From IBM to Mgm: Cinema at the Dawn of the Digital Age

From IBM to MGM: Cinema at the Dawn of the Digital Age uncovers the early history of cinema and computers and looks at how filmmakers first encountered the defining technology of the digital age. In this original study, author Andrew Utterson charts the beginnings of digital cinema, addressing both how filmmakers used new digital technologies and how attitudes and anxieties about the rise of the computer were represented in films such as Walter Lang's Desk Set, Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Michael Crichton's Westworld. At once both timely and historically-grounded, From IBM to MGM focuses on cinema's earliest encounters with computers, as filmmakers like John Whitney, Stan VanDerBeek and other pioneers responded to the flurry of digital devices that emerged in the post-war decades.

Andrew Utterson is Senior Lecturer in Film and Digital Media at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. He is the editor of Technology and Culture: The Film Reader (Routledge, 2005), an anthology concerned with cinema and technology, and co-editor of Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies (Routledge, 2004), a four-volume anthology of more than a century of film theory. He has published in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Film Quarterly, and elsewhere.