Part 3: New Technology

Traditional celluloid tools for film production rely on an indexical relationship with the world from which its images are captured. Digital cinema tools have no such reliance; the images it produces do not have to have a referent in the real world (Prince 1996, 30). CGI technology allows for the creation and manipulation of images so that they do not have any relation to an actual object, they can be entirely fictional.

Whilst celluloid technology did allow for the creation of fictionalised images, they either had to be subtle alterations, relying on tricks of perspective and colour modifications, or did not look nearly as realistic as what digital technology makes possible. This underlines the fact that digital cinema and traditional film cinema are in fact two different medium. The differences in the production process, the types of images that can be created, and the relationship those images have with real world make clear that we are dealing with a new media. As the media is different, so too will the ways in which it is utilised be different. T he new technology allows for different types of films to be created. Midnight in Paris however, whilst utilising digital technology in its production, seems to intentionally tell a story, and produce images which largely could have been made with celluloid technology. Allen’s yearning for the production methods of times past has caused him to produce a film in line with what those tools could create, and in line with his stylistic choices which were informed by that technology (Goldman,2010), in this case Allen uses a rich warm colour pallet, which is traditionally able to be created through lighting choices.