Rethinking the Frame: On the Organization and Delimitation of Moving Images

FAIN: FEL-282007-22

Ariel Rebecca Rogers
Northwestern University (Evanston, IL 60208-0001)

Research and writing leading to a book-length reconsideration of the cinematic frame in light of new advances in viewing media, especially virtual reality.

My project revisits the concept of the cinematic frame and the practice of cinematic framing in light of contemporary uses of virtual reality (VR), which ostensibly transcend this concept and practice. One of the most central concepts to the theory and analysis of cinema, the frame is fundamental to thinking about the organization of images, the designation of representation, and the positioning of the spectator. Rethinking this concept in relation to VR offers a means to examine how even media that diverge from conventional cinematic framing still accomplish such organization, designation, and positioning. Doing so, moreover, introduces a new set of tools for analyzing and historicizing cinema, suggesting fresh ways to parse the relationships between films’ textual operations, their modes of display, and their social functions. By reassessing framing across cinema and VR, the project ultimately offers a new perspective on the protean material and social parameters of media’s forms.

Associated Products

Framing VR (Article)
Title: Framing VR
Author: Ariel Rogers
Abstract: “Framing VR” explores the ways in which contemporary experiments with virtual reality (VR) can be understood to employ a mediatic frame. VR is often situated within a genealogy of immersive practices across art, theatre, and film that are taken to eliminate or transgress a notion of the frame aligned with objects such as picture frames, proscenia, and film screens. This essay, however, argues that framing continues to shape VR’s modes of representation and address and is thus crucial to analyzing its medial operations, social functions, and political possibilities. To make this argument, I explore ideas about framing from across writing on art, theatre, literature, film, philosophy, and various social sciences and, drawing from that discourse, propose that we consider the frame of moving-image media not simply as the delimitation of a view but as a principle of organization and demarcation more expansively. Harnessing this expanded notion of the frame, I then propose means to conceptualize the VR frame through close attention to the VR “films” Dear Angelica (Saschka Unseld, 2017) and Traveling While Black (Roger Ross Williams, 2019). As I show, these works harness the VR frame to layer or laminate the spaces of representation and spectatorship, encouraging users to experience their relationships in a variety of ways and to diverse ends. Far from simply immersing the user, Traveling While Black in particular makes use of the VR frame to encourage socially differentiated beholders to experience their relations to the accounts of African American history that it presents.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjad029
Primary URL Description: Link to article through journal website
Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Screen
Publisher: Oxford University Press

Camera Movement in VR: Spatial Mediation, User Positioning, and a Virtual Dinner Party (Article)
Title: Camera Movement in VR: Spatial Mediation, User Positioning, and a Virtual Dinner Party
Author: Ariel Rogers
Abstract: This essay investigates how virtual-reality "films" adapt cinematic approaches to camera movement. Focusing on the 360-degree video Dinner Party, it examines how such works distinguish user-initiated from work-initiated movements and thereby transform users' relationship to representation. In Dinner Party, it argues, these possibilities contribute to an exploration of racial difference.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://doi.org./10.3998/fc.4739
Primary URL Description: Link on journal website
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Film Criticism
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Theories of the Frame and Framing in Cinema: A Genealogy (Book Section)
Title: Theories of the Frame and Framing in Cinema: A Genealogy
Author: Ariel Rogers
Editor: Annie van den Oever and Nicholas Baer
Abstract: Proposing that we conceptualize the cinematic frame in terms of the processes it enacts rather than its formal or material properties, this chapter explores how an expansive notion of framing as a process of organization and delimitation can be traced across the history of film theory. The chapter maps the ways in which a range of prominent conceptualizations of cinematic organization and delimitation have taken shape within diverse social, historical, and cinematic contexts and in dialogue with a broader interdisciplinary discourse on frames and framing. Such mapping reveals various ways in which formal and material modes of cinematic organization and delimitation have long been imbricated with psychic and social forms of organization and delimitation.
Year: 2024
Access Model: open access
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Book Title: Technics: Media Technologies in the Digital Age

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