Alice Down the Digital Rabbit Hole: Spectacle, Speed, and Photorealism in 21st Century Hollywood

Hollywood in the 21^st Century dominates the global film market through expensively produced digitally animated family films and blockbuster films featuring action heroes.  Style and form have shifted significantly as Hollywood has made the transition from celluloid to digital cinema and embraced an approach that I will call vernacular global blockbuster.

This presentation will explore the style, structure, and audience’s experience of Hollywood’s vernacular global blockbuster.  With enormous production and marketing budgets, Hollywood’s films are usually adaptations of popular fantasy novels, comic books, video games, and other mass marketed sources that have proven their appeal beyond a single national audience.  The most successful films are part of a franchise with returning characters and continuing adventures with simple dichotomies of good and evil—even Tim Burton’s version of Alice in Wonderland (2010) is being turned into a global blockbuster franchise.

Most important, blockbuster films can be characterized as a cinema of attractions, with expensive action sequences, special effects, and eye-catching mise-en-scene dominating the narrative, emphasizing a fast-paced, kinetic and emotional experience over intellectual engagement.  These films draw upon the latest special effects digital technology and almost all of the recent successful franchises have embraced 3-D technology.  Elaborately choreographed action sequences are constructed through fast paced, discontinuous editing and multiple layers of voice, loud noise, and tense music in the sound editing. Like singing and dancing interludes in the musical genre, these action sequences often take the viewer out of the cause and effect structure of the narrative for visual and kinetic pleasure.

In addition to live actors, blockbuster films use computer graphics to construct fantastical but photorealistic villains, monsters and fantastic virtual worlds.  These films offer extraordinary interior spaces, which are futuristic, surreal, or located in a spectacular historical or imaginary past, often foregoing the rules of realism or historical accuracy.  Makeup and costumes are key components of this spectacle.  Many costume designers of blockbuster film draw upon high fashion, historical pageantry, futuristic, cyborgian, and fairytale images, or otherworldly styles to fashion the exotic, sexy, fantastical, superhuman, or glamorous bodies and attributes of the film’s heroes and villains.  This presentation will both introduce the new digital film aesthetics and form and contemplate how they have changed the engagement of contemporary audiences with cinema.

About the Speaker
Ron Gregg is Director of Film Programming at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University and Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, American Studies and LGBT Studies. Before joining the Yale faculty, he taught at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, St. Cloud State University, and Duke University.  He teaches courses on classical Hollywood, global blockbuster cinema, and experimental and gay and lesbian cinema (both Hollywood and avant-garde).  Gregg co-chaired the Yale conferences on “Postwar Queer Underground Cinema, 1950-1968” and “Secrets of the Orient: Costume, Movement, and Duration in the Cinematic Experience of the East” (2011).  His most recent writings include “Fashion, Thrift Stores, and the Space of Pleasure in 1960s Queer Underground Film” and “Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends/Faustrecht der Freiheit (1975) and Gay Politics in the 1970s.” Gregg has curated film and video programming for the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the Fashion in Film Festival, the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, the South African Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and other community and academic organizations.  He is Director of the Board for the queer experimental film series Dirty Looks.