Duke University Press Media Heterotopias: Digital Effects and Material Labor in Global Film Production

In Media Heterotopias Hye Jean Chung challenges the widespread tendency among audiences and critics to disregard the material conditions of digital film production. Drawing on interviews with directors, producers, special effects supervisors, and other film industry workers, Chung traces how the rhetorical and visual emphasis on seamlessness masks the social, political, and economic realities of global filmmaking and digital labor. In films such as Avatar (2009), Interstellar (2014), and The Host (2006)—which combine live action footage with CGI to create new hybrid environments—filmmaking techniques and "seamless" digital effects allow the globally dispersed labor involved to go unnoticed by audiences. Chung adapts Foucault's notion of heterotopic spaces to foreground this labor and to theorize cinematic space as a textured, multilayered assemblage in which filmmaking occurs in transnational collaborations that depend upon the global movement of bodies, resources, images, and commodities. Acknowledging cinema's increasingly digitized and globalized workflow, Chung reconnects digitally constructed and composited imagery with the reality of production spaces and laboring bodies to highlight the political, social, ethical, and aesthetic stakes in recognizing the materiality of collaborative filmmaking. Review "Chung’s 'media heterotopias' could be of immense use as a strategic motivator of more work that is oriented toward activist, political stakes in the spatiotemporal mappings of yet unfolding digital age ecologies." Author: Amy R. Wong Source: ASAP/Journal Review "Following Foucault's notion of 'heterotopia,'of topoi or even utopoi composed of multiple platforms layered and contested that are rendered into a single, phantasmatic whole, Hye Jean Chung proposes 'media heterotopias' as a way to understand the infusion of digital effects in contemporary cinema. At the heart of her analysis lies an affective paradox that transforms complexity, distortion, and incongruity in digital cinemas into the narcotic illusion of 'seamlessness.' At once erudite, rigorous, and highly speculative, Chung's contribution to the scholarship on digital cinemas suggests a frenzy of incoherence driving the soothing surfaces of digital effects and the labor that generates them." Author: Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of Source: Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift From the Author Hye Jean Chung is Assistant Professor in the School of Global Communication at Kyung Hee University. About the Author Hye Jean Chung is Assistant Professor in the School of Global Communication at Kyung Hee University.