Film Technology
The mechanics of shooting, processing and playback decide how an image looks, and once a given mechanism becomes obsolete it turns into an aesthetic loaded with nostalgia.
Dictionary entry
- Silent Film Intertitle 1900s–1920s / Technique
Dialogue and description were cut into the film as separate cards of type. This is where cinema and typography first met.
- Technicolor 1922–1950s / Technique
Brought saturated color to cinema by separation negatives and dye transfer, fixing 'color more vivid than reality' in film memory.
- Slit-Scan 1968– / Technique
Long exposure through a slit while the camera or the subject moves, stretching space and time into a single image. The Stargate sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey wrote it into film history.
- Bullet Time 1999– / Technique
An arc of still cameras fired at once or in sequence: time nearly stops while the viewpoint alone moves. The Matrix popularized the idea of the virtual camera.
- Film Leader 1930s– / Style
The countdown at the head of a print, there for synchronization and inspection. Reversed lettering, punch holes and numbers falling from 8 to 2 were purely functional shapes, and they turned into the cultural sign that the film is about to start.
- VHS Aesthetic 1980s–2000s / 2010s revival / Aesthetic
Scanlines, tracking noise, bleeding color and timestamp overlays: the degradation and on-screen displays of the home recording medium, stylized into the texture of recorded memory.