represented25 and we accept that some sounds are different to the ones we
hear in real life. In particular spot effects demonstrate how cinematic
conventions can become real for audiences. A useful example is the sound of
gun fire: onscreen, gun fire has to whistle to seem real, a noise that does not
correspond with the real sound of a bullet.
Paradoxically, the violation of such conventions concerning the
(un)reality of the film creates fascination and satisfaction in the audience. Â
Bout de soufflé, Le Petit soldat, Le Mépris, Lost Highway and Mulholland
Drive are all illustrative of the violation of classic cinematic conventions in
order to investigate the (un)reality of cinema. Today what we find in films
such as The Matrix, eXistenZ, Memento, Waking Life and Run Lola Run is the
‘technological’ twisting, the transformation and innovation of such
conventions to research the technology and the (un)reality in which we live.
These films break with the conventions of cinema using ‘artificial’ zooms,
movements and camera positions, slow motion, colours, sounds and narration
of the plots, which leave the spectator in a position of uncertainty.
Therefore, we should say that cinema is not real per se, but we ‘make it real’
in an (un)conscious social and audiovisual process that today reflects the
transformation in the perception and understanding of (un)reality.
The new cinematic conventions that films are creating through
technology, among which the ‘bullet time’ is the most representative,
demonstrates that the social and technological time in which we live is
generating a new glance at the world; one in which reality and unreality is
digitally (con)fused. Therefore, the introduction of new technologies implies
that cinema is not simply a ‘realist mirror’. The new technologies applied to
cinema favour the creation of new styles and simultaneously the
complexities, fears and hopes of contemporary life provides new thematics
for these films. Fused together, both elements generate the appearance of a
new image as well as a new way of seeing cinema.
25 In this respect Zack Snyder, the director of 300 (2007), justifies the abundant presence of British actors
in the film, claiming that ‘it was a convention of those type of movies that people from the ancient world
speak with an English accent. I know it is completely ridiculous, but I thought audiences would accept it’
(Millar, 2007: 25) .
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