Digital Technology, Indexicality, and Cinema

Abstract

My principal concern in this paper is to determine how fundamental are the implications, for the moving image as a medium for works of art, of the loss of indexicality consequent upon the move from a photochemical medium to a computational medium. I begin by examining the bearing of indexicality on the status of still images as photographs, or as photographic art. I then consider whether, where indexicality is lost through the use of digital technology, this has the same significance for still and for moving images. I argue that indexicality does not have the significance for cinema that some have claimed, and that the loss of indexicality does not affect in any essential way the identity of cinema.