Expanded Cinema

Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood (1970), the first book to consider video as an art form, was influential in establishing the field of media arts. In the book he argues that a new, expanded cinema is required for a new consciousness. He describes various types of filmmaking utilizing new technology, including film special effects, computer art, video art, multi-media environments and holography.

In the first part of the book, Youngblood attempts to show how expanded cinema will unite art and life. "Television's elaborate movie-like subjective-camera simulation of the first moon landing" (p46) showed a generation that reality was not as real as simulation. He says that he is writing "at the end of the era of cinema as we've known it, the beginning of an era of image-exchange between man and man" (p. 49). The future shock of the Paleocybernetic Age will change fundamental concepts such as intelligence, morality, creativity and the family (pp. 50–53). The Intermedia network of the mass media is contemporary man's environment, replacing nature. He uses recent scientific research into cellular memory and inherited memory to support his claim that this network conditions human experience. The Noosphere (a term Youngblood borrows from Teilhard de Chardin) is the organizing intelligence of the planet—the minds of its inhabitants. "Distributed around the globe by the intermedia network, it becomes a new technology that may prove to be one of the most powerful tools in man's history" (p. 57). He defends the universality of art against the localism of entertainment:

The intermedia network has made all of us artists by proxy. A decade of television-watching is equal to a comprehensive course in dramatic acting, writing, and filming...the mystique is gone—we could almost do it ourselves. Unfortunately too many of us do just that: hence the glut of sub-mediocre talent in the entertainment industry.

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