DVD and the New Cinema of Complexity
Graeme Harper · Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2005
This chapter begins with a discussion of the death of film, which began in the late 1970s. The process has been technologically driven, founded on the emergence of home videotape recording, and soon after that, home computing, leading to film's redefinition at the end of the 1990s in the launch of the DVD. The chapter also argues that the cinema of complexity — the emerging punk cinema — is today the cinema of supplementary-ness born out of the supplementary-ness of videotape and CD-ROM technology, in which activities beyond the visual and aural content of the primary medium are highlighted in its consumption. Complexity, or the grouping together of similar ideas, activities and actions, makes the centre of the DVD not the film itself but what has, until now, been considered auxiliary material in the practice of film viewing.