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The Virtual Life of Film. By D. N. Rodowick. Harvard University Press 216pp, Pounds 35.95 and Pounds 16.95. ISBN 9780674026681 and 26988. Published 12 October 2007
To say that David Rodowick's essay is a continuation in print of confessions and polemics that have been taking place for nearly a decade wherever film and media scholars gather is not intended as a criticism. Indeed, this sense of familiarity will probably afford his book, along with its promised companion, An Elegy for Theory, a central position in debates about film's future in a digital era.
Like many whose personal lives and academic careers have been closely linked to the cinema-going experience, Rodowick laments the passing of this experience in its analogue form and wants to go on professing allegiance to "film". He knows, of course, that the issue has never been clear-cut: that from the late 1980s video began to offer a parallel experience of cinema and its history, while digital processing of sound and image...