In commemoration of the recent release Jurassic World: Rebirth, I’m sharing a tidbit of my latest book chapter in Handbuch Medientheorien im 21. Jahrhundert, on “Theories of Digital Cinematography.” (I know, I’m a month late! Forgive me – I was abroad.) In true encyclopedic manner, this article covers theories of digital media in relation to phenomenology from the 1970s to the present moment, and also discusses the relationship between Gertie the Dinosaur and the Jurassic Park / World franchise. Abstract below, and full book chapter can be found here.

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Abstract: This article bridges twentieth and twenty-first-century theories of cinematography through a discussion of Soviet montage theory, Lacanian suture, structuralist ideology, obfuscation/expression in code, and phenomenology. The final section presents a case study on dinosaurs as exhibited through Gertie the Dinosaur (Winsor McCay, 1914) and Jurassic Park: Dominion (Colin Trevorrow, 2022), both of which exhibit what I call,“ciné-paleontology.” I argue that these case studies exhibit the preeminence of animation aesthetics in the non-profilmic ontologies of digital cinema. In sum, this essay points out that in the advent of the digital, spectators become reliant not on what they see, but rather, in what they believe.

Email me at ghahahan@stanford.edu for questions!