Digital cinema or what happens to the dispositif?

Abstract

The digital cinema package : Created in 2005 by the Digital Cinema Initiatives—a group of Hollywood majors that formed a joint venture in 2002,—the Digital Cinema Package (DCP) is a wrapper containing images, sound, subtitles, and metadata. Six studios got together to agree on internationally valid norms (“DCI specifications”) to ensure that their movies would be screened in 2K / 4K and compressed in JPEG 2000. The initiative also strove to protect movies against copyright infringement and to assert total control over the movies’ distribution via a decryption code, the key delivery message (KDM), without which the encrypted content could not be accessed. The KDM is a rental license that allows projection under specific conditions. Theoretical framing : In this chapter, Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk discuss the debate on the digitization of film and what the digital roll-out means for cinema and for the audience. With a particular focus on the transformations and continuities in what film theory commonly addresses as the traditional cinematic dispositif, Kessler and Lenk explore the positions taken by various authors participating in the debate and ask the question: To what extent is the cinematic dispositif actually affected by the shift from celluloid to digital?