mumbai and Chennai, for example) and the pedagogical aim of the national bureaucracy to transcend social divisions and educate a universal Indian citizen.2 Majumdar locates the rise of the film society movement, and the investment by educated elites in fostering a popular film culture, as intellectually aligned with the broader task of educating the newly postcolonial citizen-subject, who was understood to be inexperienced in the practice of democracy. Art cinema was viewed as a pedagogical tool, one that utilized an industrial medium (which aligned it with the broader Nehruvian economic development model centered on industrialization and investment in modern technology) to foster popular sovereignty, educating the masses about their role in a secular democratic society. Between 1959 and 1964, several of the most important institutions of film education and preservation were inaugurated, including the Federation of Film Societies of India (1959), Film Finance Corporation (1960), the Film Institute of India (1960), and the National Film Archive of India (1964).3 The first section provides us with a cultural history of these institutions and examines the role of key figures such as Marie Seton, a British film critic and evangelist for independent film and art cinema. Through this section, Majumdar tracks the underlying faith that these institutions and figures cultivated in the pedagogical possibilities of art cinema as a form of aesthetic education in a country where the sheer plurality of linguistic communities and rates of illiteracy made developing a shared public sphere through written text an ongoing concern for the political elite and artists alike. Their aspiration for cinema to transcend regional and linguistic boundaries and speak in a universal humanist language was also a measure of its aesthetic value and sociological importance. As Majumdar explains, the idealistic view of art cinema's pedagogical function crumbles in the 1970s with the increasingly authoritarian...

Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China by Chenshu Zhou

Reviewed by: Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China by Chenshu Zhou Zhuoyi Wang (bio) Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China by Chenshu Zhou. University of California Press. 2021. 282 pages. $85 hardcover; $34.95 paper; also available in e-book. Winner of the 2022 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Best First Book Award. In Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China, Chenshu Zhou places two ontological questions at the center of its historical investigation of film exhibition and moviegoing in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from 1949 to 1992. First, quoting Brian Larkin, she asks if the cinema has “a stable ontology that simply reproduces itself in different contexts over time and across space.”1 Second, she asks, “what does it mean for our understanding of cinema if we stop treating the ‘alternative’ as a mere ‘alternative’?”2 Engaging in a dialogue with works of such scholars as Charlotte Brunsdon, Christian Ferencz-Flatz, Julian Hanich, and Laura Wilson, Zhou’s investigation poses a convincing and productive challenge to the habitual critical standpoint that over-generalizes Western cinema’s practice of directing audiences’ attention to films alone as the basis of a universal definition of cinema. Based on her empirical study of screening practices and moviegoing experiences, Zhou instead views cinema as “a system of interfaces.”3 In this system, viewers are active agents interacting with not only films but also such extra-filmic interfaces as “surfaces (screen, seats, etc.), atmospheres, bodies (the projectionist’s, other viewers’, and their own), objects, landscapes, and weather in a [End Page 208] manner that involved their entire bodies.”4 This was particularly true during the mobile, open-air screenings common in early PRC. Each of the book’s six chapters is organized around an extra-filmic interface. The first three chapters draw on archival sources such as newspapers and magazines, government documents, and publications intended for film exhibition workers to flesh out the Communist Party’s strategies for exploring, inscribing, and controlling extra-cinematic interfaces. The last three chapters examine viewers’ memories of their moviegoing experiences, focusing on where their interactions with interfaces “[exceed] textual reception and challenge us to rethink what cinema is.”5 The interface that chapter 1 focuses on is the film exhibition space, which the newly established PRC “de-associate[d] . . . from its former connections to luxury and foreign domination” in order to “reframe moviegoing in terms of ‘serving workers, peasants, and soldiers.’”6 Theatrical spaces were Sinicized through name, signage, and spatial changes; made accessible to low-income masses; and changed from an urban commercial business to communal gathering spots in work units, rural areas, and military camps. Zhou moves beyond the conventional dismissal of this transformation as simply “propagandistic” and instead points out that it was intended “to serve the goals of both political education and mass entertainment.”7 Both goals, as well as the tensions between them, were manifested in renamed, relocated, redesigned, and reorganized film exhibition spaces. Chapter 2 examines how the PRC state cultivated through heroic narratives an idealizing gaze on the projectionist’s laboring body, which “not only constructed an essential figure in the operation of the socialist cinematic apparatus, but also participated in the larger campaign to produce the so-called Socialist New Man.”8 Unlike those hidden figures working in theatrical projection booths, early PRC projectionists were a focus of the audience’s gaze, especially in rural open-air cinema. “If Western commercial cinema seeks to erase labor from its final products,” Zhou argues, “the importance of corporeal practices and bodily techniques in building a national film exhibition network was fully acknowledged and celebrated in socialist China.”9 The projectionist’s laboring body hence “functioned as an interface in the socialist cinematic apparatus.”10 With a focus on two interfaces, slide projection and projectionists’ live performance, chapter 3 examines the intended pedagogical functions of early PRC film exhibition. As a pre-screening activity, slide projection was designed to introduce and explain to audiences local news and weather, national events, agrarian knowledge, and the content of the film to be shown. In addition to complementing pre-screening slide shows with vocal and bodily performance, projectionists were also expected...

Frequency of transnational trends and Pakistani commercial cinema: A Study on Foreign Talent, Foreign Locations and Obscenity in Pakistani Movies

With an increase in focus on globalization, the cinema industry is also facing pressure from its audience to bring in transnationalism in their contents. Transnationalism in cinema gives diversity of experience resulting in better quality movies and increased viewership. Movies around the globe are adopting transnationalism while in Pakistan it is considered a comparatively new idea. This study has tried to make sense of the presence of transnational trends in Pakistani cinema with an emphasis on three variables, (namely, foreign talent, foreign location, and obscenity). Talent from different nationalities can bring in diverse experience on the screen and behind the lens. Similarly, the selection of multination locations also brings in more interest of viewers and obscenity, though it is a very abstract idea, also attracts viewers with different social and cultural backgrounds. A total of 12 Pakistani movies were selected and content analysis was conducted to look for the presence of foreign talent, location and obscenity resulting in transnationalism. A monitored and controlled data analysis of conveniently sampled movies has been provided along with possible reasons of the existence of these transnational trends. The conclusion of our findings and possible recommendations are also added which emphasize that cultural whitewash should be avoided in the name of transnational trends.

Nowhere to belong: Migration narratives in Eeb Allay Oo! (2019) and Gamak Ghar (2019)

This article analyses the narratives of migration in the films Eeb Allay Oo! and Gamak Ghar which also incidentally speak to a moment in India during the pandemic when the precarious lives of migrants working in the informal sector took centre stage in the public discourse. While Eeb Allay Oo! follows the life of a migrant unable to find suitable work till he is recruited as a monkey repeller in central Delhi, Gamak Ghar introspects the idea of home in the filmmaker’s own village near Darbhanga in Bihar when various family members leave it to work and live elsewhere. The article addresses these films through an interdisciplinary lens of migration studies and cinema studies and as alternative to the mainstream commercial cinema of the country in terms of aesthetics and the circular journeys of the filmmakers themselves.

The Locarno Film Festival under the Influence? Programming Eastern European Movies in Anti-communist Switzerland (1946–1962)

The Locarno Film Festival (LFF), founded in 1946 by film industry professionals and local tourism promoters, is reputed as an international hub for emerging cinema. Built apart from, or in opposition to, traditional commercial cinema, the Swiss event gave particular attention to Eastern European movies, to the point that the LFF has frequently been presented as the place where ‘Westerners discovered the talents of Eastern Europe’. However, the presence of these films in Locarno, whose characteristic was the absence of official support from the state, exacerbated Switzerland's anti-communism and led to the creation of a ‘national’ selection committee in 1962 to limit the programming of movies coming from the other side of the Iron Curtain. This article analyses how Swiss politics and ideological tensions conditioned the construction of the Locarno Festival's identity through the prism of the (non-)interventions of the federal state.

Socio-political features and prospects for the development of the Russian movie industry through the prism of the history of soviet cinema and international film industry experience

The article is devoted to the Russian movie industry and the problems that national cinema is currently facing. This applies to surface level, urgent difficulties, such as the rapid decline in cinema attendance in the absence of Hollywood tentpoles at the box office, as well as to deeper shortcomings, among them the lack of Russian cinema's own identity. The author describes how the modern system of state support of the movie industry unwittingly leads to a deluge of similar run-of-the-mill movies, which not only negatively affects the total revenue of Russian cinemas, but also does not allow the domestic film market to grow, as well as effectively perform its socio-political functions. Patriotic high-budget blockbusters have become the most demanded type of Russian film production in recent years, the plot of which is based on events from Russian history, told in the language of Western commercial cinema. The rare but nevertheless sound successes of such films have led to the system under which these types of movies receive the lion's share of budget funding. Disregarding the fact that box office data shows that viewers are more often attracted to films of a smaller scale, but about lives of our contemporaries of today and tomorrow. The current situation in the Russian movie industry is compared with the experience of the formation of the Soviet cinema and withe the development of national film industries of China, South Korea and France.

Crisis and literary adaptation: the case of the movie (The necklace and the bracelet 1986) of the Egyptian filmmaker Khairy Beshara

Based on a solid industry dating back to the early 1930s, Egyptian cinema used literary adaptation at that time as a model for cultural transfer (Serceau 1999, 176) to promote contemporary socio-cultural values. The literary adaptation have allowed the Egyptian cinema to impose the credibility of its stories and to reinvent itself despite a delicate geopolitical context. However, during the 1980s, Egypt and Egyptian productions suffered from the consequences of Sadat’s economic liberalism. A commercial cinema financed by foreign capital based on comedy or farce and intended to meet the needs of new consumption trends invades the market and the influence of literature on Egyptian cinema diminishes considerably. In contrast to the vast majority of the movies of the 1980s, Khairy Beshara’s movie (The Necklace and the Bracelet 1986) revives the tradition of literary adaptation (based on the novel by Yehya Taher Abdallah) and constitutes a unique experience which puts the spotlight on a realism pushed to the extreme. How could the director, in the words of Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, “retrace the shape of the narrative, fill its gaps, nuance its lines and deconstruct its unity” to be able to transcribe the floating of individuals or even a nation and the plural crisis it faces? Through an analysis of the narration, the thematic choices and the principles of writing and reappropriation adopted by the filmmaker, we will try to find some answers to this question.

“More Champion than the Champions”: Female Masculinity in Lālehzari Music and Filmfarsi

ABSTRACT This paper examines how female Lālehzari performers of the 1950s–70s rejected conventional femininity through their performances of female masculinity in their music and in some of the song-and-dance scenes of the commercial cinema. It argues that by performing eshgh ast, a kind of camp, these artists lampooned the dominant culture’s binary gender system and their fans’ claims over masculinity, ultimately making gender more capacious and women’s performative possibilities more diverse in the Lālehzari music scene. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates that these gender outlaws and their audiences developed their own homegrown, urban modernity beyond state discourses of Westernization.

Digital 3D and the Hermeneutics of Modernity

Digital 3D and the Hermeneutics of Modernity Chang-Min Yu (bio) Nick Jones. Spaces Mapped and Monstrous: Digital 3D Cinema and Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. 304 pages. $140 hardback. $35 paperback. About twenty years ago, David Bordwell proposed the "modernity thesis" to characterize an emerging trend of scholarship that drew upon the works of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer.1 In this "culturalist" school of thought—originating from New York and then prospering at Chicago—cinema originates from and, more importantly, reflects modernity.2 The first claim is widely accepted; the second is, to say the least, fraught and contested. While most scholars can agree that cinema is a modern technologized art, it is difficult to establish a causal relationship between what is onscreen—fast editing, intensified momentum, kaleidoscopic spectacle, you name it—and what circulates in culture. The reason is simple: if whatever case of modernity is that dominating, why are we not seeing its manifestation everywhere rather than in only a few selected tokens of its forestalled realization? Isomorphic reflection aside, it also seems strenuous to clarify modernity's history since the nineteenth century—its rise, fall, upsurge, and submergence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—with regard to any particular screen technique or characteristic at stake. Though largely left [End Page 386] as an unstated assumption, this issue of modernity hermeneutics is the daunting task Nick Jones sets for himself in Spaces Mapped and Monstrous: to convincingly articulate the modernity of 3D cinema and the relation to its cultural counterpart, "digital 3D."3 The book begins with a long history of 3D cinema and its attendant research (chapter 1) and subsequently moves into a broader historiographical framework stretching to include the Renaissance perspective (chapter 2). For Jones, 3D cinema and media have not supplanted art historian Erwin Panofsky's perspective as humanity's symbolic form, but they do "encapsulate many of the dominant and emerging logics that structure media, technology, and spatial knowledge at the present digital moment" (60). This is Jones's (weak) modernity thesis. For Jones, 3D cinema (re)surfaces because it "engender[s], document[s], and highlight[s] this situation" that is built upon the contemporary rendition of the "stereoscopic imaginary" (3). And I want to highlight "digital 3D" as a term because it is a modifier nominalized. It is untethered from "filmmaking" (1) and becomes a free-floating, abstract, expansive noun—like the so-called "stereoscopic imaginary"—a paragraph after. That supple abstraction is subsequently deployed to encapsulate all the chapter key words that Jones discusses: simulation, immersion, surveillance (chapters 3–5) and defamiliarization, distortion, and intimacy (chapters 6–8), the first three spatialized governance practices and the rest haptic subversive tactics. One is the smoothly engrossing commercial cinema that thematizes the datafied exploitation of the planet. The other reveals the operating logic of such calculations by either the slight instability inherent in stereoscopy, transitional failures in digital filmmaking, or auteurist interventions within the sphere of art cinema. The dichotomy is totalizing infrastructure versus localized resistance, abstraction and embodiment ontologically imbricated with each other in this calculated and yet tantalizing tactility. Thus understood, the term "digital 3D" has two purposes. The first is to draw a line—"the malleability of digital images detaches them from the connection to the past that seemed to define analog media" (53)—between analog and computerized 3D visuality. The distinction reaffirms the already-aged newness of stereoscopic images, whose history the book meticulously traces through existent scholarship. The second is to rearticulate 3D films, such as Avatar (2009) and Goodbye to Language (2014), in terms of culture at large. "Visual culture" in the book's subtitle is enlisted to spice up and make expansive the subject, which is to say that 3D is significant because it is cultural (and less cinematic). Hence the abstraction, [End Page 387] because the nominalized term enables a shift from "3D cinema" to "3D culture." This expansion produces a curious effect. The films discussed do not have to be 3D films as long as they furnish a holographic presentation in a technologically mediated environment. Similarly, Jones can point to virtual reality and other embodied visual praxis as part...